Heartbroken

What does a Democrat have to do before he loses my support?

Andrew Cuomo lost it when he said he was going to take on the unions. Who needs a Democrat for that? Isn't that what Republicans are for?

President Barack Obama declined to name Linda Darling-Hammond US Education Secretary. Instead, he selected Arne Duncan, who ran a failed "reform" program in Chicago. Why? Because his buds at DFER liked Arne better. Is that enough? No?


How about when he applauds a whole staff of teachers being fired in Rhode Island? Does it make a difference that a good deal of the kids they taught didn't even know English yet? Did they deserve that based on test scores of these kids? Should that make him think twice before applauding more, or indeed any Americans out of work? Should that make a teacher think twice before supporting him?

Then there's his failure to push for, let alone pass the Employee Free Choice Act, which would enable working people to unionize more easily via card check. His promise to push that was one thing that made me vote for him in 08. There was also his promise to end the Bush tax cuts, which he never did.

There is the argument that a Republican could be worse, and that may be true. Nonetheless, I'd rather see a Republican doing what Republicans do than a faux-Democrat doing the same thing. Obama promised to find a pair of comfortable shoes and march with labor when it was in trouble. Frankly, I feel more like he donned a hobnailed boot and kicked us where the sun doesn't shine.

That's why it's so, so disappointing that the AFT could endorse him. If we don't stand against the nonsense he's enabled, we stand for very little indeed. Obama fooled me once, but I will not vote for him again. I don't care what a swell guy the AFT Prez finds him. I will likely support the Green candidate for President.

And yes, maybe I'm naive, maybe I don't understand the intricacies of politics, maybe I expect too much, but it breaks my heart that our national union would fail to stand up against a corporatist President who cares more about Bill Gates and Eli Broad than the people who teach our children, the people who are our children, and the people who will grow up to teach their children.

Governor 1% Doesn't Want to Get Involved

Our esteemed Governor, Andrew Cuomo, says he doesn't wish to get in the middle of a conflict between the UFT and the DOE. After all, why should he bother helping out the largest school district not only in the state, but also the country? If that darn Mayor Bloomberg thinks every principal's judgment is infallible, who is he to question? After all, Mayor Bloomberg has all that money, so he must know something.

And despite his reluctance to get involved, Governor Andy has no problem publicly blaming unions:

“Over the long term, we need to overhaul the system and change the law on the books,” he added. “The Assembly-led legislation in 2010 protected the teachers union at the expense of the students and instituted a system that was destined to fail.”

So, aside from blaming teachers for declining to accept a baseless, untested system that would likely cause us to be fired for no reason, our fearless leader is remaining absolutely neutral. Instead, Governor Cuomo is going to start a commission. He's going to study the problem, and, of course, respect the findings of his commission. He'll get people who know everything about education, like Bill Gates, Eli Broad, and the Wal-Mart family. And then he'll consult with real teachers, like Gates-funded E$E (okay, ex-teachers, but you get the point).

The commission will get great fanfare as they study the problem. Perhaps they'll be on Oprah with Arne Duncan, where they'll seriously discuss the plight of urban children, and how it doesn't matter if they're in classes of 200 as long as they have great teachers. Perhaps Bill Gates himself will come and explain his brilliant notion of making DVDs of great teachers and using the discs instead of the actual teachers. Sure, there won't be as much give and take as there would be with a live teacher, but you can't have everything.

I've absolute faith in this governor and I know precisely where his loyalties lie. He'll do right by those folks who supported him. Knowing that, it's almost enough to make me regret not having voted for him.

But it's not quite enough. I will never vote for another politician who targets teachers, unions, or working people. I don't care what political party they claim to be part of.

Governor One Percent Discreetly Pulls a Scott Walker

by special guest blogger Reality-Based Educator

Governor Andrew Cuomo was all smiles last week with the news that PEF, the Public Employees Federation union, had agreed to his contract offer that gives employees furlough days, 0% salary increases for most of the contract, and much higher health insurance premiums after he threatened to lay off thousands of them if they didn't take the contract. 

PEF members had rejected the contract the first time, but the PEF leadership, along with Governor Cuomo, redid one or two things in it (not making it any better, IMO), and this time around, the PEF members agreed to it. 

I know one PEF member and she voted for it the second time because she felt she had to or she would see many of her co-workers laid off.  (I would have voted no, btw, but that's me...)

This is the second contract negotiation Cuomo has won by threatening to lay off thousands of state employees if the unions did not agree to huge concessions.

CSEA, the Civil Service Employees Association, also agreed to a contract with huge concessions after Cuomo threatened layoffs

Here is how Governor Cuomo did his victory lap for the PEF vote:

"This shows that collaboration works," Cuomo said at a news conference after the vote. He drew a contrast between New York ‘s labor negotiations and those in other parts of the country that have been more contentious. “This is slowing people down, providing the information, removing the emotion and cooler heads prevailing for a better outcome for all.” 

Oh, yeah - there's nothing "contentious" about threatening to lay off thousands of employees unless they take your garbage contract offer that will cost them thousands of dollars a year in lost pay and extra health care costs.

That sure sounds like "collaboration" to me.

Tell me how "cool" it is to threaten to lay off thousands if they don't agree to concessions?

