New York Times, USA Today,  and Washington Post take note: Investigative pieces in   Substance News,  whose masthead is Defending the Public Schools for More than 30 Years,  are sourced several times by Evans and Kane. While the Chicago Sun-Times and Tribune were running puff pieces on the Mayor Daley-Arne Duncan school reform, Substance  was at the board meetings and in the schools telling the real story.

The focus in the American Thinker article is on Hosanna Farr Mahaley Johnson Jones, but  the “Wireless Generation”connection is mentioned.  My website  offers lots of info and outrage on this  Murdoch-owned data delivery system that’s taking over the education world.  For starters, in 2009, Jay Spuck in Texas and I in Vermont summed things up to that time,  giving a detailed account of the Mahaley Johnson-Wireless Generation togetherness in Connecting the Dots.

Please note then-Senator Barack Obama’s role here. Few people remember that he sat on the Senate Education Committee, where he could have done some good, had he chosen to do so.

He didn’t. Inviting Hosanna Mahaley to speak provides one more specific example of whose pocket he was–and is–in.

Yes, we’ve read most of this before–in bits and pieces. But here, we get a timeline on Hosanna Farr Mahaley Johnson Jones that is well worth studying.

Hosanna Mahaley Johnson Timeline

BS in History, Marquette; K-12 teaching credential, California State University; MA in Education Leadership, University of Illinois–Chicago; Executive MA in Business Administration, Kellogg School, Northwestern.

1999: summer intern in Mayor Daley’s office. From here, her career (and salary) soars.

2001:  Deputy Chief of Staff, Chicago Public Schools

2003:  Chief of Staff for Chicago Public Schools CEO, Arne Duncan

2005: Still Duncan’s chief of staff, Mahaley Johnson becomes executive officer of New Schools in Chicago. She was part of Duncan’s $100,000 Club, staff receiving well over $100,000 in pay.

2007: Then-Senator Barack Obama invites Mahaley Johnson to testify on NCLB Reauthorization Act before the Senate Education Committee on which he sits. Here’s the context in which a bulletin from the Feb. 12, 2007 National Council of Teachers of Mathematics Legislative & Policy update described it:

HELP Committee Holds NCLB Roundtable Discussion
While the House of Representatives held numerous hearings on the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) during the 109th Congress, last Thursday’s Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee roundtable discussion titled “NCLB Reauthorization: Strategies that Promote School Improvement” marked the first official Senate action. Roundtable discussions are intended to be more informal than a hearing, with panelists and Senators sitting around a large square table together and engaging in more of a dialogue than strictly timed questions and responses.

Opening the discussion, Chairman Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) spoke of NCLB’s indisputable impact and said that hearings and roundtables will be utilized in order to gather information on how best to allocate federal resources and improve existing law to turn around struggling schools. “Obviously we must do better, fortunately we know we can,” stated Kennedy. Ranking Member Mike Enzi (R-Wyo.) concurred with Kennedy’s thoughts and added that NCLB “…has provided a strong framework” and:
1) there is a need to learn more about what’s working to turn around schools and disseminate the information;
2) Congress should support school improvement activities that are authorized in NCLB; and
3) improvements can be made within the current NCLB structure to improve teacher training and professional development.

In addition to Kennedy and Enzi, participating in the roundtable were Senators: Jack Reed (D-R.I.); Barack Obama (D-Ill.); Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio); Lisa Murkowski (R-Ark.); Pat Roberts (R-Kan.); and Wayne Allard (R-Colo.).

Representing educators from the school, district and state levels, the eight panelists included:

* Dr. Martha Barber, Alabama Reading Initiative Regional Principal Coach, Birmingham, Ala.;

* Dr. Yvonne Brandon, Associate Superintendent for Instruction & Accountability, Richmond Public Schools; [her message to the Committee seemed different from the one she gave NPR one month earlier.]

* Richard Coleman, Sr., Director, An Achievable Dream Academy, Newport News, Va.;

* Michael P. Flanagan, State Superintendent of Instruction, State of Michigan;

* Hosanna Mahaley Johnson, Executive Officer, Office of New Schools, Chicago Public Schools;

* Kimberly Johnson, Principal, Briggs Chaney Middle School, Silver Spring, Md.;

* Alana Dale-Turner, Teacher, Easton High School, Easton, Md.; and

* Paul Reville, President, Rennie Center for Education Research & Policy.[ here, here, here. There's ton's more; it is significant beyond words that Kennedy would invite Reville.]

