I fol­lowed that line of enquiry myself when I was a lis­ten­er of Ms Edmonds’ Boil­ing Frogs Show. I wrote an arti­cle in French about it, if you can read it, but all ref­er­ences are in Eng­lish, pub­lished on her web­site at BoilingFrogs.com. And espe­cial­ly, there is an inter­view with Aland Mizell that you don’t want to miss. He has a strong accent (like me!) but the wit­ness account infor­ma­tion that he presents to Ms Edmonds and co-host Peter B. Collins is invalu­able. There is also a short doc­u­men­tary in French about Gulen. Check that out folks, it’s worth it!

http://lys-dor.com/2012/02/19/le-reseau-scolaire-de-fethullah-gulen-lorsque-les-operations-de-renseignement-et-lislamisation-vont-de-pair/

Great post Dave. This has been one of my per­son­al areas of research. I hope to find the time to post some more on the sub­ject. The Gulen org (not to be con­fused with the Gehlen org), real­ly embod­ies what you have dealt with in FTRs 27 & 681 Spe­cial­ized Knowl­edge & Abil­i­ties. They arguably have their ten­drils reach­ing through all sec­tors of Turk­ish soci­ety, and are com­plete­ly deni­able.

Here is a sem­i­nal arti­cle on Gulen from the Mid­dle East Quar­ter­ly, which doc­u­ments, among oth­er things, that Gulen sits on top of slush fund val­ued at $25 bil­lion.

http://www.meforum.org/2045/fethullah-gulens-grand-ambition

But don’t wor­ry, Gulen doesn’t have to use his own mon­ey, because Bill Gates recent­ly gave him more than $10.5 mil­lion to estab­lish Gulen Islam­ic schools in the USA.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.6307/pub_detail.asp

And more from Walmart’s Wal­ton Fam­i­ly foun­da­tion.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.7149/pub_detail.asp

I appre­ci­ate inves­tiga­tive jour­nal­ists; they real­ly work hard when they write a sto­ry. But this sto­ry has so many mis­takes. In addi­tion, many experts wrote about so called Gulen char­ter schools. Either he did not read them or he is not unbi­ased.
This one, for exam­ple, argues that Islam­o­pho­bia is one rea­son to attack those char­ter schools: http://www.hizmetnews.com/index.php/columns/item/3...

You may find more arti­cles here on the same mat­ter: http://www.hizmetnews.com/index.php/latest-news/itemlist/tag/Gulen%20charter%20schools

I hope you check some of these sto­ries to reach the truth.

[...] Who and/or What is Behind the Fetul­lah Gulen Orga­ni­za­tion? [...]

Sor­ry Lev­ent Koc,

The arti­cles you link to are all Gulen pub­li­ca­tion. They offer no seri­ous rebut­tal to the infor­ma­tion pre­sent­ed.

Islam­o­pho­bia is a rather lame, PC, red her­ring to bring up, when seri­ous con­cerns are pre­sent­ed.

What con­nec­tions do you have Hizmet/Gulen?

Freed Turk­ish Jour­nal­ist at Euro­pean Par­lia­ment

Thurs­day, 29 March 2012

Jour­nal­ist Ahmet Şık sharply crit­i­cized Turkey’s anti-ter­ror­ism laws and the reli­gious Fethul­lah Gülen com­mu­ni­ty while address­ing the Lib­er­al Demo­c­rat Group in the Euro­pean Par­lia­ment in Brus­sels yes­ter­day, only 16 days after his release from prison.

“Many a jour­nal­ist who assumed a crit­i­cal stance toward the AKP [Jus­tice and Devel­op­ment Par­ty] and the Gülen com­mu­ni­ty, the government’s invis­i­ble part­ner, [or] attempt­ed to main­tain a dis­si­dent out­look toward their poli­cies either lost their job or had to keep qui­et through auto-cen­sure,” jour­nal­ist Şık told his audi­ence at the Euro­pean Par­lia­ment...

...An expla­na­tion is war­rant­ed as to why the Gülen com­mu­ni­ty is so eager to orga­nize with­in the police and the mil­i­tary, Şık said, adding that he had also been tar­get­ed by the com­mu­ni­ty because he asked such ques­tions. “This sys­tem has to dis­tort every­thing, as it has been enslaved by its own lies. It dis­torts the past. It dis­torts the present. It dis­torts the future,” Şık said,...

...The Gülen com­mu­ni­ty is both aveng­ing the past and try­ing to destroy its polit­i­cal oppo­nents by orga­niz­ing with­in the judi­cia­ry and the police, accord­ing to Şık. “The Anti-Ter­ror­ism Law [depicts] every­one who is a dis­si­dent or exhibits unfa­vor­able behav­ior as a ‘ter­ror­ist,’ through a men­tal­i­ty that is based on pro­tect­ing not the inter­ests of cit­i­zens but of the state.

A recent list of 105 Turk­ish Jour­nal­ists cur­rent­ly in prison for report­ing the news can be found here...

http://www.theglobetimes.com/2012/03/07/list-of-journalists-in-jail-in-turkey/

FBI & Dept of Labor Inves­ti­gat­ing Gulen Schools

http://articles.philly.com/2011–03-20/news/29148147_1_gulen-schools-gulen-followers-charter-schools

...But fed­er­al agen­cies — includ­ing the FBI and the Depart­ments of Labor and Edu­ca­tion — are inves­ti­gat­ing whether some char­ter school employ­ees are kick­ing back part of their salaries to a Mus­lim move­ment found­ed by Gulen known as Hizmet, or Ser­vice, accord­ing to knowl­edge­able sources...

...Gulen schools are among the nation’s largest users of the H1B visas. In 2009, the schools received gov­ern­ment approvals for 684 visas — more than Google Inc. (440) but few­er than a tech­nol­o­gy pow­er­house such as Intel Corp. (1,203)...

