Very important read.  

"Pearson, a British multi-national conglomerate, is one of the largest private businesses maneuvering for U.S. education dollars. The company had net earnings of 956 million pounds or approximately 1.5 billion dollars in 2011."  

Read on.

Angela

Pearson 'Education' -- Who Are These People?

Posted: 09/04/2012 2:49 pm

Alan Singer

Social studies educator, Hofstra University

According to a recent article on Reuters, an international news service based in Great Britain, "investors of all stripes are beginning to sense big profit potential in public education. The K-12 market is tantalizingly huge: The U.S. spends more than $500 billion a year to educate kids from ages five through 18. The entire education sector, including college and mid-career training, represents nearly 9 percent of U.S. gross domestic product, more than the energy or technology sectors."
Pearson, a British multi-national conglomerate, is one of the largest private businesses maneuvering for U.S. education dollars. The company had net earnings of 956 million pounds or approximately 1.5 billion dollars in 2011.
Starting in May 2014, Pearson Education will take over teacher certification in New York State as a way of fulfilling the state's promised "reforms" in its application for federal Race to the Top money. The evaluation system known as the Teacher Performance assessment or TPA was developed at Stanford University with support from Pearson, but it will be solely administered and prospective teachers will be entirely evaluated by Pearson and its agents. Pearson is adverting for current or retired licensed teachers or administrators willing to evaluate applicants for teacher certification. It is prepared to pay $75 per assessment.
The Pearson footprint appears to be everywhere and taints academic research as well as government policy. For example, the Education Development Center (EDC), based in Waltham, Massachusetts, is a "global nonprofit organization that designs, delivers and evaluates innovative programs to address some of the world's most urgent challenges in education, health, and economic opportunity." EDC works with "public-sector and private partners" to "harness the power of people and systems to improve education, health promotion and care, workforce preparation, communications technologies, and civic engagement." In education, it is involved in curriculum and materials development, research and evaluation, publication and distribution, online learning, professional development, and public policy development. According to its website, its funders include Cisco Systems, IBM, Intel, the Gates Foundation, and of course, Pearson Education, all companies or groups that stand to benefit from its policy recommendations.
EDC sponsored a study on the effectiveness of new teacher evaluation systems, "An examination of performance-based teacher evaluation systems in five states," that Pearson is promoting but there are two VERY BIG FLAWS in the study. First, of the five states included in the study, Delaware, Georgia, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Texas, four, Georgia, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Texas, are notorious anti-union states where teachers have virtually no job security or union protection, and Delaware used the imposition of new teacher assessments to make it more difficult for teachers to acquire tenure. In Texas, North Carolina, and Georgia collective bargaining by teachers is illegal. Tennessee, Texas and North Carolina used the new assessments to make it easier to fire teachers and Georgia used the assessments to determine teacher pay. The second flaw is that the study draws no connection between the evaluation system and improved student learning.
According to the Financial Times of London, a Pearson owned property, in what I consider a conflict-of-interests, Susan Fuhrman, the President of Teachers College at Columbia University has been a "Non-Executive Independent Director of Pearson PLC" since 2004 and a major stockholder in the company with over 13,000 shares worth according to my estimate over two hundred thousand dollars. Fuhrman also is "president of the National Academy of Education, and was previously dean of the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania and on the board of trustees of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching."
In official Pearson PLC reports available online, Susan Fuhrman, President of Teachers College-Columbia University is listed as a non-executive director of Pearson. As of February 29, 2012, she held 12,927 shares of Pearson stock valued at $240,000. As a non-executive director she also receives an annual fee of 65,000 or almost $100,000. Fuhrman has been a non-executive director since 2004 and has received fees and stock I estimate worth more than a million dollars, certainly a substantial sum, but not the $20 million I initially reported.
There has been some resistance to Pearson's influence over American education.
In May 2012, students and teachers in the University of Massachusetts Amherst campus School of Education launched a national campaign challenging the forced implementation of Teacher Performance Assessment. They argued that the field supervisors and cooperating teachers who guided their teaching practice and observed and evaluated them for six months in middle and high school classrooms were better equipped to judge their teaching skills and potential than people who had never seen nor spoken with them. They have refused to participate in a pilot program organized by Pearson and to submit the two 10-minute videos of themselves teaching and a take-home test. They are supported by United Opt Out National, a website that organized a campaign and petition drive to boycott Pearson evaluations of students, student teachers, and teachers. In June 2012, New York parents protested against Pearson designed reading tests that included stand reading passages and meaningless choices.
The question that must addressed is whether the British publishing giant Pearson and its Pearson Education subsidy should determine who is qualified to teach and what should be taught in New York State and the United States? I don't think so! Not only did no one elect them, but when people learn who they are, they might not want them anywhere near a school -- or a government official.
From what I can make out from its website, the three key players at Pearson and Pearson Education are Glen Moreno, chairman of the Pearson Board of Directors, Dame Marjorie Morris Scardino, overall chief executive for Pearson, and William Ethridge, chief executive for North American Education. Although the largest stockholders are a British investment firm called Legal & General Group PLC which controls 32 million shares or 4% of the company and the Libyan Investment Authority with 24 million shares or 3% of the company. According to the Financial Times of London, the Libyan Investment Authority was founded by Libyan dictator Muammer Gaddafi's son Seif al-Islam, his heir apparent until the regime's collapse, in January 2007.
Glen Moreno is wealthy, powerful, influential, and I believe highly suspect. According to Wikipedia, Moreno was born in California in 1943 and has a law degree from Harvard University. He worked for 18 years at Citigroup in Europe and Asia, running the investment banking and trading divisions. Moreno was a director of the politically influential Fidelity International Ltd. According to U.K. Electoral Commission records, "since 1994, Fidelity Investment Management, part of Fidelity International, has donated £495,500 to the party. Mr Moreno is a former chief executive of Fidelity's international arm." He became chairman of Pearson, the publisher of the British newspaper Financial Times in October 2005.
Moreno was chairman of UK Financial Investments, the group set up by the British government to protect public funds used to bail-out banks after the 2008 global economic collapse. He was forced to resign in 2009 when it was revealed that he was a trustee of Liechtenstein Global Trust (LGT), a private bank accused of aiding tax evasion.
Moreno was also deputy chairman of Lloyds Banking Group, Great Britain's largest mortgage lender, but stepped down there in May 2012.
Among the Pearson troika, Moreno is the lowest paid, although he apparently has other resources. According to Forbes, his total compensation in 2011 was a little over $600,000. He does however own a home in London and a cattle farm in Virginia and according to the Times of London, managed to purchase 200,000 shares of Lloyd stock in 2010.
Dame Marjorie was also originally an American but became a British citizen. She has been CEO of Pearson since 1997. Before becoming CEO of Pearson she was a lawyer in Georgia and a newspaper publisher. In 2007, Forbes magazine placed her seventeenth on its list of the 100 most powerful women in the world. She was named a "Dame of the British Empire" in 2010. According to Forbes, her total compensation in 2011 was $2,455,000. But that represents a tiny fraction of her compensation that includes stock options. Scardino holds 1.5 million shares of Pearson stock.
William Ethridge became chief executive of Pearson's North American Education division in 2008. He has what Pearson considers educational experience because he previously worked for Prentice Hall and Addison Wesley. At Pearson he has been head of its Higher Education, International and Professional Publishing division and chairman of CourseSmart, a Pearson sponsored consortium of electronic textbook publishers. According to Forbes, his total compensation in 2011 was $1,390,000. He holds a half million shares of Pearson stock.
According to ILSE or London South East, which reports British stock market transactions, on July 30 and 31 2012, Dame Marjorie and William Ethridge were involved in Pearson stock transfers and sales on the London exchanges. If I read the ILSE report correctly, the percentage of their holdings that Ethridge and Scardino sold seemed to be a bit less than 4% of their total holdings. The sales brought Ethridge approximately $323,500 in U.S. dollars. However a Pearson regulatory announcement issued on August 1, 2012, claims that share sales by Pearson directors on those dates related to shares earned through Pearson's long-term incentive plan (LTIP), whose rules "require that sufficient shares are sold to discharge the PAYE (Pay As You Earn) income tax liability on the shares released."
This was at a time when financial observers including the influential Nomura Group were questioning whether Pearson stock was overvalued. ILSE reported that "Pearson had warned in April that its adjusted operating profit would be down in the first half of 2012 . . . Sales at Penguin dropped 4%, with profits falling 48% to £22 million, which management said was caused by lower sales in its more profitable U.S. market. Uncertainty over potential national and local government spending cuts in the US continues to cast a shadow over the group's Education business."
In other words, Pearson's chief operating officers, who are also heavily invested in the company, are busy trading stocks and racking up dollars and pounds while the corporation's financial situation is shaky. And their solution is to sell, sell, sell their products in the United States.
Are these the people we want designing tests, lessons, and curriculum for our students and deciding who is qualified to become teachers?
Correction:
London Stock Exchange prices are quoted in pounds and pence. Unless indicated, the price of shares is shown in pence. 100 pence equal 1 pound. I originally wrote "The sales brought Ethridge alone 20,474,712 GBX or approximately 32,350,000 in U.S. dollars." However, GBX is in pence, so the U.S. dollar value of the transaction would only be $323,500.
In official Pearson PLC reports available online, Susan Fuhrman, President of Teachers College-Columbia University is listed as a non-executive director of Pearson. As of February 29, 2012, she held 12,927 shares of Pearson stock valued at $240,000. As a non-executive director she also receives an annual fee of 65,000 or almost $100,000. Fuhrman has been a non-executive director since 2004 and has received fees and stock I estimate worth more than a million dollars, certainly a substantial sum, but not the $20 million I initially reported.
I thank "Nick50000" for bringing this to my attention.

