The Corrupt Educational Industrial Complex In a Nutshell

Tony Bennet, who has been Florida commissioner of Education of 7 months just got fired resigned because it was discovered that he fabricated the ratings of a politically connected Charter school at his last position:

A national leader in the Republican effort to overhaul public education resigned as Florida education commissioner Thursday, amid allegations that when he ran Indiana’s schools, he changed the state grade of a charter school founded by a prominent GOP donor.

In a resignation letter that surprised many, Tony Bennett dismissed the brewing scandal as “malicious and rooted in unfounded allegations” but said that it had created “a distraction from important work” and that he was leaving his post immediately.

The move came two days after the Associated Press reported that it had acquired e-mails written by Bennett in 2012, while he was running Indiana’s schools, in which he directed his staff to change the state grade for Christel House Academy. The charter school was founded by Christel DeHaan, who has given more than $2.8 million to Republicans since 1998, including $130,000 to Bennett.

The school, which had been kindergarten through eighth grade, added grades nine and 10 in 2012, and test scores from the new students were low enough to pull down the school’s rating from an A to a C on an A-to-F scale.

At Bennett’s direction, staff used a loophole in regulations and removed the scores of ninth- and 10th-graders, bringing the school’s grade back up to an A. Bennett has said that changing the grade made the rating system credible because he knew Christel House to be a high-performing school.

The Indiana State Teachers Association thinks otherwise. “It’s time to call the Tony Bennett letter-grading scandal exactly what it is — cheating,” union officials wrote in a statement. “There are no excuses for the actions taken by Bennett and his staff, as revealed in the string of e-mails, other than favoritism, cronyism, self-interest and hubris — none of which has a place in public school policymaking.”

He lost his last job in Indiana when voters tossed his sorry ass out in the 2012 elections, because the voters saw through his bullsh%#.

But Republicans, and the educational reform establishment didn't see his bullsh%$.

Case in point, the biggest stars in the anti-teacher pro-privatization education establishment,  Michelle Rhee, Jeb Bush, and Bush's  Chiefs for Change coalition, all just just offered a full throated endorsement of this ratf%$#.

This is not a an anomaly.   We now know that Rhee's "success" was built on altered tests, and the former head of the Atlanta schools, Beverly Hall, has been literally been charged with racketeering.

The goal of people like this is to destroy the public schools and the teachers' unions, so that private operators and their Wall Street backers can make bank, not to help our kids.

There are real problems with the education that our children receive in the US, but the biggest problem is that there are more poor children in the US, and the poverty is more intense, than in the rest of the industrialized world.

Wall Street and Their Evil Minions^™ cannot help with that.

In fact, their role in our economy has to been to exacerbate these problems.