While news headlines across the country still ring of negative impressions and implications of NCLB, each panelist discussed the law and its impact in positive terms.

You can read everybody’s testimony here.

Mahaley Johnson Bio Continued

On Feb 28, 2007, the Chicago Board of Education issued this resolution honoring Johnson.

2007: Leaves Chicago to become president of Atlanta Education Fund, where she formed alliance with the business community and Atlanta Schools Superintendent Beverly Hall,  funneling millions from the Fund into Atlanta schools (Most notably $22 from General Electric). Hall  was forced to resign in 2011 when USA Today articles touched off an investigation showing that 178 teachers and principals in 44 schools were involved in cheating on standardized tests.

2007: Named by The Aspen Institute and NewSchools Venture Fund as Fellow for inaugural class of the  Entrepreneurial Leaders for Public Education Fellowship Program  [Larry Berger, CEO of Wireless Generation was in this same class, as were Russllynn Ali, Chris Barbic, Richard Barth, Michael Bennet, Phoebe Boyer, Susan Colby, Gretchen Crosby-Sims, John Deasy, Lauren Dutton, James Forman, Jr., David Harris, Kaya Henderson, Kristen Kane, Dan Katzir, Jeremy Nowak, Dr. Anthony (Tony) Recasner, Ref Rodriguez, Jon Schnur, Jim Shelton, Elisa Villaneuva Beard, and Joanne Weiss]

2009:  Named Vice-Chair National Association of Charter School Authorizers (NACSA)Board of Directors

2009: Joins Wireless Generation as Executive Director, Social Justice and District Innovation

2009: Named Broad Superintendent Academy fellow

2011: Named State Superintendent of Education, Washington D. C. Public Schools

Previous D. C. State Superintendents:
Deborah A. Gist–June 2007–April 2009, then became Rhode Island superintendent of schools. Former Senior Advisor on Education to President George W. Bush.

Kerri Briggs: from April 2009 to Sept. 2010; formerly assistant secretary for elementary and secondary education. Texas native had been working in Department of Education since 2001. After superintendency, she became Director for Education Reform at the George W. Bush Institute

Feb. 2011:  NACSA President and CEO Greg Richmond testified before the District of Columbia City Council in support of Hosanna Mahaley’s confirmation as State Superintendent of Education

Dec. 2011: Hosanna Mahaley missed five out of nine D.C. State Board of Education meetings since taking office Jan. 10, including four of the past five.–Bill Turque, D.C. education agency’s progress questioned, Washington Post

The Dec. 1 Washington Post contained this snippet: State Superintendent Hosanna Mahaley, who just married, has been out of town on her honeymoon. Board member Mary Lord (Ward 2) said she admires Mahaley but adds: “You can’t find who’s in charge of anything. It’s been a disaster.” She said Mahaley has “been getting colossally bad advice.”

So maybe she missed the meetings because she was on her honeymoon.

Or maybe she was at lunch. Item from Washingtonian Dec. 2011:  At a luncheon recognizing Washington’s most powerful women, each honoree was invited to bring a guest–someone with talent and tenacity to watch in the future. PricewaterhouseCoopers sponsored the event at DC’s St. Regis hotel.

Or maybe she was in Brazil. . . on a Pearson paid-for jaunt for superintendents. (See Associated Press Wire, Oct. 13, 2011, where besieged Kentucky superintendent says Mahaley was there too.)

Or maybe looking for second job to make up for the “salary adjustment announced to staff by the mayor March 18, 2011: Mahaley’s went from $185,000 to $179,096, Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson makes $275,000.

Alternate theory: Maybe Hosanna Mahaley  is too busy working on her resume to attend meetings.

　Those who cannot remember the past

are condemned to repeat it!

–George Santayana

A new and ghastly disease which turns the brain sponge-like and has been attacking dairy cows in England for years, has now appeared in North America. Nicknamed “Mad Cow Disease,” bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) has infected more than 120,000 cattle since it was discovered in 1985.

BSE attacks the animal’s central nervous system and makes the animal fall, act confused, or act aggressive. It is thought that British cattle contracted the virus-like agent that causes this degenerative brain disease by eating protein feed supplements made from the rendered carcasses of sheep that were infected with scrapie, the sheep form of transmissible spongiform encephalopathy.

