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Tens of thousands of U.S. soldiers needed just weeks to capture Baghdad in 2003 and usher in the symbolic toppling of Saddam Hussein. Five years later, a good outcome in Iraq appears distant.
In Portland, Superintendent Carole Smith has taken longer to capture Portland Public Schools and topple the regime of her predecessor, Superintendent Vicki Phillips. But seven months in, the outcome for PPS appears much more positive.
Last week marked Smith’s biggest coup so far.
Smith announced in an email to top-level managers that she was eliminating three administrative offices established under Phillips and creating a new one to replace all three.
Beginning in July, an “academic officer” will oversee the work done by the redundant Offices of Teaching and Learning, of Schools, and of High Schools.
“The central office exists to serve our schools, not the other way around,” Smith wrote in her email.
That may read like bureaucratic babble, but the email is unmistakably a subtle critique of Phillips’ tenure, and a significant step, observers say.
Smith was more cautious with WW. “You get to do what you get to do because of what came before you,” Smith says. “I’m working really hard to look forward.”
Phillips declared victory early and often during her three-year tenure at the state’s largest school district before leaving nearly a year ago for a job with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
To detractors of the ex-superintendent, who had earned the nickname “Hurricane Vicki,” her exit strategy was clear: cut and run. Consider the K-8 reconfiguration of PPS’ elementary and middle schools and the reorganization of its high schools as examples.
Smith took over last October and has been slowly reworking Phillips’ agenda, cleaning up the messes Phillips left behind in Portland after it became clear Phillips’ mission was not accomplished. Smith says she wants to keep the urgency of Phillips’ work but lose the frenzy.
Last week’s change, displacing three of Phillips’ hires, may have been Smith’s boldest. But it’s not the first notable sign of PPS’s de-Vicki-fication. In November, Smith halted a move initiated by Phillips to relocate the popular Winterhaven School. Phillips had argued the school was too small to stay in its current location.
“I very much appreciate Superintendent Smith’s willingness to re-visit that decision,” says Winterhaven parent Rita Moore.
In January, the district announced plans to slow down discussions of rebuilding its aging high schools even as it moves forward with discussing plans for its other buildings, a shift by Smith that School Board member David Wynde called “absolutely correct.”
“Her approach to the conversation around high schools is that we need to have the program discussions first,” Wynde says.
In March, the School Board voted to settle contract negotiations with the district’s 500 custodians and food-service workers after a protracted battle that Smith helped resolve amicably.
“Carole was really open to having honest conversations with our members,” says Casey Filice, an organizer for Service Employees International Union Local 503.
Tom Gunn, the district’s labor negotiator under Phillips since December 2006, announced his resignation this month, to take effect in June. Mary Mertz, hired by Phillips in August 2005, will leave in May for a job with an online school. Mertz was responsible for overseeing the district’s special education program after Phillips made drastic cuts.
Moore, a strong critic of Phillips, maintains reservations about the district, but says, “I’m very hopeful (Smith is) going to start turning things around.”
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The poor teachers are well known amongst the active parents and they try their best to get their kids away from them when class assignment time comes.
My spouse is a elementary teacher in another district. She didn't even submit a resume to PPS (even though they pay more) because of the way good teachers are treated there.
Nationwide Efforts to Privatize Education
In recent years, privatization efforts have expanded beyond urban inner cities and are surfacing everywhere with large amounts of corporate funding and government support backing them. One effort among many is frightening. It's called "Strong American Schools - ED in '08" and states the following: it's "a nonpartisan public awareness campaign aimed at elevating education to (the nation's top priority)." It says "America's students are losing out," and the "campaign seeks to unite all Americans around the crucial mission of improving our public schools (by using an election year to elevate) the discussion to a national stage.
Billionaires Bill Gates and Eli Broad put up $60 million for the effort for the big returns they expect. Former Colorado governor and (from 2001 - 2006) superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District Roy Romer is the chairman. The Rockefeller (family) Philanthropy Advisors are also involved as one of their efforts "to bring the entire world under their sway" in the words of one analyst. Other steering committee members include former IBM CEO and current Carlyle Group chairman Lou Gerstner; former Michigan governor and current National Association of Manufacturers president John Engler; and Gates Foundation head Allan Golston.
Ed in '08" has a three-point agenda:
-- ending seniority and substituting merit pay for teachers based on student test scores;
-- national education standards based on rote learning; standards are to be uniformly based on "what (business thinks) ought to be taught, grade by grade;" it's to prepare some students for college and the majority for workplace low-skill, low-paid, no-benefit jobs; and
-- longer school days and school year; unmentioned but key is eliminating unions or making them weak and ineffective.
