Will "smart" cities lead to surveilled education and social control?

from Wrench in the Gears
July 28, 2017

A growing number of metropolitan areas are being shaped by “Smart” City policies. Bloomberg Philanthropy’s “What Works Cities” aims to bring these programs to mid-size cities as well. Even in communities without explicit “smart” initiatives, “innovation” or “empowerment” zones are being proposed, often around school districts, enabling outside interests to sidestep existing legal and contractual protections under the guise of “autonomy” and “flexibility.” I hope the information I’ve pulled together will reveal how “smart city” and “learning ecosystem” interests often intersect and encourage others to think critically about similar programs in their communities. It is important to consider digital classrooms as nodes of smart cities. Classrooms touch the lives of many, and thus are logical places to begin normalizing the idea that as citizens it is our duty to generate and hand over massive quantities of personal data that will supposedly shape policy for the “public good” and manage our economy.

Smart Cities are defined by their reliance on digital technology across government functions and the use of sensor-transmitted data to regulate provision of public services. The high cost of installing such networks, monitoring data, and maintaining the systems, especially in our current climate of austerity, means municipalities will increasingly look to partner with private companies and outside investors to provide basic public services. I anticipate “smart city” policies will fuel social impact investing. There is a belief that investments in “efficient” technologies will yield future cost savings, and therefore such infrastructure projects could become significant profit centers for venture capital.

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NAACP Dumps Charter Moratorium And Wins Ravitch "Honor Roll" Status

Last October the NAACP adopted a resolution calling for a moratorium on the authorization of new charter schools.  Even though the new position did nothing to help the millions of children already trapped and abused in thousands of apartheid "no excuses" charter schools in 45 states, the resolution was viewed as the beginning of a societal shift away from the paternalistic "broken windows" school model that billionaires, hedge funders, and corporate foundations have supported for two decades as the final solution for urban pre-K-12 education.

In adopting the new resolution against charter expansion, however, the NAACP found itself outside the political mainstream and, thus, upstream from the primary flow of cash that sustains the organization's top-heavy hierarchy.  Then, as the AFT and NEA moved "all in" with their bet on a charter-embracing DNC that was/is owned by the Clintonians, the NAACP found itself further isolated and cut off from political influence and union generosity.

The result has been a quiet death of the moratorium accompanied by a new charter-friendly policy by the NAACP.  Not surprisingly, it is policy that mirrors the positions of AFT and NEA and NPE, which will be front and center in the 2018 midterm election year.

How does the NAACP explain its reversal?  Easy.  As Diane Ravitch explains, the NAACP has simply, though "boldly," asserted that charter schools now are public schools and, therefore, incapable of draining public money away:

The NAACP report boldly acknowledges that charters are part of a public-funded system. It says that it makes no sense to strip funding from the public schools that enroll the great majority of students in order to fund a parallel system that is usually no better than the public system and often worse.

Got that?  If charters are now "public," how can charters be stripping money away to a "parallel system?!"  Charters, then, are no longer part of the problem--they are part of the solution!  Bingo.

A month ago before the new NAACP report was released, Ravitch was thoroughly convinced by reading Rebecca Klein' dissembling at HuffPo that the moratorium would remain intact. She had this say then:

I am very impressed that the NAACP did not succumb to the big-money behind the privatization movement. That shows their genuine commitment to the children and families for whom they fight.

And what about now, after it has become clear that the NAACP capitulated and has, in fact, become the parrots of the AFT/NEA/NPE position for embracing charters. As you might imagine, now Ravitch is even more impressed by her new allies:

Like every national organization, the NAACP relies on major donors to survive. By standing strong against privatization of public schools, the NAACP has demonstrated courage and integrity. I add the NAACP to the honor roll of this blog, with admiration and respect.

 Remember, now, boys and girls: charter schools are public schools, so they can no longer be accused of privatizing.

NEA Continues Support for Charter Schools

NEA Continues Support for Charter Schools

by Jim Horn

Every year American public school educators send approximately a billion and a half dollars to the National Education Association and over half that amount to the American Federation of Teachers.  The NEA’s latest policy statement on charter schools should make every teacher wonder why she is sending in those hundreds of hard-earned dollars every year to help NEA and AFT misleaders to put a stake in the heart of public schools. 

The corporate lawyers who write NEA policy have been dissembling, dodging, and weaving for a long time on the subject of charter schools. With this new policy statement, it is clear that that has not changed.  