...Ruth Hock­er, for­mer pres­i­dent of the par­ents’ group at the Young Schol­ars of Cen­tral Penn­syl­va­nia Char­ter School in State Col­lege, began ask­ing ques­tions when pop­u­lar, cer­ti­fied Amer­i­can teach­ers were replaced by uncer­ti­fied Turk­ish men who often spoke lim­it­ed Eng­lish and were paid high­er salaries. Most were placed in math and sci­ence class­es...

...Oth­er school par­ents described how uncer­ti­fied teach­ers on H1B visas were moved from one char­ter school to anoth­er when their “emer­gency” teach­ing cre­den­tials expired and told of a pat­tern of sud­den turnovers of Turk­ish busi­ness man­agers, admin­is­tra­tors, and board mem­bers...

...Fur­ther evi­dence of the ties comes from a dis­af­fect­ed for­mer teacher from Turkey who told fed­er­al inves­ti­ga­tors that the Gulen Move­ment had divid­ed the Unit­ed States into five regions, accord­ing to knowl­edge­able sources. A gen­er­al man­ag­er in each coor­di­nates the activ­i­ties of the schools and relat­ed foun­da­tions and cul­tur­al cen­ters, he told author­i­ties. Ohio, Cal­i­for­nia, and Texas have the largest num­bers of Gulen-relat­ed schools. Ohio has 19, which are oper­at­ed by Con­cept Schools Inc., and most are known as Hori­zon Sci­ence Acad­e­mies. There are 14 in Cal­i­for­nia oper­at­ed by the Mag­no­lia Foun­da­tion. Texas has 33 known as Har­mo­ny schools, run by the Cos­mos Foun­da­tion...

Kick­backs

...And the dis­af­fect­ed teacher who described the five regions gave author­i­ties a doc­u­ment called a tuzuk, which resem­bles a con­tract and pre­scribes how much mon­ey Turk­ish teach­ers are sup­posed to return to Hizmet...

Note, Hizmet, which means “action” in Turk­ish, is also the name of a branch of the Gulen org. All pre­vi­ous poster Lev­ent Koc’s links are Hizmet web­sites.

@Vanfield: Inter­est­ing. Sad thing is, though, if this ‘Lev­ent Koc’ per­son real­ly is con­nect­ed to Hizmet and not just one of their biggest fans....then his state­ments might prove harm­ful to those expos­ing actu­al Islamophobia(Just as a reminder, it is indeed some­times used as a cov­er but real exam­ples do unforunate­ly exist. Please don’t for­get that, espe­cial­ly since there’s been a recent mur­der in Calif. in which an Iraqi immi­grant lady was mur­dered sim­ply for being of for­eign ori­gin. No offense meant, just want­ed to point that out.)

@Steven L.: If I read you cor­rect­ly, your talk­ing about a ‘boy who cried wolf’ meme.

Here is a link that shows more infor­ma­tion on the Gulen Schools in Ari­zona. The Pima Coun­ta IDA has giv­en mil­lions in Az. tax dol­lars to sup­port these schools. They have donat­ed mon­ey to Tom Horne to prtect them­selves from his wrath of audit­ing teach­ers with accents and his anti eth­nic stud­ies bill.

http://azstarnet.com/search/?l=50&sd=desc&s=start_time&f=html&q=Gulen

The Turk­ish Gulenists will often times as you can see on this thread pre­tend to be hap­py par­ents and attack those that post about Gulen and his objec­tives. It is there attempt to derail the con­ver­sa­tion.

As a par­ent who’s daugh­ter attend­ed one of these schools I can tell you first hand just how dan­ger­ous these schools real­ly are. I would love to inter­view with you as I have done with oth­er radio shows in the past about Fethul­lah and his objec­tives. I am also doing speak­ing engage­ments on the dan­gers of Gulen Char­ter Schools and to edu­cate par­ents and the com­mu­ni­ty about this issue.

Hey Steven L. weren’t you just on the Wash­ing­ton Post Blog sto­ry about your Hocae­fen­di TRYING to post the SAME stu­pid sto­ry about the Iraqi woman who was killed. The only thing is, you post­ed under “Jason Tuff”
Are you also hear­ing voic­es in your head, poor lit­tle Gulen Light­house school boy. They are so brain­washed, all this truth about Fetos is hard for them to process.
So they make a fee­ble attempt to cre­ate straw man argu­ments while deflect­ing the glar­ing ques­tion about the 130+ char­ter schools in the USA that are owned, managed/operated by known fol­low­ers of the Gulen Move­ment (Hizmet)
Lousy attempt, and the Gulen Move­ment has noth­ing to do with reli­gion as it is a CULT. One that is mixed with com­merce, social con­trols, edu­ca­tion, and pol­i­tics.
Make no bones about it, they are not want­ed in Turkey where their cow­ard leader fled after his famous anti-sec­u­lar speech about “get­ting into the arter­ies of the sys­tem, until you reach all pow­er cen­ters”
We have heard it all:
“We have no organ­ic con­nec­tions”
“Your chil­dren are get­ting a pri­vate edu­ca­tion for free”
“Your chil­dren will be taught by Turk­ish Schol­ars”
“Our teach­ers may be Gulen Inspired, but we are not a Gulen School<—-what the hell is that sup­pose to mean?

I had sex but did­n’t ejac­u­late?

These Gulen Light­house boys are vir­gins. Taught to guard secrets like they guard their chasti­ty. They are instruct­ed to not mar­ry until they reach 50 years of age.

They have issues with women and treat them hor­ri­ble with­in their move­ment. Con­verse­ly, the Amer­i­can females teach­ers have filed many EEOC dis­crim­i­na­to­ry law­suits against this group. The best one was Chesa­peake Char­ter where the Turk male prin­ci­pal for­bid them to use the Inter­net, was very con­trol­ling to the point the local police had to escort him off cam­pus.

