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"Eva Moskowitz, the firebrand chief of the city's fastest growing charter chain, isn't just backed by Wall Street, she's officially moved there - with Wall Street-type salaries to boot."

Scapegoating is a powerful tool to sway public opinion. That's why I'm not surprised that teachers unions are consistently being singled out for the shortcomings of public schools ("Can Teachers Unions Do Education Reform?" The Wall Street Journal, Mar. 3). After all, they are such an easy target at a time when the public's patience over the glacial pace of school reform is running out. The latest example was an essay by Juan Williams, who is now a political analyst for Fox News ("Will Business Boost School Reform?" The Wall Street Journal, Feb. 28). He claims that teachers unions are "formidable opponents willing to fight even modest efforts to alter the status quo." Their obstructionism is responsible for the one million high school dropouts each year and for a graduation rate of less than 50 percent for black and Hispanic students. Williams says that when schools are free of unions, they succeed because they can fire ineffective teachers, implement merit pay, lengthen the school day, enrich the curriculum and deal with classroom discipline. These assertions have great intuitive appeal to taxpayers who are angry and frustrated, but the truth is far different from what Williams maintains.

By almost every educational measure, the Agora Cyber Charter School is failing. Nearly 60 percent of its students are behind grade level in math. Nearly 50 percent trail in reading. A third do not graduate on time. And hundreds of children, from kindergartners to seniors, withdraw within months after they enroll. By Wall Street standards, though, Agora is a remarkable success that has helped enrich K12 Inc., the publicly traded company that manages the school. And the entire enterprise is paid for by taxpayers.

By almost every educational measure, the Agora Cyber Charter School is failing. Nearly 60 percent of its students are behind grade level in math. Nearly 50 percent trail in reading. A third do not graduate on time. And hundreds of children, from kindergartners to seniors, withdraw within months after they enroll. By Wall Street standards, though, Agora is a remarkable success that has helped enrich K12 Inc., the publicly traded company that manages the school. And the entire enterprise is paid for by taxpayers.

"The Wall Street Journal this morning failed to report ties between the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and controversial "parent-trigger" legislation that would allow parents to take over and convert public schools to charter schools. They also failed to report that the Journal's parent company, News Corp, is a member of ALEC. The Journal's treatment of the legislation also cited no criticism of the proposal, which has been described as an effort "to manipulate parents into letting [the charter school lobby] privatize more public schools."

While on Wall Street many protesters decry economic inequality, and in Washington, D.C. debates continue over federal education policy, teachers across the country are occupying their classrooms. In the eyes of the president of the second-largest teachers' union, the two issues of inequality and education are closely related. Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, has been a frequent visitor to New York's OWS protests. The AFT recently revised its "working document" -- a sort of mission statement -- to include language referring to the richest 1 percent.

When New York City schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott stood up to face a full Seward Park High School auditorium on the Lower East Side Tuesday evening, he found himself confronted by the shrill sound of the "people's mic," a consensus-building tactic that has become a hallmark of the Occupy Wall Street protests.

"In effect, "the invisible hand" behind the push to create new education markets is coming from Wall Street investors who are flush with capital for investment. Wall Street bundlers and investment firms are buying up stock in charter school companies and big education vendors. These bundlers not only fund both party's campaigns, they also sell stock, betting on the futures of big education vendors, start-ups, charter schools, and vouchers. They "encourage" political leaders to pursue policies that will hedge their bets on education products and to view all schools as portfolios that will increase in value as long as the Feds and the states pursue policies that encourage privatization."

It was perhaps inevitable that the political moment that has given birth to the Occupy movement, pitting Main Street against Wall Street and the 99% against the financial elite, would eventually succeed in making some chinks in the armor of the 1%'s favorite feel-good hobby: the school reform movement.

This is an interesting article about the intersection of charter schools and hedge fund managers.

Another hedge-funder is going to prison for insider trading. Only this time, the imprisonment of convicted Wall Street crook Raj Rajaratnam could be costly to some corporate school reforms and charter school privateers.

It's not often that intellectual heavyweights disagree so fundamentally about the same issue in commentaries published days apart in the nation's two most respected newspapers. I'm referring to Paul Krugman, whose column "Wasting Our Minds" appeared on Apr. 29 in The New York Times, and to George P. Schultz and Eric A. Hanushek, whose essay "Education Is the Key to a Healthy Economy" appeared in The Wall Street Journal on May 1. The subject was the relationship between educational outcomes and economic growth.

