Obama's "Way-to-Go, Brownie!" Moment?
Wednesday, December 10, 2008
by Greg Palast
for the Huffington Post
Has Barack Obama forgotten, "Way-to-go, Brownie"? Michael Brown was that guy from the Arabian Horse Association appointed by George Bush to run the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Brownie, not knowing the south shore of Lake Pontchartrain from the south end of a horse, let New Orleans drown. Bush's response was to give his buddy Brownie a "way to go!" thumbs up.
We thought Obama would go a very different way. You'd think the studious Senator from Illinois would avoid repeating the Bush regime's horror show of unqualified appointments, of picking politicos over professionals.
But here we go again. Trial balloons lofted in the Washington Post suggest President-elect Obama is about to select Joel Klein as Secretary of Education. If not Klein, then draft-choice number two is Arne Duncan, Obama's backyard basketball buddy in Chicago.
Say it ain't so, President O.
Let's begin with Joel Klein. Klein is a top notch anti-trust lawyer. What he isn't is an educator.
Klein is as qualified to run the Department of Education as Dick Cheney is to dance in Swan Lake. While I've never seen Cheney in a tutu, I have seen Klein fumble about the stage as Chancellor of the New York City school system.
Klein, who lacks even six minutes experience in the field, was handed management of New York's schools by that political Jack-in-the-Box, Mayor Michael Bloomberg. The billionaire mayor is one of those businessmen-turned-politicians who think lawyers and speculators can make school districts operate like businesses.
Klein has indeed run city schools like a business - if the business is General Motors. Klein has flopped. Half the city's kids don't graduate.
Klein is out of control. Not knowing a damn thing about education, rather than rely on those who actually work in the field (only two of his two dozen deputies have degrees in education), Klein pays high-priced consultants to tell him what to do. He's blown a third of a billion dollars on consultant "accountability" projects plus $80 million for an IBM computer data storage system that doesn't work.
What the heck was the $80 million junk computer software for? Testing. Klein is test crazy. He has swallowed hook, line and sinker George Bush's idea that testing students can replace teaching them. The madly expensive testing program and consultant-fee spree are paid for by yanking teachers from the classroom.
Ironically, though not surprisingly, test scores under Klein have flat-lined. Scores would have fallen lower, notes Jane Hirschmann, head of watchdog group Time Out From Testing, but Klein "moved the cut score," that is, lowered the level required to pass. In other words, Klein cheats on the tests.
Nevertheless, media poobahs have fallen in love with Klein, especially Republican pundits.The New York Times' David Brooks is championing Klein, hoping that media hype for Klein will push Obama to keep Bush schools policies in place, trumping the electorate's choice for change.
Brooks and other Republicans (hey, didn't those guys lose?) are pushing Klein as a way for Obama to prove he can reach across the aisle to Republicans like Bloomberg. (Oh yes, Bloomberg's no longer in the GOP, having jumped from the party this year when the brand name went sour.)
Choosing Klein, says Brooks, would display Obama's independence from the teacher's union. But after years of Bush kicking teachers in the teeth, appointing a Bush acolyte like Klein would not indicate independence from teachers but their betrayal.
Hoops versus Hope
The anti-union establishment has a second stringer on the bench waiting in case Klein is nixed: Arne Duncan. Duncan, another lawyer playing at education, was appointed by Chicago's Boss Daley to head that city's train-wreck of a school system. Think of Duncan as "Klein Lite."
What's Duncan's connection to the President-elect? Duncan was once captain of Harvard's basketball team and still plays backyard round-ball with his Hyde Park neighbor Obama.
But Michelle has put a limit on their friendship: Obama was one of the only state senators from Chicago to refuse to send his children into Duncan's public schools. My information is that the Obamas sent their daughters to the elite Laboratory School where Klein-Duncan teach-to-the-test pedagogy is dismissed as damaging and nutty.
Mr. Obama, if you can't trust your kids to Arne Duncan, why hand him ours?
Lawyer Duncan is proud to have raised test scores by firing every teacher in low-scoring schools. Which schools? There's Collins High in the Lawndale ghetto with children from homeless shelters and drug-poisoned 'hoods. They don't do well on tests. So Chicago fired all the teachers. They brought in new ones - then fired all of them too: the teachers' reward for volunteering to work in a poor neighborhood.
It's no coincidence that the nation's worst school systems are run by non-experts like Klein and Duncan.
Obama certainly knows this. I know he knows because he's chosen, as head of his Education Department transition team, one of the most highly respected educators in the United States: Professor Linda Darling-Hammond of Stanford University.