With this group of Gulen Light­house boys there is always dra­ma and scan­dals. It fol­lows them from school to school, coun­try to coun­try.

Enjoy read­ing some of them here:
http://www.gulencharterschoolsusa.blogspot.com
http://www.charterschoolscandals.blogspot.com

http://www.charterschoolwatchdog.com
(make sure you read the entry “teach­ers with guns”)

@Parent: I’m so sor­ry to hear about your expe­ri­ence with them. These Gulenist char­ter schools real­ly need to be inves­ti­gat­ed and I do won­der just how far down the prover­bial rab­bit holes go.

Thank­ful­ly, we have intre­pid researchers like Dave Emory blow­ing the whis­tles on stuff like this. =)

@Dr. Kaz: I’m sor­ry, but what? I have no such alias as ‘Jason Tuff’. I didn’t even know that name exist­ed until today, to be hon­est.

BTW, the Iraqi woman I was refer­ring to, was one Shaima Alawa­di, who was liv­ing El Cajon, Calif.
http://utsandiego.com/news/2012/mar/24/el-cajon-woman-dies-after-beating-earlier-week
The only rea­son I brought her up because I got the impres­sion that Van­field might have been think­ing that real Islam­o­pho­bia doesn’t exist, when in fact, it still does.

In all hon­esty, Dr. Kaz, I nev­er once argued against the con­tent put forth in this post, and I have my own sus­pi­cions about these peo­ple myself.

And, I’m sor­ry if this ‘Jason Tuff’ char­ac­ter was par­tic­u­larly nox­ious to you but I had no knowl­edge of this person’s exis­tence until you brought him up, and quite frankly, I real­ly didn’t appre­ci­ate being false­ly con­flated with this per­son, nor your quite frankly semi-libelous com­ment call­ing me a ‘Gulen Light­house school boy’ and claim­ing I was hear­ing voic­es in my head(seriously?).

This isn’t the place to be doing such things, Doc­tor. I will glad­ly study the links you have post­ed but will also request that you refrain from such unfound­ed accu­sa­tions in the future. This is seri­ous stuff, and we need not be fight­ing each oth­er when we could be spread­ing the word and wak­ing peo­ple up.

Best regards,

–Steven L.

Adnan Oktar is a Turk­ish cult leader, who looks like the Dev­il, out of cen­tral cast­ing, sees him­self as a can­di­date for Mad­hi, rul­ing over a reformed Ottoman Empire. Old friend’s with Erdo­gan, he is try­ing to claw his way to the top, while run­ning a sex cult.

Stand for Peace, an inter­faith group, as an inter­est­ing report on Oktar, which can be down­loaded at the site below.

It’s well worth check­ing out.
V.

http://standforpeace.org.uk/adnan-oktar-and-the-islamist-sex-cult/

Adnan Oktar and the Islamist sex cult
Down­load Report Here

Israeli politi­cians and Jew­ish media across the World have excit­ed­ly embraced the efforts of Turk­ish tele­vi­sion chan­nel A9 to effect and encour­age inter­faith dia­logue – or, as the chan­nel itself puts it, pro­mote “peace and love” between all peo­ples.

The pro­gramme is part of a hard­line group run by Turk­ish Islamist Adnan Oktar (aka Harun Yahya), an extrem­ist with a his­to­ry of pro­mot­ing Holo­caust Denial and who fus­es Ataturk nation­al­ism with Turk­ish Islamism in his attacks upon Jews, Dar­win­ists and Athe­ists. His group of fol­low­ers is best described as a cult; one accused by a num­ber of crit­ics of using sex­u­al abuse and black­mail to achieve polit­i­cal lever­age.

A9 is false­ly per­ceived by a num­ber of media out­lets as an exam­ple of a mod­er­ate Islam­ic voice that is work­ing to bring Jews and Mus­lims clos­er togeth­er. While this is indeed the declared pur­pose of A9, it is a facade that shrouds a hos­tile Islamist agen­da. Just as democ­ra­cy was a use­ful means for Turk­ish Islamists to prop­a­gate their anti-demo­c­ra­t­ic views, so too is A9’s declared devo­tion to inter­faith dia­logue a sani­tis­ing veneer that dis­tracts from its more sin­is­ter ideas.

Jew­ish media out­lets, from the Los Ange­les Jew­ish Jour­nal to Arutz She­va and the Jerusalem Post, have pub­lished opin­ion pieces by Oktar and a num­ber of his dis­ci­ples. Israeli politi­cians, includ­ing for­mer cab­i­net min­is­ters, have appeared on Oktar’s tele­vi­sion show. By embrac­ing Oktar, they risk bury­ing the truth about Oktar’s anti-Semi­tism and will legit­imise Oktar and his group as a respectable organ­i­sa­tion.