Two Visions for Chicago’s Schools

""The strike is a headache for President Obama, because he is trapped between two allies that he needs for the November election. He needs the support of organized labor, especially the four million teachers, many of whom enthusiastically campaigned for him in 2008. But how can he abandon Rahm Emanuel?"

Two Visions for Chicago’s Schools

Diane Ravitch

M. Spencer Green/AP Images

Rahm Emanuel at a temporary day care during the Chicago teachers strike, September 10, 2012 

According to most news reports, the teachers in Chicago are striking because they are lazy and greedy. Or they are striking because of a personality clash between Mayor Rahm Emanuel and union president Karen Lewis. Or because this is the last gasp of a dying union movement. Or because Emanuel wants a longer school day, and the teachers oppose it.

None of this is true. All reports agree that the two sides are close to agreement on compensation issues—it is not money that drove them apart. Last spring the union and the school board agreed to a longer school day, so that is not the issue either. The strike is a clash of two very different visions about what is needed to transform the schools of Chicago—and the nation.

Chicago schools have been a petri dish for school reform for nearly two decades. Beginning in 1995, they came under tight mayor control, and Mayor Richard Daley appointed his budget director, Paul Vallas, to run the schools; Vallas set out to raise test scores, open magnet schools and charter schools, and balance the budget. When Vallas left to run for governor (unsuccessfully), Daley selected another non-educator, Arne Duncan, who was Vallas’s deputy and a strong advocate of charter schools. Vallas had imposed reform after reform, and Duncan added even more. Duncan called his program Renaissance 2010, with the goal of closing low-performing schools and opening one hundred new schools. Since 2009, Duncan has been President Obama’s Education Secretary, where he launched the $5 billion Race to the Top program, which relies heavily on student test scores to evaluate teacher quality, to award merit pay, and to close or reward schools; it also encourages the proliferation of privately managed charter schools.

This is the vision that Washington now supports, and that the Chicago school board, appointed by current mayor and former Obama chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, endorses: more school closings, more privately managed schools, more testing, merit pay, longer school hours. But in Chicago itself, where these reforms started, most researchers agree that the results have been mixed at best. There has been no renaissance. After nearly twenty years of reform, the schools of Chicago remain among the lowest performing in the nation.

The Chicago Teachers Union has a different vision: it wants smaller classes, more social workers, air-conditioning in the sweltering buildings where summer school is conducted, and a full curriculum, with teachers of arts and foreign languages in every school. Some schools in Chicago have more than forty students in a class, even in kindergarten. There are 160 schools without libraries; more than 40 percent have no teachers of the arts.

What do the teachers want? The main sticking point is the seemingly arcane issue of teacher evaluations. The mayor wants student test scores to count heavily in determining whether a teacher is good (and gets a bonus) or bad (and is fired). The union points to research showing that test-based evaluation is inaccurate and unfair. Chicago is a city of intensely segregated public schools and high levels of youth violence. Teachers know that test scores are influenced not only by their instruction but by what happens outside the classroom.

The strike has national significance because it concerns policies endorsed by the current administration; it also raises issues found all over the country. Not only in Chicago but in other cities, teachers insist that their students need smaller classes and a balanced curriculum. Reformers want more privately-managed charter schools, even though they typically get the same results as public schools. Charter schools are a favorite of the right because almost 90 percent of them are non-union. Teachers want job protection so that they will not be fired for capricious reasons and have academic freedom to teach controversial issues and books. Reformers want to strip teachers of any job protections.

The strike is a headache for President Obama, because he is trapped between two allies that he needs for the November election. He needs the support of organized labor, especially the four million teachers, many of whom enthusiastically campaigned for him in 2008. But how can he abandon Rahm Emanuel? Even more problematic for the president, the teachers are rebelling against the core principles of the Obama administration’s Race to the Top program. That program, which provides grants to states, including Illinois, that demonstrate they are pursuing its reforms, relies heavily on standardized testing to enable states to evaluate teachers, to award merit pay, and to identify schools as “failing” and set them up for mass firings and closure.

Ultimately, the strike may be resolved around seemingly technical issues having to do with pay scales (whether teachers continue to earn more for degrees and experience) and regulations governing layoffs and rehiring. But what is likely to remain are the biggest issues: Will carrots and sticks for teachers produce better education for students? Should Chicago continue privatizing public education? Are standardized tests appropriate measures of teacher quality and school quality? Do school closings lead to better schools? Can school reform overcome concentrated racial segregation and poverty? Can our society afford to give children in urban districts a far higher quality of education than is now available?

