PA: Tenure Attack Renewed

HB 805 -- a bill to #protectexcellentteachers -- just passed the Senate Education Committee by a vote of 6-3. #HB805 #PAbudget

— StudentsFirst in PA (@PAStudentsFirst) December 4, 2015

And while the latest round budget attempts was stirring up dust, that's about as much attention as anyone was paying this week when the Pennsylvania Senate Education committee sent this direct assault on seniority in Pennsylvania back out into the world.

I last wrote about this bill back at the end of June after the PA House passed. You can skip back and see what I said back then, but here are the highlights.

The bill takes aim at two main portions of the laws regarding teacher employment-- temporary (pre-tenure) teachers, and the business of getting rid of a teacher. As I said in June, there is a large-ish amount of strike-out and new language in this, and you are encouraged to go sift through the whole thing yourself. I've read it, but you probably ought to, too.

The Small Potatoes

Pre-tenure employment used to be two years. More recently it was upped to three years. The new bill says that temporary teachers become professional employees after completing their third year. Yes, I know what I said and read before (four years), but I'm looking at the proposed language and it says that for anybody hired after June 30, 2015, "Whose work has been certified by the district superintendent to the secretary of the school district during the last four (4) months of the third year of such service ... as being satisfactory shall thereafter be a 'professional employe' within the meaning of this article."

However, the superintendent may extend that for a fourth year of temp-ness if it somehow seems that there's something to be learned about the temp teacher in a fourth year.

The Big Enchilada

The more serious issues with the bill are in the section dealing with getting rid of teachers, specifically the Why and the Who.

The bill adds another reason to jettison a teacher. The old standards were declining enrollment, cut programs, combined schools, and combined districts. Now add to that "economic reasons."

Let that sink in. It would be okay in Pennsylvania to cut teaching positions, even if everyone knows and acknowledges that such cuts are not educationally defensible. Let's also note that, given the ongoing huge problems that come with Pennsylvania's school funding system (called the most inequitable in the country) and that fact that today marks the 158th day late for our budget (supposed a deal has just been struck, but I'll believe it when I see it), the list of school district suffering economic distress in Pennsylvania includes pretty much all of them.

Now for the who.

Pennsylvania currently operates with the traditional First In Last Out system. This bill will end that. When teachers are let go, under this bill, such decisions must first consider teacher ratings from evaluations.

The bill proposes using the most blunt-instrument form of the evaluation. IOW, rather than tossing teachers based on, say, a five point difference in evaluation scores, only the category is considered. PA only has four -- crappy, needs work, pretty okay, and super-awesome. So if teachers must go, the crappy ones go first, then the needs work group, and so on. Within the groups, we revert to FILO. Also, callbacks work the same way, in reverse.

There are some fine details to go with this. The district can't suspend anybody with a super-awesome rating for economic reasons. And you are generally well-protected if two of your last three annual ratings are super-awesome (though nobody is supposed to get super-awesome ratings regularly-- we "live" in pretty good and only "visit" super-awesome). If you dump teachers because of enrollment shrinkage, you must dump an equal percentage of administrators (unless you only have five, or you get a special note from Harrisburg, etc etc).

Oh, and the bill expressly forbids districts from dumping teachers because they make too much money, which practically speaking means that districts are expressly forbidden to say out loud that's what they're doing.

Baldfaced Baloney

Practically speaking, this is a bill that reflects the baldfaced foolishness of groups like StudentsFirst. It starts with the presumption that districts are harboring large groups of terrible crappy teachers, either because principals weren't doing their jobs during the teacher pre-tenure temp period, or because awesome teachers are being thrown into the street while crappy ones keep their jobs. And as always, it rests on the fiction that administrators lack the power to get rid of teachers who can't do their jobs, and so those teachers are still there in the classroom.

