In accordance with subsection (e) of the legislation, the Illinois P-20 Council has amalgamated with Northern Illinois University's Center for P-20 Engagement, which has instituted the Northern Illinois Regional P-20 Network. NIU's Regional P-20 Network is further conglomerated into five regional "Work Groups," including Workforce Development Group that is delegated to "[c]oordinate the Regional P-20 Network's workforce development activities with local, state, and national initiatives in order to more closely align academic offerings and student preparation with workforce needs," according to the NIU P-20 Network website .
To broaden the regional influence of the Northern Illinois Regional P-20 Network to a national scale, NIU President Douglas Baker led a delegation of P-20 Network representatives to the 2014 White House College Opportunity Summit to convene with "colleges and universities, business leaders, nonprofits and others committed to supporting more college opportunities" and more regional workforce development planning, according to NIU Today .
Douglas's P-20 delegation emphasized that "[r]ecent studies show a strong correlation between the educational attainment of a state's workforce and median wages in the state, meaning that increasing access to high quality education expands economic opportunity for residents and helps to strengthen the regional economy." Accompanying the P-20 Network delegation, John Rico, who is a Co-Chair of the Illinois Workforce Investment Board, stated that "[a]s a business owner, I believe that the P-20 and workforce are joined at the hip. Businesses depend on the K-12 and higher ed institutions to create the proper programs that offer students the required soft skills, training, degrees and certifications necessary for all students to thrive and prosper in their career development."
Douglas's and Rico's pitch to the White House for regional integration of corporate business and P-20 education councils is evidence of the trend towards nationwide assimilation of public-private P-16/20 council governance across the business and educational sectors of the United States' planned economy.
This cradle-to-career collaboration between corporate business, the Northern Illinois Regional P-20 Network, and the federal government is paralleled by the cradle-to-career collaboration between corporate business, the California SAPEP P-20 Regional Intersegmental Alliances, and the NAF. Meanwhile, these regional-national council networks are complemented by the proliferation of several other state-level P-20 councils across the country, including the P-20 Council of Connecticut , the Delaware P-20 Council , the P-20 Leadership Council of Maryland , the Missouri P-20 Council , and the Governor's P-20 Council of Arizona . According to the Education Commission of the States , a total of "38 states have established a P-16 or P-20 council. Two states (Louisiana and Pennsylvania) have two councils convening P-16/P-20 stakeholders, for a total of 40 P-16 or P-20 councils nationwide. An additional five states do not have a P-16 or P-20 council, but have consolidated most or all governance of public education in one or two agencies or boards who essentially perform the function of a P-16 or P-20 council." At least nine state-level P-16/20 councils are thoroughly incorporated with "local and/or regional P-16/P-20 councils."
Fueling this national-fascist proliferation of P-16/20 workforce planning councils, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has financed public-private P-16 and P-20 council projects with at least $8,007,834 in grants between the years 2003 and 2010. In fact, the Gates Foundation Senior Policy Officer for Education is designated as an administrative member of the Superintendent's California P-16 Council, which thus puts a Gates Foundation official directly in charge of educational governance in California.
In sum, these P-16/20 council networks form the nationwide institutional and statutory infrastructure necessary to facilitate mass charter privatization at both the state and federal levels by monolithic education corporations such as the NAF and KIPP. Consider the nonprofit KIPP corporation as a case study of how educational megacorporations utilize regional and state P-16/20 council planning to dominate the national education market for workforce development through "career pathways" and "career readiness" programs such as KIPP Future Focus:
- The Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP): KIPP operates 200 corporate charter schools that currently span twenty US states, which KIPP subdivides into thirty-one corporate regions. The KIPP website states that the company's corporate "regions are supported by a central office, governed by a common [unelected] local board, and led by a local executive director. . . . [A] central office provides services across multiple schools, such as human resources, recruiting, facilities management, technology, food service, procurement, and transportation, as well as alumni services."
KIPP coordinates three corporate regions in California and one corporate region in Illinois, which are thereby linked with the regional P-20 council networks that facilitate public-private charter school incorporation across both of those states.
Furthermore, the Chief Research, Design, and Innovation Officer of the KIPP Foundation, Jonathan Cowan, collaborated with Illinois P-20 Council officials and the Boston Consulting Group to conduct a study titled "Illinois Report Cards: Project Update to the P-20 Council," which charts data compiled to streamline P-20 outcomes. Personnel from KIPP and the Illinois P-20 Council are also partnered through Advance Illinois, which is a 501(c)3 corporation managed by a "group of philanthropic, education, political, business, and community leaders" who provide support for various workforce development educational reforms such as House Bill (HB) 5729: the Postsecondary and Workforce Readiness (PWR) Act. According to the Advance Illinois website , the Project Director of Advance Illinois is "the founding principal at KIPP Ascend Charter School in Chicago," Jim O'Connor, while the Deputy Director of Advance Illinois is Benjamin Boer, who "sits on the Performance Evaluation Advisory Council for the Illinois State Board of Education and supports the work of a number of Illinois P-20 Council committees."
To bolster national P-20 workforce training through KIPP's unelected corporate councils, KIPP is funded by the tax-exempt foundations of several megalithic corporations including the Walton Family Foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Citi Foundation, Goldman Sachs Foundation, Prudential Foundation, and the JP Morgan Chase Foundation. KIPP is also bankrolled by Google Corporation and billionaire Reed Hastings, who is the founder, president, CEO, and Chairman of the Board of Netflix.
Hastings, a former member of the California State Board of Education , also sits on the KIPP Board of Directors , along with Walmart Baroness, Carrie Walton Penner, who is a Trustee of the Walton Family Foundation; Philippe Dauman, who is the President and CEO of Viacom; and Emma Bloomberg, the daughter of billionaire corporatist-politician Michael Bloomberg.
Now, backed by the administration and financing of such corporate giants, the unelected council governance of KIPP schools is being pushed as a model for nationwide education reform by corporatists such as Hastings.
In his keynote speech at the 21st Annual California Charter Schools Conference, Hastings lauded the "self-perpetuating governance" of unelected corporate charter school councils, and he called for the institution of self-perpetuating council governance throughout a 90% charter school education system across the fifty states: "the work ahead is really hard because we're at 8% of students in California whereas in New Orleans there're 90%. So we've got a lot of catch-up to do. We've got a lot of work of adding more schools . . . And if we succeed over the next twenty or thirty years, that will be one of the fastest rates of change ever seen around the world for a large system."
The Deweyan-Hegelian Conglomeration of Education, Healthcare, and Law Enforcement:
Considering the extensiveness of this already widespread charter council expansion, backed with the monumental corporate sponsorship of the Gates Foundation and billionaires like Hastings, Charlotte Iserbyt investigates an imperative question in her article "School Choice Is America's Trojan Horse" : "[w]hat is to keep Americans from accepting the unelected council form of government at all levels of government once one of the major sections of our economy (education) is being run by unelected councils?"
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