Predictably, the striking teachers are taking a beating in the national media, which admires Rahm Emanuel’s tough position, but teachers elsewhere are rallying around the Chicago strikers. Many see them as standing up for teachers and their right to bargain collectively, a right that was settled—or so it seemed—during the Depression with the passage of the Wagner Act of 1935, which protected the right of workers to join unions. Education researchers, who have been concerned about the overuse and misuse of standardized testing, may fear to see issues settled politically instead of by reference to evidence. If the mayor wins, it will be perceived as a victory for a continued assault on teachers and their unions and an endorsement of school closings and privatized charters. If the teachers win, which is a long shot, the children of Chicago might get smaller classes and a better curriculum. The best outcome would be an amicable settlement, one that assures not more testing but better education.
September 12, 2012, 5:45 p.m.

Voter Suppression, as American as Apple Pie – It Is Run By Plutocrats

Doesn't quite feel like Apple Pie, though.  Great piece by Dr. Estades.
-Angela

Jaime Estades-Voter Suppression, as American as Apple Pie – It Is Run By Plutocrats

Filed under: Issues, Politics — Leave a comment

September 13, 2012

Voter Suppression, as American as Apple Pie - It Is Run By Plutocrats
By Jaime Estades

 The Greeks of 400 B.C. viewed concentration of wealth in the hands of the few as a great threat to democracy and a problem for the polity as a whole. However, plutocrats of that time and today believe the exact opposite — that wider distribution of political power and a concern for social welfare threatens their vision of democracy.

The regulation of democracy and the deregulation of the economy have always been intrinsically controlled by the power of the economic elites. The same corporations that benefit from the Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission, 558 U.S. 50 (2010) decision are now involved in local state voter ID legislation and efforts to effectuate large scale voter suppression. Recently, the U. S. Supreme Court has awarded an expansion of voting rights to corporations (Citizens United), while limiting the rights of people (Crawford v. Marion County, 553 U.S. 181 (2008)).

Voting And Post Reconstruction Era
Voter suppression is just as American as apple pie and baseball. The strategy to control the vote in favor of a particular class of people originated in the U.S. prior to the drafting of the Constitution. Women, blacks, poor and working whites without land or substantial assets were not allowed to vote. During the few years of Reconstruction, freed men were allowed to vote for the first time through the 14th and 15th Amendments. However, that did not last long. With support from the U.S. Supreme Court, the white backlash immediately created a new phase with the Post Reconstruction Era that introduced a more sophisticated strategy of voter suppression.

In his book, “The Strange Career of Jim Crow,” author C. Van Woodward describes how the end of the slavery system left white society without the free labor of slaves, resulting in a dramatically deteriorated southern economy. Thus, it became imperative for white oligarchs to keep economic and political control as close to the old slavery system as possible. Reconstruction had to be stopped, and black voting could not happen. As W.E.B. Dubois stated, “The slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back toward slavery”.

In Lawrence Goldstone’s brilliant book “Inherently Unequal” he dedicates a chapter toWilliams v Mississippi, 170 U.S. 213 (1898), where an all-white jury found Williams guilty of murder. The appeal focused on a systematic exclusion of blacks from the voting roll that was used to identify candidates for participation in grand juries. In 1890, 134 delegates attended the Mississippi State Convention, including 133 white delegates and 1 black delegate. The Convention established the legal basis for racially discriminatory literacy tests and property taxes to prevent blacks from registering to vote and voting in the state of Mississippi. As a consequence of this discriminatory practice, Williams was denied a jury of his peers.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Williams established that for such a law to be Unconstitutional “it must pronounce its intention to discriminate against a class of people”. The Court implied that the discriminatory effects were non-intentional, and, therefore, the case was closed. These “non-intentional” “non-discriminatory” effects continued to prevent millions of blacks from voting in the U.S. for almost 80 years. In other words – “oops”! It was just an accident — who cares that in the year Williams was decided, in Mississippi alone almost 907,000 black residents were not eligible to go to the polls because of these laws.

Does it sound similar to the justification by today’s Republicans about the new voting laws? The excuse in 1890 mirrors the excuse of 2012, and the same class of economic elites is the beneficiary. These hypocritical assertions remind us of the old Groucho Marx line after he was caught cheating: “Are you going to believe me or your lying eyes?”

Goldstone reminds us of an extremely important fact, “when Plessy was overturned in 1954, it was on social grounds ‘separate but equal is inherently unequal’, not because of judicial error. Williams, was never overturned by the Court at all, but rather was rendered moot by the Voting Rights Act of 1965.”

Why is this scary? Next year, the Supreme Court will re-evaluate the future of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. If terminated, Williams may well be the precedent the Supreme Court will follow regarding state voting rights. Are we ready to jump in the time machine? The plutocrats are!

Regardless of the passage of more than 130 years since the creation of Jim Crow and three years since Citizens United era began, the situation remains the same in 2012. State voting laws are being introduced with the intent of preventing millions of people from voting. The number of citizens who can vote is not important to the plutocrats. What matters to them is who votes, and they know perfectly well whom they want to vote.

Crawford v. Marion County (Voter ID)
To make matters worse in the area of voter identification, in 2008, the U.S. Supreme Court decided in favor of the state of Indiana in Crawford v. Marion County, 553 U.S. 181 (2008). In a surprising majority opinion for the six to three decision, two years before his retirement, Justice John Paul Stevens wrote: “The burdens placed on voters are limited to a small percentage of the population, and were offset by the state’s interest in reducing fraud.” It is worth noting that lower courts and Stevens himself agreed that no history whatsoever of fraud had been identified. The Court asserted that “the threat of fraud” was sufficient to justify such law. Stevens, a liberal on the Court for decades, seemingly was too loyal to the states’ typical role of regulating voting laws and ignored the potential abuse of this decision by those seeking to limit voter participation. Still, the Crawford decision begins to sound a lot like 1890?

As expected, Justice Anthony Scalia took sides with the state law. No surprise here. However, he was even more direct, stating: “It is for state legislatures to weigh the costs and benefits of possible changes to their election codes, and their judgment must prevail, unless it imposes a severe and unjustified overall burden upon the right to vote, or is intended to disadvantage a particular class.”

So far, this decision reminds us of the 1898 decision in Williams and many other decisions in which the courts have chosen to ignore the potential negative impact of voter suppression through voter poll taxes and literacy tests, even while asserting their willingness to protect in the future a class that may be disadvantaged by such law, as Scalia stated. If the voter identification laws that are currently being challenged end up in the U.S. Supreme Court, then Crawford may be difficult to overturn as a recent legal precedent.

Corporations Believe Voting Is
Too Important to Leave to Voters
Many mathematicians believe that “physics is too important to leave it to physicists.” Well, corporations believe that voting is too important to leave to voters. In the same way that former slave owners, oligarchs and white supremacists took the vote away from freed men in the 19th century, in the 21st century, corporations do the same through “The American Legislative Exchange Council” (ALEC). This group is a funded mostly by corporations. ALEC’s main goal is the deregulation of everything that moves! They would like to eliminate the word “regulation” from dictionaries, along with “environmental law”, “tort reform”, “market regulation”, “education”, “Medicaid”, “Medicare” and guess what else? Voting.

