BLACK STAR: "The Corporate Takeover of American Schools" (See, blackstar1000@ameritech.net to support Black Star).
The corporate push to take over state education is, in fact, masking the failures of corporate America. And, in turn, this masks the fact that America has failed state education, rather than state education failing America
The Corporate takeover
of American Schools
The trend for appointing CEOs to top jobs is symptomatic of a declining commitment to public education and social justice
By Paul Thomas
Joel Klein, the outgoing chancellor of New York schools. He is joining News Corp as a vice-president and advisers to Rupert Murdoch; his successor, Cathie Black is chair of Hearst magazines. (Photograph: Lisa Carpenter for the Guardian)
The top positions in state education across the US - for example, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, recent chancellors Joel Klein (New York) and Michelle Rhee (Washington, DC), and incoming Chancellor Cathleen P Black (New York) - reflect a trust in CEO-style leadership for education management and reform. Along with these new leaders in education, billionaire entrepreneurs have also assumed roles as education saviours: Bill and Melinda Gates, and Geoffrey Canada.
Gates, Canada, Duncan, Klein and Rhee have capitalised on their positions in education to rise to the status of celebrities, as well - praised in the misleading documentary feature Waiting for Superman, on Oprah, and even on Bill Maher's Real Time.
What do all these professional managers and entrepreneurs have in common?
Little or no experience or expertise in education. (Instead, they have degrees in government and law, along with nontraditional entries into education and strong ties to alternative certification, such as Teach for America). Further, they all represent and promote a cultural faith in the power of leadership above the importance of experience or expertise.
When Klein quit his post as chancellor in New York - soon after Michelle Rhee left DC - the fact that he was leaving for a senior position at News Corp and that his replacement would be a magazine executive sent a strong message. The implication was that the American public distrusts not only schools, but also teachers and education experts.
More telling, however, is the appointment of Duncan as secretary of education under President Obama. This appointment of a CEO-style leader of schools in Chicago comes under a Democratic administration and, ironically, a president once demonised as too friendly with the radical left within the education community.
Like Obama, Secretary Duncan has led refrains against bad teachers, while ignoring the growing impact of poverty on the lives of children and on schools. One very visible effect of this trend for recruiting CEO-style leaders and billionaire entrepreneurs is the new commitment to corporate-sponsored charter schools - such as the Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP) and the Harlem Children's Zone (HCZ) among the most high profile.
The messages coming from state education in the US, then, are that government has failed and that only the private sector can save us. But is that message accurate?
The corporate push to take over state education is, in fact, masking the failures of corporate America. And, in turn, this masks the fact that America has failed state education, rather than state education failing America.
The standards, testing and accountability movement is built on a claim that education can change society. The corporate support for the accountability movement and the "no excuses" charter school movement seeks to reinforce that claim because, otherwise, corporate America and the politicians supporting corporate America would have to admit that something is wrong with our economic and political structures.
And the evidence isn't on the side of corporate America.
The Joseph Rowntree Foundation has shown that only 14% of pupil achievement can be attributed to the quality of the school; 86% of that achievement is driven by factors outside of education. David Berliner has also established six out-of-school factors that overwhelm the effectiveness of education against poverty and expanding social inequities.
In the US, achievement gaps and failure in state schools reflect larger inequalities in society, as well as dysfunction in corporate, consumer culture. The schools did not cause those gaps or failures - although it is true that, far too often, they perpetuate the social stratification. And the evidence shows that schools alone will never be able to overcome powerful social forces.
The real failure, which is the message being ignored here, is that one of the wealthiest countries in the world refuses to face the inequities of its economic system, a system that permits more than 20% of its children to live in poverty and to languish in schools that America has clearly decided to abandon, along with its democratic principles.
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November 12, 2010
How Do Black People in America
Spend $507 Billion Dollars Annually?
With $836 Billion in Total Earning Power,
only $321 Million Spent on Books while $7.4 Billion Spent on Hair and Personal Care Products and Services
New 'Buying Power' report shows black consumers spend as economy improves
New 16th edition shows expenditures rise to $507 billion
(November 1, 2010) African-American consumers are cautiously increasing their spending in some key product categories, even as they continue to make adjustments in a slowly growing economy. The finding comes from the soon to be issued 16th annual edition of "The Buying Power of Black America" report.