Sum­ma­ry

Adnan Oktar (aka Harun Yahya), a Turk­ish author, fus­es Ataturk nation­al­ism with Turk­ish Islamism in his attacks upon Jews, Dar­win­ists and Athe­ists. His group of fol­low­ers is best described as a cult; one accused of using sex­u­al abuse and black­mail to achieve polit­i­cal lever­age.
Oktar’s claim, after 2001, to abhor anti-Semi­tism and to be a voice of peace and mod­er­a­tion is, in our opin­ion, a cha­rade designed to bring him greater influ­ence and respectabil­i­ty. His web­sites are replete with anti-Semit­ic ideas and ref­er­ences to anti-Semit­ic works that Oktar claims he did not write.
Like­wise, the A9 tele­vi­sion channel’s inter­faith pro­gramme is a front for Oktar’s hard­line Islamist ide­ol­o­gy, designed to earn Oktar legit­i­ma­cy.
Jew­ish media and Israeli politi­cians have mis­tak­en­ly latched on to Oktar as a mod­er­ate; with­out grasp­ing the truth about Oktar’s ide­ol­o­gy. By engag­ing with him and his cult, Jew­ish lead­ers run the risk of betray­ing bona fide lib­er­al Mus­lim groups and legit­imis­ing Oktar as a pro-peace and anti-ter­ror voice.
Oktar’s group is typ­i­cal of Turk­ish Islamism, which increas­ing­ly seeks to adopt and exploit West­ern process­es in order to prop­a­gate its ide­o­log­i­cal val­ues. Just as the AKP has used demo­c­ra­t­ic meth­ods to pro­mote anti-demo­c­ra­t­ic ideas, so too is Oktar using inter­faith dialoue to both san­i­tize him­self and prop­a­gate anti-West­ern and anti-Semit­ic tropes.

@Vanfield and Pter­rafractyl–

Kudos to both of you. Please do check out the extent to which your recent posts (3 in all, two by Van­field) com­ple­ment and sup­ple­ment one anoth­er.

Turns out the Marathon bombers’ uncle is mar­ried to Gra­ham Fuller’s daugh­ter.

Fuller was for­mer sta­tion chief for CIA in Kab­ul, was a strong advo­cate of alliance between the U.S. and the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood and also runs inter­fer­ence for the Fetul­lah Gulen orga­ni­za­tion!

Brings the Earth Island pol­i­tics about which I’ve been spec­u­lat­ing for so long, into focus.

THIS is what I’ve been try­ing to get across to peo­ple.

It is NOT that these guys are doing this at behest of CIA to estab­lish a “police state”–the stan­dard “Truther” line. (Though a police state cer­tain­ly lies ahead and will be wel­comed by sig­nif­i­cant ele­ments of the pow­er elite.)

The point is that the transna­tion­al cor­po­ra­tions, the GOP and the Under­ground Reich that con­trols both of them have tabbed the Islamists as foot­sol­diers to: dri­ve a wedge into the Earth Island, get­ting hold of the Russ­ian and Chi­nese min­er­al-rich, Mus­lim-inhab­it­ed lands; fin­ish off Israel and the Jews; harass and/or attack/subjugate the Unit­ed States and resid­ua of the British Com­mon­wealth as need­ed; tar Oba­ma with the “ter­ror brush,” there­by assur­ing GOP ascen­dance in the next elec­tion.

In this con­text, recall my obser­va­tions about Michael Morell and the Petraeus scan­dal.

I STRONGLY sus­pect we’re look­ing at a com­plex sit­u­a­tion involv­ing dou­ble or triple agents.

It will be inter­est­ing to see if Oba­ma’s reboot of rela­tions with Rus­sia is dam­aged by the fall­out.

It is obvi­ous that the alleged perps were on the radar screens of var­i­ous intel­li­gence and law-enforce­ment agen­cies.

The fact that these ele­ments have been tabbed as “cor­po­rate combatants”–to coin a term–assures that the tracks of their han­dlers will remain obscured, past a point.

Think of this as an exten­sion of World War II, which it is, to an extent.

Allied sol­diers, sailors and air­men fought a very real and bloody, stress­ful con­flict against an ene­my whose anti-com­mu­nist, anti-labor and racist/an­ti-Semit­ic ide­ol­o­gy endeared it to the pow­er­ful U.S. eco­nom­ic and polit­i­cal inter­ests who financed it in the first place.

As doc­u­ment­ed in so many of the books, inter­views and posts avail­able here, de-Naz­i­fi­ca­tion failed as a mat­ter of pol­i­cy, as the fas­cist were returned to pow­er in the coun­tries occu­pied by the West­ern allies as a bul­wark against com­mu­nism.

What we are look­ing at here is a sim­i­lar­ly janus-faced enti­ty.

Best,

Dave Emory

Inter­est­ing note re: Gra­ham Fuller. I’m sur­prised Mr. Emory does­n’t ref­er­ence “Amer­i­ca’s Nazi Secret” by for­mer State Depart­ment lawyer John Lof­tus, as it fills in the back­ground to a sto­ry that includes such char­ac­ters as Rein­hard Gehlen, who Mr. Emory was speak­ing about way back when his “Hard Rain” show played on KALX radio in Berke­ley.

[...] back by heavy-hand­ed tac­tics by the country’s Fetul­lah Gulen–dom­i­nated police estab­lish­ment, the demon­stra­tions appear to embody a broad­er [...]

As the Wal­tons have been teach­ing the world for decades, some dreams must be built on the night­mares of oth­ers:

Arkansas Times
Arkansas Blog
The Wal­ton dream real­ized in New Orleans: All char­ter schools. Or is it a night­mare?
Post­ed by Max Brant­ley on Thu, May 29, 2014 at 2:12 PM

I high­ly rec­om­mend this big Wash­ing­ton Post arti­cle on the end of con­ven­tion­al pub­lic schools in New Orleans. Thanks to Kat­ri­na, recov­ery mon­ey and Louisiana pol­i­tics, the schools have been turned over to char­ter school oper­a­tors.

The sto­ry is about win­ners and losers. On the sur­face, the over­all num­bers look bet­ter on stu­dent test scores. But the Kat­ri­na dias­po­ra of poor fam­i­lies from New Orleans makes it impos­si­ble to neat­ly com­pare over­all scores today with pre-Kat­ri­na. Black school employ­ees were fired whole­sale. Many have been replaced by young, white Teach for Amer­i­ca recruits.

