Meeting Report – Arne Duncan’s “How Schools Work”

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This section includes the final report on the National Audubon Society plus the ad hoc meetings during the sabbatical described in the following e-mail.

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From: ReadingLiberally-SaltLake@johnkarls.com
To: ReadingLiberallyEmailList@johnkarls.com
Bcc: The Approximately 150 Recipients of Our Weekly E-mail
Subject: Another John Karls Sabbatical To Write Another Book
Date: [This Is The Regular Weekly E-mail To Be Sent Pre-Dawn Sat, June 16, 2018]
Attachments:
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Dear Friends,

Many of you will probably recall the 4/19/2014 notice 4 years ago that I would be taking a sabbatical to write a book about the materials in the third and fourth sections of http://www.ReadingLiberally-SaltLake.org entitled “Inner-City Holocaust and America’s Apartheid ‘Justice’ System (In Honor of Jonathan Kozol and In Memory of John Howard Griffin).”

The time has come to write another book (this time on the topic of “The National Audubon Society Executes Great Salt Lake Death Warrant”) and, accordingly, I will be taking another sabbatical.

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Ad Hoc Meetings

As was the case 4 years ago, there may be Ad Hoc Meetings such as the 2 that occurred during that 9-month sabbatical.

If anyone would like to propose a topic for an Ad Hoc Meeting, please forward it to me and I will include it in the next Pre-Dawn Saturday E-mail (which may be irregular rather than weekly during the sabbatical if there are not a lot of proposals).

RSVP’s for the Wednesday evening 4-5 weeks after the Pre-Dawn Saturday E-mail containing the Ad Hoc Meeting proposal will be put in touch with the proposer.

If the minimum quorum for our regular meetings of 6 RSVP’s is attained, the group will have authority to issue one of our Six-Degrees-Of-Separation E-mail Campaigns. However, the normal promotional Short Quizzes, Suggested Discussion Outlines, etc., will not be provided.

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Short-Fuse Campaigns

As set forth on the face of the first section of http://www.ReadingLiberally-SaltLake.org entitled “General Info and Info Re Next Meeting,” we have a Short Fuse Procedure for situations in which action would be required before the next meeting could be scheduled (for example, a governmental unit is soliciting public comments for a limited period).

In such cases, our Pre-Dawn Saturday E-mail invites all of our approximately 150 members to participate in a Short-Fuse Working Group.

This procedure will also be available during the sabbatical.

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Length of the Sabbatical

The 12 participants for our 6/13/2018 meeting were curious how long the sabbatical might last.

It is noted that the 2014 sabbatical 4 years ago lasted 9 months.

However, this time the events of the final chapter of the book to be written have yet to occur.

Your friend,

John K.

PS -- To un-subscribe, please press "reply" and type "deletion requested."

NB: Please do NOT block our e-mail because you are too embarrassed to request a deletion -- 10 of our approximately 150 regular e-mail recipients use Comcast.net which has an algorithm blocking all e-mails from a website for which a certain percentage of recipients have requested blockage AND 3 of our regular meeting attendees who use Comcast.net now can NOT receive our weekly e-mails.

[Posted 6/14/2018]
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Meeting Report – Arne Duncan’s “How Schools Work”

Post by johnkarls »

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Meeting reports are usually NOT prepared unless there are a lot of inquiries about what happened. Which is the case with our 9/19/2018 meeting on Arne Duncan’s “How Schools Work.”

Following our normal modus vivendi, The Undersigned prepares a report based on his notes and then each of the other attendees is invited to post any comments s/he feels are appropriate.


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“IT’S THE SOCIOLOGY STUPID”!!!

By way of background, The Undersigned’s reason(s) for his original proposal of Arne Duncan’s book had been questioned in an e-mail exchange with Pat that was posted on http://www.ReadingLiberally-SaltLake.org as a “response” to the proposal (together with material from past meetings that Pat brought forward).