What has changed is the mass of qualifiers that NEA has added, ostensibly to earn the organization’s continued blessing for charter schools.  If, however, the corporate governing bodies do not abide by NEA’s list of wishes, then that could trigger an NEA response that must have the charter industry quaking at the thought:

Unless both the basic safeguards and process detailed above are met, no charter school should be authorized and NEA will support state and local moratoriums on further charter authorizations in the school district.

Now mind you, this does not mean that NEA headquarters will do anything or even threaten anything on its on if the charter industry ignores NEA’s latest dissembling.  What NEA will do, however, is to not stand in the way of any NEA affiliate that wants to tie its membership onto the tracks for the billionaires’ corporate charter locomotive to flatten.  Where is the NEA and AFT leadership?  They are, of course, at the corporate education table, even if they have to sit underneath it and beg for bones to be thrown to educators.

Based on past experience, we may expect the multi-billion dollar charter industry to summarily ignore NEA’s pathetic statement on charters, which is delivered without demand, without promised repercussions, and with zero fanfare.  NEA’s new statement signals a policy that continues down the dead-end Democratic Party’s Third Way, which has surely earned the label of Third Rail by now—following the 2016 election.  NEA’s policy on charter, in fact, is one that would never cause a Clinton to cluck. 

And what happens if, by some miracle, NEA’s entire fanciful list of conditions is met, thus making meaningless calls for moratoriums unnecessary and any further pretense of charter outrage irrelevant?  Not much.

Now the NEA statement supports “prohibitions against for-profit [charter] operation.” It is reasonable to ask, then, if for-profit charters are prohibited, will the billions of public dollars that are now going to the charter industry stop flowing into privatizers’ pockets.

Not at all.  In fact, the majority of charters have always been of the “non-profit” variety, with only 13 percent of the nation’s 7,500 charters run by for-profit companies.  Insisting that all charters become “non-profit” will only guarantee that that state and local education dollars will continue to fill the coffers of the charter industry, which thrives by claiming “non-profit” status for their segregated cultural sterilization schools based on the KIPP Model. 

It matters not to a school system that must fire its librarians to make payroll if, in fact, monies now being diverted to charters go to a charter operator’s bank account that is designated as “non-profit.”  In fact, the “non-profit” status guarantees many tax advantages for the big donors and operators who view the paternalistic “no excuses” charters as the urban education final solution.

Which brings us to the greatest weakness of the NEA policy on charter schools.  If all the items of NEA’s wish list were realized, and that is a huge “if,” the charter industry’s corporate colonization of urban schools by the 6,500 non-profit charters now in operation would continue unabated.  If all of NEA’s fanciful wishes were met, hundreds thousands of children and thousands of their missionary teachers would continue to suffer daily indignities and ongoing dehumanization from white corporate school managers who pretend that callous brutality is justified as a means to an end that always boils down to performance on standardized tests and behavioral grade cards.

We have to wonder when the remaining members of AFT and NEA will join those hundreds of thousands of educators who have already stopped their enabling of NEA’s corporate education habit.

ESSA Goes After NY Community High Schools

There are 51 of them in New York City, and they serve transfer students whose circumstances made it impossible to work through a regular high school.  Students receive counseling, career guidance, and other social services that allow students to actually learn while finish high school at a decelerated pace.

Now those schools are under threat from ESSA, which could have never passed without the support of corporate reform protection units of NEA, AFT, NPE, and FairTest:

The schools are small, and many of them work with community-based organizations to offer counseling, college and career advising, and internships. They have a significantly better track record than other high schools in graduating students who are two or more years behind. But because students often enter transfer schools with few credits, it can take them six, seven or even eight years in total to graduate.

Now advocates and city education officials fear the schools may be in danger. On Monday, the State Education Department is expected to present the Board of Regents with regulations to conform with the Every Student Succeeds Act, the successor to No Child Left Behind. Under the expected regulations, the vast majority of the city’s transfer schools would be designated as “in need of improvement” and could be at risk of being closed.

Under the regulations, schools that fall short of a six-year graduation rate of 67 percent would be put on a list to receive “comprehensive support and improvement.” Only four of the city’s 51 transfer schools currently meet, or are on track to meet, that benchmark.