Cuomo is smarter than some other union-busting governors around the country because he has gotten the shills running the unions to not peg him as the union-busting oligarch that he is. 

But make no mistake, Andrew Cuomo is no different than union-busters like New Jersey Governor Chris Christie or Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker or Ohio Governor John Kasich.

He is defending the 1% of this country on the backs of the 99%.

Cuomo has made ending an income tax on millionaires and billionaires the signature achievement of his administration, he has happily (and greedily) gone after the unions to take huge concessions or face layoffs, he has slashed the state budget for education and health care for senior citizens even as he has opened up the state to polluters in the gas industry who want to hydrofrack.

And if you don't like what he's doing, well, Cuomo doesn't want to hear from you.

Not at all.

A protest group modeled on Occupy Wall Street has sprung up in the state capital.

They call themselves Occupy Albany.

The Occupy Albany group has turned their protest to Governor Cuomo, who they have dubbed Governor 1% for his refusal to keep the millionaires' tax in place even as he slashes the state budget to the bone. 

They call their encampment "Cuomoville."

Cuomo, famously thin-skinned and vindictive beyond belief, wanted the Occupy Albany folks arrested and displaced from their place of protest.

He called on Albany Mayor Jerry Jennings to have the protestors arrested and the protest ended.
The mayor tried to do Cuomo's bidding but was rebuffed by the police chief of the city who said he would not use any police officers to

"monitor, watch, videotape or influence any behavior that is conducted by our citizens peacefully demonstrating."

In addition, the Albany DA said he wouldn't prosecute any protestors arrested for exercising their First Amendment rights.

Cuomo, not used to losing political battles these days and certainly not used to have people under him like an Albany County district attorney or police chief tell him that they're not going to do his dirty work for him, backed down from the confrontation.

In public, Cuomo's people say the story about his demanding Occupy Albany arrests was not true.

I guess they're trying to "save face."

But make no mistake, Governor 1% backed down when students, middle aged parents and senior citizens protesting his policies in Albany didn't run from him, didn't agree to concessions or give him his way.

Here is how the NY Times viewed Cuomo's "defeat" by the Occupy Albany protestors at Camp Cuomo:

"Perhaps, as the governor’s men now say, Mr. Cuomo never sought this conflict and his aides never pressured Mr. Jennings, who they suggest may have suffered a failure of will. Or perhaps a willful governor watched others take a step back, and despite himself acquired a dose of wisdom."

Perhaps.

Or perhaps Governor Cuomo, like all bullies around the world, backed down when somebody stood up to him.

Which is  exactly what PEF and CSEA should have done in their contract negotiations.

Andy Cuomo's Principles

Governor Andrew Cuomo is standing up. His Dad Mario felt very strongly that the death penalty was a moral outrage, and though public opinion was against him, he vetoed death penalty bills repeatedly. Andy has decided to do the same, except his issue is the millionaire's tax. Who will stand up and demand rich people not pay taxes? I guess it's the guy who took 87K from Tea Party zillionaire David Koch and his wife.

So we now have a governor, ostensibly a Democrat, who has no problem going after unions, but is willing to take a principled stand to save David Koch a little cash. As a lifelong Democrat, this is a little tough for me to take. I didn't vote for Governor Andy, throwing my vote to Howie Hawkins of the Green Party. Some of my friends told me I was wasting my vote. Sure, the Republican who ran against Andy appeared a little out of his mind. But as a teacher, a working person, a unionist, how can I vote for someone who swears to go after unions? With Democrats like those, who needs Republicans?

I'm going to call Governor Andy's office and express outrage that, with schools being cut, teachers being laid off, and working people suffering all over, that all he can worry about is saving David Koch another billion. I'll tell him I'm a lifelong Democrat and he won't be getting my vote in the future if he doesn't sharply reconsider his priorities.

Too bad, after not having a raise for the last 40 months, I haven't got $87,000 to persuade him further.

Thanks to Reality-Based Educator

Murdoch's Education Ventures Go Forward With The Help Of Politicians On His Payroll

The Independent reports today that Rupert Murdoch is going ahead with his plans to create a News International-sponsored academy school near his newspaper headquarters in east London despite the hacking and political corruption scandal that is embroiling his company, News Corporation.

The hacking scandal has seen 11 former News International employees arrested on a variety of charges, from phone hacking to conspiracy, including the former News of the World editor and News International chief Rebekah Brooks and one of British Prime Minister's David Cameron's former top aides and former editor at News of the World, Andy Coulson.

News International is the British subsidiary of Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation.

News International employees have been accused of hacking into the phones of murder victims, murder victims' family members, 7/7 terrorism victims and their families, celebrities, politicians and members of the Royal Family, bribing the police for information, and conspiring with police and political officials to cover-up the scandal and sidetrack any official investigations into the matter.

The scandal has led to the shuttering of the newspaper at the center of the hacking allegations, the 168-year old News of the World, as well as the withdrawal of News Corporation's bid to take over shares of the British satellite network BSkyB that are not already owned by News Corp.

The nexus between News International criminal activity, News International employees, politicians and police in this scandal has been getting special scrutiny since former News International employee Andy Coulson was forced to resign from his government position earlier in the year as a result of the scandal and since allegations came to light that current or former Murdoch employees hired by the police may have helped quell past investigations into the hacking scandal.