In 2009, black households spent an estimated $507 billion in 27 product and services categories. That's an increase of 16.6% over the $435 billion spent in 2008. African-Americans' total earned income for 2009 is estimated at $836 billion.
The report, which is published annually by Target Market News, also contains data that reflect the economic hardships all consumers are facing. There were significant declines in categories -- like food and apparel -- that have routinely shown growth in black consumers' spending from year-to-year.
"These latest shifts in spending habits are vital for marketers to understand," said Ken Smikle, president of Target Market News and editor of the report, "because they represent both opportunities and challenges in the competition for the billions of dollars spent by African-American households. Expenditures between 2007 and 2008 were statistically flat, so black consumers are now making purchases they have long delayed. At the same time, they re-prioritizing their budgets, and spending more on things that add value to their homes and add to the quality of life."
The median household income for African-Americans dropped by 1.4% in 2009, but because of students going out on their own, and couples that started their lives together, the number of black households grew 4.2%. This increase meant that many household items showed big gains. For example, purchases of appliances rose by 33%, consumer electronics increased 33%, household furnishings climbed 28%, and housewares went up by 37%.
Estimated Expenditures by Black Households - 2009
Apparel Products and Services
$29.3 billion
Appliances
2.0 billion
Beverages (Alcoholic)
3.0 billion
Beverages (Non-Alcoholic)
2.8 billion
Books
321 million
Cars and Trucks - New & Used
29.1 billion
Computers
3.6 billion
Consumer Electronics
6.1 billion
Contributions
17.3 billion
Education
7.5 billion
Entertainment and Leisure
3.1 billion
Food
65.2 billion
Gifts
9.6 billion
Health Care
23.6 billion
Households Furnishings & Equipment
16.5 billion
Housewares
1.1 billion
Housing and Related Charges
203.8 billion
Insurance
21.3 billion
Media
8.8 billion
Miscellaneous
8.3 billion
Personal and Professional Services
4.1 billion
Personal Care Products and Services
7.4 billion
Sports and Recreational Equipment
995 million
Telephone Services
18.6 billion
Tobacco Products
3.3 billion
Toys, Games and Pets
3.5 billion
Travel, Transportation and Lodging
6.0 billion
Source: Target Market News,
"The Buying Power of Black American - 2010"
"The Buying Power of Black America" is one of the nation's most quoted sources of information on African-American consumer spending. It is used by hundreds of Fortune 1000 corporations, leading advertising agencies, major media companies and research firms.
The report is an analysis of consumer expenditure (CE) data compiled annually by the U.S. Department of Commerce. The CE data is compiled from more than 3,000 black households nationally through dairies and interviews. This information is also used for, among things, computing the Consumer Price Index.
The report provides updated information in five sections:
- Black Income Data
- Purchases in the Top 30 Black Cities
- Expenditure Trends in 26 Product & Services Categories
- The 100-Plus Index of Black vs. White Expenditures
- Demographic Data on the Black Population
The 16th annual report on "The Buying Power of Black America" also includes a preview of findings from the forthcoming 2010 Census report.
Copies of "The Buying Power of Black America" can be purchased from Target Market News for $99 each. For more information call 312-408-1881, or click here to purchase online.
Join the Black Star Fathers Club for Women's College Basketball!
UIC Flames vs. Depaul Blue Demons
on
Tuesday, November 23, 2010
at the
UIC pavilion
525 South Racine Street
Chicago Illinois
Game starts at 7:00 pm
Call Bruce Walker at 773.285.9600 to reserve your FREE tickets.
For 15 years, The Black Star Project has asked school systems and government for help with this problem and has gotten little. Now, after losing another generation of Black boys, they acknowledge the problem with no plan of action.
"There's accumulating evidence that there are racial differences in what kids experience before the first day of kindergarten," said Ronald Ferguson, director of the Achievement Gap Initiative at Harvard.
Proficiency of Black Students Is Found to Be Far Lower Than Expected
By TRIP GABRIEL
Published: November 9, 2010
An achievement gap separating black from white students has long been documented - a social divide extremely vexing to policy makers and the target of one blast of school reform after another.
But a new report focusing on black males suggests that the picture is even bleaker than generally known.
