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"These education gangsters have wrought
tremendous damage on school children of
color they have claimed to love and to nurture."
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Chris Cerf, newly appointed superintendent of the Newark Public
Schools, has been a long-term servant of the Cartel of right-leaning
corporate and foundation CEOs and Wall Street hedge fund
managers. However, he is part of a network of education gangsters
across the nation who work to privatize public education in low-wealth
and middle-class school districts. Their central connection is to
Eli Broad and his Broad Superintendent’s Academy (BSA) where they have
been trained in a model that views K-12 public education like a
business and uses it as a profit center. Eli Broad, a billionaire
corporate mogul and the Cartel’s education minister, promotes a mantra
to turn public education into his private fiefdom. He and Cartel
billionaires, the Koch Bros., Bill Gates, Suzy Walton, Betsey DeVos,
etc., have combined their financial resources to create a multi-racial
and gender diverse gang of educational privatization mercenaries to
march across America with the primary goal of moving public education
dollars into private sector hands. Their destruction and
devastation of public education’s infrastructure has left students,
teachers, and public education stakeholders in a lurch.
Funding and/or creating a vast inter-connected network of think tanks,
grassroots activists, advocacy groups, political Super PACs, and a
bipartisan coalition of elected officials, the Cartel has made
significant strides in its violent assault on public education:
demonizing and terminating teachers via evaluation mechanisms that are
not based on sound educational research; placing novice, so-called
teachers in at-risk schools with limited preparation and no
certification, many without four-year college or university degrees;
reducing resources for students in economically distressed urban and
rural school districts where students of color are the majority or near
majority; forcing students to attend classes in dilapidated and
physically unhealthy school buildings; and hiring administrators who
have no background in managing teachers or school districts.
Collectively, these tactics constitute ongoing forms of education
violence. Moreover, there has been a systematic dismissal of
African American and Hispanic teachers who are disproportionately
replaced by young, mostly white Teach for America (TFA) teachers with
five weeks of training.
In addition, numerous Cartel disciples, with Cartel influence, have
been appointed superintendents in large school districts where they
have seized opportunities to enrich themselves and their friends on the
backs of poor students of color. Chris Cerf cooperates with them
through the vast Broad and Cartel system where they rape and plunder
school districts primarily populated by students of color. The
perpetrators of these education crimes are minority and majority male
and female educational leaders alike.
On October 13, 2015, Dr. Barbara Byrd-Bennett, a Cartel and Broad
devotee, who served as superintendent of the cash-strapped Chicago
Public Schools (CPS) from 2012-2015, pleaded guilty in federal court to wire fraud for awarding more than $23 million in no-bid contracts to her previous employer and devising a scheme where she would receive a ten percent kickback from the contracts worth more than $2 million. In an email exchange with her co-conspirator, Byrd-Bennett even implied she needed cash because she had "…tuition to pay and casinos to visit,"
according to the charges. She was also given a $254,000 bonus,
via a trust fund set up for her twin grandsons, for her efforts in
arranging the contracts, provided tickets to sporting events, and given
funding for a holiday party she hosted for CPS staff. In
Byrd-Bennett’s deal with federal prosecutors, she accepted a
recommended sentence of 71/2 years instead of the 11-14 years the
charge mandated under federal sentencing guidelines. She
apologized to the students saying that “I am terribly sorry...They
deserve much more, much more than I gave to them" (an understatement).
Byrd Bennett Is now being investigated for taking kickbacks from a contract she gave to another Cartel acolyte, Dr. Robert Bobb,
former head of the Detroit Educational Authority (DEA) who employed her
in Detroit as chief academic auditor. The disturbing aspect of
this educational violence is that it is being perpetrated by
administrators of color on students of color. Thus, they joined
Cerf in creating a national gangster education group. Elsewhere,
the late Beverly Hall,
deceased superintendent of the Atlanta Public Schools (APS) was
indicted for setting up a testing improvement scam from which she earned nearly $500,000 in bonuses
before it collapsed on her and two dozen of her subordinates (Hall died
before she could stand trial). Prior to that revelation, the late
Dr. Arlene Ackerman, former superintendent of the School District of Philadelphia (SDP), was being probed for a similar testing charade (although no charges were filed)
and driving the district budget into a deficit. When she
resigned, the School Reform Commission (SRC), which oversees the SDP,
held up her $900,000 payout. After the intervention of the
Cartel, which directed Ackerman to send out a detailed email to all of
her educational associates endorsing charter and voucher schools as
being the solution to the educational challenges facing low-income
students of color, the payout was released. Her communique’
caused some concern among her colleagues in the National Alliance of Black School Educators (NABSE),
the largest group of professional African American educators in America
where she had been a leader for thirty years. This was the
assemblage of teachers and administrators that Eli Broad and the Cartel
wanted to embrace their privatization agenda for public education as
NABSE members overwhelmingly work in the districts the Cartel is
targeting.
These education gangsters have wrought tremendous damage on school
children of color they have claimed to love and to nurture. The
Cartel’s insistence on a largely non-regulated K-12 education
environment invites educational violence and gangster behavior to take
root. But what is interesting is that the Cartel adherents of
color are a high percentage of those being indicted and going to
jail. Minority administrators refuse to acknowledge that they
will be more closely scrutinized when they are in charge of large
budgets in the public and private sectors. But their individual
greed, like that of their majority counterparts, blinds them to that
reality. The late Dr. Kenneth Clark, a key architect of the 1954
Brown Decision, noted in a 1984 essay in Daedalus that “One of the most
interesting things that has happened is that the black community of
this country, for the first time in history, has come to control a
large number of public educational systems, and is doing nothing with
them.” Three decades later, Dr. Clark’s observations have proven
to be prescient in that superintendents of color in large and small
school districts throughout the nation have had modest success, at
best, in elevating educational outcomes for students of color and
oftentimes have succumbed to personal greed at the expense of these
same students with whom they share racial affinity.
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BlackCommentator.com Columnist, Dr. Walter C. Farrell, Jr., PhD, MSPH, is a Fellow of
the National Education Policy Center (NEPC) at the University of
Colorado-Boulder and has written widely on vouchers, charter schools,
and public school privatization. He has appeared on the Today Show with
Matt Lauer and National Public Radio’s The Connection to discuss public
school privatization, and he has lectured to parent, teacher, and union
groups throughout the nation. Contact Dr. Farrell.
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 is published every Thursday |
Executive Editor:
David A. Love, JD |
Managing Editor:
Nancy Littlefield, MBA |
Publisher:
Peter Gamble |
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