Governor Haslam's crony, Brad Martin, and the corporate high rollers in Memphis made a mockery of the university search for President last year in order to appoint David Rudd as head of the University of Memphis. Already ensconced as Provost when the call came, Rudd rushed into the president's office with a bunch of debts to pay off for the plutocratic support that got him his new job.
Rudd pushed forward with corporate consultation from Huron Consulting to put in place strategic budget implementation (SRI), which calls for departments to become entrepreneurial units that spend time dreaming up schemes to pay the rents they will be charged under the new plan.
Rudd farmed out web page redesign, student recruiting, and "rebranding," and he set about to reduce benefits for maintenance workers and temps to save money. He cut $20 million cut from the University budget, mostly through personnel cuts, and he pursued the corporate plan for manufacturing a sense of financial crisis, with an accompanying austerity plan and corporate contracting.
To prove to Hyde, Gates, and the Walton clan that he could deliver on introducing private contracting of instructional programs, he huddled with corporate foundations and a corporate teacher prep program with no university connection to cut a deal that would send $5 million per year from University of Memphis accounts to the corporate welfare profiteers of the Relay Graduate School of Education. Now that's strategic!!
The plan was hatched with no input from the College of Education at U of M, and no input from the other departments, all of which stand to lose students to the corporate Relay program if it goes forward.
Rudd's rationale? Simple, and simply stupid. Rudd argues that the University of Memphis sent only 19 students into Memphis's poorest schools last year, and the University should be sending more.
There are a couple of problems with this argument. First, we must wonder how the President of U of M not only came to define the goals for the College of Education, and but how Rudd decided to create a plan to ostensibly reach that goal with no input from the College.
Which brings us to the second problem with Rudd's argument. The poorest schools of Memphis have been losing certified teachers to Teach for America, which now has over 400 teachers in the poorest Memphis schools, with plans to have 550 by the fall of 2015.
Certified, professional career teachers are not interested in the poorest schools of Memphis because they have seen the writing on the wall that is spelled ASD and IZone. The lowest scoring and poverty-ridden public schools of Memphis are scheduled to be swallowed up by the Achievement School District (ASD), which will hand them over to corporate charter operators, or they will be turned over Shelby County's Innovation Zone (IZone).
In either case, all teachers in these turnover schools to ASD or IZone will be fired and must reapply for jobs in the new "no excuses" hell schools that replace the community schools. Professional teachers most dedicated to social justice are not interested in becoming prison guards. It is only the naive undergrads who can be hoodwinked into these new hell schools. This is the group that Rudd hopes to prey upon with his career-advancing corporate scheme.
Which brings us to the third problem with Rudd's loser rationale: Relay was created to manufacture teachers for charter schools, and that remains its mission. Relay uses brutal and discredited pedagogical techniques to create total compliance chain gangs that no middle class parent would ever allow for their own children. This is Rudd's choice for what he calls "urban specific" teacher preparation for the poor kids in Memphis.
Will the students, faculty, and alumni of a great university allow this kind of corporate cram down by a self-serving fool who would trade the reputation of the University of Memphis for a chance to move up the corporate food chain?
The oligarchs and the education industry are pushing for teacher education to be turned into paternalistic test prep, and it will happen unless those who came up with this ill-advised plan know that to do so will be too dangerous or too expensive, or both.
Help them to understand that by writing your own letter to let them know what will happen if reason (see the letter below) is not heeded. Or add your name to the letter below here.
As university teacher educators (including faculty, researchers, and administrators), we strongly urge you to withdraw the proposed 2015 teacher preparation regulations. The proposed regulations do not reflect current research or up-to-date knowledge of teacher preparation, teacher and student assessment, or the purposes of education.
• The regulations erroneously place unfounded blame on individual teachers for the perceived failure of the educational system in the United States. This analysis ignores important and well-documented factors that influence student success, such as the impact of poverty, the levels of trauma experienced by youth in urban areas, and accessibility of social services such as health care.
• The regulations include an over-reliance on value-added measures (VAMs), which purportedly identify a causal relationship between student achievement, as measured by high-stakes test scores, and teacher competency. This is a highly controversial form of measurement that several leading research organizations have declared invalid and unreliable. The proposed regulations extend this relationship further to link teacher preparation programs to student achievement; because teacher education programs will be judged by the scores of the students in their graduate’s classrooms, programs may be reluctant to place their graduates in the most difficult and highest poverty classrooms where standardized test scores are more likely to be low.