So here we have the ludicrous scene of the President-elect asking this recognized authority, Dr. Darling-Hammond, to vet the qualifications of amateurs Klein and Duncan. It's as if Obama were to ask Michael Jordan, "Say, you wouldn't happen to know anyone who can play basketball, would you?"
Classroom Class War
It's not just Klein's and Duncan's empty credentials which scare me: it's the ill philosophy behind the Bush-brand education theories they promote. "Teach-to-the-test" (which goes under such pre-packaged teaching brands as "Success for All") forces teachers to limit classroom time to pounding in rote low-end skills, easily measured on standardized tests. The transparent purpose is to create the future class of worker-drones. Add in some computer training and - voila! - millions trained on the cheap to function, not think. Analytical thinking skills, creative skills, questioning skills will be left to the privileged at the Laboratory School and Phillips Andover Academy.
We hope for better from the daddy of Sasha and Malia.
Educationally, the world is swamping us. The economic and social levees are bursting. We cannot afford another Way-to-go Brownie in charge of rescuing our children.
****************
Greg Palast is the father of school-aged twins and the author of, "No Child's Behind Left," included in his New York Times bestseller, Armed Madhouse. Palast is a Nation Institute Puffin Foundation Fellow for investigative reporting.
Get a signed copy of Armed Madhouse for the holidays for a tax-deductible contribution to the Palast Investigative Fund at www.PalastInvestigativeFund.org
Subscribe to Palast's reports at www.GregPalast.com
Please re-post this.
Print This Post
Shocked? Are you really surprised?
Only those of us who didn't vote for this fraud are not surprised by any of his appointments. We finally get the last laugh as all you so-called progressives voted for a guy who has no record, who was in the IL Senate for 55 days/year for 7 years, who's never done anything but who you all projected as some kind of liberal savior. He was funded by WALL STREET, lobbyist lawyers and Exelon.
Back & better than ever !
"Yes, America does have a Manifest Destiny-to Let Freedom Ring-which the evil and greedy and pernicious would twist into a grab for land and resources and ethnic cleansing. And so the Manifest Destiny of the journalists in our shitty little offices in New York and London is to expose these motherfuckers." – Greg Palast
CITIZENS 2.0 : PLAYERS NOT CHEERLEADERS !
"I am new enough on the national political scene that I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views." Barack Obama / The Audacity of Hope
I'LL BITE... YOU WANT CHANGE ?
DON'T JUDGE POLITICIANS ON WHAT THEY SAY BUT ON WHAT THEY DO !
"Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies." - Groucho Marx
Marxism we can believe in
Have the best 2009 possible !
THANKS for another great lecture, Professor Palast, for free, on the internets
i suggest that you stick to what you know, greg, cuz you don't know shit about chicago schools. and to talk about raising test scores with no reference whatsoever to nclb is dishonest in the extreme.
chicago's school system is NOT A TRAIN WRECK. ritchie daley is not his old man. he is a great mayor, and a decent man. he took control of a system that was a wreck. i have a beef or 2 with arnie, but if he can bring to the nation's schools the kind of leaps and bounds improvements that he has brought to chicago's, they are gonna have to find room on the mall for another fucking statue.
did you even make any phone calls for this story, greg? i don't think so. you wanna come to chicago and look around? i will take a whole fucking week off to drive you.
Umm. It was "heckuva job, Brownie," not "way to go."
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/1230-01.htm
A very good article. But it would have been better to
also include the probable Klein-Duncan defense of
their actions and critique that, too.
How Rahm Emanuel Made Mega-Millions and Bought His Way to Power
By Ben Protess, ProPublica. Posted December 9, 2008.
New details emerge of Emanuel's days as an investment banker.
Since Rahm Emanuel was appointed the next White House chief of staff last month, ProPublica has been retracing his previous life as an investment banker, which earned him more than $18 million in less than three years.
The New York Times recently shed new light on Emanuel's Wall Street days -- and how they helped send him to Congress.
In late 1998, Emanuel left the Clinton White House to work for Wasserstein Perella, a now defunct investment bank run by Bruce Wasserstein, a major Democratic donor.
"I had this idea that this could work and that it had upside," Wasserstein told the Times. "It worked out better than I could have hoped."
Indeed, as we previously noted, Emanuel used his political connections to broker major deals while at the firm. (One deal was a $16 billion merger that created Exelon Corp., now one of the nation's largest electric utilities. Another involved SBC Communications, the telecommunications company run by William Daley, Clinton's commerce secretary and the brother of Chicago's mayor.)
