Monday, August 10, 2015

IPS Board Member Resigns For Another Education Profiteering Role

IPS school board member Caitlin Hannon was already one of the infamous education profiteers who seized control of the board after outside education corporate interests funneled large sums of money into the past two IPS school board elections to install their puppets. Hannon has served as executive director of Teach Plus, which had a contract with the school district. Hannon announced today she's resigning her position on the board to accept a new position with yet another nonprofit organization bankrolled by the education profiteers.

Hannon has accepted an education entrepreneur fellowship from the Mind Trust where she will launch yet another nonprofit organization that will provide a shared enrollment system for IPS parents to enroll their students in either an IPS school or a charter school using one form. Chalk Beat notes that it's an idea Hannon has championed as an IPS board member. The current IPS board members will choose Hannon's replacement, which you can bet will be yet another person bought and paid for by the corporate interests that have a financial investment in the policies made by the state's largest school district.

Not by coincidence, an advisory group on which Hannon served released a report in May urging IPS and Indianapolis charter schools to consider partnering to create a one-stop approach for enrollment. Innovation in Public School Choice, which authored the report, was populated with all of the usual education profiteer suspects comprising its board. Hannon's Teach Plus organization actually commissioned that study. It's just another blatant example of self-dealing these folks have set up for themselves which you won't read about in any of the mainstream news media organizations in Indianapolis. They're all in the tank with these corporate elitists who use the education system as an open spigot for financing their education profiteering opportunities.

UPDATE: A reader's comment prompted us to provide a little more information on The Mind Trust, which was set up at the behest of former Mayor Bart Peterson as part of his plan to bust the teacher's unions and transfer power to him and his wealthy crony friends who want to get rich off insider education deals just like the Peterson family earned its fortune from insider real estate deals. According to The Mind Trust's most recent tax filing, it has about $7 million in revenues. It's CEO is David Harris, a former Peterson mayoral aide. He earns about $275,000 a year. The executive VP, Ken Bubp, earns about $175,000 a year. Another executive, Ethan Gray, earns about $135,000, while his assistant, Carrie Douglas, is paid close to $110,000 a year.

Teach for America is its biggest grant recipient, receiving a little more than $2 million annually. You may recall The Mind Trust installed one of the Teach For America beneficiaries, Jason Kloth, as Mayor Greg Ballard's deputy mayor of education before he recently left to work for the Aspen Global Leadership Network, another one of these shadowy NGOs established by New World Order sycophants who have pretty much bought off every elected official of any significance in this country. The New Teacher Project pulls down a grant of a little more than $1 million annually. Caitlin Hannon's former employer, Teach Plus, received a grant of $20,000. Other grant recipients include: Entrepreneurial Ventures ($100,000), Phalen Leadership Academy ($550,000), Christel House ( $250,000), CEE Trust ($960,000), Tindley Accelerated Schools ($250,000)  Kipp Indianapolis ($400,000)  and College Summit ($10,000).

The Board of Directors consist of the usual suspects:

Bart Peterson (Chairman)
David Harris (CEO)
Jean Blackwell
Robert Manuel
Ann Murtlow
Mark Miles
Joyce Rogers
Andrew Rotherham
Ariela Rozman
David Shane
Jane Pauley
Robert Clifford (Treasurer)
Ethan Gray (Executive Director of CEE Trust)
Ken Bubp, Executive VP
Carrie Douglas (Deputy Executive Director of CEE Trust).
Bill Shrewsberry
Don Stenson

Make no mistake about it. The Mind Trust is nothing but an education reform scam whose well-heeled backers have succeed in convincing elected officials who are more concerned about where they're going to raise their next campaign contribution than the quality of our schools to transfer hundreds of millions of our tax dollars annually into the pockets of the education profiteers who don't give a damn about improving the quality of schools, notwithstanding the never-ending press releases masquerading as legitimate news reporting to which we're treated in the Indianapolis Star and the IBJ about the good work they're doing.

5 comments:

Flogger said...

This interesting from the Mind Trust Web Site.

In 2001, at the urging of then Mayor Bart Peterson, the Indiana legislature approved a law making Indianapolis the first U.S. city where the mayor has the ability to authorize charter schools, which are public schools that are independent from school districts and therefore have more freedom to make key decisions at the school level.

Peterson selected David Harris, one of his policy advisors, to build and run the mayor's charter school office. Peterson and Harris knew that making this a reality would require creating enough great schools for every student to be able to attend one. They launched Mind Trust in 2006 to help do that.

Board of Directors:
Bart Peterson
Senior Vice President of Corporate Affairs and Communications, Eli Lilly and Company, and Former Mayor, City of Indianapolis (Chair)

Mark Miles
CEO, Hulman & Company

If you want to check the financials they weak to say the least on details like how much is paid out on salaries. http://www.themindtrust.org/files/file/2014-final-collateral.pdf

Anonymous said...

Amazing how "Rent A Civic" Mark Miles' name seems to be on so many insider, crony, questionable municipal/state enterprises.... Amazing. I recall hearing this guy speak at the GOP meetings and always felt he was, in brief, a total phony solely interested in growing his bank accounts.

Anonymous said...

Well when you consider that k-12 education is by far the largest recipient of state and local tax dollars, that's a lot of opportunity for the political hacks of the state to tap in to. follow the damn money. Thank you for posting this, Gary.

Anonymous said...

How will the new board member be selected?

Gary R. Welsh said...

The other board members appoint the replacement.