• The proposed regulations are an unfunded mandate that places an unreasonable burden on educational institutions, especially public institutions that prepare the majority of the nation’s teachers who serve in high poverty districts. The cost of collecting data on the placement and retention of teachers is substantial, especially when the validity of these data are in question.
• This program threatens funding sources, such as TEACH grants, for prospective teachers. Rather than providing this federal source of funding for teachers with financial need who are committed to teaching in high poverty areas, the legislation will reduce the number of institutions who have access to this grant. A consequence of this policy is likely to be that there is less incentive for new teachers of color to enter the teaching force.
• The regulations further narrow the conceptions of teaching and learning, rewarding teaching that is geared toward preparation for tests rather than toward deep engaged learning and preparation for participation in a democratic society.
Our country is founded on democratic principles that undergird our educational system and the very innovation we are known for throughout the world. The implementation of these regulations could mean that excellent teacher preparation programs and access to becoming and remaining a P12 teacher, especially among communities of color, is in jeopardy. For these reasons and because of our commitment to the future of our profession and the education and success of all children, we urge you to reconsider and significantly revise this proposed regulation.
States that don't do the common core or who have rejected it typically have their own version of testing hell.
Below you will find the individual slides from the secret powerpoint prepared last July in preparation for the publicly funded corporate "teacher" prep progam that David Rudd arranged without any consultation with University of Memphis faculty, either outside or inside the College of Education.
This program was planned in secret, and it involved handing over teacher preparation for the urban charter system of Memphis to two corporate bodies, the Relay Graduate School of Education and the The New Teacher Project (TNTP).
The need for corporate "no excuses" teachers in Memphis has been manufactured by the continuing closure or turnover of public schools in Memphis to charter operators chosen by the Achievement School District from the lowest scoring and poorest schools in Shelby County.
When schools are closed by ASD or turned over by Shelby County to their "Innovation Zone," teachers are fired and must reapply for their jobs.
Of course, the new corporate operators do not want professionally prepared career teachers but, rather, the inexperienced beginners who have been trained as rigid guards who treat children more like prisoners than pupils. These beginners will do three years before moving on to become CEOs of their own charter hell schools.
Explanations and comments are included below the slides.
See any discussion or input by the Shelby County Board of Education or by the faculty and staff of U of Memphis? Didn't think so.
As a result of annual firing of teachers as ASD claims public schools and new charters open up, "offerees" will have plenty of spots to choose from. In fact, there will always be a bottom 5 percent of schools to convert.
Wondering who is going to pay the cost of this program? Hint: it won't be Bill Gates.
That's right: this corporate program will be paid for with public dollars from a cash-strapped public university.
Need some extra funding to put in the pockets of the predators who run this program? Just take it from Title I or II funding.
Notice that administrative costs top instructional costs.
More managers, analysts, coordinators, and directors than you can imagine.
I write to express my concerns regarding the various versions of the new ESEA now circulating in Washington, all of which appear to have enough in common to be combined, perhaps, under a more fitting title–something like The Corporate Foundation and Education Industry Welfare Act of 2013. All of the versions that I have seen appear to embrace the principle that known failure should never be sacrificed for untried levels of success.
The past four decades represent generations now of failed accountability efforts to assist, threaten, demand, shame, and bribe public school students and their teachers to raise school achievement as a way to demonstrate that testing accountability can accomplish what racism and poverty have made consistently impossible in America. The chimerical idea that increasing education access could cure social and economic injustice was and is an ambitious, though fanciful, project that has been embraced by both liberals and conservatives since the late 1960s at least. Increasing educational access during the 60s came to serve as a coward’s proxy for more substantive and politically risky structural changes in housing, health care, jobs, transportation, and safety–all of which were and are as desperately needed as they are studiously ignored.
During that era, millions of Mexican children had their futures determined by racist IQ tests and classist achievement tests given in a language that they could not even read. To show you how much things change and remain the same, today in Tennessee and other states wanting to “first to the top,” kindergarten children are taking standardized tests (the SAT-10) before they learn to read and count. A hundred years ago society’s “defectives” (either mental, social, cultural, or racial) were offered, on the basis of junk IQ tests, a very different industrial training education that taught students to accept and to actively participate in their own subjugation.
Today we use state or corporate achievement tests to justify closing public community schools and opening segregated corporate reform schools that no middle class parent would ever send they own their children to. In these neo-eugenic schools, children are programmed to blame themselves if the propaganda fails to deliver. Ask how many KIPP teachers or TFA missionaries would send their own children into the anti-cultural straightjacket chain gangs. Ask your colleagues in Congress if they would make their children KIPPsters.