It's worth noting that the folks pushing this bill have failed to come up with compelling tales of excellent teachers thrown into the street. The bill's sponsor, when he first started pushing this, resorted to a letter filled with made-up faux statistics. I'm just going to cut and paste from my earlier piece:

Here you can see a letter written by the bill's chief sponsor, Rep. Stephen Bloom, back in February. It contains several fine slices of baloney, including this statistic thrown out without any references:

Research demonstrates that under a seniority-based layoff system, the more effective teacher is dismissed roughly four out of five times. 

What research? How is it demonstrated? And why haven't we heard about this before like, say, during the Vergara trial's work of destroying tenure and seniority in California? Those guys were clearly willing to bring up anything they could think of to make their point-- but I don't believe they mentioned this. So I kind of suspect this is not an entirely fact-based statement.

Who will be affected? 

In fact, the last round of teacher evaluations found that 98.2% of PA teachers were rated Pretty Good or Super Duper-- the highest percentage ever.

The total number of teachers rated unsatisfactory in all the public schools in Pennsylvania-- 289. In charter schools-- 803.

Why do we care, anyway? 

This is a foot-in-the-door bill, a bill that throws out the idea of tenure and seniority and resets the whole teacher employment model around a teacher's ability to get good test scores out of her students. Because remember-- teacher evaluations are based on one chunk test scores, one chunk school rating (which are 90% test scores), and small chunk of things over which a teacher has no control.

At the moment, this may seem like a not-big-deal; after all, it draws a target mainly on 289 public school teachers. But just imagine what would happen if legislators later say, "This isn't accurate enough. Instead of basic rating, let's set job security based on each teacher's precise rating score."

At that point we get Teacher Thunderdome, and that's not just a problem for teachers. It's a problem for schools. When teachers must compete for every small numerical advantage for job security, teachers will face a real dilemma-- share a teaching strategy that will help students, or hold onto it so that you have better odds of being able to feed your own family?

And for tough schools, underfunded schools, troubled schools, the very schools that we all want to see improved filled with the students have been most underserved and neglected-- how do you recruit a teacher to a school where it's so hard to get the numbers she needs to keep her career alive?

So if you're in Pennsylvania, it's time to email your Senator to suggest that HB 805 is a bad bill that should die a quiet death. Granted, he's probably busy not getting a budget passed and doing terrible things to our pension at the same time (but that's another story). Still, it would be huge bad news if this bill somehow slipped through during the larger drama. This does not "protect excellent teachers." It just attacks the profession, forcing teachers to treat their colleagues as enemies and their students as obstacles. This bill should never, ever become law.

ESSA Will Not Solve Anything

It's not that I don't appreciate the good parts or hate the bad parts. I'm not delighted to see social impact bonds tossed into the mix, nor am I pleased to see the doors opened here and there for performance based education. I take a bit of pleasure in seeing the ways in which the bill makes extra effort to spank the secretary of education (who has been weirdly trying to save face by repeatedly saying, "Oh yeah, this is what we wanted all along"), and I'm quite happy with the various piecesparts that defang the Big Standardized Test. It is a mixed bag, a shift of inches in mostly the right direction kind of. I think Jeff Bryant said it best with, "Go Ahead, Pass Every Student Succeeds Act, But Don't Celebrate It."

Because here's the problem. The ESSA won't actually solve a thing.

Yes, state leaders may very well say, "Thank God! Let's scrap the Common Core and replace them with real standards that we develop ourselves, and let's work up our own Big Standardized Test and let's design a way to evaluate teachers and public schools that uses authentic markers of excellence and not a bunch of BS Test baloney and let's even allow parents to opt out of testing and if the feds don't like it, they can try to sort it out in a courtroom. Screw 'em."

Or.

Or state leaders may say, "You know, all this stuff that we had to do under the Obama-Duncan-Bush-Page administrations is just fine with us, and it took a lot of time and money to get it all up and running, and some nice lobbyists tell us that it's all working great, so we're actually not going to change a single solitary thing."

Some state leaders might say, "We have a vision for truly excellent public schools in our state. Now that tests can be decoupled from the high stakes, we will embrace systems for evaluating our students, teachers and schools that support and reveal their many forms of excellence, building up a state system of education of which we are justly and deeply proud."