After leaving the bank in 2001 to run for Congress, Emanuel benefited from the sale of Wasserstein Perella, which gave him an unusually large payout. Russ Gerson, global head of financial markets for A.T. Kearney Executive Search, told the Chicago Tribune in 2003 that Emanuel's compensation would put him "in the top 3 to 5 percent" of investment bankers at that time.
The cash proved helpful when Emanuel found himself in a tough fight for a seat in Congress. He contributed $450,000 out of his own pocket to the primary campaign, and his leading rival accused him of trying to buy his seat, the Times reports.
The financial industry also heavily financed Emanuel's campaign. From the Times:
After Emanuel left banking to run for Congress, members of the securities and investment industry became his biggest backers, donating more than $1.5 million to his campaigns dating back to 2002, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
Mr. Emanuel also leaned heavily upon the industry while he was chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee during the 2006 midterm elections. Financial industry donors contributed more than $5.8 million to the committee, behind only retirees.
Once he reached Congress, Emanuel served on the Financial Services Committee, which handles legislation involving financial markets and banks.
Neither the Times nor anybody else has suggested Emanuel went on to do the bidding of the financial industry. But there's little question his days as a banker have helped shape Emanuel's perspective. From the Times:
Former colleagues said the insight it afforded him on the financial services sector is invaluable especially now. But Mr. Emanuel built up strong ties with an industry now at the heart of the economic crisis, one that will be girding for a pitched lobbying battle next year as the incoming Democratic administration considers a potentially sweeping regulatory overhaul.
Friends of Mr. Emanuel's from his private-sector days said he still checks in with them regularly to plumb their insights on economic issues.
In an interview with the Times, Emanuel said he often acted against the wishes of the financial industry. "I would say I've been as tough on my friends as others," he said. "I call it like I see it."
http://www.alternet.org/workplace/110396/how_rahm_emanuel_made_mega-millions_and_bought_his_way_to_power/
Mr. Palast,
Thank you for your consistenty excellent reporting; in particular the above article on Obama and Joel Klein.
My question though is this, Mr. Palast -- were you advocating support for a third party in the recent presidential election (re. Nader, McKinney or someone else to their left)?
Unless and until a viable third party is established in the US, nothing funamental is going to change. Nowhere is this more evident than in Obama's post-primary lurch to the right, and now his post-election right-leaning presidential appointments.
In solidarity, *
Tony Ficociello
* Meaning: not "lesser of the two evils" solidarity.
It wasn't 'way to go', it was 'heckuva job, Brownie'.
Well, I hope the fact that many of the people chosen for appointments in his administration have been the leader of or part of a specific area of his transition team calms your fears. Based on that I would think that Prof. Darling-Hammond has a greater chance of becoming the Sec. of Education. It's obvious that many people who are going to be vetted for any position in his White House is going to have something that goes against them - even the best and most qualified ones.
What a disingenuous hit piece! You criticize Klein for lack of experience, even though he's been running the country's largest school system for six years (twice as long as Obama's senatorship). Furthermore, you try to blame Klein for NYC's lousy graduation rate when, in fact, Klein has been graduating a larger fraction of his students every year since he took office[1]. It seems that your dislike of Joel Klein has nothing to do with his administrative efficacy but stems entirely from his association with Bush's educational policies. How embarrassingly tribal.
[1] http://www.nysun.com/new-york/state-city-report-uptick-in-graduation-rates/83687/
It appears my earlier comment was deleted. Are the comments here moderated/censored?
As a retired teacher, I couldn't agree with you more about the non-value of teach-to-the-test. As a result of drifting away from the truth that real education is, as you say, "analytical thinking skills, creative skills, questioning skills," I had students in a high-performing school who couldn't write their way out of a sentence, yet had always gotten A's in English. Not only was their grammar poor, but they couldn't express ideas clearly.
One day I went online and stumbled upon a site where students could rate their teachers. It was a real revelation. I figured that the students who bothered to rate a teacher would either love or hate them, but it was so much more complex and revealing than I expected, even with a very rudimentary rating system, and even with just a few self-selected students leaving ratings. The patterns leapt off the page.
One teacher was rigorous and knowledgeable, but intimidated students. There were numerous examples of him making students feel stupid for asking a question, and even making several cry. I already knew this, but here it was.
What a great opportunity it would be if every single student had to rate their teachers, answering really well-designed, probing questions, and having a chance to leave comments as well. What incredible feedback, chock full of useful information to help improve one's teaching. Here are some simple questions that would have weeded out several teachers who really should not have been teaching.
Rate your teacher either A, B, C, D or Fail on the following;
Does the teacher know their subject well?
Does the teacher explain things clearly?