The Undersigned explained that he had been shocked and appalled by Arne Duncan’s comments on Face the Nation the day before making the proposal that showed Arne Duncan is oblivious to the conclusion that our group has reached on multiple occasions that the SINGLE-DIGIT high-school graduation rates of the worst inner-city schools in 51 of America’s largest cities are a SOCIOLOGY problem, rather than an EDUCATION problem.

Additional details are available in the materials posted by Pat, but the essentials can be seen in the typical conditions facing 180 “I Have A Dream” programs in 51 American cities during the 1990’s --

• SINGLE-DIGIT high-school graduation rates for the class immediately preceding, and the class immediately following, the Dreamer class;
• 99% of all Dreamers living in single-adult households;
• 95% of all Dreamers living in single-adult households headed by a druggie;
• 75%-80% of all Dreamers living in a single-adult household headed by a druggie who handed over all receipts to the pusher so that the kids had to steal just in order to eat; and
• Virtually-universal recognition by inner-city 5-year-olds that their only realistic career objectives are pusher or pimp, or girl friend of a pusher or pimp graduating to whore.

Indeed, digging further into the material posted on our website discloses the sad fact that pushers recruit THIRD GRADERS as “runners” because the pushers don’t want to risk arrest themselves!!!

Accordingly, The Undersigned was shocked and appalled that Arne Duncan, who had been Superintendent of the Chicago Public Schools 2001-2009 and President Obama’s Secretary of Education 2009-2015, would view the dismal results of our inner-city schools as an EDUCATION problem.

And depressed that Arne Duncan’s failure to understand “how school’s work” would set back any progress for yet another decade!!!

You’d think Arne Duncan would at least have read two of the many books by Prof. Diane Ravitch (NYU’s long-time Research Professor of Education, Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution and former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Education) entitled “The Death and Life of the Great American School System” (Basic Books 2010 and the focus of our 9/12/2012 meeting) and “Reign of Error: The Hoax of the School Privatization Movement” (Alfred A. Knopf 2013 and the focus of our 6/17/2015 meeting).

We were delighted that Prof. Ravitch in her 2013 book pirated without attribution our 2012 explanation for Prof. Ravitch’s 2010 conclusion that the dismal results of our inner-city schools are a SOCIOLOGY problem rather than an EDUATION PROBLEM with the analogy --

“[It] makes no more sense than shutting down an inner-city police precinct in which a crime is committed and hiring amateurs in its place.”

[We do not mind anyone using our ideas, with or without attribution.]


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ARNE DUNCAN’S FIRST BIG LIE

Arne Duncan’s first chapter entitled “Lies, Lies Everywhere” posits that inner-city public schools promote most of their students from grade to grade even though they are many years behind grade level in terms of skills and knowledge.

So you might think that Arne Duncan is implying that he is a truth teller!!!

So why was he among 21 U.S. and California governmental officials starting with President Obama who shunned THREE pleas to file Amicus Curiae briefs in litigation against 15 of the world’s largest financial institutions that would have provided “I Have A Dream” programs for 10 million inner-city children???

Which may have been why 43 news-media superstars also shunned THREE pleas to provide the same coverage that they were then providing David Boies Esq. and his gay-rights lawsuit!!!

Even though President Obama, et al., and the 43 news-media superstars must have known that ANY ONE OF THEM lifting a SINGLE FINGER might have been sufficient to enable the 10 million inner-city children to escape a “fate worse than death”!!!

[Details, including copies of the texts of the six letters, are available in the third and fourth sections of http://www.ReadingLiberally-SaltLake.org entitled “Inner-City Holocaust and America’s Apartheid ‘Justice’ System (In Honor of Jonathan Kozol and In Memory of John Howard Griffin).”]

After all, those letters to President Obama, et al., documented that the first half of the 180 IHAD Programs in 51 American cities during the 1990’s typically raised the SINGLE-DIGIT high-school graduation rates for the class ahead and the class behind the “Dreamer” classes to 65% - 70%!!!