One of ALEC’s main strategies is to use state lawmakers to legislate voter identification laws that suppress the vote. The span of their efforts has influenced 33 states with voter identification proposals. ALEC’s main and only justification is to preserve the integrity of the vote by preventing voter fraud. The Brennan Center for Justice, which has done excellent work in following this type of legislation, states that: “one is more likely to be stricken by lightning than to commit voter fraud.”
Legislators who are affiliated with ALEC have introduced half of the voter identification legislation in those states, according to “News 1 Analysis”, an investigative group founded by the late Walter Cronkite. Pennsylvania and Florida provide a glimpse into the impact of the legislation. According to the Pennsylvania Civil Liberties Union, 12.8% of registered voters in that state (1,055,200 people) lack voter identification, and 12.6% of 2008 presidential election voters (757,325 people) will not be able to vote because of these restrictions. Needless to say, affected voters are disproportionately black, Latino, elderly and/or students.

Until two weeks ago, the state of Florida had effectively criminalized voter registration mobilization by threatening to bring charges against organizations that presented voter registration forms with any mistakes. This threat effectively prevented voter registration mobilizations by not-for-profit organizations, most of which lack resources to go to court to defend common mistakes that are frequently written by individuals registering to vote. This prompted the League of Women Voters of Florida to cease voter registration in the state of Florida almost a year, until an appeals court in Florida recently struck down the law. However, the damage had been done. More than year passed and hundreds of thousands of potential voters were not able to register because of the law. Also in Florida, early voting days were reduced, particularly with regards to the Sunday before Election Day, when African American churches mobilize their base to vote in “Souls to the Polls” mobilizations.
The corporate mogul and billionaire Koch brothers have invested millions of dollars in Super PACs and have also invested heavily in ALEC. Liza Graves, the Executive Director of “Media and Democracy” wrote in the “The Nation” magazine: “The Kochs have a penchant for paying their way out of serious violations and coming out ahead. Helped by Koch Industries’ lobbying efforts, one of the first measures George W. Bush signed into law as Governor of Texas was an ALEC model bill giving corporations immunity from penalties if they self-report to regulators their own violation of environmental rules. Dozens of other ALEC bills would limit environmental regulations or litigation in ways that would benefit Koch.”

Lobbying and voter suppression have always been extremely important tools, used by economic elites to regulate government. Clearly, for them, voting is too important to leave it to voters.

Old Concept:

“Corporations Are Persons”

In the U.S., plutocrats have controlled voting since before the Constitution was created. At that time, most states excluded women, slaves and poor white men from voting. Only white men in possession of large assets, land and/or successful businesses were eligible to vote. Those who did vote were the same class of men who wrote the U.S. Constitution and controlled the U.S. Supreme Court.

In 1885, the Supreme Court decided the case of San Mateo v. Southern Pacific Railroad, 116 U.S. 138 (1885), an attempt by San Mateo County to collect taxes owed by Southern Pacific Railroad Company. The attorney for Southern Pacific, Roscoe Conkling, was a corporate lawyer and former Senator who was a member of the Joint Congressional Committee that drafted the 14th Amendment. Conkling claimed to have kept a journal during the deliberations of the Joint Congressional Committee. He claimed that the word “person” was used instead of “citizen” because the Committee members intended to eventually include corporations, rather than to freed men. While reading from what he claimed was his journal, Conkling asserted to the Court that the Committee intended to include individuals and joint stock companies. As of this date, there is no independent evidence that such a journal existed; it was never presented as evidence, and no other evidence exists that members of the drafting Committee had never expressed such intent. The case was dismissed.

In 1886, in one of the most controversial cases in Supreme Court history, the Court considered the case of Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, 118 U.S. 394 (1886). The Railroad asserted that the County of Santa Clara could not require the company to pay taxes because the state wrongly assessed the value of Railroad property by accidentally adding the value of the fences on the right of way. The company had a value of $30 million and refused to pay a tax of $30,000. They argued that the County was evaluating them differently from a person under the equal protections clause of the 14th Amendment.   The Court decided for the company. Importantly, this is the first case under the 14th Amendment that seems to declare that corporations have the same rights as persons.

The Court followed this ruling for decades, even though new evidence seems to show that the Court never intended to make such an assertion or ruling. However, the main point is that the concept of corporations as persons has been litigated under the 1st and 14th Amendments since the late 19th century. Since then, many cases have been brought by corporations as plaintiffs seeking remedy under the 14th Amendment, which was intended to provide equal rights to former slaves and equalize legal rights among individuals, and never intended as a legal remedy for corporations.
From the 1880s to the New Deal, the Court began re-defining the 14th Amendment, influenced not only by corporate America, but also by the new pseudo-social theories from Europe that permeated in the Supreme Court, academics and conservative circles of the time, such as Laissez-Faire and Social Darwinism. These theories are historic favorites of plutocrats in justifying the morality of an economic order of exploitation. The consumption of these concepts by the elites resulted in the demise of Reconstruction, as well as Supreme Court decisions that established the doctrine of “Separate but Equal” (Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896)) and anti-labor laws (Lochner v. New York, 198 U.S. 45 (1905)).

The Lochner Era
Judicial activism in favor of corporations is not a new concept. In 1895, the State of New York enacted a labor law, which prohibited bakery employees from working more than 60 hours per week or more than 10 hours per day. Corporations went nuts; they felt like an “oppressed minority” (a concept use by Roberts in Citizens United). How dare the government interfere with the American tradition of worker exploitation?

The Supreme Court decided that no reasonable grounds existed for interfering with the “right of free contract” by regulating bakery hours of labor. Therefore, the state could not regulate working hours. The Lochner case was a devastating blow to a labor movement that was beginning to make significant advances in the U.S.

In his dissent, Justice Holmes asserted, “The Constitution was not intended to embody a particular economic view and is not a document about economic philosophy.” Holmes was by no means a Socialist; however, he understood that the concept of Laissez-Faire was not in the Constitution. Neither is the concept of “corporations are persons.”

The Supreme Court of the Lochner era is still considered to be one of the most politically conservative and judicially activist in the history of the Court. This pro-corporate and deregulation phase continued well to the mid-1930s, rejecting labor and market laws efforts to help the poor and workers during the New Deal.

Citizens United and Lochner
Two years ago, the United States Supreme Court decided the case Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, 558 U.S. 50 (2010). The Court concluded by a five-to-four vote that, in the electoral arena, corporations have the same First Amendment rights as individual citizens of the United States. In others words “corporations are people.”
Chief Justice Roberts, in his concurring opinion, went so far as to say that corporations have been treated as an “oppressed minority.” This is coming from someone who has no history of being oppressed or of being a minority. This comment does, however, give us a glimpse back to the retrograde Lochner Era.

The Court gave corporations the power and advantage over individuals to greatly influence the outcome a federal election as Lochner gave corporations the right to establish working hours. We survived Lochner, but it will take time to overcome Citizens United. Corporations now have a “bigger bullhorn” than the average citizen with regards to First Amendment rights – confirming not only that rights are not equal, but also that non-living entities have civil rights.

Conservatives like to argue that because unions are also allowed unlimited spending, theCitizens United decision was balanced. The question is, “Can unions really compete for influence against corporations?” A review of some facts on the art of persuasion can be illustrative. In 2010, in advertisements alone, General Motors spent $4.2 billion, Ford spent $3.9 billion, AT&T spent $2.5 billion, CitiGroup spent $1.5 billion (just 1.4% of their revenues), Bank of America spent $1.0 billion (1.7% of their revenues), JP Morgan spent $2.4 billion (2.3% of their revenue), and Wal-Mart spent $2.5 billion (0.5% of their revenue).   One corporation can outspend all the unions in the U.S. in one election cycle, if they wish.