Only 12 percent of black fourth-grade boys are proficient in reading, compared with 38 percent of white boys, and only 12 percent of black eighth-grade boys are proficient in math, compared with 44 percent of white boys.
Poverty alone does not seem to explain the differences: poor white boys do just as well as African-American boys who do not live in poverty, measured by whether they qualify for subsidized school lunches.
The data was distilled from highly respected national math and reading tests, known as the National Assessment for Educational Progress, which are given to students in fourth and eighth grades, most recently in 2009. The report, "A Call for Change," is to be released Tuesday by the Council of the Great City Schools, an advocacy group for urban public schools.
Although the outlines of the problem and many specifics have been previously reported, the group hopes that including so much of what it calls "jaw-dropping data" in one place will spark a new sense of national urgency.
"What this clearly shows is that black males who are not eligible for free and reduced-price lunch are doing no better than white males who are poor," said Michael Casserly, executive director of the council.
The report shows that black boys on average fall behind from their earliest years. Black mothers have a higher infant mortality rate and black children are twice as likely as whites to live in a home where no parent has a job. In high school, African-American boys drop out at nearly twice the rate of white boys, and their SAT scores are on average 104 points lower. In college, black men represented just 5 percent of students in 2008.
The analysis of results on the national tests found that math scores in 2009 for black boys were not much different than those for black girls in Grades 4 and 8, but black boys lagged behind Hispanics of both s*xes, and they fell behind white boys by at least 30 points, a gap sometimes interpreted as three academic grades.
The search for explanations has recently looked at causes besides poverty, and this report may further spur those efforts.
"There's accumulating evidence that there are racial differences in what kids experience before the first day of kindergarten," said Ronald Ferguson, director of the Achievement Gap Initiative at Harvard.
"They have to do with a lot of sociological and historical forces. In order to address those, we have to be able to have conversations that people are unwilling to have."
Those include "conversations about early childhood parenting practices," Dr. Ferguson said. "The activities that parents conduct with their 2-, 3- and 4-year-olds. How much we talk to them, the ways we talk to them, the ways we enforce discipline, the ways we encourage them to think and develop a sense of autonomy."
The report urges convening a White House conference, encouraging Congress to appropriate more money for schools and establishing networks of black mentors.
What it does not discuss are policy responses identified with a robust school reform movement that emphasizes closing failing schools, offering charter schools as alternatives and raising the quality of teachers.
The report did not go down this road because "there's not a lot of research to indicate that many of those strategies produce better results," Mr. Casserly said.
Other have a different response. The key to narrowing the achievement gap, said Dr. Ferguson, is "really good teaching."
One large urban school district that has made progress is Baltimore's, where the dropout rate for African-American boys declined to 4.9 percent during the last academic year, down from 11.9 percent three years earlier. Graduation rates for black boys were also up: 57 percent in 2009-10, compared with 51 percent three years earlier.
Andres A. Alonso, the chief executive of the Baltimore City Public Schools, said the improvement had little to do with changes at the margins, like lengthening the school day or adding mentors. Rather, Mr. Alonso cited aggressively closing failing schools, knocking on the doors of dropouts' homes to lure them back and creating real-time alerts - "almost like an electrical charge" - when a student misses several days of school.
"Hispanic kids and African-American kids this year had a lower dropout rate than white kids," Mr. Alonso said.
Get Your Beat "On"
and Get Your Dance "On" and Support
The Black Star Project At the Same Time
This Thanksgiving, give thanks by giving back to the community! You can support The Black Star Project on Thanksgiving weekend while hearing the finests in global percussive arts! Purchase tickets to see any one of the 4 performances through Global Rhythms 6 and you can receive a 10% discount and The Black Star Project will receive 50% of your ticket price as a donation! Just enter the partner code CHRP-STAR
Join The Black Star Project
at the
Harris Theater for Music and Dance
205 E. Randolph Dr.
Chicago, IL 60601
Click here for ticket information and please use The Black Star Project's promo code: CHRP-STAR.
Parents can teach
their children math!!!
Don't wait for schools to teach your children math -- do it yourself!
Click on links below for more information about the great programs of The Black Star Project
For more information on our other programs and how you can get involved, click on these links below or please call 773.285.9600:
Attend a Black Star Event in Chicago
Become a Black Star Mentor
Posted By: agnes levine
Tuesday, November 23rd 2010 at 5:52AM
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