But then this pas­sage is stun­ning in its hon­esty:

White stu­dents dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly attend the best char­ter schools, while the worst are almost exclu­sive­ly pop­u­lat­ed by African Amer­i­can stu­dents. Activists in New Orleans joined with oth­ers in Detroit and Newark last month to file a fed­er­al civ­il rights com­plaint, alleg­ing that the city’s best-per­form­ing schools have admis­sions poli­cies that exclude African Amer­i­can chil­dren. Those schools are over­seen by the sep­a­rate Orleans Parish School Board, and they don’t par­tic­i­pate in OneApp, the city’s cen­tral­ized school enroll­ment lot­tery.

John White, the state’s super­in­ten­dent of edu­ca­tion, agreed that access to the best schools is not equal in New Orleans, but he said the state is pre­vent­ed by law from inter­fer­ing with the Orleans Parish School Board’s oper­a­tions.

“The claim that there’s an imbal­ance is right on the mon­ey,” White said. “The idea that it’s asso­ci­at­ed with priv­i­lege and high out­comes is right on the mon­ey.”

Stan Smith, act­ing super­in­ten­dent of the Orleans Parish schools, said his district’s char­ter schools have agreed to par­tic­i­pate in the OneApp when their con­tracts are renewed, in two to 10 years from now.

So black chil­dren might have equal access to the best schools in 10 years? In 1954, it would have been unthink­able that the U.S. Supreme Court would coun­te­nance such as this. But it is 2014. And we have no less than Chief Jus­tice John Roberts telling us that it is a post-racial world and no cor­rec­tives are nec­es­sary any longer.

The Wal­ton Fam­i­ly Foun­da­tion is a big play­er in New Orleans, of course.

Edu­ca­tion­al suc­cess! Brought to you by the Wal­mart. It’s the kind of sto­ry that’s a reminder that suc­cess does­n’t come easy. It takes time, ener­gy, ded­i­ca­tion, and a will­ing­ness to sub­vert the mean­ing of suc­cess:

The Huff­in­g­ton Post
On the ‘Suc­cess’ of a 100 Per­cent Char­ter Recov­ery School Dis­trict
Mer­cedes Schnei­der
Pub­lic school teacher, edu­ca­tion activist, PhD

Post­ed: 05/30/2014 5:58 pm EDT Updat­ed: 05/30/2014 5:59 pm EDT

On May 29, 2014, Lind­sey Lay­ton of the Wash­ing­ton Post wrote this arti­cle on the con­ver­sion of the state-run New Orleans Recov­ery School Dis­tric­t’s (RSD) con­ver­sion to char­ters.

I would like to clar­i­fy a few of Lay­ton’s glossy state­ments about RSD.

Let us begin with this one:

The cre­ation of the coun­try’s first all-char­ter school sys­tem has improved edu­ca­tion for many chil­dren in New Orleans.

Lay­ton offers no sub­stan­tial basis for her opin­ion of “improve­ment” oth­er than that the schools were “seized” by the state fol­low­ing Kat­ri­na.

Cer­tain­ly school per­for­mance scores do not sup­port Lay­ton’s idea of “improve­ment.” Even with the infla­tion of the 2013 school per­for­mance scores, RSD has no A schools and very few B schools. In fact, almost the entire RSD — which was already approx 90 per­cent char­ters — qual­i­fies as a dis­trict of “fail­ing” schools accord­ing to Louisiana Gov­er­nor Bob­by Jin­dal’s def­i­n­i­tion of “fail­ing schools” as C, D, F schools and whose stu­dents are eli­gi­ble for vouch­ers.

The dis­trict grade for RSD “rose” to a C due to a delib­er­ate score infla­tion doc­u­ment­ed here and here.

The pur­pose of vouch­ers is to enable stu­dents to escape “fail­ing” schools. Iron­ic how the pre­dom­i­nate­ly-char­ter RSD has the great­est con­cen­tra­tion of such “fail­ing” schools in the entire state of Louisiana.

...

Let us now turn our atten­tion to a quote by New Schools for New Orleans CEO Neer­av Kings­land:

“We’ve rein­vent­ed how schools run,” said Neer­av Kings­land of New Schools for New Orleans, which pro­motes and sup­ports char­ter schools. Kings­land is leav­ing the orga­ni­za­tion to try to export the mod­el to oth­er cities. “If I am unhap­py with ser­vice I’m get­ting in a school, I can pull my kid out and go to anoth­er school tomor­row. I don’t have to wait four years for an elec­tion cycle so I can vote for one mem­ber of a sev­en-mem­ber board that his­tor­i­cal­ly has been cor­rupt.” [Empha­sis added.]

In truth, New Orleans par­ents can­not “just” decide upon which school their chil­dren will attend. What is clear is that the Wal­ton-fund­ed OneApp open-enroll­ment process is any­thing but sim­ple — with most choic­es hav­ing “fail­ing” grades by the state’s own school let­ter grade sys­tem.

The OneApp even includes mis­lead­ing infor­ma­tion that the cream OSPB schools have seats and then on a sub­se­quent page, such schools are declared not open for more stu­dents.

As for the orga­ni­za­tion New Schools for New Orleans- they are will­ing to manip­u­late what infor­ma­tion the pub­lic is allowed to see- and to reshape the RSD mes­sage from one of “mir­a­cle” to “improve­ment.”

After eight years, RSD does not have a sin­gle A school. One can see the need to bury the “mir­a­cle” mes­sage.