Smart Cities and Social Impact Bonds: Public Education's Hostile Takeover Part II

from Wrench in the Gears
July 13, 2017

The Ed Reform 2.0 push to atomize knowledge into bits and pieces for validation by badges and micro-credentials has me very worried. It’s not what I want for my child, for other people’s children or for future generations. There are many days I feel like a Cassandra. It’s not that people don’t believe my predictions; rather, they are down in the trenches fighting more immediate battles and don’t have the luxury of time or head space to step back and let things come into focus. Part of the strategy, in fact, is to create repeated immediate threats that zap our resources and distract us from the true end game. It is unclear exactly what is to be done, because pushing back against these powerful global forces will take tremendous collective effort. And of course it is a weighty thing to hold this knowledge. I sense there are a lot of people who simply don’t want to look for fear that it will be too hard to carry that knowledge going forward.

I recognize there was no era in which public education was designed to care for ALL our nation’s children. As we stare down Ed Reform 2.0, we must be prepared not only to fight the reformers’ surveillance, human-capital management tactics, but also to collectively imagine and realize a new paradigm that will cultivate the intellect and talents of each and every child while recognizing and celebrating their human dignity. Rather than the toxic construct of “personalized” online learning that railroads children into set pathways, isolates them, and forces them to compete against one another, we need to embrace learning as an inherently human process, one that encourages students to take pleasure in discovering and constructing knowledge with the guidance of trained educators, in the fellowship of engaged peers, and within the context of their communities and culture.

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Getting Personal with Michael Horn in Indy

 By Doug Martin

 “In 15 years from now, half of US universities may be in bankruptcy. In the end I’m excited to see that happen. So pray for Harvard Business School if you wouldn’t mind.”  Clayton Christensen (2013)

“Thank God for Clayton Christensen and Michael Horn.” Jeb Bush

(NOTE: Michael Horn also is helping Mitch Daniels, but that topic goes beyond the scope of this blogpost)

When Michael Horn keynotes the Metropolitan School District of Warren Township’s Blended Learning Forum in Indianapolis at Creston Intermediate/ Middle School on July 20, 2017, the Harvard Business School graduate will be welcomed by the school reform crowd, since it won’t be the first time his Christensen Institute has mingled in Indiana. 

Horn and his mentor Clayton Christensen* specialize in convincing educators and politicians that personalized learning, through technology, can save a so-called failing and outdated school system.  The two co-founded the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation (formerly known as the Innosight Institute*), now a San Francisco Bay area think tank.  Although he has shuffled into a new job with Entangled Solutions, Horn is still listed as a distinguished fellow at the Christensen Institute. 

Clayton Christensen, a Harvard business professor, is glorified in the business community for his theories supposedly explaining how disruption “takes root initially in simple applications at the bottom of a market and then relentlessly moves up market, eventually displacing established competitors.” In the case of education, the “established competitors” to be displaced by “personalized” computer-based learning are public school teachers, since blended learning and online educational environments allow for a reduced labor force and will eventually lead to the elimination of brick-and-mortar schools altogether, edtech leaders hope.  

Besides pocketing over $3.4 million in Gates Foundation money over the years, the Christensen Institute has received high esteem from those determined to privatize public education from pre-school to university.  For the Christensen Institute and the billionaires, the end-game plan means first gaining access to the schoolhouse itself then using administrators and educators (like those at the MSD of Warren Township conference) to spread the technology and so-called personalized learning from school district to school district.

THE INDIANA WEB

Michael Horn and the Christensen Institute have connections at the Indianapolis-based Mind Trust.  Horn was a member of the Mind Trust/Public Impact advisory panel for the October 2015 report, “Raising the Bar: Why Public Charter Schools Must Become Even More Innovative.”

The Christensen Institute’s  senior research fellow, Thomas Arnett, an earlier Teach for America member and author of “Teaching in the Machine Age: How Innovation Can Make Bad Teachers Good and Good Teachers Better," was at the Mind Trust-hosted Marian University conference in Indianapolis on January 6, 2017, where “top national and local education thought leaders and pioneers, converged upon” campus “for a ‘Teacher Innovation Pipeline Convening’ event to discuss The Educators College teacher preparation program changes.”