We should not be surprised if at some time in the future, instead of referring to the “Senator from California,” we end up calling the “Senator from Coca Cola.” The vision of a corporate lobbyist trying to persuade the Majority Leader of the Senate to support legislation that creates additional consumer safety protections is difficult to imagine.

All corporations want only one thing from government — to be left alone. Car, food and pharmaceutical manufacturers, airlines and most other companies do not want anyone to require them to spend more money to satisfy federal safety standards. Fewer regulations directly correlate to greater corporate profits. This government “hand off” approach includes the elimination of all corporate taxes. Under this scheme, humans will pay taxes, and the “new people” (corporations) will not.

Through the control of government, corporations can legislate the government out of the markets and their companies out of all regulatory policies. That is what Lochner andCitizens United were all about — deregulation.

Never Forget Montana
In a June 2012 decision, the state of Montana lost its case challenging the Citizens Uniteddecision in American Tradition Partnership, Inc. v. Bullock. The Supreme Court stated that the question in this case was whether the Citizens United decision, which established that corporate spending on elections is permitted as a matter of free speech, applied to the Montana state law. The court stated that: “There can be no serious doubt that it does.” However, we should not forget the history of Montana, which encapsulates the concept of plutocracy and the bias toward corporations by the current Supreme Court.

More than a century after Lochner, Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy in hisCitizens United majority opinion asserts that no evidence exists that unlimited corporate or union contributions would have a corrupting effect on elections. The State of Montana had more than 100 years of evidence that money corrupts elections and government. Contradicting to the assertions of the Justices in Citizens United, based on historical grounds, in January 2012, Montana’s Supr
eme Court upheld a century-old law barring corporate spending in state and local elections.
Corruption in Montana had been so monumental that it was the main reason for the adoption of the 17th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. In 1913, this Amendment changed the selection of U.S. Senators from a vote by state legislatures to popular election. The reason for this action was the inappropriate influence of Montana copper and mining company barons who had such great control of the state legislature that the federal senator was handpicked through favors and kickbacks given to state elected officials.

As in Lochner, Citizens United followed a legal jurisprudence that taints the Supreme Court history in favor of corporations. Lochner and all the cases that followed until Roosevelt threatened to increase the number of Supreme Court justices were part of legal philosophy that follows the Social Darwinism and Laissez-faire philosophies of the late 19th century, which contaminated the court.
How Justice Kennedy and the other four Justices failed to acknowledge the history of the 17th Amendment concerning the corrupting effect of money can only be understood by a “Pavlovian” reaction to deregulation in favor of corporations and/or incomplete legal and historical research. Early this year Justices Ginsburg and Breyer declared that the Montana experience makes it exceedingly difficult to assert that independent expenditures by corporations “do not give rise to corruption or the appearances of corruption.”

Unfortunately, reason escaped the five conservative Justices of the Supreme Court during the last term. Once again, they ignored history and the genesis of the 17th Amendment and voted 5-to-4 to reject the Montana Supreme Court’s decision that was based on a history that clearly shows that money corrupts.

Jaime Estades, Esq., MSW, is Founder and Chair of The Latino Leadership Institute and an Adjunct Professor at Rutgers University. He can be reached atjaimeestades@yahoo.com.

Excellent blog post by Strauss on the larger, deeper meanings of the Chicago Teachers Union Strike.
-Angela

The Answer Sheet
Posted: 09/11/2012

The real problem with Rahm’s school reforms in Chicago

By Valerie Strauss

 

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel has been pushing a school reform agenda backed by the Obama administration that is at the center of the strike that the Chicago Teachers Union is now waging in the third largest school district in the country.

This is not about whether or not you think the union should have called a strike as it did on Monday,


but rather about the central problem
(M. Spencer Green/AP) with the reforms that Emanuel has been advocating: There’s no real proof that they systemically work, and in some cases, there is strong evidence that they may be harmful.
The reforms championed by Emanuel, a former chief of staff to President Obama, have been pushed by Obama’s education secretary, Arne Duncan, and implemented in a number of states.
These include merit pay, an expansion of charter schools, teacher and principal assessment systems that are linked to student standardized test scores, a longer school day and job security for veteran teachers.

The union is also striking for financial reasons, but even the union president, Karen Lewis, said the two sides were very close on those. It’s the other issues that are proving to be bigger problems.
Here are some things you should know about some of the major issues:

Test-based evaluation and merit pay
 
Reformers like Emanuel want to use as a key measure of principal and teacher evaluation the standardized test scores of students, but assessment experts across the country say these tests aren’t designed for this purpose and that it is an invalid evaluation tool.
A number of states have passed laws requiring that test scores be used in evaluation in varying degrees, but Emanuel is at the upper edge with his plan to have the testing ultimately make up half of an educator's evaluation.
In fact, Emanuel received an open letter earlier this year from scores of professors and researchers from 16 universities throughout the Chicago metropolitan area saying this about test-based evaluation system for educators:

...The new evaluation system for teachers and principals centers on misconceptions about student growth, with potentially negative impact on the education of Chicago’s children. We believe it is our ethical obligation to raise awareness about how the proposed changes not only lack a sound research basis, but in some instances, have already proven to be harmful...

You can read the entire letter here
A major report by the National Research Council, the research arm of the National Academies, which include the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering and the Institute of Medicine, reported last year that:

The standardized test scores that have been trumpeted to show improvement in the schools provide limited information about the causes of improvements or variability in student performance.This would be true, presumably, for any school system that use standardized tests as a measure of achievement.

This hasn’t stopped the fabulously wealthy Gates Foundation from spending hundreds of millions of dollars to pilot evaluation systems that include test scores. Gates is a brilliant man but on school reform he is no expert. Unfortunately, he has an outsized say in the direction of reform because he can fund whatever he wants to. (The same holds true for other billionaires with school reform agendas that don’t stand up to the evidence.)

Some of the country’s best school systems use multiple measures to evaluate teachers that don’t include test scores, and they work just fine. Here’s one great post on how to do evaluation the right way.

Merit pay, or performance pay, is just what it sounds like — giving more money to educators for doing a great job. But the idea that offering more money will provide an incentive for teachers and principals to do a better job doesn’t actually work in the real world.

In fact, it’s been tried over and over since the 1920s, according to education historian Diane Ravitch, and failed every single time. The most comprehensive trial of teacher merit pay, conducted by economists at Vanderbilt University’s National Center for Performance Incentives, discovered that merit pay made no difference.Why? Teachers would like to make more money but most still work as hard as they can whether they get a bonus for it or not.

Besides, teachers also know that competing for bonus money destroys cooperation that is critical to a good teaching environment in a school, and most important, how “merit” is determined is not simple if you want to be fair.

There have recently been some studies on “loss aversion” — a psychological finding that losing something makes us feel worse than gaining the same thing makes us feel better — works to help incentivize teachers to do their best works. The studies are nonsense, as you can see here.

You may have read about some recent studies that show merit pay does work. Be careful to check methodology when you look at study results and whether the people who did them had a vested interest in the outcome.

Here are some more posts you can read on the subject:
The long unsuccessful history of merit pay
Why merit pay for teachers sounds good — but isn’t
Why merit pay doesn’t work for teachers
Does merit pay really increase teacher retention?
 