Does the teacher grade fairly?
Does the classwork and homework help you understand the subject?
Does the teacher make their subject interesting?
Is the teacher enthusiastic about teaching?
Did you get the help you needed from the teacher?
Does the teacher encourage questions?
Does the teacher treat you with respect?
Does the teacher have good control of the class?
Is the classroom pleasant to be in?
Does the teacher treat all students equally most of the time?
Please leave any additional comments, especially if you feel strongly about this teacher.
Everyone at any given school knows who the 'good' teachers are, and who the 'bad' ones are. Students, teachers and administrators. Really. Just ask the kids; they'll give you an earful. Because of the tenure system, bad teachers stay for years, poisoning the school environment. There is no peer review. The administration's hands are tied. It's a stupid way to operate, ignoring the obvious, too politically correct to act on common sense. Sure, tenure protects teachers from the whims and personal bent of administrators, but there are better way to protect us, and better ways to offer real professional feedback and growth.
Accountability and improvement can be achieved in a very straightforward way, without standardized tests. Standardized evaluations of faculty and administrators, by peers and students would give so much real information, especially if well designed, and show real patterns. Teachers who got high ratings would not be fired, teachers who scored poorly would need to show improvement, and work with their administrators. If they didn't improve they could then be fired.
It will never happen, but I can dream.
I try and follow all the goings on as it pertains to education in America, I'll be a school teacher myself in 1 1/2 years, but I missed this one, so, thank you Greg for bringing this up, I will be emailing and blogging about this at barackobama.com and elsewhere, for what its worth....
I've been a supporter of Barack Obama since just about day one and knew that there would be some moves that President-elect Obama would make that would not make me happy. This is one of those times.
Keep up the good work Greg!
Why do you think Duncan is a lawyer? Aren't there enough of us to kick around without conferring law degrees on all those who you consider incompetent?
Although I can understand the insight and foreshadowing of your say-it-aint-so moment at the beginning of your article....please refrain from mentioning Brown as a horrible person in regards to Katrina. I would never defend this man for having colluded with Bush.....though Brown was the ONLY person to stand up to Thad Allen, Cheney, Bernanke, Chertoff, and Bush with regards to the slaughter of thousands of personal pets following the levee detonations. Bush ordered the slaughter of thousands of personal pets following a flood. That was a 1st in Presidential history. He also ordered every single personal pet be left behind following a flood...also another 1st in Prez history. Thousands of dogs were shot by Blackwater agents, sheriffs, and local police right in front of the owners...some while they were holding a personal pet. Can you imagine the pain and horror of such a sight Mr. Palast? From de=classified emails after Katrina it was shown that Brown was the ONLY person to ever stand up to that order. He also "resigned" in protest on Sept 12th 2005 the day that Bush again enacted the slaughter orders. These people may never give a rats ass about humans but at least someone tried for the animals.
Next time pick a different example of Bush moments that are deemed idiotic...there are so many to choose from.
According to Duncan's official biography he graduated with a major in sociology. How does this make him a "lawyer?"
http://www.cps.k12.il.us/AboutCPS/people/Duncan/duncan.html
So, I guess we should all be glad that he's nominated Arne Duncan instead?
Dude: a recent posting from the Palast website on Education...
I think your going to be suprised like this all through out his adminstration.
He is going to fill his close circle with fellow back scratchers.
Great post though!
Yes, public education is a mess. The politicians, the consultants, the experts, the citizens all agree on that. I'm a teacher. Want to know what I think will truly reform public education? Quit letting people misuse it. Remember welfare? Try this painful-but-effective plan. Kids who come to school to learn, (and even get into a little bit of trouble) show up, listen, do their work and LEARN something. Kids whose presence distracts from the education of others stay home. The welfare system gave early warning. Schools can give early warning that the old days are over. Come to learn or stay away. Kindergarten through senior year.
Yes, it would be very, very rough at first. I can already hear the chorus of dysfunctional parents and well-meaning educators. But the learning process in schools would skyrocket, and it would be cheap!
Of course we could just keep paying "experts" to peddle their ivory-tower ideas. They've been doing it for years. See how well that has worked out?
"Can you imagine the pain and horror of such a sight Mr. Palast?"
I think that pain will be nothing compared to the pain we'll go through economically if the public schools aren't fixed. Not to mention the pain and horror of school shootings, violence, unwanted pregnancies and the like that will keep going on in the public schools if they aren't fixed.
Hi there,
comments are moderated. I am the new person now moderating, so the parameters might be different. I believe in posting most comments unless they are overly littered with expletives or foul language. Best, Leni