Today the hostility of corporate education reformers to the public interest and the common good is matched only a rapacious and unchecked greed that is supported now with hundreds of millions of federal dollars that your programs approve. And all of the fine-sounding bills listed above want to scale up the KIPP model, TFA, and their emulators within the growing school incarceration industry of urban America. Public schools, with your help, have become corporate revenue streams and miseducative, unhealthy testing labs.
If your plans proceed, more and harder tests from the Common Core Corporate Standards guarantee a continuing supply of hostile corporate takeover targets within poor communities. More “turnarounds” equals more corporate reform schools, and there will always be a bottom five percent to prey upon. Despite warnings from the science community, these same national tests you are planning are to be used in evaluating teachers, who will doubtless sacrifice care and commitment to students for the necessity of assuring their own paychecks. Testing performance has replaced student learning, and all of your bills further enable that tragic transition.
The bills you are offering, too, will help to make teaching even more unattractive than it is today (if that is possible), thus increasing the demand for more and more Teach for America temps who have no inkling of the damage they are doing. You must understand that corporate reform is about building businesses of the most corrupt and exploitative variety–it is not about education. I expect you will have quit reading my letter before you get to this point, but let me offer a picture of what will happen if high stakes is preserved in the new ESEA.
You will see a growing army of parents and teachers and grandparents and policymakers, all working together to nullify the grand schemes of your legislation, with its next generation of racist and classist high stakes tests and segregated chain gang schools.
You will see increasing numbers of students refusing to take the high stakes tests, enough to regularly cause test results to be useless.
You will see an increase in civil disobedience and nonviolent resistance that will use any non-violent means to stop corporate schooling and high stakes testing.
You will see very expensive technical snafus increasing as online high stake testing increases.
You will see testing data warehouses targeted by hackers.
You will see the end of corporate unionism and the rise of a real teacher union movement with the health and welfare of children’s physical, mental, and emotional health as the first and foremost non-negotiable demand.
You will see a multiplicity of new information sources that no longer print the lies and propaganda that corporate foundations offer to you and the corporate media for parroting.
You will experience increasing disruption of corporate education at every level, from pre-K to graduate school.
You will see increasing resistance from within the university, and you will see much new high quality research in the public interest rather in for corporate benefit.
You will see the vampire squid of the education industry exposed for public examination.
You will find your connections to the corporate reform schoolers the subject of constant and unceasing examination.
You will see that what Wall Street fears, the spirit of Jeffersonian and Deweyan democracy, that is alive and well and increasingly impatient with the status quo.
You will come to see that these demands are not negotiable.
Since being promoted from Provost to President of the University of Memphis, at the behest of Governor Haslam, the Hydes, and and their plutocrat club, the corporate insider, David Rudd, has been fixated on austerity measures and privatization of the university.
His favorite crackpot scheme of the moment involves bringing in a New York corporation to offer minimal "broken windows" temp teacher preparation to serve the children in Memphis who need the most experienced and professionally prepared teachers.
This would represent an experimental step toward a charter university model.
University faculty members have not been enthused.
Below is a summary of finding from public records documents. Prepared by University of Memphis associate professor, Mate Wierdl, I have edited parts of the summary.
The main source of the findings below is a PDF file, which is a scanned compendium of public record documents that were obtained via a FOIA request in November. They cover the period June-November, 2014. The contained documents are arranged in chronological order except the last document which is dated June 3.
The plan is that students, from all departments, will be recruited, via a professional ad campaign, to take part in the Relay program after their sophomore year. After a student leaves her home department, she will take part in a one year teacher "internship" (as it's nowadays called), and will end up graduating from University College. In other words, the teacher training program will try to cannibalize (not my word, as you will see) our majors. One problem with this is that under the new budget model SRI, departments will get their $ based on the number of graduates they produce. Every student, then, going to Relay will represent a loss of funding for other departments.
The program will cost $5 million per year to the University. Relay will have full autonomy over the program, and they will handle this taxpayers' $5 million without apparent accountability. This the very essence of what they call privatization: public money goes into corporate hands without public scrutiny about its spending and without added benefit to the public.
The University will provide space and maintenance of facilities without charge. Meanwhile, a professor in the math department is on the verge of giving back his half a million NSF grant, since the University couldn't find a space for him).