As to “cor­rup­tion” — do not believe Kings­land’s mis­lead­ing words that “cor­rup­tion” did not hap­pen in RSD fol­low­ing Kat­ri­na. Here’s just a brief exam­ple:

The rel­a­tive­ly gar­gan­tu­an salaries of many of the con­sul­tants who appeared to rule the new sys­tem was anoth­er fac­tor in the pub­lic’s gen­er­al unease. Func­tionar­ies of the account­ing firm Alvarez & Marsal, for exam­ple, which will have tak­en more than $50 mil­lion out of its New Orleans pub­lic schools’ oper­a­tion by year’s end, were earn­ing in the mul­ti­ple hun­dreds of thou­sands, billing at any­where from $150 to more than $500 per hour. The fir­m’s con­tracts con­tin­ued unchal­lenged, despite the fact that one of its chief assign­ments — the dis­po­si­tion of left-over NOPS real estate — was being han­dled with­out the ser­vices of a sin­gle archi­tect, engi­neer, or con­struc­tion expert. This omis­sion cost the city a year of progress in deter­min­ing how and where to rebuild bro­ken schools, and endan­gered hun­dreds of mil­lions of dol­lars in FEMA mon­ey. It only came to light when the two Pauls [Pas­torek and Val­las] were forced to hire yet more con­sul­tants for real estate duty, and to bring in the Nation­al Guard to over­see the engi­neer­ing oper­a­tions...[Empha­sis added.]

Com­pare the above bla­tant rob­bery of school fund­ing with Lay­ton’s words about OPSB pre-Kat­ri­na:

When Kat­ri­na struck in 2005, the pub­lic schools in New Orleans were con­sid­ered among the worst in the coun­try. Just before the storm, the elect­ed Orleans Parish School Dis­trict was bank­rupt and could­n’t account for about $71 mil­lion in fed­er­al mon­ey.

Read here for more of the sto­ry on post-Kat­ri­na mil­lions squan­dered — mil­lions that were meant to rebuild New Orleans schools.

Char­ter con­ver­sion has not “solved” fis­cal mis­ap­pro­pri­a­tion, friends.

White’s refusal to prop­er­ly over­see char­ters only con­founds the issue.

As to Lay­ton’s report of the less-than-stel­lar “57 per­cent of stu­dents per­formed at grade lev­el in math and read­ing in 2013,” read here for the lat­est on Louisiana Super­in­ten­dent John White’s botch job on 2014 LEAP/iLEAP report­ing. And notice that his press release was qui­et about RSD’s per­for­mance. It was noth­ing to show­case.

And then there’s Teach for Amer­i­ca (TFA).

Char­ter pres­ence pro­duces con­tin­u­ous churn — char­ter school turnover — as one char­ter oper­a­tor comes in, makes rel­a­tive­ly unreg­u­lat­ed mon­ey for at least three years, and then leaves, only for anoth­er to come in its place.

Char­ters depend upon turnover staff. TFA pro­vides such peo­ple.

John White is count­ing on a strong TFA pres­ence in RSD. He has the TFA-lucra­tive con­tracts to prove it.

One final Lay­ton arti­cle quote, this one by RSD Super­in­ten­dent Patrick Dobard:

The Recov­ery School Dis­trict closed fail­ing tra­di­tion­al schools or turned them over to char­ter oper­a­tors, nev­er intend­ing to recon­struct a tra­di­tion­al school sys­tem, said Patrick Dobard, the super­in­ten­dent. [Empha­sis added.]

That is true. RSD was not sup­posed to be a per­ma­nent dis­trict. How­ev­er, Dobard is not telling the entire sto­ry. Fol­low­ing Kat­ri­na, state-run schools were sup­posed to be returned to home dis­tricts accord­ing to this Cowen Insti­tute his­to­ry of RSD:

Intend­ed as a mech­a­nism for restruc­tur­ing and reform, the RSD was nev­er meant to be a per­ma­nent part of the pub­lic school gov­er­nance land­scape in New Orleans. Instead, the RSD was meant to take con­trol of and turn around chron­i­cal­ly fail­ing schools for an ini­tial peri­od of five years. After that time, and assum­ing ade­quate school improve­ment, schools would be released from the juris­dic­tion of the RSD and returned to their local school board. [Empha­sis added.]

In 2010, for­mer State Super­in­ten­dent Paul Pas­torek and Louisiana Board of Ele­men­tary and Sec­ondary Edu­ca­tion (BESE) changed the rules. No need for state-takeover schools to return — a per­fect sce­nario for char­ter-pro­mot­ing pri­va­ti­za­tion.

Won­der what Dobard’s job will be if RSD is “trans­formed” into a 100% char­ter dis­trict.

Super­in­ten­dent of Char­ter School Turnover?

Lay­ton might not real­ize it, but that is the end game of this “grand exper­i­ment”:

Char­ter churn, churn, churn.

Churn, churn, churn, change rules, and, voila, pri­va­tized schools! Then rinse and repeat:

Arkansas Times
Arkansas Blog
Arkansas char­ter school oper­a­tor teach­ing cre­ation­ism in Texas
Post­ed by Max Brant­ley on Thu, Jan 16, 2014 at 11:16 AM

A fas­ci­nat­ing, even explo­sive, inves­tiga­tive arti­cle in Slate says that a Texas-based char­ter school oper­a­tor with an expand­ing foot­print in Arkansas is teach­ing cre­ation­ism instead of evo­lu­tion in biol­o­gy class­es in Texas and oth­er­wise using texts and mate­ri­als full of frac­tured his­to­ry and reli­gious dog­ma thin­ly dis­guised as aca­d­e­m­ic mate­r­i­al.

The out­fit is Respon­sive Edu­ca­tion Solu­tions of Lewisville, Texas, which recent­ly won approval of an appli­ca­tion to open a Quest char­ter mid­dle school in ritzy Chenal Val­ley, a school like­ly to attract upscale white par­ents anx­ious to avoid the major­i­ty black and poor Lit­tle Rock School Dis­trict schools avail­able. They at least still teach sci­ence, not reli­gion.

From Slate:

A Texas char­ter school group has a sec­u­lar veneer and is fund­ed by pub­lic mon­ey, but it has been con­nect­ed from its incep­tion to the cre­ation­ist move­ment.