And the second half of the 180 IHAD Programs from SINGLE DIGITS to more than 90% (after we understood the importance of our tutors/mentors having become de facto “surrogate” parents who could prevent 50% of the female “Dreamers” from becoming pregnant by expressing the tutor’s/mentor’s hopes and dreams for the “Dreamers”)!!!

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The record will show our 1/17/2007 meeting focused on my recommendations of Senator Barack Obama’s “The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream” (Crown Publishing 2006) and “Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance” (Times Books 1995).

[Our 1/17/2007 meeting took place when Senator Obama had been in the Senate for only two years AND BEFORE he announced his candidacy for President.]

Everyone was excited when I explained that after Senator Obama had graduated from Harvard Law School (where he was President of the Harvard Law Review), he had spent his career as a “community organizer” on Chicago’s “South Side” where we had had more than half-a-dozen “I Have A Dream” programs in the 1990’s that had produced such stupendous results!!!

Because everyone thought that as a “community organizer,” Senator Obama had to be intimately familiar with the stupendous results of the “I Have A Dream” programs in the “community” he claimed to be “organizing”!!!

And because everyone thought that if elected President, Senator Obama would proceed to do everything humanly possible to provide IHAD- and IHAD-style programs for as many of America’s inner-city children as possible!!!

INSTEAD OF REFUSING TO LIFT A FINGER (2010-2011) DURING THE LITIGATION AGAINST 15 OF THE WORLD’S LARGEST FINANCIAL INSTITUTIONS TO PERMIT $84 BILLION OF PRIVATE FUNDING FOR IHAD- OR IHAD-STYLE PROGRAMS FOR 10 MILLION INNER-CITY CHILDREN!!!

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SO WHAT WAS ARNE DUNCAN’S FIRST BIG LIE???

We were all surprised that Arne Duncan claimed (page 20) to have worked for six years in an “I Have A Dream Program” that had adopted in 1992 the class of graduating sixth graders at the Shakespeare School on Chicago’s “South Side” for which tutoring/mentoring was then provided (page 158) as they progressed from seventh grade through high school graduation with a promise of college tuition.

ARNE DUNCAN’S FIRST BIG LIE is that he compares (page 21) the results of the “I Have A Dream” program in which he worked for six years as follows --

“The vast majority of [the “Dreamers”] did graduate in the summer of 1998. (To put this in perspective the citywide graduation rate that year was 47 percent – and that was for kids who took five years to get through high school; the four-year rate [Reading Liberally Editorial Note: Chicago featured four-year high schools and K-8 elementary schools] was a dismal 43 percent.)”

So why was Arne Duncan using Chicago-wide statistics that included such affluent areas as Chicago’s famous “Gold Coast”???

Why wasn’t he using the standard IHAD “measuring rod” of the high-school graduation rate of the class just ahead and just behind each “Dreamer” class???

Virtually all of which in the 180 programs in 51 American inner-cities were SINGLE DIGITS???

And BTW, what was the “vast majority’ who graduated???

The 65%-70% for the first half of the 180 IHAD programs in the 1990’s or the 90% for the second half of those 180 programs???


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ARNE DUNCAN’S SECOND BIG LIE???

Why did Arne Duncan turn his back on the stupendous results of IHAD programs while Superintendent of Chicago Public Schools 2001-2009???

Because he claimed (page 25) that IHAD could not be taken to scale!!!

Saying that the “I Have A Dream” program in which he worked for six years only served 40 inner-city children while there were 400,000 children in Chicago public schools.

So what did Arne Duncan achieve instead???

He says (page 59): “I like to think that in Chicago I’ll be remembered for things like…..how we increased high school graduation rates by 12 percent”!!!

Taking Chicago’s 47% (including, inter alia, Chicago’s “Gold Coast”) to, apparently, 59%???