Charter schools
Emanuel wants to expand the number of public charter schools — which don’t have teachers unions — in the city. But they are not a systemic fix to ailing urban education.
This Chicago Sun-Times story from late 2011 says:

Chicago charter school franchises produced wildly uneven results — even among different campuses of the same chain — on state achievement test data released Wednesday for the first time in more than a decade.

Since Emanuel believes in the validity of test scores as an assessment tool, he ought to take this into account. In fact, the same is true wherever charter schools exist, some are good, but most don’t do better than traditional public schools.
There are also big questions about whether charter schools pick and choose their students, resulting in different populations of students than the traditional public school that may be down the street. And critics say that many are being run by for-profit companies that are more interested in making money than educating students.
Here are some posts you can read about this:
The big business of charter schools
Are charter schools still public?
Why states should say no to charter schools
A charter network with ties to a Turkish Muslim preacher

Longer school day
In July, the Chicago Teachers Union and Emanuel/Chicago Board of Education came to an interim agreement on extending the school day. Chicago’s elementary school students had the shortest day of any urban district in the country. — five hours and 45 minutes. (The national average is 6.7 hours in school.)

High school students were in school for seven hours. Under the agreement, elementary school students would see their day extended to nearly seven hours and high school students to 7 1/2 hours.
It seems like it may be intuitive that the longer a child is in school, the more they can learn, but of course, it’s not necessarily so. It all depends on how schools actually use that time, and some ways are more productive than others. Merely extending each class by minutes doesn’t do much, though that’s what some districts that extend their school day have done.

Reformers often say that successful school systems in countries such as Finland, Japan and Korea spend more time in school than American students, but researchers say that is, on average, not true.
Here’s a post you can read on this:

What new research says on longer school day
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By Valerie Strauss  |  05:00 AM ET, 09/11/2012

Have Education Vouchers Reduced Segregation and Increased Competition in Local School Markets in Sweden?

http://www.ncspe.org/list-papers.php?utm_source=op+208&utm_campaign=OP+208&utm_medium=email



HAVE EDUCATION VOUCHERS REDUCED SEGREGATION AND INCREASED COMPETITION IN LOCAL SCHOOL MARKETS IN SWEDEN?

By: Nihad Bunar  
Occasional Paper No. 208

Parents and teachers on local school markets: Evidence from
Sweden   
Sweden is one of the only countries in the world that has a universal education voucher program. The reform has two primary components. First, any type of organization can operate a school, including both for-profit and community-based organizations. These schools are known as "independent" schools because they are granted greater operational autonomy, but they must follow the national curriculum. Second, competition between and within the public and independent school sectors is stimulated by a voucher system in which all students receive public funding, which they can use to attend any public or independent school of their choosing. Advocates of the program anticipated that competition would push all schools to improve their performance and that school choice would sever the association that has existed in Sweden between the socioeconomic composition of a neighborhood and perceived school quality.

In this paper, Nihad Bunar conducts case studies of two mid-sized, suburban school markets to explore how parents, teachers and school administrators in a sample of public and independent schools (13 in total) perceive the effects of choice and competition. In total, 81 interviews were conducted, and other local documents and statistics were analyzed. The parents interviewed in the study reported that choosing a school is a stressful decision in that parents must balance their desire to be good citizens with their desire to find the best school possible for their children. In that many parents agreed that social segregation in the schools has increased, it appears that the child consideration holds precedence over the social concern.

Teachers reported that while competition has led public and private schools to do more to engage with families and improve student achievement, it has also led to grade inflation and aggressive marketing, especially among the independent schools. A major finding in the analysis is that the most important factor motivating parental choices is not whether the school is private or public or what programs it offers, but the general reputation of the school, which is based largely on the socioeconomic composition of the students enrolled at the school. Thus, rather than choice serving as a vehicle to decrease existing segregation, this study suggests that families are making choices based on factors that lead directly or indirectly to an increase in segregation.
Click here to view new occasional papers from the National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education.
About NCSPE
The Center provides independent, non-partisan information on and analysis of privatization in education. The Center's program includes research, evaluation, conferences, publications, and dissemination on a full range of issues regarding privatization of education from pre-school to higher education, both national and international.Teachers reported that while competition has led public and private schools to do more to engage with families and improve student achievement, it has also led to grade inflation and aggressive marketing, especially among the independent schools. A major finding in the analysis is that the most important factor motivating parental choices is not whether the school is private or public or what programs it offers, but the general reputation of the school, which is based largely on the socioeconomic composition of the students enrolled at the school. Thus, rather than choice serving as a vehicle to decrease existing segregation, this study suggests that families are making choices based on factors that lead directly or indirectly to an increase in segregation.

White Racial Anxiety and the Changing Demographic Tide: Legitimate Concern or Illogical Worry?

 

White Racial Anxiety and the Changing Demographic Tide: Legitimate Concern or Illogical Worry?

Friday, 31 August 2012 00:00 By Michael Ortiz, Truthout | Op-Ed

An american suburb. (Photo: futureatlas.com / Flickr)Census projections show that by 2042, the majority of the American population will consist of people identified as "non-white." In other words, in about 30 years, whites will no longer make up the majority of the American population. But before we actually get to that point when whites indeed become a quantitative minority (whereby some of them will begin to claim to be the "new" racially oppressed minority group in America), let's analyze exactly what this demographic shift entails.
Usage of the terms "majority" and "minority" has always been a misleading and inaccurate way to describe racial groups in America. These terms typically signify a quantitative phenomenon, which implies that groups with a numerical majority gain dominant status simply by virtue of their relative population numbers. Using quantifiable terms such as these actually does very little to describe and understand contemporary and future racial dynamics in America. In fact, using these terms to describe racial dynamics will invariably lead to greater misunderstandings about race and racism; which will in turn lead to greater tensions among different racial groups.

Racial supremacy or racial dominance exists as a social and systemic phenomenon; and is not based on relative population. A dominant racial system reveals itself as an ideological and systemic arrangement of various institutions, policies and procedures that constantly aim to maintain the racial status quo. The prevailing system of racial supremacy is also characterized by the social and material benefit it affords to those who are members of the dominant racial group. Racism is then described as a form of discrimination that may systemically, institutionally, or ideologically disadvantage those groups of subordinate status, while those of the dominant group gain disproportionate advantage. Racial privilege then describes all the ways in which dominant group members actualize their disproportionate social and material benefit (i.e. increased access to resources, better hiring potential, elevated social desirability etc.).

Therefore, it may be more accurate and pertinent to use terms such as dominant and subordinate, or privileged and disadvantaged when describing groups that operate within a particular racial system. In this way, it is not the population numbers of dominant racial members that dictates racial supremacy; but rather, it is the established system of racial supremacy that assigns racial privilege and advantage to its quantifiable, dominant members (regardless of their number).

Read the rest of the article here.

 

Texas’ prosperity depends on success of Latino students

Couldn't agree more.   Increasingly, this will be true for the entire county.  By 2050, the whole country will look demographically like Texas looks now.  Demographics IS destiny.  We pay now or we pay later.  It is wise, as Dr. Roberto Calderon suggests, to invest in our future today.  No shortcuts. 