When pub­lic-school stu­dents enrolled in Texas’ largest char­ter pro­gram open their biol­o­gy work­books, they will read that the fos­sil record is “sketchy.” That evo­lu­tion is “dog­ma” and an “unproved the­o­ry” with no exper­i­men­tal basis. They will be told that lead­ing sci­en­tists dis­pute the mech­a­nisms of evo­lu­tion and the age of the Earth. These are all lies.

The more than 17,000 stu­dents in the Respon­sive Edu­ca­tion Solu­tions char­ter sys­tem will learn in their his­to­ry class­es that some res­i­dents of the Philip­pines were “pagans in var­i­ous lev­els of civ­i­liza­tion.” They’ll read in a his­to­ry text­book that fem­i­nism forced women to turn to the gov­ern­ment as a “sur­ro­gate hus­band.”

Respon­sive Ed has a sec­u­lar veneer and is fund­ed by pub­lic mon­ey, but it has been con­nect­ed from its incep­tion to the cre­ation­ist move­ment and to far-right fun­da­men­tal­ists who seek to under­mine the sep­a­ra­tion of church and state.

Infil­trat­ing and sub­vert­ing the char­ter-school move­ment has allowed Respon­sive Ed to car­ry out its reli­gious agenda—and it is suc­ceed­ing. Oper­at­ing more than 65 cam­pus­es in Texas, Arkansas, and Indi­ana, Respon­sive Ed receives more than $82 mil­lion in tax­pay­er mon­ey annu­al­ly, and it is expand­ing, with 20 more Texas cam­pus­es open­ing in 2014.

As I’ve writ­ten before, this arti­cle notes Respon­sive Edu­ca­tion’s poor achieve­ment record, accord­ing to the respect­ed CREDO study at Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty.

The orga­ni­za­tion has nonethe­less received sig­nif­i­cant sup­port for its char­ter schools from the Wal­ton Foun­da­tion, which favors let­ting a thou­sand char­ter schools bloom and wor­ry­ing lat­er about the fail­ures, char­la­tans and kooks. Respon­sive Edu­ca­tion was approved in 2012 to open the North­west Arkansas Clas­si­cal Acad­e­my in Ben­tonville, Pre­mier High School in Lit­tle Rock and a Quest Mid­dle School in Pine Bluff.

UPDATE: Respon­sive Edu­ca­tion also got approval from the char­ter autho­riz­ing pan­el for char­ter schools to oper­ate in coop­er­a­tion with the Foun­tain Lake School Dis­trict and Pea Ridge dis­tricts. Any­body look at the cur­ricu­lum? It also will advise a new con­ver­sion char­ter high school in West Mem­phis. Arkansas school offi­cials are untrou­bled by the rev­e­la­tions..

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The Slate writer also finds reli­gious and cul­tur­al bias in his­to­ry books Respon­sive Edu­ca­tion uses in Texas — such as find­ing anti-Chris­t­ian bias in the roots of World War I. It blamed World War II, in part, on a non-exis­tent group in Japan. It makes unusu­al cul­tur­al com­ments about the Philippines.It refers to homo­sex­u­al­i­ty as a “lifestyle.” It makes erro­neous state­ments about stem cell research. It ques­tions John Ker­ry’s war cre­den­tials. Fem­i­nism and homo­sex­u­al­i­ty are held in low regard.

This stuff is too rich to be believed. Fun­ny if it was­n’t so sad that so many gullible peo­ple think this is bet­ter than going to a school with a sound cur­ricu­lum because it has too many peo­ple with the wrong skin col­or. (Not­ed: Respon­sive Ed also oper­ates schools aimed at near­ly all-black con­stituen­cies, fol­low­ing the rapid reseg­re­ga­tion pat­terns of char­ters every­where.)

One of Respon­sive Ed’s schools, Founders Clas­si­cal Acad­e­my in Lewisville, Texas, where Respon­sive Ed is based, uses a cur­ricu­lum far worse even than the Respon­sive Ed Knowl­edge Units. The school teach­es Amer­i­can his­to­ry from A Patriot’s His­to­ry of the Unit­ed States. The patri­ots book is “required read­ing,” accord­ing to Glenn Beck, and it opens with an inter­view between Rush Lim­baugh and the author. It is a book that, as Dave Weigel says, “will make you stu­pid­er.”

This book teach­es the supe­ri­or­i­ty of the West, which in the 1400s and 1500s was appar­ent­ly “quan­tum leaps” ahead of “native peo­ples,” includ­ing Ming Dynasty Chi­na, one of the most pros­per­ous Chi­nese dynas­ties. It explains that the West was supe­ri­or to “native pop­u­la­tions” in bat­tles because “Aztec chiefs and Moor sul­tans alike were com­plete­ly vul­ner­a­ble to massed fire­pow­er, yet with­out the legal frame­work of repub­li­can­ism and civic virtue like Europe’s to replace its lead­er­ship cadre, a native army could be decap­i­tat­ed at its head by one vol­ley.”

Fem­i­nism gets ripped.

On the fem­i­nist move­ment, Founders Clas­si­cal Acad­e­my stu­dents are taught that fem­i­nism “cre­at­ed an entire­ly new class of females who lacked male finan­cial sup­port and who had to turn to the state as a sur­ro­gate hus­band.”

There’s “char­ac­ter” edu­ca­tion galore.