While it has not been proven that humans can contract the disease from BSE-infected cattle, humans are susceptible to three brain diseases similar to BSE. The most common of these, though still rare, is Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD), a horrendous condition that leads to rapid dementia and death within a year after its first symptoms appear. CJD has an incubation period of up to 30 years.

So far two British dairy farmers, whose herds were infected with BSE, have died from CJD, and a teenage girl whose favorite food is beef-burgers also is said to have developed the disease. Since 1989, the number of Britons who succumb to CJD each year has increased by 100 percent. Nonetheless, the official position of both the British and U.S. governments is that BSE poses no risk to humans.

The recent discovery of a case of BSE on a ranch in Alberta, Canada, has increased fears that a BSE epidemic threatens North America.

Sources for this story, the 25^th censored story of 1994, were The Animals Agenda, March/April 1994, and In These Times, 1/29/94.

As the secrecy ban is finally lifted, the unethical, immoral, and illegal Cold War radiation experiments on unsuspecting humans by the Department of Defense are illuminated by a most remarkable document that has emerged virtually unnoticed.

Dated April 17, 1947, an Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) memorandum, stamped SECRET and addressed to the attention of a Dr. Fidler, at the AEC in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, reads in part as follows: “Subject: MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS ON HUMANS

“1. It is desired that no document be released which refers to experiments with humans and might have adverse effect on public opinion or result in legal suits. Documents covering such work field should be classified `secret’.”

The memorandum was issued over the name of O.G. Haywood, Jr., Colonel, Corps of Engineers. Apparently it was effective, for it was not until November 15, 1993, when The Albuquerque Tribune (circulation: 35,000) broke the story which was then catapulted into the national headlines by the forthright admissions and initiatives of Secretary of Energy Hazel O’Leary. Eileen Welsome’s three-part investigative series for the Tribune later won her a Pulitzer Prize.

Sources for this story were Secrecy & Government Bulletin, March 1994, and Columbia Journalism Review, March/April 1994. The revelation of the 1947 AEC memo was cited as the #6 censored story of 1995.

REPORTED IN 2011:

PAST MEDICAL TESTING ON HUMANS REVEALED

The Associated Press reported on 2/27/11 that “Shocking as it may seem, U.S. Government doctors one thought it was fine to experiment on disabled people and prison inmates. Such experiments included giving hepatitis to mental patients in Connecticut, squirting a pandemic flu virus up the noses of prisoners in Maryland, and injecting cancer cells into chronically ill people at a New York hospital.

“Much of this horrific history is 40 to 80 years old, but it is the backdrop for a meeting in Washington this week by a presidential bioethics commission. The meeting was triggered by the government’s apology last fall for federal doctors infecting prisoners and mental patients in Guatemala with syphilis 65 years ago.

“U.S. officials also acknowledged there had been dozens of similar experiments in the United States — studies that often involved making healthy people sick. …”

Those who cannot remember the past

are condemned to repeat it!

–George Santayana

NUCLEAR POWER PLANTS — ATOMIC LEMONS

The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), a national public interest group, has for years been trying to tell the story of nuclear hazards to the American public with little success.

Last year, the UCS released a report titled “Scientists’ Group Judges Federal Nuclear Safety Inspection Effort” which received little coverage.

The report criticized the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s (NRC) failure to be a tough inspector of nuclear power pants. UCS spokesman Robert D. Pollard said “Nuclear power plants are inherently hazardous. Irrespective of how safe reactors are in theory, federal inspectors cannot be sure they are built and operated safely. This report shows the NRC’s inspection efforts are biased against enforcement, undermined by political considerations, weak and ineffective.”

Contrary to the common conception that the nuclear industry is closely regulated, UCS found: only one to five percent of safety related nuclear power plant activities are inspected; NRC inspectors spend most of their time inspecting utility records, not the power plants themselves; most regulatory standards are drafted by the nuclear industry itself.

As early as 1973, the Wall Street Journal, in a well-documented article, pointed out the economic liabilities of nuclear power plants and termed them “atomic lemons,” another story which did not receive widespread coverage.

Sources for these stories were the Union of Concerned Scientists Report, November 26, 1978, and The Wall Street Journal, May 3, 1973.