Angela

Texas’ prosperity depends on success of Latino students Más Wired | September 5, 2012 | 11:00 am

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By Dr. Roberto R. Calderón, Associate Professor of History at the University of North Texas
Texas’s future Latino majority is already reflected in its known current and projected public school enrollments. These numbers are widely available. A brief analysis of these numbers reveals the basic contours of Texas’s current and near-term future ethnic demographic changes. The state’s prosperity resides in the near- and long-term success of its Latino public school students. Education is a key battleground to no one’s surprise.

Here are the numbers we know and with which we prepare this analysis:



In a recent interview given to The Texas Tribune, Steve Murdock sketched some brief but important demographic projections where the Texas school population pre-K to 12 is concerned. Murdock as many know is the former longtime Texas State Demographer and later under the second George W. Bush presidency was appointed Director of the US Census Bureau for a time. The key projected data were offered in two short paragraphs by reporter Morgan Smith. She wrote:

But geography aside, Texas public schools may increasingly find more in common with the South Texas district. In 2011, the state reached two landmarks. For the first time, Hispanics became the majority of public school students. And to cope with a historic budget deficit, the Legislature did not finance enrollment growth in the state’s schools — something that had not happened since the modernization of the state’s public school system in 1949. Though the first turning point passed quietly and the second with much political strife, they both underscored the challenges ahead as a dramatic demographic shift occurs in public school classrooms statewide.

By 2050, the number of Texas public school students is expected to swell to nine million from roughly five million now, and nearly two-thirds will be Hispanic, according to Steve Murdock, a demographer and director of Rice University’s Hobby Center for the Study of Texas. The overall percentage of white students will drop by half to about 15 percent. Without a change in Hispanics’ current socioeconomic status, that also means Texas students will continue to grow poorer — and their education more expensive — in the next four decades, Murdock added.

Based on these projections there will be an estimated 5.94 million Latino students in the public schools of Texas by 2050. This represents two-thirds of the nine million projected by that date.
This is an increase of about four million above and beyond today’s statewide five million public school students. Stated differently, there will be one million more Latino public school students by 2050 than the total number of Texas public school students today. That is, the overall student population in Texas is projected to grow by about 80 percent between 2012 and 2050.

Within this overall growth trend Latinos will account for some 86 percent of the total increase of public school student enrollments. Blacks, Asians, and others will account for the remaining 560,000 public school student enrollment increase. As evidence of a far more Latino or Mexicanized Texas society specifically these projections are quite compelling.

Similarly, if today thirty percent of the five million public school student population is White (or about 1.5 million students statewide), by 2050 this number will have been reduced by half to 15 percent of the total of nine million.

This means that there will about 1.35 million White students by 2050 statewide in this age grouping. White student enrollments in this age grouping will not increase between now and 2050 and will in fact decrease slightly by an estimated 150,000 students. White students in this population grouping constitute a static growth category that will decrease by 10 percent between 2012 and 2050, according to the projections cited.

Conversely, Latino students will experience an altogether different trend in the age category indicated. While such students today constitute half or about 2.5 million students of the state’s five million students in the pre-K to 12 student population, by 2050 they will have increased their number by an additional projected 3.44 million. That is, Mexican American and other Latino students will have increased their number by a percentage of 137.6 percent (or 138.0%). Projected Latino public school student enrollments constitute the most active growth category in Texas bar none.

The remainder of the one-third of our Texas pre-K to 12 students by 2050 will be comprised by Black, Asian and other student cohorts. Taken together these student cohorts will comprise 19 percent of the total such number or equivalent to about 1,710,000 students.

Texas has far and away the largest and fastest growing actual and projected public school student population after California in the nation. This is both challenge and opportunity where Mexican American and Latino students as a whole are concerned.

Such historic increases in public school student enrollments will not occur in a vacuum. Every institution will be affected. From the standpoint of the Texas Latino community we can certainly raise several questions: Whither employment and promotions, authority, budgets, resources, etc., for Latino staff, teachers, and administrators? Will two-thirds of the state’s public school positions across the board including staff, teachers and administrators, as well as school board members and superintendents be Latino by 2050? In other words, what do these projected public school enrollment figures represent for the community that is most directly affected?

What will happen on the journey getting there from where we stand today? Will we be able to construct a multiracial society premised on equity and parity that may become the norm in our society? Is it possible to grow and build such a progressive consciousness in our society in the short space of four decades? Or will we simply be reproducing more of the same of what we’ve known for the past four decades as the Occupy movement made manifest, a period in US history wherein we have generated increased social inequality at every level. Public resources and budgets, it’s as basic as it gets.

In practice equality should be a plural concept in every sense of the term. Short of it, the worst of our history surfaces instead and racism is the outcome which tends to limit the perks available in society to a privileged few or at best selected cohorts in society. What about shared governance and the effective equitable democratic practice of shared power? Commensurate with said socially conscious practices our society needs desperately to embark on a history- changing project to challenge and eliminate poverty and extant inequalities. We need leadership that is prepared to walk this path. We need leadership that is unafraid to face the wrath of those who would covet and hoard all power, a trajectory that is fundamentally anathema to the highest ideals of every would-be democratic society in the world including our own.

Moreover, what will the Texas public higher education establishment—community colleges and four-year universities—do to widen, create and extend existing and new success and achievement opportunities for the growing non-White student population going forward toward 2050 in light of such a scenario? And because Mexican American and Latino students will comprise two-thirds of the total of such students statewide in that future that is ours already, what specifically will be our policy toward this particular community? Is the expectation of racial, social and economic justice too much to hold?

Clearly, in order to create a more prosperous and equal society Texas needs to significantly expand rather than contract its available funding of public education at all levels including higher education. The mood, however, for such a progressive turn in policymaking following on the heels of the recent neoliberal retrenchment in such funding for the first time since 1949 is up in the air. It’s a political throw of the dice and a game of chicken all rolled into one. The mood on the right politically is plain ugly and beholden to all sorts of self-serving and anti-democratic corporate interests. In Texas being a conservative also means being subservient to a racialized view of our world that is status quo and thereby reactionary by definition. It’s a posture that conveniently denies contemporary historical developments. It’s a posture that’s determined to hold onto all privilege and power until whenever.

For those who believe in social justice and live the principles of equality espoused in the documents of our nation and its society, there is no other possible alternative but to seek and work toward building the equitable society that will benefit all the state’s residents now and in the future. That fight is being waged daily. And it will be in play certainly in the upcoming Texas Legislature’s biennial session scheduled from January to May of 2013.

Texas’s current and future prosperity resides in the collective fortunes of its public schoolchildren. And with Texas Latino public school students already comprising the numerical majority today and more so going forward during the next four decades, it is their educational success and economic achievements, their combined effective equitable social and political capital that will assure the prosperity of the second most populous state in the Union. All Texas residents will win. Let us join and make it happen.

Pearson 'Education' -- Who Are These People?

Excellent piece I highly recommend to all.  Three important words from within: "Conflict of Interest."

-Patricia

Alan Singer | Huffington Post
09/04/2012
 
According to a recent article on Reuters, an international news service based in Great Britain, "investors of all stripes are beginning to sense big profit potential in public education. The K-12 market is tantalizingly huge: The U.S. spends more than $500 billion a year to educate kids from ages five through 18. The entire education sector, including college and mid-career training, represents nearly 9 percent of U.S. gross domestic product, more than the energy or technology sectors."
Pearson, a British multi-national conglomerate, is one of the largest private businesses maneuvering for U.S. education dollars. The company had net earnings of 956 million pounds or approximately 1.5 billion dollars in 2011.