Top officials at Scotland Yard have resigned in the wake of these allegations.

But neither Murdoch nor the political establishment seem disturbed enough by the scandal to put a temporary halt on Murdoch's education moves.

The news about the Murdoch-sponsored academy in Britain is just the latest example of a Murdoch move into the education sphere and he is doing these moves with the help of politicians either currently on his payroll or formerly on it.

For example, former News International employee and now British Education Secretary, Michael Gove, has met with News Corp. executives at least 21 times since the last election, more than any other member of the British government, including six times with Rupert Murdoch himself.

Gove, a corporate education reform advocate with close ties to another Murdoch employee, former New York City Schools Chancellor Joel Klein, has called for a radical overhaul of education in Britain, comparing his reform efforts to Chairman Mao's Long March.

Gove's plans include starting networks of "free schools," which will be similar to charter schools here in the U.S., that will be free from many of the rules schools in Britain have to abide by as well as a radical shift in the school curriculum and an increased emphasis on testing. Gove has also pushed for a ten hour school day and half day school on Saturdays, though the extended hours would not be compulsory.

Gove had a three day series of meetings with Joel Klein on the free schools issue earlier this year. Like Klein, Gove is also a proponent of technology education and hopes to digitize many of Britain's classrooms in the near future for online instruction and education.

Rupert Murdoch himself said he sees online education and instruction as a $500 billion dollar profit sector in the near future and has bought a U.S. company that provides the kind of software and technology that is used for online education, Wireless Generation.

Former New York City Schools Chancellor Klein signed a no-bid contract with Wireless Generation for a few million dollars when he was running the NYC school system.

Klein went to work for Rupert Murdoch after he resigned his chancellorship. Two weeks later, Murdoch purchased Wireless Generation and put Klein in charge of running the News Corporation K-12 online education division, which includes Wireless Generation.

Wireless Generation has since been given a no-bid contract by the NY State Education Department worth $27 million dollars.

That contract is under scrutiny, as 16 other companies tried to bid for the contract but NYSED officials claimed there was no time to bid out the contract competitively, as they were under a deadline for Race to the Top funds.

The Daily News has reported this was not so, that the timeline would have allowed for competitive bidding but that the NYSED decided not to take any competitive bids for the contract

This week the United Federation of Teachers and the New York State Union of Teachers called for the Wireless Generation contract to be voided, citing concerns over the News International hacking scandal in Britain.

Which brings me back full circle to the Independent article about the Murdoch-sponsored free school in Britain that will focus on technology education.

It is apparent that Murdoch, with the help of former political operatives now on his payroll, like Joel Klein or former Murdoch employees now working in the public sector, like Michael Gove, is intent on creating a public/private education system with an emphasis on technology and online instruction, then carving out a substantial part of that sector for News Corp profit-taking.

As he said himself, he expects to make billions off such a partnership even as his own media outlets like the NY Post and the Wall Street Journal call for more technology-friendly reforms from their editorial pages that will ultimately make News Corporation more profitable.

That Murdoch and his minions like Gove and Klein are getting away with this even as the News International hacking scandal continues to grow is disturbing.

An official British inquiry team into the scandal led by Justice Brian Leveson has begun an investigation that is expected to take a year to look into the matters.

Here in the United States, the FBI has opened an investigation into whether News Corporation employees or their British counterparts at News International hacked into the phones of 9/11 victims and their families.

Murdoch announced his own internal News Corp. investigation led by Joel Klein, the man who prepped Rupert Murdoch and his son, James, for their July appearance before a Parliament committee.

Klein reports to another Murdoch employee and News Corporation board member, Viet Dinh, for this investigation, but the internal News Corp. probe has been widely criticized as compromised since men very close to Rupert Murdoch are leading it.

Questions of a continued Murdoch cover-up surfaced when news broke that Murdoch has given employees fired as a result of the News of the World closure raises and bonuses, a move that sounds very much like bribery to keep possibly disgruntled employees quiet about the hacking scandal.

In addition, James Murdoch has been accused of lying before Parliament about his knowledge of the phone hacking scandal and News International payoffs to victims of the hacking by two former high level News International employees, lawyer Tom Crone and former News of the World editor Colin Myler.

Murdoch paid out a 700,000 GBP payment to News International hacking victim Gordon Taylor, but claimed he was only doing so on the advice of Crone and Myler and did not know the reason for the payout.

The statement seems absurd on the face of it (who hands out $1.2 million as a payout without knowing why?) and Crone and Myler are now stating that openly.

So the Murdoch hacking scandal, while at a low level now with Parliament on recess, is not even close to being over.

Many more allegations and disclosures are to come and the scandal may still bring down both James Murdoch and his father, Rupert.

For governments in either the United States or Britain to do education business with News Corp. or News International while this scandal continues to break is disgusting and hypocritical.

But given that so many in the governments of both Britain and the United States are either on the Murdoch payroll, used to be on the Murdoch payroll, or want to be on the Murdoch payroll in the future, I suppose it is not a surprise that Murdoch is continuing with his education ventures unimpeded.