The first thing I noticed was the chummy exchanges between the public officials in change of the New York City public school system and the top dogs of the charter leadership-the Wall Street hedge fund managers, the leader of Democrats for Education Reform (DFER), the leader of the New York City Charter Center, and various others. It comes clear that there is a strong and concerted effort to hand over as much public space as possible to the charters.

"Chicago teachers are fighting not just for fair pay and decent health care but for a host of things that will improve education for Chicago kids-smaller classes, needed books and teaching materials, comfortable and well-maintained schools. But they're running into a buzz saw of well-organized, well-funded opposition from the massive anti-teacher, pro-corporate education policy world. Teachers don't have the money or the media platform that Wall Street billions and Mayor Rahm Emanuel will get you, which is why they need our help and support. What we're seeing in Chicago is the fallout from Jonah Edelman's hedge fund backed campaign to elect Illinois state legislators who supported an anti-collective bargaining, testing based education proposal giving Edelman the "clear political capability to potentially jam this proposal down [the teachers unions'] throats," political capability he used as leverage to jam an only slightly less awful proposal down their throats. It's a political deal that explicitly targeted Chicago teachers, while trying to make it impossible that they would strike by requiring a 75 percent vote of all teachers, not just those voting, for a strike to be legal. But more than 90 percent of Chicago teachers voted to strike. It's not just Jonah Edelman, though. Rahm Emanuel worked with a tea party group to promote Chicago charter schools and denigrate traditional public school teachers and their unions."

For much of the past decade, the New York City Department of Education has engaged in a variety of reform efforts, which have undermined public participation in the city's public school system. I was glad to see teachers, parents and students protesting with Occupy Wall Street on the doorstep of the Tweed building - the Department of Education's headquarters - last week. This movement belongs at the Department of Education. However, I think the outraged citizens have a real opportunity to shine a light on the root issue by heading uptown, to the McGraw-Hill Building, where standardized tests are created.

"Mic check! MIC CHECK! Let the Puppet show begin! LET THE PUPPET SHOW BEGIN!"   The demonstrators who held the floor at a December 14 meeting at Newtown High School in Corona, Queens, were part of Occupy DOE (Department of Education), a mix of veteran teachers, parents and Occupy Wall Street activists that is bringing the language and tactics of OWS to the grassroots fight against neoliberal education reform.

I'd like to begin by thanking my teachers in the fifth, sixth and seventh grades, Mrs. Pulaski, Mr. Burke and Miss Elmer. They taught us percentages and showed us how to "round down," which I am doing now. The U.S. population is 312,624,000, and we have 3,198,000 public school teachers, which computes to 1%. But this is not the 1% composed of Wall Street fat cats, professional athletes, entertainers and other rich people. I guarantee there's no overlap between the two groups. The average teacher today earns about $55,000. At least 75 CEOs earn that much in one day, every day, 365 days a year. According to the AFL-CIO's "Executive PayWatch," the CEO who ranked No. 75, David Cote of Honeywell, was paid $20,154,012, for a daily rate of $55,216.47.

Wall Street has always put its money where its interests and beliefs lie. But it is far less common that so many financial heavyweights would adopt a social cause like charter schools and advance it with a laserlike focus in the political realm. Hedge fund executives are thus emerging as perhaps the first significant political counterweight to the powerful teachers unions, which strongly oppose expanding charter schools in their current form.

Gov. Chris Christie plans a new challenge to a court-ordered state education funding formula that has provided billions of dollars in extra funding to poverty-stricken schools within the so-called Abbott districts. While he didn't discuss specifics of how he would continue the fight, Mr. Christie said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal that he would nominate two state Supreme Court judges this spring who won't "grossly" overstep their powers-as he argues the court has by ordering more school funding.

This week, the Wall Street Journal reported that the NY Board of Regents approved the state's sharing of student and teacher information with a new national database, to be funded by the Gates Foundation, and designed by News Corp's Wireless Generation. Other states that have already agreed to share this data, according to the NY State Education Department, include Colorado, Delaware, Georgia, Illinois, Kentucky, North Carolina, Louisiana and Massachusetts. All this confidential student and teacher data will be held by a private limited corporation, called the Shared Learning Collaborative LLC, with even less accountability,  which in July was awarded $76.5 million by the Gates Foundation, to be spent over 7 months. According to an earlier NYT story,  $44 million of this funding will go straight into the pockets of Wireless Generation, owned by Murdoch's News Corp and run by Joel Klein.