Hoola Hoops, Tulips, and CDOs... by George Schmidt

Naomi Klein points to the Chicago School of Milton Friedman's disciples as the most fundamental of capitalists. (To our educators, reading Klein will show you how Uncle Miltie's theories underlie a lot of what is going on in your schools today.) When right wing Republicans blew up yesterday's bailout conference at the White House, economists from Chicago were cited. No surprises there.

George Schmidt, who has lived under mayoral control of the school system for 13 years, would be classified as the alternate Chicago School. Can it be that George and Miltie's boys and girls have some common ground of agreement on opposing this bailout? In this post to ICE mail George treads on this ground.

Note that when George says, "The white collar workers who produced these commodities may have had "perfect" SAT scores and MBAs from the "best" Ivy League schools" he is also describing the very same types that Joel Klein has surrounded himself with.

9/26/08

Friends from ICE:

Some of us have been talking about this for a couple of weeks as the latest Wall Street, "bi-partisan", and Bush scam unfolded. For the first time in a long time, I find myself re-reading the first volume of Capital while agreeing with the most conservative Republicans. The market has judged these commodities, and there is no reason why we should not let the market continue to take its course.

Basically, the "products" that Lehman Brothers, Goldman, Merrill and Genworth Financial (watch that one next, shipmates) and the others were selling were no different (in the classical capitalist sense) from any other commodity produced for a competitive market. Just because they were given fancy named like "Collateralized Debt Obligations" (CDOs) or "Default Swaps" and had to wait to be birthed by Capital until the age of computers doesn't make them any different from their classical ancestors in the history of markets, bubbles, and panics.

The fact that the products were produced using computers by overpaid whiz kids (and their elders, right up to Henry Paulson) doesn't change their basic reality. The white collar workers who produced these commodities may have had "perfect" SAT scores and MBAs from the "best" Ivy League schools, but they were still producing a product to sell at a profit in the "marketplace" they've been worshipping since the first day they read "Atlas Shrugged" in one of those right wing essay contests every high school was forced by poverty to sponsor.

The financial products, as commodities, were and are no different from Hoola Hoops, SUVs, and Rely tampons (which also proved "toxic" after years of marketing hype).

This latest (bi-partisan) scam, from an Adam Smith point of view, is that they think they can unload a worthless inventory of commodities they have overproduced (in typical fashion, going all the way back to the Tulip Bubble at the very onset of Capital) on the taxpayers.

It may help some people to see what's going on by viewing all these arcanely named thingamajigs as simply the latest version of the Hoola Hoop. There is a market. The commodity is overproduced by those trying to cash in on the market. The price of the commodity crashes, and someone is left with huge inventories.

Why should we be buying this generation of Hoola Hoops with our tax dollars when we were smart enough to avoid buying them when they were for sale in the open market?

George N. Schmidt
Editor, Substance

www.substancenews.net

Diane Ravitch on How Dems Match Republicans on School Reform

Dems say

Diane Ravitch began a new season on her blog with some points on how Dems are aping the elephants on ed reform.

We used to see a partisan divide about the big issues in education policy. The Democratic party advocated more funding for disadvantaged students and policies that promoted equity. The Republican party advocated choice, privatization, merit pay, and accountability, and criticized the teachers’ unions as the main obstacles to reform.

In this election cycle, that familiar divide has changed dramatically. The Republicans still advocate choice, privatization, merit pay, and accountability and are still critical of the teachers’ unions. But now there is a significant movement within the Democratic party that advocates the same positions as the Republicans.

The “reforms” of the Klein-Sharpton-Rhee group are not at all new. They attack the teachers’ union, bash teachers, demand merit pay, promote charter schools and private management, and laud testing, lots more testing. They love NCLB, and they want it toughened. At bottom, they would like to see the public school system of the United States run like a business, with employees hired and fired at will. They are ready to privatize and outsource whatever they can, trusting private managers to succeed where the public sector (with themselves as leaders) has failed.

Read it all at Bridging Differences, her dialogue with Debbie Meier here.

As one of the major players and founders in the standards movement, is Diane playing the role of Dr. Frankenstein as she sees what has become of her monster?

Follow events in Chicago going on right now with a student boycott over a failed schools system. Need I remind you that Mayor Daly is a Dem? That city has had mayoral control and all the "goodies" of the ed reform movement since 1995 - and Paul Vallas to get it all started. He went on to Philly to create a mess and is not running New Orleans. Hate to say we told you so, but we did - starting with pleas to the UFT back in 2001 to resist mayoral control when reports out of Chicago started surfacing compliments of George Schmidt and Substance.