Men like Joel Klein and Michael Gove have shown their allegiance is to Rupert Murdoch and News Corporation, not to children or the public or public education, so I guess I shouldn't be surprised when many other people in the political establishment feel the same way.

In Britain, that means the Cameron government.

In America, that means the Bloomberg administration, the Cuomo administration, the New York State Education Department and the Regents, and even the Obama administration's USDOE.

It seems that short of murder itself, there is nothing that Rupert Murdoch, James Murdoch or News Corporation employees can do that would get the political establishment to bar them from doing business in the public education system.

But who knows?

Given the severity of the hacking scandal already, with News International employees hacking into a murdered teenager's phone and erasing messages, with News International employees hacking into the phone of the mother of another girl murdered - a phone that News International gave her - and with allegations that News International employees hacked into the phones of 7/7 and 9/11 terrorism victims, the investigation may just yet turn up a body or two as well.

Murdoch And Klein Game The System

The NY Daily News reports that News Corporation, the media and news conglomerate owned and run by Rupert Murdoch, has gamed the political system to get a no-bid contract for its educational division:

More than a dozen private firms wanted to work on a project like the one the state Education Department is set to award to a Rupert Murdoch-owned company in a $27 million no-bid contract.

Agency officials have cited "an extremely challenging time line" in their decision to partner with News Corp. subsidiary Wireless Generation to build a data system of student test scores and other information.

The Daily News has learned that the agency has explored the project for at least two years - proof, critics say, state officials had ample time to competitively bid out the contract and still meet a fall 2012 deadline for a federal Race to the Top grant.

"It raises all kinds of questions," said Susan Lerner, executive director of good government group Common Cause New York. "There appears to be time in this process to go through a much more open-bidding process to ensure that the public is getting the best vendor at the best price."

The News has also learned that Wireless Generation paid as much as $5,000 a month to lobbying firms to advocate for the contract and Race to the Top funds with state officials.

The biggest lobbying Murdoch could have done for this business was to hire Joel Klein, the former chancellor of New York City schools and a big proponent of Wireless Generation, to run the education division of News Corp. that now owns Wireless Generation.

In 2009, Klein had handed Wireless Generation a contract for School of One, a computerized education program that Klein said would help create "a school system where instruction was individualized by cutting down on the number of teachers and relying more on technology."

This contract was extended in October 2010 by the DOE, just one month before Klein resigned from his chancellorship of the NYCDOE and announced his hiring by News Corporation and a month and a half before Murdoch's News Corp. bought Wireless Generation.

Rupert Murdoch has been a wizard at greasing the wheels for much more lucrative deals in the past then this one (after all, $27 million is just chump change to Murdoch), but don't kid yourself, Murdoch and Klein envision a very profitable future for their for-profit online education division.

In a speech he gave in June, Murdoch said he expects News Corporation's education division to become "a leading provider of educational materials within five years, aiming for about 10% of total revenue to come from this source."

Now that Murdoch has dropped his bid for BSkyB, the British satellite broadcasting company that would have added billions to News Corporation's profits, Murdoch may need the extra revenue from his education division even more.

The loss of the BSkyB deal came as fall-out from the phone hacking scandal that is embroiling Murdoch's News International company in Britain.

Allegations that Murdoch's employees at his British newspapers hacked into the phones of murder victims, victims' families, politicians, celebrities and others, bribed the London Metro police for hacking information, and subverted justice by paying off cops charged to investigate News International and politicians have Murdoch's empire in Britain reeling.

Murdoch has already shut the newspaper at the center of the scandal, News of the World, and may be forced to sell his remaining British newspapers in addition to losing the BSkyB deal.

Ten people have been arrested in the scandal, including the former editor of News of the World and one of Rupert Murdoch's closest allies in News International, Rebekah Brooks.

Murdoch named Joel Klein to head an internal News Corporation investigation into the hacking scandal. Klein can be seen at the photo at the top left seated behind Rupert Murdoch's son, James, as he testified to Parliament back on July 19 that he knew nothing about a cover-up of the phone hacking scandal.

James Murdoch's testimony has since been disputed by former News International employees.

The scandal, seemingly isolated to Murdoch's British News Empire, has crossed to the United States in the last few weeks when allegations surfaced that News International employees may have hacked into the phones of 9/11 victims.

Representative Peter King (R-NY) asked for the FBI to investigate the allegations and the Department of Justice has opened an investigation into the matter. In addition, Murdoch's Wall Street Journal reported that the SEC may be opening an investigation into News Corporations' business practices and the Daily News has reported that employees at the NY Post have been advised by the editor to save any information related to the hacking case for an internal News Corp. investigation.

Les Hinton, the former chairman of News International during the period the phone hacking scandal was alleged to have taken place and the publisher of the Wall Street Journal, was forced to resign from the paper over the scandal earlier this month.

All of this brings me back to just how Murdoch and Klein, still engulfed in a phone hacking scandal that has seen new allegations that News International employees hacked into the phone of a murdered girl's mother News International itself had given her, can be winning the $27 million no-bid contract from the New York State Department of Education when the rest of the News Corporation Empire is so scandal-ridden.

And the answer is of course the same as how Murdoch got away with so much criminal activity in Britain for all these years.