With a few national players, the Mind Trust Marian event was attended by a who’s who of Indiana school privatization forces:

--former state school chief Tony Bennett*, listed as a consultant for MGT

--Mind Trust’s David Harris

--former Indianapolis mayor’s charter school director Beth Bray, now the Walton Family Foundation’s program officer

--Public Impact’s Bryan Hassel

--Marian president and prior Indiana state board of education member Daniel J. Elsener

--Republican lawmaker Robert Behning, who is Marian’s director of external affairs

--Purdue Polytechnic Indianapolis High School’s Scott Bess

--longtime school reform ally Claire Fiddian-Green

--Indianapolis Public Schools’ human resource officer, Mindy Schlegel

 

--Brent Maddin, the founding provost at the Relay Graduate School of Education

--Teach to One Math’s Christopher Rush

--Maggie Runyan Shefa, the co-CEO of New Schools for New Orleans

--Derek Redelman, now vice president of research and policy at USA Funds

--Bellwether Education Partners’ Andy Rotherham

--Scott Jenkins, the Lumina Foundation’s strategy director and a former policy director for past Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels

Previous Mind Trust operative Ken Bubp, now commanding the Arnold Foundation’s education unit, also attended the Mind Trust Marian event. 

The Arnold Foundation, a Mind Trust funder, handed Christensen and Horn’s Innosight Institute $274,075 from 2011-2012.  In October 2011 at a Philanthropy Roundtable event* in San Francisco, the Innosight Institute, the Arnold Foundation, Education Elements, and the NewSchools Venture Fund unveiled their  K-12 education technology market map, “designed to help investors, donors, and entrepreneurs better evaluate today’s landscape of education technology ventures.” Michael Horn, at the event, shared the stage with NewSchools Venture Fund’s then-CEO, Ted Mitchell, who later became Obama’s undersecretary of the Department of Education, and Education Elements’ Anthony Kim, introducing the map to, as Horn himself has written, “an audience of foundations and venture capitalists.” 

Michael Horn and the Christensen Institute also have friends at the Mind Trust-spinoff CEE-Trust.  In September 2012, when the Christensen Institute was still calling itself the Innosight Institute, Horn was on the “Launching an Inner-City Blended Learning School” panel at the Philanthropy Roundtable conference in New York City, an event where Ethan Gray, head of CEE-Trust, also presented.  In 2013, Michael Horn did a CEE-Trust webinar on disruptive innovation with host Carrie Douglass, a past Broad Foundation resident and chief strategy officer for CEE-Trust.  With the Gates, Broad, and Dell foundations, the Charter School Growth Fund, Silicon Schools, and a few others, CEE-Trust and the Christensen Institute developed “A Working Definition of Personalized Learning,” now accepted as industry gospel.  

Horn has also praised Carpe Diem’s blended-learning enterprise, which now operates in Indianapolis, writing in 2011 that the charter school chain “is one of the best-executed in terms of everything, to have rethought curriculum, instructional delivery, teacher role, and student supports.”  To create “smarter demand” in edtech, Horn notes, foundations must “Create more examples of exemplar blended-learning school models, such as Carpe Diem’s schools and Rocketship Education,” educate “the general public, media, and parents around the potential of digital learning,” and “Help educate school leaders, states, and districts, for example, to know what questions to ask as they implement online and blended learning,” since disrupting the K-12 market means going “beyond input-focused metrics–around such things as seat time and student-teacher ratios.”

COURSE ACCESS

Along with the Jeb Bush and Tony Bennett-founded Chiefs for Change and ALEC (the American Legislative Exchange Council), Michael Horn and the Christensen Institute are big advertisers for Course Access, available in Indiana after the 2017 passing of House Bill 1007, which “creates a course-by-course voucher program to enable students to enroll and pay for online courses funded by the student's public school.”

At the Texas statehouse on March 12, 2015, Christensen’s senior research fellow Thomas Arnett testified before the Texas Senate Education Committee in favor of SB 894, a Course Access bill allowing students to grab classes through the Texas Virtual School Network, as did a representative from iNACOL, and favorable testimony from Jeb Bush’s Foundation for Excellence in Education followed the next day.  

Course Access is meant to disrupt traditional public schools, siphon school funding to private online companies, allow cash-strapped districts not to hire or replace teachers, and help consulting firms land money by training schools on how to manage their outsourced courses. 

Michael Horn has praised the tactic, stating “it takes school choice and ‘puts it on steroids.’” In an interview with Ron Matus at redefined, Horn says the MOOCs (the massive open online courses used at universities) and Course Access (also referred to as “Course Choice”) programs “blow up the geographic … scheme we’ve had for where someone goes to school.” He adds that students may still need a school of record to help students and parents manage their options. 