Starting in May 2014, Pearson Education will take over teacher certification in New York State as a way of fulfilling the state's promised "reforms" in its application for federal Race to the Top money. The evaluation system known as the Teacher Performance assessment or TPA was developed at Stanford University with support from Pearson, but it will be solely administered, and prospective teachers will be entirely evaluated, by Pearson and its agents. Pearson is adverting for current or retired licensed teachers or administrators willing to evaluate applicants for teacher certification. It is prepared to pay $75 per assessment.

The Pearson footprint appears to be everywhere and taints academic research as well as government policy. For example, the Education Development Center (EDC), based in Waltham, Massachusetts, is a "global non-profit organization that designs, delivers and evaluates innovative programs to address some of the world's most urgent challenges in education, health, and economic opportunity." EDC works with "public-sector and private partners" to "harness the power of people and systems to improve education, health promotion and care, workforce preparation, communications technologies, and civic engagement." In education, it is involved in curriculum and materials development, research and evaluation, publication and distribution, online learning, professional development, and public policy development. According to its website, its funders include Cisco Systems, IBM, Intel, the Gates Foundation, and of course, Pearson Education, all companies or groups that stand to benefit from its policy recommendations.

EDC sponsored a study on the effectiveness of new teacher evaluation systems, "An examination of performance-based teacher evaluation systems in five states," that Pearson is promoting but there are two VERY BIG FLAWS in the study. First, of the five states included in the study -- Delaware, Georgia, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Texas -- four (Georgia, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Texas) are notorious anti-union states where teachers have virtually no job security or union protection, and Delaware used the imposition of new teacher assessments to make it more difficult for teachers to acquire tenure. In Texas, North Carolina, and Georgia collective bargaining by teachers is illegal. Tennessee, Texas and North Carolina used the new assessments to make it easier to fire teachers and Georgia used the assessments to determine teacher pay. The second flaw is that the study draws no connection between the evaluation system and improved student learning.

According to the Financial Times of London, a Pearson owned property, in what I consider a conflict-of-interests, Susan Fuhrman, the President of Teachers College at Columbia University has been a "Non-Executive Independent Director of Pearson PLC" since 2004 and a major stockholder in the company with over 13,000 shares worth according to my estimate over twenty million dollars. Fuhrman also is "president of the National Academy of Education, and was previously dean of the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania and on the board of trustees of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching."

There has been some resistance to Pearson's influence over American education. In May 2012, students and teachers in the University of Massachusetts Amherst campus School of Education launched a national campaign challenging the forced implementation of Teacher Performance Assessment. They argued that the field supervisors and cooperating teachers who guided their teaching practice and observed and evaluated them for six months in middle and high school classrooms were better equipped to judge their teaching skills and potential than people who had never seen nor spoken with them. They have refused to participate in a pilot program organized by Pearson and to submit the two 10-minute videos of themselves teaching and a take-home test. They are supported by United Opt Out National, a website that organized a campaign and petition drive to boycott Pearson evaluations of students, student teachers, and teachers. In June 2012, New York parents protested against Pearson-designed reading tests that included stand reading passages and meaningless choices.

The question that must be addressed is whether the British publishing giant Pearson and its Pearson Education subsidy should determine who is qualified to teach and what should be taught in New York State and the United States? I don't think so! Not only did no one elect them, but when people learn who they are, they might not want them anywhere near a school -- or a government official.
From what I can make out from its website, the three key players at Pearson and Pearson Education are Glen Moreno, chairman of the Pearson Board of Directors, Dame Marjorie Morris Scardino, overall chief executive for Pearson, and William Ethridge, chief executive for North American Education. Although the largest stockholders are a British investment firm called Legal & General Group PLC which controls 32 million shares, or 4 percent of the company and the Libyan Investment Authority with 24 million shares, or 3 percent of the company. According to the Financial Times of London, the Libyan Investment Authority was founded by Libyan dictator Muammer Gaddafi's son Seif al-Islam, his heir apparent until the regime's collapse, in January 2007.

Glen Moreno is wealthy, powerful, influential, and highly suspect. According to Wikipedia, Moreno was born in California in 1943 and has a law degree from Harvard University. He worked for 18 years at Citigroup in Europe and Asia, running the investment banking and trading divisions. Moreno was a director of Fidelity International Ltd. and became chairman of Pearson, the publisher of the British newspaper Financial Times in October 2005.

Moreno was chairman of UK Financial Investments, the group set up by the British government to protect public funds used to bail-out banks after the 2008 global economic collapse. He was forced to resign in 2009 when it was revealed that he was a trustee of Liechtenstein Global Trust (LGT), a private bank accused of aiding tax evasion.

Moreno was also deputy chairman of Lloyds Banking Group, Great Britain's largest mortgage lender, but stepped down there in May 2012.

Among the Pearson troika, Moreno is the lowest paid, although he apparently has other resources. According to Forbes, his total compensation in 2011 was a little over $600,000. He does however own a home in London and a cattle farm in Virginia and according to the Times of London, managed to contribute half a million pounds to the British Conservative Party in 2009, and purchase 200,000 shares of Lloyd stock in 2010.

Dame Marjorie was also originally an American but became a British citizen. She has been CEO of Pearson since 1997. Before becoming CEO of Pearson she was a lawyer in Georgia and a newspaper publisher. In 2007, Forbes magazine placed her seventeenth on its list of the 100 most powerful women in the world. She was named a "Dame of the British Empire" in 2010. According to Forbes, her total compensation in 2011 was $2,455,000. But that represents a tiny fraction of her compensation that includes stock options. Scardino holds 1.5 million shares of Pearson stock.
William Ethridge became chief executive of Pearson's North American Education division in 2008. He has what Pearson considers educational experience because he previously worked for Prentice Hall and Addison Wesley. At Pearson he has been head of its Higher Education, International and Professional Publishing division and chairman of CourseSmart, a Pearson sponsored consortium of electronic textbook publishers. According to Forbes, his total compensation in 2011 was $1,390,000. He holds a half million shares of Pearson stock.

According to ILSE or London South East, which reports British stock market transactions, on July 30 and 31, 2012, Dame Marjorie and William Ethridge were heavily involved in Pearson stock transfers and sales on the London exchanges earning them millions of dollars. If I read the ILSE report correctly, the percentage of their holdings that Ethridge and Scardino sold seemed to be a bit less than 4 percent of their total holdings. The sales brought Ethridge alone 20,474,712 GBX or approximately 32,350,000 in U.S. dollars.

This was at a time when financial observers including the influential Nomura Group were questioning whether Pearson stock was overvalued. ILSE reported that "Pearson had warned in April that its adjusted operating profit would be down in the first half of 2012 . . . Sales at Penguin dropped 4 percent, with profits falling 48 percent to £22 million, which management said was caused by lower sales in its more profitable U.S. market. Uncertainty over potential national and local government spending cuts in the U.S. continues to cast a shadow over the group's Education business."
In other words, Pearson's chief operating officers, who are also heavily invested in the company, are busy trading stocks and racking up dollars and pounds while the corporation's financial situation is shaky. And their solution is to sell, sell, sell their products in the United States.
Are these the people we want designing tests, lessons, and curriculum for our students and deciding who is qualified to become teachers?