He's got politicians like Andrew Cuomo in his pocket as allies to do his bidding for him, he's manipulated the political process by using his media empire as a bludgeon over the heads of politicians who don't give him what he wants, and paid off the right people either with campaign contributions or jobs.

As John Nichols wrote about Murdoch's political influence in The Nation:

As in England, Murdoch and his managers have for many years had their way with the American regulators and political players who should have been holding the mogul and the multinational to account. Sometimes Murdoch has succeeded through aggressive personal lobbying, sometimes with generous campaign contributions (with Democrats and Republicans among the favored recipients), sometimes by hiring the likes of Newt Gingrich (who as the Speaker of the House consulted with Murdoch in the 1990s) and Rick Santorum (who as a senator from Pennsylvania was a frequent defender of big media companies), sometimes by making stars of previously marginal figures such as Michele Bachmann.

Former White House political czar Karl Rove, who prodded Fox News to declare George Bush the winner of the disputed 2000 presidential election and who remains a key player in Republican politics to this day, still works for Murdoch, as does former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, a prospective GOP vice presidential candidate.

But Murdoch is not the rigid partisan some of his more casual critics imagines. He often discovers unexpected political heroes or heroines—such as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, a former target whose 2000 US Senate run in New York and whose 2008 presidential run earned surprisingly generous coverage from the New York Post and Fox after Murdoch determined that she was on the rise politically. The Clinton embrace was classic Murdoch. He plays both sides of every political divide. But when he is not aiding and abetting the party of the right he looks for conservative and centrist figures (Britain’s Blair, America’s Clinton) within traditional parties of the left. The point, always, is to assure that those with power are pro-business in general and pro-Murdoch (or, at the least, indebted to Murdoch) in particular.

The strategy has been so successful that, even now, there is some debate about the extent to which Murdoch’s influence will diminish in the United States.

Murdoch has taken that strategy into public education by hiring former NYC Schools Chancellor Joel Klein, by using his Americans news outlets like the NY Post, the Wall Street Journal and FOX NEWS to promote the meme that public education is a failure that can only be saved by radical reform of the system, and aggressively lobbying behind the scenes for business deals and radical education reforms like tenure changes that will help his for-profit online K-12 education division grow into the moneymaker he envisions.

So far, it's still working in education even as Murdoch sees his news divisions here in the U.S. come under scrutiny for the hacking case and his British division come close to collapse.

In fact, News Corporation is sponsoring an education conference that will promote online K-12 education as well as give Republican 2012 presidential hopefuls a platform to air their views on the issue:

NEW YORK - Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. and not-for-profit the College Board said Tuesday that they will work together to make education reform a top issue in the 2012 presidential campaign with an event that will give Republican candidates the opportunity to outline their vision for improving the U.S. education system.

...

To help set the agenda, the two organizations said they will co-host The Future of American Education: A Presidential Primary Forum here on Oct. 27, which will be televised and streamed online. It is timed to coincide with the College Board’s annual national forum, which attracts representatives from educational institutions across the country.

All Republican primary candidates "who meet a threshold level of support in national polls" will be invited to participate in the event, the companies said.

“Whoever is elected President in 2012 will need to take dramatic steps to improve the way we prepare our students for college and ensure our nation’s ability to better compete in the global economy,” said News Corp. chairman and CEO Murdoch. "This forum will provide a great opportunity for candidates for the Republican nomination to articulate their plans to achieve these goals."

Klein and the Wall Street Journal's Paul Gigot will host the forum.

This conference was announced before the phone hacking scandal broke wide open, so we'll see if News Corporation remains a public sponsor of the event or if Klein remains one of the hosts now that he has become a very prominent face in the Murdoch damage control team.

But the point of all of this remains whether this education conference comes off or not.

Murdoch is creating a very profitable environment for his online education business by denigrating public schools in his media, buying off the politicians to get them to change labor laws and regulations to help promote this business (just as he has done with the media enterprises in the past in both Britain and the U.S.) and hiring the right people with the right connections to promote his education business as an alternative to the public school system.

The Wireless Genration/ARIS contract is just a little glimpse into that very corrupt process and Murdoch and Klein should NOT be allowed to get away with this, NOT after the phone hacking, NOT after the bribery of the London Metro police, NOT after the conspiracy to subvert justice in Britain, NOT after all the political manipulation and chicanery.

The Murdoch phone hacking scandal points us toward the future.

It is not only time for a Murdoch-free news media in Britain.

It is time for a Murdoch-free education system here in America.

Documents? We Don't Need No Stinking Documents!

As NYC Educator posted yesterday, New York State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli found in an audit that the KIPP Academy Charter School in the Bronx paid nearly $70,000 dollars for staff development trips to the Dominican Republic and the Bahamas.

KIPPsters claim donated private funds were used for the overseas staff development trips but according to the report "auditors could not determine if this was the case because donated funds were not accounted for separately from state aid."

Lack of documentation seems to be a chronic problem with the KIPP Academy. The state audit also found the following deficiencies:

* lack of documentation of criminal background checks for seven employees at the school;
* an unclear policy regarding the competitive bidding process that resulted in the awarding of four contracts totaling in $181,584 without the benefit of competition;
* no written policies and procedures to determine and approve salary increases;
* missing or incomplete overtime records;
* no system to track employees’ sick or personal leave accruals; and
* no written policies and procedures or Board approval for employee bonus and stipend pay.