But state leaders might also say, "We actually share the vision of Arne Duncan and of Bill Gates and of our very most excellent good charter-operating friends over with the giant piles of money. We are pretty sure that our public schools suck with the suckage of a thousand black holes, and we look forward to breaking them down and dismantling them and handing the pieces over to our chartery friends."

The ESSA doesn't settle anything. It doesn't solve anything. Every argument and battle that supporters of public schools (and the teachers and students who work and learn in public schools) have been fighting will still be fought-- the difference is that now those arguments will be held in state capitols instead of Washington DC.

Depending on your state, that may be good news. Or it may be that the best we can say is that your state government isn't any worse, and they live closer to you.

There are definite advantages. State government officials are easier to find, to get to, to contact, to talk to. When a single state decides to implement terrible policy, they won't be implementing it for the entire country. And there are now plenty of groups that have become very accomplished and effective at making themselves heard in their home state (looking at you, New York opt outers).

Both those who love it and those who hate it, I think, missing the most important feature. ESSA replaces a great deal of the old "you must do" this language with "you may do this" language and even "you could get money for this but you have several choices here" language.

ESSA makes it possible to take many important steps forward. It also makes it possible for states to step backward. The steps that are taken will be decided state by state, and the same players who have worked hard to break down public education are still right there, still well-funded, still fully committed to the goals they have pursued for over a decade. It is absolutely critical that advocates for public education keep the pressure up on state governments. Congress has taken an unprecedented step in returning some power and control to the states; now we have to make sure that power is well used and that all students, schools and teachers receive the support and the tools needed to do the job we signed up to do.

The struggle is not over. It has just shifted venue. Get ready for the next rounds of debate-- all fifty of them. The one big change is the, unlike its predecessors, ESSA mandates relatively few things. But it opens the doors of opportunity wide to many many things, both good and bad. It's up to all of us to be vigilant about what walks through those doors.

MA: Boston's Lying Problem

Boston Mayor Marty Walsh is sad. He seems to be sad specifically because he is "taking heat" But I think Walsh may be sad because of all the lying that's going on in Boston.

About a month ago in Esquire, Charles Pierce said that Marty Walsh was going "full Scott Walker" by first defeating an opponent by accusing him of being a education reform "grifter" who was trying to destroy pubic ed. And then, Pierce said, Mayor Walsh dumped Candidate Walsh and worked out a plan to close down 36 of Boston's roughly 120 school buildings, taking the BPS total to 90-- all part of a cozy partnership with charteristas in MA.

Not so, said the mayor's office. The Esquire article was untrue and unsourced-- in other words, Pierce was a lying liar who just made this stuff up.

But Pierce's article linked right back to the blog of Mary Lewis Pierce (no relation) who posted the documents (acquired by QUEST via FOIA)  that showed the driving partnerships behind the mayor's plan.

So somebody is surely lying. Maybe the blogger Pierce is lying about having the documents. Maybe she made them up. Maybe QUEST never filed a FOIA request, or maybe when they did, somebody who sent her the documentation sent her fake documents. Or maybe Marty Walsh was lying about the allegations being untrue and unsourced.

And Walsh was also sad about that number 90. True, he intended to "consolidate" some schools, but "closing" is such an ugly word. And he certainly wasn't going to do whatever it is to 36 schools.

This would fit in with Walsh's unified enrollment plan, where students fill out just one handy application and the school district puts the students in a school of the district's choice, thereby allowing the district to funnel students directly into the charter "partners" of the public system. This is a system favored at the folks at the Boston Compact, a group built on partnership between public and charter schools. What a great idea, since by its very existence, the group legitimizes charter claims to taxpayer education dollars.

The Boston Compact also has ties to the New Schools Venture Fund, a group devoted to funneling public tax dollars to private investor pockets by-- hey, wait. Where have I heard that name before? Oh yeah-- the New Schools Venture Fund is the previous employer of Jim Peyser, who explained back then how to take over and gut a public school district by "breaking down the barriers" between public and charter schools. Course that was before he took his new job-- Secretary of Education for the state of Massachusetts.