PERIL AND CONFUSION AT JAPANESE NUCLEAR PLANT

The New York Times reported on March 16, 2011, that “Japan’s nuclear crisis intensified on Wednesday after the authorities announced that a second reactor at the stricken Fukushima Daichi plant in northeastern Japan may have ruptured and appeared to be releasing radioactive steam.

“The break, at the No.3 reactor unit, worsened the already perilous conditions at the plant, a day after officials said the containment vessel in the No. 2 reactor had also cracked.

“But in one of a series of rapid and at time confusing pronouncements on the crisis, the authorities insisted that damage to the containment vessel at the No. 3 reactor — the main focus of concern earlier on Wednesday — was unlikely to be severe.”

are condemned to repeat it!

–George Santayana

“Studies have linked sustained microwave exposure to headaches, dizziness, fatigue, irritability, loss of judgment, leukemia, cataracts, changes in the blood-brain barrier, heart trouble, and central nervous disorders.” Yet a cover-up exists.

The food industry uses microwaves to roast peanuts and coffee beans, freeway call-boxes use microwaves, burglar alarms and automatic garage door openers use microwaves, TV transmitters, CB radios, police radios, cab radios, telephone relay systems and radar at our airports all consume microwaves in some form. And these are only civilian related uses of microwaves and not military.

People who are exposed to the potentially harmful effects of microwave radiation have no way of knowing it. Microwave radiation, studies show, has a cumulative effect upon humans, much like x-rays. So what may appears to be safe today may result in some harmful effect 20 years later.

There has been no U.S. research to date on the long-range effects of microwave radiation on humans.

Sources for this story include Zapping of America, by Paul Brodeur, 1977; The New Yorker, 12/13/77; New Times, 3/6/78. The issue was cited as the #16 censored story of 1977.

REPORTED IN 2011: STUDY: CELLPHONE USE AFFECTS BRAIN

USA TODAY  reported on February 23, 2011, that “Holding a cellphone against your ear changes the activity in your brain, according to a new study that shows the brain is sensitive to the phone’s radiation emissions.

“Whether the increased sensitivity is harmless or hurtful to the brain is still up for debate, says researchers from the National Institutes of Health, who found that less than an hour of cellphone use is linked to increased activity in the part of the brain closest to the phone antenna.”

–George Santayana

There are some serial murders, like the Hillside Strangler, the Atlanta Murders, and the Night Stalker, that attract nationwide media coverage and generate massive public outrage.

There are others, like the Green River Murder Case, that don’t.

The Green River Case is an on-going, unsolved (at this writing) murder case that started nearly four years ago, on July 15, 1982, when the body of 16-year-old Wendy Lee Coffield was found in the Green River near Seattle, Washington.

To date, investigators have made no arrests and list 61 women as possible victims of the murderer. However, this number could go as high as 140, the number of victims carried on a fact sheet put out by the women’s Coalition to Stop the Green River Murders, Seattle. This list includes women killed in Los Angeles, Oakland, San Diego, Portland, Salem, Tualatin, Vancouver, as well as Seattle.

The victims in Seattle and other cities have been mostly young, black prostitutes, a fact that the Women’s Coalition says is one reason there has been no arrest made. “If the women were more middle class it would have been handled a lot differently,” Cookie Hunt of the Coalition maintains. The Green River Task Force, which is investigating the murders, says this not so. “We don’t know how close we are, but we are getting closer (to solving the case),” Fae Brooks, a Task Force spokeswoman said in 1985.

Given the media’s normal tendency to sensationalize serial murders, it surely is odd that the Green River Murder Case has received so little attention.

Sources for this story included the Seattle Times, 6/8/85; San Francisco Examiner, 2/17/86; and The Progressive, October 1984. It was cited as the #24 censored story of 1985.

REPORTED IN 2011:

GREEN RIVER KILLER ADMITS KILLING 49^TH VICTIM IN PLEA DEAL

While there were many earlier reports on the initial arrest of the Green River Killer, the Associated Press recently reported, on February 19, 2011, that “One of the nation’s most prolific killers pleaded guilty Friday to killing a 49^th person.

“Gary Ridgeway already is serving 48 life terms at the Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla. He entered his plea on a murder charge at the King County Regional Justice Center in Kent, a Seattle suburb.

“Ridgeway, who has been dubbed the Green River Killer, confessed to killing Rebecca “Becky” Marrero in 1982 as part of a 2003 plea deal that spared him the death penalty.”