Notice how the KIPPsters just can't seem to provide much documentation for how they hire people, what kind of criminal background checks they do on hirees, how they pay them, how they dole out bonuses, how they dole out no-bid contracts or how they track sicktime/overtime.

Apparently the KIPP Academy Charter School in the Bronx, supported by free-market proponents who want to privatize public education in order to bring the efficiencies of the free market to the public education sphere, have taken the whole free enterprise thing to heart and are running the school with "Enron-style accounting."

You remember Enron-style accounting. That's where business CEOs and boards lie, cheat and steal from stockholders/customers all the while living high off the hog on their ill-gotten largess. You keep the documentation to a minimum, put all the bad stuff "off the books" so that regulators don't see it and have another drink on the poor suckers who don't know any better.

Currently Enron-style accounting is back in the news because many financial institutions like Citigroup, Wachovia, WaMu, JP Morgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, Bear Sterns and Merrill Lynch are using the "off the books" documentation method to avoid having to list billions of dollars of losses they've taken in the mortgage mess.

Apparently the post-Enron, post-Tyco, Post-WorldCom, post-Adelphia regulation that free marketers are always complaining about (Sarbanes-Oxley) didn't actually take care of the fuzzy documentation problem on Wall Street. Eventually these venerated financial institutions will probably have to acknowledge they've lost billions, but for now they play a game of hide and seek with the losses.

And KIPPsters, backed by Wall Street CEOs and hedge fund managers who have created and/or enabled this fuzzy documentation environment where truth is held off the books and money losses do not become real until you acknowledge them, have learned their lessons well from their free market masters.

Keep the bad stuff off the books. Keep as little documentation as possible. Complain about regulation. Shrug when regulators come and ask for the documentation. Extol the free market. Continue to hand out the no-bid, no-competition contracts. And most importantly, cheat the poor suckers who are providing you with the money for your operations.

POSTSCRIPT: One of the more disturbing findings in the audit is that the KIPP Academy couldn't provide documentation for the criminal background checks of seven employees.

The school lists 25 employees on its website, so they couldn't provide auditors with criminal background check documentation for 28% of the staff!

I don't know about you, but in this day and age I don't think I'd want to send my kid to a school where they don't know if the math teacher is an upstanding citizen or a felon.

Apparently the boys and girls running KIPP don't have the same concerns.

Yuk, Yuk, Yuck

Here's a You Tube video of the 50th birthday party/celebrity roast/charter school fund-raiser Randi Weingarten held for herself last night at UFT Headquarters:



Just in case you work at the NYCDOE and your computer doesn't have speakers, here's what the mayor said about Weingarten at the roast:

“Like Christina Aguilera, she’s a superstar performer (cue small shimmy from the union prez), like Robert Moses, she’s literally changed the lives of 8 million New Yorkers, and, like Brad Pitt she really loves beautiful women.”

Oh, yeah - that's funny.

And then there was the merit pay joke the mayor made and "the big hug and kiss" he gave her:



Or how about this yuk yuk from the UFT’s Brooklyn Borough Representative Howard Schoor:

Schoor suggested that Weingarten abandon her life as a lesbian and marry Klein, noting the two have a lot in common, including: “kissing Bloomberg’s ass for the past six years.”

None of this is funny, of course, but it does go to show you just how chummy this "labor leader" is with the captains of industry, Wall Street types and politicians who see gutting union protections and Walmartizing public schools as a life's work.

In addition to Bloomberg, Quinn, Thompson and the rest of the elected political parasite class, Al Sharpton showed up looking spiffy (according to the Daily News) and Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul and Mary sang Happy Birthday to Dear Leader.

You'll note that the one guest not at the party was a working teacher.

Oh, I'm sure there were plenty of Unity/New Action apparatchiks there to play the dutiful role of working teachers who are devoted to Ms. Weingarten, but they're just paying back the extra pensions, no-show jobs and other patronage gifts Ms. Weingarten and the UFT leadership hand out to people who do their bidding.

As for real working teachers like you and me, we were only there in spirit - and in the money used to pay for the building, the electricity, the food and drink and the party favors.

Remember, we paid for this abomination with our hard-earned money that we give to these crooks every two weeks out of our checks.

At the end of the day, the joke is really on us.

UPDATE: As of 7:54 PM, the Weingarten party hasn't been mentioned on either Edwize or UFT.org. This is strange, since the UFT never misses a chance to tell us what Randi has been up to, so you'd have to think the leadership really doesn't want most rank-and-filers to know how they're spending our money.

I left this comment on Edwize's "Teacher News of the Day" post for December 5th to let them know how I feel:

Gee, how come the dues-funded soiree/birthday party/fund raiser for charter schools Randi threw for herself, the Mayor, the chancellor and a bunch of other dignitaries at UFT Headquarters didn’t make it to Teacher news of the Day or to the front page of UFT.org?

Usually you never miss a chance to tell us what Randi’s up to but strangely enough the hugs, kisses and yuk-yuks Randi enjoyed last night with the mayor and the rest of the political establishment at the building built and powered by rank-and -file dues money didn’t get a mention.