Patricia Burch, an associate professor of education and policy at the University of Southern California, worries that the Course Access maneuver, which has already been adopted by ten other states, can have a major impact on school districts’ budgets, since money for online courses will be sent not only across districts but also state lines, she told the Atlantic. 

Course Access, no doubt, could be a boon for K-12, Inc. and other online companies and platforms.  In fact, thanks to the lobbying efforts of Chiefs for Change, where IPS’ Lewis Ferebee is now a member, the new ESSA federal law permits states to use 3 percent of their Title I funding—which amounts to $425 million—for programs which include online courses, personalized learning, and Course Access programs. 

In the introduction to a 2014 Course Access brief, Jeb Bush writes that “Having a high-quality education must no longer depend on location.  For the next generation of students, the international stakes are too high to restrict access to great courses based on zip code.” In reality, trends in Florida, Utah, and Texas show that wealthy and white students are the ones using Course Access, not the low-income minority kids Bush and other edtech supporters claim.

NOTES

* Horn, who worked at America Online “during its aol.com re-launch,” has directed the hedge fund-affiliated $25 million Robin Hood Education + Technology Fund in New York City and was a member of the New York Education Reform Commission and the $100 million Gates-funded student data-collecting failure, InBloom, for starters. 

Clayton Christensen, too, has mingled with school privatization players.  In 2013, the Harvard business professor keynoted Jeb Bush’s the Foundation for Excellence in Education’s 6^th annual summit on education reform in Boston, that year sponsored by, among others, the Dick and Betsy DeVos Family Foundation, ExxonMobil, Scholastic, Target, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, K12, Inc., State Farm, CharterSchools USA, Edgenuity, Microsoft, the Oberndorf Family Foundation, the Doris and Donald Fisher Fund, Intel, and Pearson.  In a promotional video for the Christensen Institute (“About the Institute,” published on June 5, 2014), Jeb even says: “Thank God for Clayton Christensen and Michael Horn.”

* The Innosight Institute should not to be confused with the Innosight consulting firm, which Clayton Christensen co-founded in 2000 with Michael Overdorf, now Eli Lilly’s vice president of corporate strategy & business transformation. 

* Besides edtech champions Tom Vander Ark, iNACOL’s Susan Patrick, and Rocketship’s CEO John Danner, the Philanthropy Roundtable conference in New York City also included the Mind Trust-backed Seton Education Partners’ Scott Hamilton and Anthony Kim, CEO of Education Elements, the NewSchools Venture Fund-backed enterprise that MSD of Warren Township hired to launch its personalized learning program. 

* In 2011, when then-Indiana superintendent of public education Tony Bennett sat on the Council of Chief State School Officers’ taskforce on Next-Generation State Accountability Systems, Horn was one of several advisors who reviewed and gave feedback on CCSSO’s Roadmap (page 38). 

Billionaire Fave, Matchbook Learning, Coming to Indy

By Doug Martin 

UPDATE:  The Mind Trust has now posted its press release on its website.  Here is what it says about Matchbook Learning's proposed Indy school: 

• They propose to launch a new school in Indianapolis, which would be the seventh prototype of a school turnaround model that has been tested and refined in Detroit and Newark, NJ.  The proposed K-8 Innovation charter school would launch in Fall 2018, with Swann as school leader. 

Along with several other outside people and groups, Matchbook Learning’s Sajan George and his chief school officer, Amy Swann, have been picked as 2017 fellows for the Mind Trust Innovation Schools program. IPS’ supt. Lewis Ferebee and the IPS board helped choose these Mind Trust fellows, and two of them are planning new high schools (KIPP and the Purdue Polytech High School), even as the district is closing its own high schools.  Mind Trust fellows can launch new charter schools, take over IPS schools, and partner with IPS itself.  

According to Chalkbeat Indiana’s Dylan Peers McCoy, Matchbook Learning will open a K-8 school in Indy.  But a Matchbook Learning job posting states that “We want a Principal ready for the challenge and opportunity of a five year mission to turnaround a failing school and to do say [sic] in such a way that it can impact the entire city of Indianapolis by sharing their success with other failing schools via our Accelerator.”

Known for blended learning turnaround models and cashing in on disaster capitalism, or as Matt Tully pleasantly puts it, “running a nonprofit that helps turn around profoundly failing schools,” Sajan George is the CEO of Matchbook Learning and a billionaire favorite of many involved in school privatization in Indiana and across the country.   