Those who cannot remember the past

are condemned to repeat it!

–George Santayana

SOMETHING FOUL IN THE CHICKEN INDUSTRY AND THE USDA

The number of cases of salmonella has risen to 2.5 million a year and led to an estimated 500,000 hospitalizations and 9,000 deaths. This national epidemic was caused by a massive leap in consumer demand for the “healthier food” of chicken and by a massive failure of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

While the chicken industry has grown to a $16-billion-a-year industry, the USDA has cut its inspection staff, lowered health standards, and cracked down on employees who try to inform the public about contaminated food.

The relaxed inspection practices — known as the Streamlined Inspection System– are literally maiming workers and killing consumers. The rate of injury and illness for workers in poultry processing plants is twice that of textile or tobacco workers and even higher than miners.

…In 1906, Upton Sinclair shocked the public with his description of the Chicago meatpacking industry in his book, “The Jungle.” The slaughtering practices in the poultry industry today are remarkably similar. It is time the mass media blew the whistle on the USDA and the poultry industry.

This story appeared in the Summer 1989 issue of Southern Exposure. It was cited as the #10 censored story of 1989.

REPORTED IN 2011:

OBAMA SIGNS LEGISLATION TO IMPROVE FOOD SAFETY

“The Food Safety Modernization Act moves the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) away from its early-20^th-century role of responding to adulterated food to a more modern one of requiring companies to stop contamination before it happens by looking for the places where things can go wrong and fixing them.

“It also allows the agency to issue mandatory recalls and hire more food-safety inspectors. The FDA oversees most of the nation’s food supply except for meat, poultry and processed eggs, which are the purview of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.”

are condemned to repeat it!

–George Santayana

Our national dependency on the automobile has contributed to air pollution, the national trade imbalance, inflation, the deaths of 50,000 Americans annually, disabling injuries to millions more, and billions of dollars annually in lost wages and medical expenses.

It also destroyed a mass transit system that was relatively clean, energy efficient, reliable, and low-cost.

America’s long-running love affair with the automobile was not arranged in heaven. Rather, it was cold-bloodedly arranged in Detroit, Michigan. It was a massive criminal corporate conspiracy that directed our national transportation policy away from mass transit and into the automobile.

Some of the biggest corporations in the country conspired from the mid-1930s through the1940s. Electrified-rail mass-transit systems, which carried millions of riders, were bought and junked. Tracks literally were torn out of the ground, sometimes overnight. Overhead power lines were dismantled and valuable of-street rights of way were sold. Transit officials who remember the earlier systems say, if left intact, they could have formed the nucleus for a modern American transit system.

The conspirators, led by General Motors, included Standard Oil of California, Phillips Petroleum, Mack Manufacturing, Firestone Tire & Rubber, and others. In a little-remembered trial in Chicago, in 1949, they were convicted of criminal antitrust violations for their part in the demise of mass transit. Guilty corporations were fined up to $5000 each while individuals paid fines of exactly $1 each.

This extraordinary conspiracy, from which we are still suffering, was revealed by investigative writer Jonathan Kwitny based on his review of the original trial transcripts, other evidence from the cases, and personal interviews. His article appeared in the February, 1981, issue of Harper’s Magazine and was cited as the #14 censored story of 1981.

REPORTED IN 2010:

BIG STEP FOR L.A. TRANSIT

The New York Times reported on November 28, 2010, “Subway expansion, plans for light rail reflect change in city known for its cars.

“This (Los Angeles) auto-obsessed city — a place where people love their cars almost as much as they hate the traffic– has embarked on the biggest expansion of its mass transit system in decades, an effort to change the way people navigate its sprawling and clogged streets and freeways.

“Los Angeles transit officials, after years of debate, have approved an 8.6-mile extension of the Purple Line subway from Koreatown through a crowded corridor of offices, homes, museums, schools, and shopping centers in “Beverly Hills, Century City and Westwood. What once seemed a quixotic vision — the ‘Subway to the Sea,’ connecting Union Station in downtown to the Pacific Ocean in Santa Monica — no longer seems quite so quixotic.”

(Editor’s Note: While the NYT feature article later mentions that Los Angeles “once had a large, intricate and thriving public transportation system,” it does not mention the corporate conspiracy that destroyed it.)

Those who cannot remember the past

are condemned to repeat it!

–George Santayana