Could it be you don’t want the rank-and-file to know the party was held and partially funded by dues money?

I reprint the comment here because Leo Casey, fresh from his fake censorship battle with Mickey Mouse, will no doubt promptly censor my comment from the official UFT blog paid for by my dues money as a "personal attack."

Botox Anyone?

Yomister remarked in this comment thread that the UFT, which bills itself as a "Union of Professionals," is now running on its homepage an advertisement for botox treatments, breast enhancement and other kinds of plastic surgery by some doctor in Staten Island (I'm not putting up a link to the guy, but that's his logo over to the left.)

Yomister wonders when the ads for escort services and the like will show up on the UFT website.

If you click on the link for other advertisers on the UFT webpage, it's clear that the escort service ads are actually already there.

Listed on the advertisers page are:

1. Washington Mutual Mortgage Home Loans - a company that is being probed by NY State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo for pressuring a big title insurer to inflate appraisals of homes so that they could hand out bigger mortgage loans and charge higher rates to people

2. Countrywide Financial - the nation's largest mortgage company that pioneered such innovative financial products as the NINJA loan (no income, no job no assets - no problem!!!) and handed out hundreds of thousands of adjustable rate mortgages to anybody with pulse no matter whether they had the ability to make payments once the mortgages reset to higher rates or not.

Like WaMu, Countrywide has also been accused of inflating home values so they could push higher mortgages (with higher fees) onto people. But the dishonesty and criminality didn't stop there. Gretchen Morgensen wrote the seminal article on the unethical Countrywide Financial for the NY Times back in August. Here's a taste:

Countrywide’s entire operation, from its computer system to its incentive pay structure and financing arrangements, is intended to wring maximum profits out of the mortgage lending boom no matter what it costs borrowers, according to interviews with former employees and brokers who worked in different units of the company and internal documents they provided. One document, for instance, shows that until last September the computer system in the company’s subprime unit excluded borrowers’ cash reserves, which had the effect of steering them away from lower-cost loans to those that were more expensive to homeowners and more profitable to Countrywide.

...

Countrywide’s product list showed that it would lend $500,000 to a borrower rated C-minus, the second-riskiest grade. As long as the loan represented no more than 70 percent of the underlying property’s value, Countrywide would lend to a borrower even if the person had a credit score as low as 500. (The top score is 850.)

The company would lend even if the borrower had been 90 days late on a current mortgage payment twice in the last 12 months, if the borrower had filed for personal bankruptcy protection, or if the borrower had faced foreclosure or default notices on his or her property.

Such loans were made, former employees say, because they were so lucrative — to Countrywide. The company harvested a steady stream of fees or payments on such loans and busily repackaged them as securities to sell to investors.

If you have heard about all the record foreclosures across the country, then you know just how much complicity Countrywide Financial has in the whole sub-prime mortgage mess.

The bottom line here is that if you have done any business with either WaMu Mortgage Home Loans or Countrywide Financial, you have more likely than not been cheated by them. The track record is there for all to see if you simply google these companies.

Yet our union, the dear old UFT, is helping these two unethical companies cheat UFT members by letting them advertise on the UFT website and taking a fee to do it.

I dunno about you, but that definitely sounds like the definition of "whoring" to me.

I wonder if that's what Randi means when she says the UFT is a "Union of Professionals"?

Florida Districts Having Trouble Paying Teachers And Bills

Well, it didn't take long for the financial problems involving a state-run investment pool in Florida that I posted about yesterday and today to hit teachers and other public employees right in the pocketbook.

Bloomberg News reports that school districts, counties and cities across Florida are struggling to raise cash in order to make routine expenditures like paying employees now that they have been denied access to the $15 billion dollars remaining in the state-run investment pool.

There had been a rash of redemptions from the fund by local governments, cities and school districts after it was reported that the fund contained at least $1.5 billion dollars of downgraded and defaulted debt.

Florida officials froze the fund yesterday after redemptions reduced the assets in the fund by 44%.

Here's how it affected some of the districts:

The Jefferson County school district was forced to take out a short-term loan to cover payroll for the 220 teachers and other employees in the system after $2.7 million it held in the pool was frozen yesterday. At least five other districts also obtained last-minute loans, said Wayne Blanton, executive director of the Florida School Boards Association.

``The unthinkable and the unimaginable have just happened here in Florida,'' said Hal Wilson, chief financial officer of the Jefferson County school district, located 30 miles (48 kilometers) east of the state capital Tallahassee. ``What we just experienced here is a classic run-on-the bank meltdown.''

Thousands of school districts, municipalities, towns and municipal organizations keep their money in state- and county-run pools. These state- and county-run pools, similar to money market accounts, are supposed to invest in safe liquid short-term financial products like Treasuries and certificates of deposit from highly-rated banks.

But many of these funds have invested in high-risk products like structured investment vehicles (SIVs) backed by sub-prime mortgage debt or CDs from banks with a decent probability of failure (like Countrywide Financial.)

Hal Wilson says he should have seen the writing on the wall when other counties and school districts started withdrawing money from the fund earlier in the month.