THE CLAN

Sajan George visited Indianapolis earlier this year, giving the closing address at the DeVos/Walton American Federation for Children conference back in March, where so-called personalized learning was the buzzword, as it was a few weeks earlier at the NewSchools Venture Fund Summit.

Silicon Valley’s NewSchools Venture Fund, in fact, backs Matchbook Learning’s blended learning schools,.  NewSchools Venture Fund, if you remember, gave Phalen Academy $200,000 in October 2015 to help take over IPS’ Francis Scott Key School 103.  That same year, NewSchools’ New Schools Fund gave Matchbook Learning $840.000 (page 41), adding to its $250,000  investment  in Matchbook in 2011. 

Two months after Sajan George spoke at the DeVos/Walton event, IPS’ Lewis Ferebee joined a panel discussion on “ESSA opportunity” at the NewSchools Venture Fund Summit. 

 

In 2012, when Sajan George was awarded the NewSchools’ Growth Mindset Award, Deborah McGriff, now a partner at NewSchools, said George “has a long-term view of change and he and his students frequently think about what they want to be when they grow up.” As I mention in Hoosier School Heist, McGriff is a former Edison Schools leader and the wife of Howard Fuller, the Black Alliance for Educational Option’s founder.  Both Edison Schools (now Edison Learning) and BAEO have played their part in Indiana school privatization.  

In 2015, when the now Mind Trust-supported Arnold Foundation gave over $16 million, the Dell Foundation $2.5 million, the Walton Foundation $2.2 million, and the Bloomberg Family Foundation $1 million (see pages 44-45) to the Charter School Growth Fund, the Charter School Growth Fund, in its 990, stated that Matchbook Learning received $250,000 for loan forgiveness implementation (page 19).  It is unclear if this was forgiveness for a loan from the Charter School Growth Fund or if the money was used to help Matchbook pay off a loan from somewhere else. 

NEXT GEN TIME AGAIN 

Another Matchbook Learning funder is Next Generation Learning Challenges (NGLC), the edtech initiative supported by many in the corporate school movement in Indiana.  The Next Generation Learning Challenge’s $150,000 to Matchbook Learning in late 2012 went to the company’s plans to “reinvent a middle school in Tennessee’s Achievement School District with its teacher-centric, blended turnaround school model.” 

The Next Generation Learning Challenges initiative, ran by Educause, has received funding from the Gates Foundation and the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation, both supporting the technology takeover of public schools and Indiana school reform.

Billionaire Eli Broad’s Foundation, whose Academy just named Lewis Ferebee a fellow, handed $2.4 million to the Next Generation Learning Challenges in 2014 to hold a contest in which “at least four major cities across the United States will compete to win funds to redesign or build new schools that personalize instruction for their students.”

SWALLOWING THE BIG APPLE

On his bio page, Matchbook Learning’s Sajan George boasts of working in New York City when it received the 2007 Broad Foundation Prize for a turnaround school system.  He was paid quite handsomely.  

The New York Times notes that George was outrageously making $450 an hour working as the managing operator of Alvarez & Marsal, the consulting firm Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein hired, “without competitive bidding,” for $15.8 million to restructure the NYC school system, finding “cuts in regional superintendent offices, janitorial services and school building repairs,” and to revamp the student busing.  George’s other job title was “the chancellor’s chief adviser on restructuring.” At the time, Alvarez & Marsal specialized “in rescuing bankrupt companies.” 

Alvarez & Marsal’s busing plan with the city schools’ Office of Pupil Transportation fell apart in early 2007, “leaving shivering students waiting for buses in the cold and thousands of parents hollering about disrupted routines,” and “the complaints threatened to morph into a renewed attack on Mr. Klein’s reliance on outside consultants.”  

In 2010, George and Alvarez & Marshal advertised its school turnaround plan with partners Connections Academy, Florida Virtual Schools, and Wireless Generation. Joel Klein went on to work for Wireless Generation, after NewsCorp’s Rupert Murdoch bought the edtech outfit in November 2010. 

THEIR NATION

There’s much more to say about Sajan George and Matchbook Learning, but I will leave that for my new book-in-progress and now let the man speak for himself, this time to the billionaire crowd in Indy during the American Federation for Children conference: “I think the root cause (in the classroom) is a design problem.  “(Students) lack personalization. I believe the personalized learning model can change the structure of our nation.”  The nation George refers to is not my nation, your nation, or your children’s nation; it is a nation which belongs to the billionaires and those like Sajan George who are paid well to do the billionaires’ work.