When trying to foster more “I Have A Dream” programs would have raised SINGLE-DIGIT high school graduation rates to 90%!!!

And then refusing, as U.S. Secretary of Education, to “lift a finger” to permit $84 billion of private funds to provide “I Have A Dream” programs for 10 million inner-city children!!!

Shame on you, Arne Duncan!!!


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ARNE DUNCAN’S “RACE TO THE TOP” AS U.S. SECRETARY OF EDUCATION

All of us were appalled by Arne Duncan’s “Race to the Top” in which a mere $4 billion of the estimated $784 billion cost of President Obama’s “American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009” was allocated to Arne Duncan’s “Race to the Top”!!!

Especially because President Obama had spent his career until being elected to the U.S. Senate as a “community organizer” on Chicago’s “South Side” where more than half-a-dozen IHAD programs had already demonstrated that inner-city high-school SINGLE DIGIT graduation rates are a SOCIOLOGY problem rather than an EDUCATION problem.

And how treating those SINGLE DIGIT rates as a SOCIOLOGY problem can typically increase them to 65%-70% and, with a bit of common sense, to 90%!!!

So why did Arne Duncan insist on “chicken feed” for trying to invent new EDUCATION ideas instead???

BTW, we were all appalled that the only ideas that “Race to the Top” produced according to Arne Duncan’s book were “BGO’s” or “blinding glimpses of the obvious”!!! None of which “moved the needle” significantly!!!

AND MORE IMPORTANTLY, why did Community-Organizer-In-Chief Barack Obama permit his Education Secretary to engage in such a travesty in the face of what both already knew???


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A POSSIBLE REASON WHY ARNE DUNCAN WROTE HIS BOOK

Among the attendees for our meeting were 3 members of our Great Salt Lake Working Group who were familiar with the obvious “cat and mouse game” that involved (unless one believes in coincidence after coincidence) the Mormon Church and the State of Utah Division of Water Resources reacting repeatedly to our actions.

Perhaps those 3 participants can be excused for not knowing or remembering that the third section of http://www.ReadingLiberally-SaltLake.org entitled “Inner-City Holocaust and America’s Apartheid ‘Justice’ System (In Honor of Jonathan Kozol and In Memory of John Howard Griffin)” contains as its currently-third posting, one entitled “President Obama, et al., Shun Three Pleas To File Amicus Briefs” from which there is available for download the text of three of the pleas that were sent to President Obama and each of 20 other U.S. and California governmental officials.

Arne Duncan was one of the other 20 officials.

And as stated in the second (6/18/2010) of those letters, Arne Duncan was contending with his own “Deep State” in the form of a letter from one of his own Assistant Secretaries reacting to the previous letter (4/4/2010) to President Obama, Arne Duncan, et al., by lavishly praising the “I Have A Dream” programs.

[Strongly implying that the Assistant Secretary thought Arne Duncan was a SCHMUCK (please pardon “my French”) for refusing to “lift a finger” to save the 10 million inner-city children from “a fate worse than death.”]

It wouldn’t be the first time that someone such as Arne Duncan has reacted to material on our website!!!

Though one would have thought Arne Duncan would have mounted a real defense rather than an “emperor wearing no clothes” excuse!!! Perhaps his conscience demanded a confession!!!


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THE CURRENT CALL FOR FREE TUITION AT PUBLIC COLLEGES/UNIVERSITIES

Arne Duncan’s “How Schools Work” does NOT mention this policy which has been adopted by so many politicians who appear to be running for President in 2020.

However, as a non-partisan public-policy study group, it was impossible to refrain from discussing this issue for a few minutes toward the end of our meeting.

There was a consensus that if, as a society, we can provide free K-12 public education, there should be no insuperable financial reason why we could not provide free K-14 or K-16 public education.