Rather than look at ways to continue mayoral control with checks or independent commissions to evaluate results (a good thing) as all too many critics like Diane seem to line up, better to seek ways to remove education from the control of politicians who, no matter what the controls, will engage in tactics to override them.

More on Obama and Education in Chicago

Finally, we are getting some hard core information on Obama and the Chicago school issue from someone involved in the front lines and this looks like somewhat of a plus for Obama. (See my comment below after Julie Woestehoff's points.)

Leonie Haimson has gone to a source and sent the following to her listserve:

As you know, I have always been reluctant on this list and elsewhere to get involved in partisan politics; for one thing, my organization's non-profit status depends on not endorsing any candidates for elective office.

But I think because of the previous discussion of Obama on this list and assorted claims that he supported or was somehow involved in some of the worst aspects of the so-called education reform agenda in Chicago, its important to set the record straight.

I turned to my friend Julie Woestehoff, the president of Parent United for Responsible Education, who has worked in Chicago in support of parent rights and parent involvement in the public schools for many years. Julie is a fantastic advocate, and she co-authored our letter to the parents of LA which we wrote in June 2006, when they were considering Mayoral control in that city. (For a copy of this letter, which received a lot of media attention at the time, see http://www.classsizematters.org/lettertoLAparents.html)

Just a little background – LSC’s or Local School Councils are like our School Leadership Teams – teams made up of parents and staff that are supposed to make important decisions at the school level and that the administration in Chicago has been trying to weaken over many years (sound familiar?)

I urge you to read Julie’s unedited observations about Barack Obama below.

Leonie Haimson
Executive Director
Class Size Matters

Hi Leonie-
Glad to offer my 2 cents, and I don't mind your sharing any of it.

First of all, Sen. Obama is my neighbor (we vote in the same polling place), and he has also been my state senator and currently my US Senator. I've always voted for him and we have a nodding acquaintance. He is just as charming, funny, straightforward, and thoughtful in person as he seems. Our community is absolutely thrilled with his candidacy -- but it's the senior African-Americans who seem happiest ("Never thought in my lifetime..."). In addition, my husband is a minister in the United Church of Christ and has enormous respect for Obama's church and its pastor, both of which are major influences on him. So I'm not unbiased. But I do have some history to relate.

As a state senator, Obama supported our elected, parent-majority local school councils during a time when we were under attack by Paul Vallas, the schools CEO at the time. Vallas wanted to be able to veto LSC principal selection decisions in cases where the LSC decided not to rehire a principal when his/her contract was up. PURE proposed a compromise, to bring in independent arbitration. There's an entry on my blog that quotes Obama in support of that process, which was made law and has worked well for almost 10 years now:

http://pureparents.org/index.php?blog/show/Obama_on_LSC_principal_arbitration_process

We wanted him to take up the LSC cause more vigorously than he did, and he disappointed us from time to time, but never on anything major. As a sidelight, I encountered Michelle Obama when she was a member of the Chicago Board of Education's Accountability Council, a now defunct group whose responsibility at the time was to review schools for potential interventions. She and a couple of other women on the council were the only ones who stood up against CPS's efforts to get them to rubber stamp any intervention that Vallas proposed. Again, she didn't get out and rock the boat, but she was strong and intelligent.

As our US Senator, Obama made the effort to get onto the Senate Education Committee and his office has been very responsive to our communications about NCLB and related matters. I've had some extensive discussion with his education aide. Where we agree most is on the importance of parent involvement. If elected, I believe that Obama will direct the USDE to take significant steps to promote and strengthen the role of parents. Obama also gets the problems with testing and has begun highlighting that in his speeches and campaign themes.

It's not true that Obama supports Renaissance 2010. He has been publicly supportive of charter schools, but his support developed prior to the wholesale appropriation of charter and other new school strategies that undergird the disaster Mayor Daley calls Renaissance 2010. Even the heretofore positive notion of small schools is tainted, at least in Chicago, by their being used to justify massive school closing and privatization. This is all fairly new stuff and even we have to work hard to keep up with the various mutations. I believe that Obama is aware of what's really going on and that he gets the issues.