But Wilson listened to state officials who told him the money would be safe.

He screwed up - he believed them.

Now he and his school district will have to scramble to raise cash to meet expenses until Florida state officials can find some way to fix this mess.

You can bet that if state officials don't fix the problems soon, teachers and other public employees will start to work without pay and local governments will start to default on debt service payments.

As for Jefferson County, Wilson says as soon as the fund is unfrozen, the county plans on pulling all of its cash out:

"They won't have to worry about little Jefferson County any more,'' he said.

That's why Florida probably won't unfreeze the fund any time soon.

The Bloomberg News article notes that there have also been problems with a state-run investment pool in Montana where school districts, cities and counties withdrew $247 million from the state's $2.4 billion investment pool in the past three days.

The Montana investment pool held $90 million in a SIV downgraded to a default rating by Standard & Poor.

With news breaking tonight that Moody's says $64.5 billion dollars of debt sold by Citigroup has either been cut to default status or placed on review for downgrade, you can bet that there will be more old-fashioned bank runs on state- and county-run investment pools in the very near future.

This stuff is getting scary.

UPDATE: The NY Times reported today that one scheme Florida officials are considering to shore up the state-run investment fund and help local school districts meet payrolls and other routine expenditures is raiding the state's $137 billion dollar public employee pension fund for cash.

The Florida public workers' union is understandably concerned about this proposal since it transfers risk to the pension fund.

I can understand why.

There's nothing like having to worry about the solvency of the investment funds that pay for both your salary and your pension.

No Redemptions For You

Florida officials have suspended redemptions from that state-run investment fund I told you about yesterday.

Local governments and public school funds were pulling their money out after news broke earlier in the month that the fund is backed by at least $700 million dollars of defaulted debt and other high-risk structured investment vehicles (SIVs.)

After redemptions by local governments and public school funds reduced assets in the fund portfiolio by 44%, Florida officials put a stop to future redemptions.

Before the run of redemptions, the fund had $27 billion in assets. Now it has $15 billion remaining.

Calculated Risk posts that there are serious questions about the investment decisions made by the people running the pool. While only $700 million has gone bad so far, the fund has also invested $650 million dollars in CD's in Countrywide Bank, an institution that could very easily go belly-up at any time due to mortgage problems and credit crunch issues.

But if you haven't already gotten your dough out of that state-run pool before today, you have to sit tight and hope/pray the rest of it doesn't go bad.

The lesson learned?

With Wall Street awash in non-transparent complex structured investment vehicles that you have to be a lawyer, an attorney and a nuclear scientist to figure out and with the government and the Federal Reserve having encouraged the expansion of such speculative products over the past few years, many people, many pension funds, many local governments and even foreign towns are at risk of losing it all.

And unless you're one of the Wall Street shills or crooked fund managers who were hawking this fraudulent garbage (they called it "financial innovation" at the time), you probably have little idea how bad it can get.

I believe it was Bob Dylan who said "If you steal a little, they throw you in jail... if you steal a lot, they make you Fund Manager of the Year."

Niagara Falls

That's where a bunch of university employees are gonna have to drive for vacation, now that EduCap, a loan company, has cancelled their all-expenses-paid trip to the Caribbean island of Nevis. The officials were all set to stay in $565-a-night beachfront rooms, and now it's sixty bucks out of pocket with continental breakfast at an EconoLodge with a view of the parking lot. EduCap was suddently concerned about the perception they might be buying people off.

Now where on earth would anyone get that idea?

I once took a bunch of ESL students to Philadelphia. The oily little guy who booked the trip, ostensibly a tour guide, tried to give me passes for a weekend at some spa or something. I declined and booked buses directly (at huge savings to my kids) the next time we took that trip.

However, a lot of people are smarter than me. My congressman, Peter King, can spend over six thousand bucks on steak houses, thirteen thousand on hotel rooms, and thousands more on cell phone, cable and car lease bills, and his campaign fund pays for it. Alan Hevesi seems to have spent $80,000 of taxpayer funds to chauffer his wife.

Closer to home, my union boss, Randi Weingarten, rewards all her loyal Unity hacks with not only jobs, but an annual all-expenses-paid trip to the AFT convention, which could be anywhere in the country. Let's keep our fingers crossed we get to send them to Hawaii this year. It hardly seems worth it paying for a bunch of Queens residents to stay in Manhattan hotel rooms.

Certainly Leo Casey needs a vacation, and the rest of them need to get their batteries recharged after spending all year censoring our comments, calling their opponents Nazis, and quashing democracy in the United Federation of Teachers.

Wacky Pataki

Governor George Pataki, proud recipient of the coveted UFT endorsement, has just destroyed 200,000 rebate checks scheduled to be mailed to NY taxpayers. That's because they didn't give him credit for the program. Perhaps that's because he fought tooth and nail against it, and only signed it when it was pointed out his veto was going to be overridden.

So now our tax dollars will reprint those checks, so that the gov can boast about his great compassion for working people. The practice of issuing rebate checks just before elections is reprehensible, and it's very sad we put up with such blatant nonsense.

Multi-millionaires like Pataki and Bloomberg are certainly free to buy our votes. But we shouldn't allow them to do it with our own money.

Thanks to Schoolgal