The public school advocacy group QUEST insists that Walsh told them privately about his intention to shutter 36 schools. This makes Walsh sad:

“The Mayor has never said, nor does he have a plan to close 36 schools,” mayoral spokeswoman Laura Oggeri said in a statement.  

And that might have been true on a technicality, but Walsh has since doubled down on his denial, saying, that although the meeting happened, “There was absolutely no talk about shrinking schools or closing schools — none at all." In fact, there's a whole list of things that have never happened. He has never had discussions with anybody about co-locations. The Boston Compact is sure it has no interest in or plan to increase charter market share in Boston.

So what are we to do with all these lying liars who lie. I mean, that has to be what we have in Boston, right? It's strictly he-said, she-said, and somebody has to be lying. So either the parents and QUEST are just making things up because, I don't know-- they're bored? They want to make Walsh sad? They are looking for some made-up cause so that they can give up their spare time to raise a commotion about nothing, because reasons? Or Walsh is keeping secrets and  lying because he's betrayed a bunch of constituents in order to work for big-money interests and further a privatization agenda that is widely opposed and he'd rather not have to defend it. I don't know-- which one of these scenarios seems most plausible?

Of course, I suppose it's also possible that Walsh is just sadly confused. After all, he insists that it's just a small group of parents who are raising a fuss, and the vast silent majority think this is a great idea. Does that sound familiar, too? Perhaps it's because you remember when Walsh insisted that the Bostonian opposition to hosting the Olympics was just "ten people on twitter." That turned out to be false. It also turned out that the failure to build public support was related to a failure to be transparent, open and honest with the public, as well as the discovery that the whole thing was a get-rich-quick scheme for some connected insiders.

So maybe Boston doesn't have a problem with liars. Maybe it just has a problem with officials who can neither recognize nor learn from the truth.So maybe Boston has a truth problem, which is different from a lying problem in the same way that school closures are different from consolidating takeover merger closings.

[Correction: I originally attributed the FOIA request to Pierce (the blogger), but the request was filed by QUEST. Also, somehow in the editing process a reference to a long-out-of-date article popped back in. This is what I get for writing through lunch period.]

NEA on ESSA

Thursday evening NEA Government Relations Director Mary Kusler and Director of Education Policy and Practice Donna Harris-Aikensspoke on a brief conference call about NEA and the New ESSA. This will be as disjointed as my notes, and there aren't many surprises here, though a few pieces of clarifying information (I may have missed a crossed T or dotted I thanks to my phone connection.)

Richard Allen Smith opened by observing that "we can see the finish line" for ending NCLB. Then he handed the conference off to Kusler.

Kusler used the word "historic" roughly six billion times, noting among other things that this was the first education conference committee meeting since about 2008, with a full conference committee meeting further still in the past.

Who was naughty

She also noted that it was bipartisan and bicameral about a thousand times (my notes are sloppy). She did note that the bill came out of committee with just one nay vote, and that nay-voter was Rand Paul.

The language NEA keeps using to praise the bill which Kusler echoed is that every child will have access to quality education regardless of their zip code. She thinks ESSA will do that. She's apparently kind of an optomist.

Kusler noted that NEA had "three buckets" that marked their goals:

1) reduce testing and divorce it from high stakes
2) maximize multiple measures, noting that everyone loved the disagregated data of NCLB, but we should also be noting if all subgroups are getting art class and guidance counselors, and not just test scores.
3) when educators have a voice, students do better. Looking out for the profession. That kind of thing.

What next?

Senate vote next week. It will pass overwhelmingly. Rumors are that the Pres could be signing this by the end of next week. We are on the cusp of changing the federal government's role and insuring quality education etc etc every child.

Dropping her rose colored glasses for more accurate ones, Kusler noted that the President signing this bill is not the end but merely the beginning. Implementation will be key. I will give my Senator a crisp twenty dollar bill if he can work in a provision that we don't have to hear the word "implementation" in the ed world for the next ten years.