Finally, the fact that Obama was recently excoriated for having Linda Darling-Hammond as one of his education advisors speaks pretty well for him. If you haven't read Mike Klonsky's blog on this topic, here's an example:
http://blog.360.yahoo.com/blog-6z6IhP08cqXp9kfshYQPv87gCfJyFg--?cq=1&p=1924

I hope this helps!!
Julie

Norm's follow-up:

On this point:

Even the heretofore positive notion of small schools is tainted, at least in heretof, by their being used to justify massive school closing and privatization. This is all fairly new stuff and even we have to work hard to keep up with the various mutations. I believe that Obama is aware of what's really going on and that he gets the issues.

It seems I've veen hearing about some of this for years, way before this occurred in NYC. Schmidt's Substance has been running stuff on this for many years. Debbie Lynch ran and won in the Chicago Teachers Union election back in 2001 I believe partly on the school closing issue. I ran articles in Ed Notes around 2001/2 addressing this issue in Chicago and that was one of the lessons we tried to bring to the UFT when the small schools business started in NYC. So I would love to hear more than a belief he is "aware" and "gets" the issue. Silence is still complicity and if we are electing a president I would sure like to know where he/she stands on the kind of educational malpractice we've seen in Chicago and NYC and other places.

Comment on out previous post from anon:

So let me get this straight. You want Klonsky to join George Schmidt in attacking Obama in the middle of campaign against Clinton and McCain? And on what issue? Mayor Daley's school reform plan. Have I got that right?

Response: Al

I want to put up as much information unfiltered on where Obama has stood on the Chicago school - I won't honor it by calling it a reform plan. I would like to see Schmidt and Klonsky and others give us some hard info on where Obama has stood if anywhere at all over the past 13 years. Klonsky was correct to crit. Russo but provides nothing much more than that. By the way, I don't consider Schmidt's criticism more of an attack on Obama than on Clinton.

Read more on Chicago school un-reform at Under Assault in this post.

Smearing Obama: More Wind from the Windy City

George Schmidt's critical look at the Obama Ed program which we posted here seems to have been joined by Alexander Russo. I get the feeling Schmidt is not an admirer of Russo. But neither is he an admirer of Mike Klonsky. So, who is lining up where? Klonsky at his Small talk blog accuses Russo of a smear job and if you take his narrow slice, it sure looks that way. He also hints that maybe this is part of the Clinton dirty tricks campaign.

Interestingly, Randi Weingarten raised the issue of Obama's positions on education - gently, but negatively - at the Delegate Assembly on Feb. 6. Maybe not exactly a dirty trick - a slightly smudgy trick. Like the Clintons with their buddies Joel Klein and Andrew Rotherham are not in the phony Ed reform movement up to their ears.

Though right now I am inclined to support Obama, though I am also concerned about the things Schmidt pointed to. I mean, silence on the part of Obama in the face if the Richard Daly/Paul Vallas onslaught is complicity. I wish Klonsky would comment on this aspect of George's statement:

There has been no difference between Barack Obama and Mayor Richard M. Daley on any of the corporate "school reform" plans foisted on Chicago since Daley pioneered the "mayor control" dictatorial model of school governance (thanks to a vote of a Republican dominated Illinois General Assembly, a la the Gingrich Congress) in 1995.

Despite the fact that many community leaders and even some public
officials have challenged Mayor Daley on "Renaissance 2010" -- especially the wholesale relocation of children as schools were closed and often flipped for charter school use, Barack Obama was not public with any criticism of "Renaissance 2010." In fact, his positions are indistinguishable from Mayor Daley's or those of his Hyde Park neighbors and the people pushing privatization, charterization, and corporate "school reform" out of the University of Chicago and elsewhere in corporate Chicago. Rumor locally has been that Barack Obama has included Arne Duncan [the Joel Klein of Chicago] and others of that ilk in his informal educational brain trust.

Here are some excerpts from Klonsky's post which you can read here in full:

Russo won't get the job

Is Alexander Russo auditioning for a job in the dirty-tricks department of the Clinton campaign? One might think so after reading his latest attempt to smear Barack Obama and his school reform supporters. On his TWIE blog, Russo claims that Obama’s co-sponsorship of a bill promoting a Teacher Residency Program, in effect, makes the senator a supporter of school closings, teacher firings and turning over public schools to “outside organizations.”

Klonsky closes with:

Whether or not one agrees with the TRP narrative’s positive description of AUSL, or with Obama’s candidacy, it would be pretty hard to give any credence to Russo’s pitiful anti-Obama smears. Sorry, Alexander. You don't get the job. They already have hired the best in the business.