HOWEVER, free K-14 and/or free K-16 public education will NOT solve the problem described in Arne Duncan’s “How Schools Work”!!!

His thesis (aptly described in the title of his first chapter “Lies, Lies Everywhere”) is that public schools promote students despite lagging many years behind in terms of skills and knowledge.

And, in this regard, we agreed that Arne Duncan was probably being “politically correct” in NOT focusing his criticism on inner-city schools.

After all, our studies of inner-city education have always taken into account the books of Jonathan Kozol -- (1) The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America (2005); (2) Ordinary Resurrections: Children in the Years of Hope (2001); (3) Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation (1995); (4) Savage Inequalities: Children in America’s Schools (1991); (5) Rachel and Her Children (1988); (6) Illiterate America (1985); (7) The Night is Dark and I Am Far From Home: Political Indictment of US Public Schools (1975); (8) Death at an Early Age (1967).

And those books have constantly trumpeted that the U.S. government has been constantly and consistently reporting for more than 50 years that 30% OF AMERICANS ARE ILLITERATE AS DEFINED BY THE ABILITY TO READ THE WARNING LABEL ON A CAN OF RAT POISON!!!

And that America has created what we have termed a “Permanent 30% Under-Caste” by virtue of its K-12 public schools which are based on housing patterns and largely financed by property taxes.

So now “the magic wand” is sending the 30% of America’s high school graduates WHO CANNOT READ into public colleges and universities???!!!

Why not focus first on the SOCIOLOGY of our inner-city K-12 schools so that they produce high school graduates who are qualified to enter college???

And yes, we noted the irony of how the U.S. Supreme Court has approved America’s “apartheid” K-12 school system based on housing patterns.

And we speculated what the free tuition for public colleges/universities would do --

(1) Would they be forced to accept the 30% of high school graduates who, according to the U.S. government per Jonathan Kozol, cannot read???

(2) If so, will the public colleges/universities be permitted to flunk them out after a decent interval, or will they be forced to graduate them after four years EVEN THOUGH THEY STILL CANNOT READ???

(3) And why do our pols think it is such a wonderful idea after CHEATING our inner-city children out of a decent education K-12, to send them to public colleges/universities WHERE THEY WILL BE “HIT BETWEEN THE EYES” WITH HOW THEY HAVE BEEN CHEATED – PRESUMABLY WITHOUT PROVIDING ANY REMEDY???

(4) Would our pols avoid Questions 1 thru 3 by simply requiring public colleges in inner-cities to admit illiterate high school graduates who could then be moved along for four years until being graduated still illiterate???


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PRESIDENT OBAMA’S EPITAPH

Yes, in the e-mail exchange posted as a “reply” to my proposal of Arne Duncan’s “How Schools Work,” Pat had asked my reason for the proposal after I had been so bitter that President Obama and Arne Duncan had refused 2010-2011 to “lift a finger” to permit $84 billion of private funding to finance “I Have A Dream” programs for 10 million inner-city children.

Noting that my bitterness had still shown through when I ended the Suggested Discussion Outline for our 9/6/2017 meeting with a suggested epitaph for President Obama’s tombstone (though wishing him a long life) –

America’s First “Token” Black President
He “Knew His Place” on The Establishment’s “Plantation”
He Condemned 10 MILLION Inner-City Children to “A Fate Worse Than Death”

From a non-partisan public-policy viewpoint, this captures the essence of WHAT IS WRONG WITH “IDENTITY POLITICS”!!!

My father, who was a bank CEO, used to joke that if you don’t want to give someone a raise, then give her/him a more-important-sounding title instead!!!

Similarly, if you don’t want to “lift a finger” to help inner-city minority children, then nominate and elect a minority President so that nothing additional need be done in order to lock up the minority vote!!!

Respectfully submitted,

John Karls

PS – As noted at the outset, the foregoing was prepared from my meeting notes and the other attendees are invited to post whatever additional comments they deem appropriate.

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