The I Word

Harris-Aikensspoke will be the NEA implementation czar. She says there's a lot of opportunity built into this bill, pushing down responsibility so that state and local education folks have to decide what assessment should look like. She notes that there are pieces that guarantee educator (by which she means more than teachers) voice will be critical.

Note too that early education and community schools play an important role in there somewhere.

NEA will be developing a suite of materials for parents and teachers will be able to use, and teachers will help make them, and I resisted the urge to ask if they would be a crappy as the junk NEA banged out in support of Common Core.

Questions? 

Actually, most folks resisted the urge to ask questions. I don't know. It's always hard to ask questions when you can't read or see the room, but fortunately, Leonie Haimson was there, and she asked:

What about special ed and ELL?

The answer was illuminating to me. The old rule is that only 1% of Students with disabilities could be proficient. The new rule is that only 1% of SWD can take an alternative assessment [Correction-- h/t to Leonie Haimson. 1% of all students, 10% of IEP students]. NEA does not love that, but they feel that language in ESSA clarifies that IDEA trumps ESEA and the the IEP team has the final word on what assessment a student should take.

Waivers can be granted on state and federal level. I suspect this will all end up in a court somewhere, but NEA seems to think IDEA has gotten the upper hand.

What about social impact bonds?

Leonie asked this too. The answer is A) NEA thinks these sucks and B) that old NEA favorite, you should have seen it before we got involved. Apparently SIB references were spread like crabgrass through the bill, and now are weeeded back to only two references in some specific locations. So, bad, but could have been worse?

And that was it. Quick and over in about 30 minutes, slightly illuminating. Particularly the Rand Paul part.

The New ESEA and Content

There's a huge amount of discussion about how the New ESEA will affect policy and the flow of money and the new ways that privateers can grub for that money and just how big a hash states will make out of education, anyway etc etc etc,

But over at the Fordham blog, Robert Pondiscio has put a bit of focus where focus ought to be-- the new bill's effect on content.

Pondiscio is a reform fan who has always been willing to see what we see in the classroom-- that an emphasis on high stakes reading tests is destructive to the teaching of reading. I've made the same argument. The current theories about reading embedded in both the Common Core and in Big Standardized Tests is that reading is a set of free-floating skills unrelated to content, prior knowledge, or the engagement of the reader. The BS Tests have focused on short excerpts specifically chosen to be boring and weirdly obscure so as to guarantee that students will have no prior knowledge and will not find the excerpts interesting. All this because some reformsters believe that reading is a set of skills that has nothing to do with content, which is kind of like trying to imagine waves that exist independent of any matter through which they move. As Pondiscio puts it:

Years of treating reading as a discrete subject or a skill—teaching it and testing it that way—have arguably set reading achievement in reverse. You don’t build strong readers by teaching children to “find the main idea,” “make inferences,” and “compare and contrast.” You do it by fixing a child’s gaze on the world outside the classroom window.

It has been, and continues to be, a dumb and counterproductive way to approach reading. For one thing, it means that the best way for me to increase student achievement would be to never teach anything but daily three-paragraph excerpts from anything at all. Throwing out my anthology of American literature and replacing it with daily newspaper clippings would be an excellent way to get test scores up-- and a complete abdication of my responsibilities as a professional English teacher.

And professional English teachers know that. But for the past many years, we have also known that our school and professional ratings rest on those scores. So we have made compromises, or we have been commanded by state and/or local authorities to commit educational malpractice in the name of "student achievement" (the ongoing euphemism for "test scores").

This, more than anything else, is why the federal decoupling of teacher evaluation and school ratings from the BS Tests is good news.

Under the new ESEA, states will still have to test students annually, including in reading. But they have a lot more control over the way the results from those tests are turned into grades for schools. This could offer an opportunity to restore some sanity to schooling.

Exactly. States have the chance now to put an end to questions like, "Well, that's a lovely unit, but how will it prepare students for The Test?" It gives us the chance to get back to teaching students that reading (and writing and speaking and listening) are ways to engage with and unlock the wonders of the world.

