The following continues Doug Martin’s look into the Gülen charter school movement, which began with Islam and the Free Market of Privatized Education: “Friending” the Gülen Charter Schools . It first appeared at Common Errant . Besides noting U.S. charter school connections to the Fethullah Gülen Movement during her testimony in the Schmidt v. Krikorian case in Ohio on August 8, 2009,* [...]

Christel House Donors: Dell’s Official Flckr Page (The following was first posted on B-Town Errant , Bloomington, Indiana:) B-Town Errant Editor’s note: Doug Martin’s work supplies a kind of corrective to the simple “top-line” story and understanding of the education reform movement.  It can be understood to be “about” management and assessment to enforce a worldview where production is only quantifiable [...]

(The following is part of a larger investigative piece on donations and other financial public records in various counties concerning members of Mavericks in Education Florida, Charter Schools USA, and Imagine Schools.  It first appeared at B-Town Errant .) When the Palm Beach Post endorsed Chuck E. Shaw for the Palm Beach County School Board’s district 2 seat, they praised the ex-JFK Medical Center Charter School principal [...]

(This was first posted at B-Town Errant , Bloomington, Indiana) When Lisa Rab outed Joe Biden’s brother, Frank, as a major force behind a for-profit education management organization (EMO) dead set on building 100 new charter schools across Florida,* it came as no surprise to anyone who has been paying the slightest bit of attention to the corporate school reform [...]

This piece is cross-posted at B-Town Errant , Indiana’s new and most progressive anti-corporate magazine. Please check it out. As Atlanta Progressive Review’s Matthew Cardinale recently noted, Purpose Built Communities (PBC), a neighborhood turnaround group started in 2009 by Warren Buffett, hedge fund manager Julian Robertson, and Atlanta businessman Tom Cousins, have hired former Atlanta mayor Shirley Franklin to team up [...]

As the Indiana State Board of Education decides to hand over Indiana’s so-called “failing” schools to EdisonLearning, Charter Schools USA , and Rupert Murdoch’s Wireless Generation today, it is important to note that both Edison and Wireless Generation have donated to Education Reform Idol Indiana supt. of public instruction Tony Bennett’s campaign chest. In fact, Wireless Gen. even lavished money on Mitch Daniels and Indiana Republicans, [...]

This piece is cross-posted at B-Town Errant , Indiana’s new and most progressive anti-corporate magazine. Please check it out. A few weeks after I criticized EdisonLearning’s invitation to Indiana, Supt. of Public Instruction Tony Bennett and Mitch Daniels have welcomed yet another Jeb Bush crony, Jonathan Hage, CEO of Florida-based for-profit education management company Charter Schools USA (CS USA), [...]

Yesterday in the Sun-Times, Gary, Indiana, Pastor Ray Dix regurgitated the same deceptive rhetoric the Black Alliance for Educational Options (BAEO) has been shamefully pumping into low-income African American parents for over a decade, specifically that vouchers and charter schools are the answer to the failing/imprisonment of black students. But, as every school choicer watchdog group knows, the [...]

  May 30, 2011, Governor Mitch Daniels 200 West Washington Street, #206 Indianapolis, IN 46204-2731 Dear Governor Daniels: As a language scholar and Hoosier, I find serious problems in your decision to appoint proponents of pure oralism to the board at the Indiana School for the Deaf. While promoting the artificial and often-futile task of [...]

“The government has ceased to function…the corporations are the government.” Theodore Dreiser If one applies cognitive and political linguist George Lakoff’s “Strict Father” model to Governor Mitch Daniels and Indiana superintendent of public instruction Tony Bennett, it’s obvious they see themselves as the be-all and end-all authorities on how teachers and students should be whipped into shape. Since [...]

Indiana Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Bennett sees teachers and their unions as worse than Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) snaking throughout the locker rooms and hallways of Indiana’s public school buildings. Yet, after setting out on his pilgrimage to prove in his doctoral dissertation that teachers’ unions and teachers’ contracts were negatively influencing Indiana education, the [...]

Kevin P. Chavous should be every public educator and parent’s nightmare. The Indianapolis-born school reformer chairs the anti-public education Black Alliance for Educational Options’ board of directors. As co-founder of the hedge fund operated group Democrats for Education Reform , he also holds a high position in the astroturf American Federation for Children, whose Indiana-registered PAC has [...]

Although she likes to post on the charter school/voucher/merit-pay promoter Indiana Democrats for Education Reform’s facebook page , Indiana State Board of Education member Jo Blacketor makes her living at Faulkner Strategies doing PR work for right-wingers. Currently changing its name to Gridiron Communications, Faulkner Strategies’ clients include or have included actor-lawyer-turned-nutcase Fred Thompson, the anti-public education DeVos family front group All [...]

Besides a State Board of Education member who forged her dissertation , charter studies done by charter supporters, and a Superintendent of Public Instruction whose dissertation disproves everything he is putting into practice, Indiana now has Mitch Daniels’ Aiming Higher PAC running a TV ad (displaying a pronoun-antecedent agreement error, in fact) with a two-year teaching veteran the director of the [...]