The millions (about $20 million) to be provided by donors to the program during the first two years will pass through the university without any overhead, even though the University demands hefty accounting fees for other grant money coming through the university.
Here are some of the highlights from the source.
S, page 40, Section titled "Structured campus engagement"
In addition to the upfront professional campaign, ongoing cultivation and recruitment strategies will be conducted on the University of Memphis campus. Ongoing campus-based outreach will include multiple forms of communication and informational sessions encouraging students to explore this pathway into teaching.
Targeted marketing and outreach, particularly to the sophomore class and with a focus on specific candidate pools (e.g., STEM, Honors students), will be conducted through similar on-campus channels as those for the campus-based-ontreach.
In addition, a one-time investment of up to $2M over the first two years of the program is envisioned to support the professional marketing campaign and candidate cultivation activities to encourage service through this innovative program. This funding would cover the development of the content and messaging for all marketing and communications related to this program, website development, professional agency fees, and media campaigns (e.g., social media, viral video, etc.) that aim to effectively reach high school students and first- and second-year students at the University of Memphis (and other colleges) and attract them to this new teacher preparation program at the University of Memphis.
Students will not graduate from home departments but from University College.
S, Page 44, Secion a.
Students who successfully complete the core program will be eligible to receive 30 credits (or the equivalent credits for one-quarter of the required courses for graduation from the University of Memphis). These credits will count towards graduation from the University of Memphis with a Bachelor in Liberal Studies awarded by University College.
The program will compete with the existing teacher training program, and the president knows this well.
What happens to the current teacher education program? Are the current players on campus ready for a pretty radical new entity that will be “competing” and possibly cannibalizing their students/revenue?
The success of the new teacher preparation program likely will lead to a material decline in demand for the current teacher preparation program and the University is prepared to manage this transition.
When can we meet to discuss the status of this and what I am allowed to tell concerned faculty?
2) needing to coordinate in some fashion with the College of Education faculty that this is a complimentary program (i.e. an urban teacher prep program to pair with the suburban work they're currently doing) not a competing one with the College, otherwise they'll likely see it as an "outside" program in direct competition. We'd need to coordinate with them a bit so a few loud voices don't drown out the good work and overshadow the effort.
2. The pass through on philanthropy dollars, with no recovery or over-head charges by the U of M ..
The above references are just samples. Further documentation is required to determine the details of the proposed budget, salaries, university support, and other departmental sacrifices.
Investigators are combing records to figure out the exact responsible parties for this apparent intentional violation of shared governance at the University and to uncover the motivation and driving forces behind the Relay program.
A wider issue than having a private company running a "department" on campus at our expense is the recent outsourcing of university functions to private companies: recruiting, web design, temp workers, etc. In other words, the apparent privatization of higher education---arriving at the University of Memphis at the same President Rudd moves in.
The Nonprofit Industrial Complex in Los Angeles are using their unlimited resources to sway our schoolboard elections again. Here's a tweet linking to the Occupy United Way page that first pointed out the issue.
My slightly edited statement from that page.
With the possible exceptions of Public Counsel and CHIRLA, could the United Way of Greater Los Angeles (UWGLA) have gathered a more vile coalition of revenue hungry corporate charter chains and billionaire foundation funded Nonprofit Industrial Complex (‎NPIC) members? KIPP, Coro, Eli Broad's Dan Chang's GPS:LA, E4E, ICS, and more. It's a rogues gallery of organizations on the dole of the Koch's, Bloomberg's, Broad's, Gates', and Walton Family Foundations. How is it that these organizations with the clear-cut political agendas of their funders are allowed to host forums like this?
Just in case there's any doubt that this entire event has been orchestrated by the UWGLA, here's the text from the registration form. See the email address?
Please fill out this brief form to let us know you will attend a Candidate Forum.
Childcare, translation, refreshments, voter registration and ballot information will be provided free of cost.
UWGLA runs these events so that they have complete control over what questions get asked, the tone and content of the conversations, the composition of audience, etc. These so-called forums end up being informercials for their favored (read charter school industry connected) candidates, and more importantly, their neoliberal corporate education reform agenda. Remember, UWGLA is the same organization that pays for fake "research" papers from less-than-credible fellow neoliberal NPIC like National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ). There is no depth too low for the UWGLA to plumb, evidenced by their now infamous April 2014 astroturf stunt.
United Way Greater Los Angeles is the best public relations firm that Eli Broad has ever hired.