Whether states will take the opportunity remains to be seen. But if they screw this up, they can no longer blame it on the feds. And if we sit in our schools and let them screw this up without raising a fuss in our respective state capitals, shame on us. The federal defanging of tests gives us the opportunity to put reading (and writing and listening and speaking) back in its rightful place, taught properly and properly used to empower student discovery of a million amazing things. No matter how I feel about the rest of the ESSA, I feel good about this.

Is Educational Philanthropy Jumbo Shrimp?

The announcement that Mark Zuckerberg and his wife intend to give away $45 billion in Facebook stock raises all sorts of questions, including this one:

Does anybody even understand what philanthropy is any more?

The word means "love of humanity," and the idea goes back-- way back. Early philanthropic efforts often cited include Plato's bequest of a farm to support students and faculty at his school, and Pliny (the Younger, not the old guy) giving one-third the cost of a school for Roman students. So yes-- philanthropy has been mucking around schools forever. (Said Pliny, arguing for Roman schools for Roman students, "You cannot make your children a more handsome present than this, nor can you do your native place a better turn. Let those who are born here be brought up here, and from their earliest days accustom them to love and know every foot of their native soil.")

We've had philanthropy in this country as long as we've had a country, often synonymous with "charity" and the idea of giving money to people who need it, either directly or through some do-gooding church or charitable organization.

We generally consider John. D. Rockefeller the grand-daddy of modern philanthropy (and to his credit, Rockefeller was a philanthropist before he was a rich guy). Once he became a rich guy, he hired people and started organizations to help him manage the giving away of money "scientifically." (One group led in 1928 to the Brookings Foundation). Rockefeller's system became one of finding smart people who could figure out how to solve an issue, giving them a bunch of money, and leaving them alone.

Rich Guy Philanthropy has always been a bit subject to... cognitive dissonance. Like many Carnegie biographies, this one by David Nasaw juxtaposes Andrew Carnegie's advice to his workers that they pursue learning and leisure activities and read more-- even as he demanded that they work ten hours a day, seven days a week. Carnegie's generous gift of libraries to communities across the country stands side by side with his iron-fisted refusal to pay his workers decent wages.

Rich Guy Philanthropy has always struggled with a central contradiction: If rich guys want to make life better for ordinary folks, they could start with the ordinary folks who work to make them rich.

Rockefeller's idea of business-style scientific philanthropy grew and evolved, but somewhere along the way, we completely lost the idea of philanthropy at all.

If you give an organization like a school or a hospital or a sports team a whole bunch of money in order to build a facility with your name on it, that's not philanthropy. That's advertising. Nobody looks at a building with TRUMP in huge gold letters on the side and thinks, "Wow, what a great, giving humanitarian." Why should that work differently if, instead of building the big TRUMP building himself, he gave someone else money to do it for him?

In fact, modern philanthropists have strangely confused "giving money to improve the life of human beings" with "hiring some people to do work that you want to have done."

This 2006 article about Philanthrocapitalism lays out many of the principles that the new breed feels need to take the place of the old Rockefeller-style foundations. Invest IN something. Set up infrastructure. Add value.

Hacker Philanthropy (as laid out by Sean Parker, napster co-founder), isn't really philanthropy at all. It's a process of putting yourself in charge of something and then imposing your idea of a solution on the problem, confident that your outsider mindset allows you to see what the weakness is and "disrupt" it.

The classic view of philanthropy, the one most commonly shared by givers who aren't filthy rich, is that you find people who are doing something worthwhile, and you help them do it. But in current Rich Guy Philanthropy, you decide the solution you want to implement, and then you hire people direct your giving toward that goal.

Classic philanthropy was a gift. Modern philanthropy is "impact investment." Classic philanthropy was a gift, free and clear. Modern philanthropy comes with many, many strings attached. I will give you money-- to do what I want in the manner I direct. That's not a gift. That's hire and salary.