In addition, the plan involves putting big money behind transforming public and charter schools to private-for-profit ones. It's spreading everywhere, and consider California's "Program Improvement" initiative. Under it, "All schools and local educational agencies (LEAs) (must make) Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP)" under NCLB provisions nearly impossible to achieve. Those that fail must divert public money from classrooms to private-for-profit remediating programs. It's part of a continuing effort to defund inner city schools and place them in private hands, then on to the suburbs with other "innovative" schemes to transform them as well.
Under the governor's proposed 2008 $4.8 billion education budget cut, transformation got easier. As of mid-March, 20,000 California teachers got layoff notices with State Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O'Connell saying this action puts student performance "in grave jeopardy." Likely by design."
continuing ...
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=8579
Biloxi
A lot of this is welcome news; thank you for making it public.
I fear you misspoke regarding Winterhaven. VP's rationale for moving it was to grow the program larger. It is already over capacity at its current location, so saying that it is "too small to stay" there is incorrect.
Phillips left to work for Bill & Melinda Gates after she got sacked? (I hope) for doing what she was undoubtedly paid to do, or her stock portfolio has been most certainly enriched for her future retirement.
Obviously she is working for the royalty of America now.
Smith “wants to keep the urgency of Phillips’ work but lose the frenzy.”
Smith is obviously part of the royal family's U.S. "Ambassadors," as is her loyal colleague Phillips.
Ok the children of commoners and commoner parents of “common stock” pay for those who are “elite,” and the elite get to choose their ambassadors (for lack of a better word?), who commit criminal acts of monetary fraud and worse, crimes against humanity.
How long does it take a nation to awaken to the fact that globalization and privatization is only good for the few who create it in order to live off a nation of consumers in the name of “free market,” or “free trade,” this is the question we must come to understand immediately.
This is the Clintons’ greatest claim to fame - “Free Trade Agreements.”
Free for who and to whom does this so-called “market” feel free?
Yes, it’s free alright and those such as Phillips and others do get to have their cake and eat it too. Bill and Hillary Clinton are proof of those who join the Club of Rome in order to be “free.”
Free lunches off our children cause in the future the dumbing down of education creates an even further unintelligent “consumer.”
Consumers is what we are to those who have the most money on planet Earth.
Those who need to trade digits in the global market and have lots of weapons, war, and so on, need consumers to consume so they can trade.
Think about it a minute.
Thank goodness there are plenty of humans born with the gene of altruism cause those who are zombies for the globalists are definitely what the “Blue Bloods” think of themselves, cold blooded.
Education has been seriously deteriorating in the U.S. and one of the chief causes was that in 1965, nuclear testing was done on the soil of America. Testing was conducted on children prior to that and after. The test scores in children lowered substantially, after. Continued use of DU (check all those stock portfolios, DU is a high traded commodity in the global exchange - especially during wars), has been devastating to the brains of human beings. Test scores in the U.S. have never risen again to the levels before 1965 and indeed, the scores are diminishing in a rabid decline.
Public education is the best education and I can state this with full knowledge. I attended both private and public schools and I also enrolled both my sons in private and public schools.
To privatize schools so that an elite governing body of corporations can rule, and these multi-nationals as labeled are headquartered on foreign soil/s such as China, should not be allowed simply due to “money.”
Read THE WEB OF DEBT, by Ellen Hodgson-Brown, JD.
It begins opening the door to understand what’s going on, however, to truly unravel this “education” piece, F. William Engdahl’s A CENTURY OF WAR - ANGLO-AMERICAN OIL, POLITICS AND THE NEW WORLD ORDER.
The “New World Order” are operative bullet points, so don’t get stuck on conspiracy jargon.
Education is a tough one for all of us since the 21st Century rolled a new game of dice and a collective select few major family dynasties, more or less referred to as "dictators of the western hemisphere via capitalism," and extremely influential in the eastern half of the hemisphere as well, have been stopped, it’s rumored.
What this means is that a certain group of people who were in charge of dominating (world leadership) world governance (monetary control) since World War II – well the simplest way to express it is that a shift in power has occurred.
Every human being in the U.S. is experiencing this “educational” shift and do not understand the implication of what the news mostly prints as recession, inflation, etc. and so on.
It is a paradigm shift.
Websites for quick reference: http://www.webofdebt.com and
http://www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net