These lessons were lift­ed direct­ly from a com­pa­ny called Char­ac­ter First Edu­ca­tion, which was found­ed by an Okla­homa busi­ness­man named Tom Hill. He is a fol­low­er of Bill Gothard, a min­is­ter who runs the Insti­tute in Basic Life Prin­ci­ples, a Chris­t­ian orga­ni­za­tion that teach­es its mem­bers to incor­po­rate bib­li­cal prin­ci­ples into dai­ly life. IBLP is con­sid­ered a cult by some of its for­mer fol­low­ers. Gothard devel­oped char­ac­ter qual­i­ties asso­ci­at­ed with a list of “49 Gen­er­al Com­mands of Christ” that Hill adopt­ed for his char­ac­ter cur­ricu­lum. Hill then removed Gothard’s ref­er­ences to God and Bible vers­es and start­ed mar­ket­ing the cur­ricu­lum to pub­lic schools and oth­er pub­lic insti­tu­tions.

The val­ues taught by Respon­sive Ed can often be found word for word on Gothard’s web­site.

Got­thard, you should know, teach­es the need for obe­di­ence of women and chil­dren to men.

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Well done Amer­i­ca. This + This = The Nation­al Invest­ment in the Future.

“We have no con­cern about what the EU might say, whether the EU accepts us as mem­bers or not, we have no such con­cern. Please keep your wis­dom to your­self.” Erdo­gan’s war with Fethul­lah Gulen is clear­ly a pret­ty high pri­or­i­ty:

Turkey’s Erdo­gan says media raids a response to ‘dirty’ plot

By Humeyra Pamuk

IZMIT, Turkey Mon Dec 15, 2014 11:41am EST

(Reuters) — Turk­ish Pres­i­dent Tayyip Erdo­gan on Mon­day defend­ed week­end raids on media out­lets close to a U.S.-based Mus­lim cler­ic as a nec­es­sary response to “dirty oper­a­tions” by the gov­ern­men­t’s polit­i­cal ene­mies, and told a crit­i­cal Euro­pean Union to mind its own busi­ness.

Sun­day’s raids on the Zaman dai­ly and Samany­olu tele­vi­sion marked an esca­la­tion in Erdo­gan’s bat­tle with for­mer ally Fethul­lah Gulen, with whom he has been in open con­flict since a cor­rup­tion probe tar­get­ing his inner cir­cle emerged a year ago.

Erdo­gan accus­es Gulen of estab­lish­ing a ‘par­al­lel’ struc­ture in the state through his sup­port­ers in the judi­cia­ry, police and oth­er insti­tu­tions, and of wield­ing influ­ence through the media. The cler­ic denies any ambi­tion to over­throw Erdo­gan.

“They cry press free­dom, but (the raids) have noth­ing to do with it,” Erdo­gan said, speak­ing at the open­ing of an exten­sion to an oil refin­ery near Istan­bul.

“We have no con­cern about what the EU might say, whether the EU accepts us as mem­bers or not, we have no such con­cern. Please keep your wis­dom to your­self,” he said.

The Euro­pean Union, which Turkey is seek­ing to join, said the raids ran counter to Euro­pean val­ues. EU Enlarge­ment Com­mis­sion­er Johannes Hahn described them as “not real­ly an invi­ta­tion to move fur­ther for­ward” with Turkey.

Ger­man Chan­cel­lor Angel Merkel’s spokesman said it was “in Turkey’s own inter­est to clear up any pos­si­ble doubt over its com­mit­ment to basic demo­c­ra­t­ic prin­ci­ples” fol­low­ing the raids, in which 24 peo­ple includ­ing top exec­u­tives and for­mer police chiefs were detained.

Erdo­gan’s com­ments sent the Turk­ish lira, already suf­fer­ing in an emerg­ing mar­kets sell-off, falling fur­ther, hit­ting 2.34 to the dol­lar TRYTOM=D3.

“I won­der if we will look back and see this day as the final death of Turkey’s EU acces­sion bid,” said Tim­o­thy Ash, head of emerg­ing mar­kets research at Stan­dard Bank in Lon­don.

“SABOTAGE”

Erdo­gan, whose AK Par­ty was elect­ed in 2002, intro­duced many demo­c­ra­t­ic reforms in his first years in pow­er and curbed army involve­ment in pol­i­tics. NATO allies often cit­ed Turkey as an exam­ple of a suc­cess­ful Mus­lim democ­ra­cy, but more recent­ly crit­ics have accused Erdo­gan of intol­er­ance of dis­sent and, increas­ing­ly, a divi­sive rever­sion to Islamist roots.

He has cast the bat­tle against Gulen’s “Hizmet” (ser­vice) net­work as a con­tin­u­a­tion of Turkey’s “nor­mal­iza­tion”, a strug­gle to root out anti-demo­c­ra­t­ic forces, and said on Mon­day that Turkey’s demo­c­ra­t­ic stan­dards were ris­ing.

“This process is the plant­i­ng of the seeds of the new Turkey,” he said.

“Those who try to get involved in dirty busi­ness and dirty rela­tions with the hope of return­ing Turkey to its old days are get­ting the nec­es­sary response, and will con­tin­ue to get it.”

Istan­bul Chief Pros­e­cu­tor Hadi Sal­i­hoglu said on Sun­day arrest war­rants had been issued for 31 peo­ple on charges of “estab­lish­ing a ter­ror­ist group”, forgery and slan­der.

Two for­mer police chiefs, Samany­olu’s chair­man and the staff of two Samany­olu dra­ma series, one about an anti-ter­ror­ism squad and the oth­er set in a south­east hit by Kur­dish rebel­lion, were among those detained.

Asked whether he expect­ed “sab­o­tage” from Gulen allies ahead of a par­lia­men­tary elec­tion next June, Prime Min­is­ter Ahmet Davu­to­glu told the pro-gov­ern­ment Sabah news­pa­per on Mon­day that the state had to “take pre­cau­tions”.

“This is not an inves­ti­ga­tion into jour­nal­is­tic activ­i­ties,” he was quot­ed as say­ing, and more details would emerge as the legal process took its course.

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