Michael Massing looks at Bill Gates as an example of this new giving style, leaning on the book No Such Thing As A Free Gift by Linsey McGoey. And we know how that's gone-- Bill Gates decided that schools should be smaller, so he used funding to grow a bunch of organizations to implement and study that solution. Then he became convinced that Common Core would fix schools, so he threw a bunch of money at that, creating organizations to implement and promote his preferred solution. (Also, I love McGoey for her coinage "philanthrocapitalist")

What makes this philanthropy?

If Gates hired a bunch of computer programmers to form a work group that designed a new music storage-and-playing device, nobody would call that philanthropy. But if Gates hires a bunch of thought leaders and PR specialists to promote CCSS, that's philanthropy? How?

Is it because there's no obvious profit involved, or is it because Gates has taken charge of a portion of the public sector?

Zuckerberg's "gift" has folks looking back at his previous foray into philanthropy-- his ill-fated attempt to help fix Newark. Jordan Weissman at Slate is "optomistic that Mark Zuckerberg won't mess up this philanthropy thing." His optimism is based in I'm-not-sure-what, but he seems to believe that after Z's adventures in Newark, the cyber-mogul would have learned a thing or two. His evidence is that Zuckerberg's huge donation to Bay Area schools was more incremental and focused-- but it was once again framed as, "Here are the solutions we're hiring you to implement." [Update. Several critics have noted that Zuckerberg's generosity isn't all that generous anyway.]

But David Auerbach at Slate takes a more measured look, also noting that Gates's attempt to make himself the unelected School Board Chairman of America has not logged many (or even any) successes. Auerbach does make one point in philanthrocapitalism's favor-- it at least is not more of the Let's Buy Ourselves Some Senators investment strategy of Ken Griffin or the Koch Brothers.

Except. Except that, slowly but surely, the two are becoming the same thing. Charters have become a magnet for philanthrocapitalists who can do well while doing good. "I'm building a school and making a bundle," is the new -- well, can we even call it philanthropy at this point? And those philanthropists are willing to go the Koch route with their giving. Consider the news from LA, where a PAC was used to hide the investment of charter backers in getting three charter-friendly school board candidates elected. Among those on the list are "philanthropist Eli Broad," whose "philanthropy" seems to consist entirely of hiring people to push his personal agenda and build his personal power.

So we finally arrive at a point where the word "philanthropy" means absolutely nothing at all. Hell, Donald Trump is a philanthropist. Vladamir Putin is a philanthropist. Every time I pay my phone bill, I'm a philanthropist. Apparently any time you give anybody any money for any reason, you're a philanthropist.

Look-- here's the rule. If you are giving money to somebody with the expectation that they will carry out your instructions, further your agenda, owe you compliance and assistance, or complete a project you've assigned them-- you're not a philanthropist. If your giving is designed to give you power or control over an aspect of public life in our country-- you're not a philanthropist.

You know what else happened over the weekend? A couple dropped a check for $500,000 in a Salvation Army kettle. And then when news outlets wanted to follow up on the story, they insisted on remaining anonymous. And they didn't tell the Salvation Army how to spend it, what to spend it on, or where to put their name on the side of the building. They just remembered how hard life was when they couldn't get enough to eat, so they were hoping they could help other humans in similar dire straits. I may or may not love the Salvation Army, but I know an anonymous philanthropist when I see one or two.

I wish there were more of them.

Blog Commenting Changes

Okay, we're going to try modulated comments for a while.

While I enjoy a spirited debate and discussion in the comments section, at the end of the day, this blog is something that I maintain with time that I would otherwise spend eating and sleeping and from which and for which I do not make a cent. I have no problem with people who disagree with me or each other, but I'm really not maintaining this blog just to give people the opportunity to spit in my face.

I continue to welcome and pursue dialogue with intelligent, well-informed, or fun members of the loyal opposition (any one of the three qualifications is sufficient to qualify) but if you can't manage any of those AND you insist monopolizing huge chunks of conversation with the repeated use of insults against me or my guests-- well, I am not running Mr. Greene's Home For Wayward Trolls.

Unfortunately, blogspot does not provide the opportunity to block individual accounts, so for the time being, all comments will be subject to review and approval, and we'll see how that goes.