Guidestar, "Neutral" Arbiter of Nonprofits, Swings Openly Left

The venerable* nonprofit organization rating website Guidestar has apparently become comfortable enough with its venerableness to openly shift to the left. This week it came out with a list of "hate group"nonprofit organizations that was long on conservative values and short on actual hate. Not surprising given that the list came from the Southern Poverty Law Center, an organization that would be genuinely surprised that anyone would NOT consider virtually any conservative Christian nonprofit organization a hate group. SPLC's definition of "hate" seems to be anything that disagrees with the progressive agenda. One Target  on SPLC's list is the American Family Association, a conservative Christian group that opposes redefining marriage, promotes Christian values, and opposes pornography, transgender bathrooms, and abortion. This according to SPLC and now Guidestar makes it a hate group.

Let the pandering to the socialist left begin....

As a semi-retired nonprofit professional, I read trade publications for the industry and utilize websites like Guidestar. Mostly I'm trying to keep organizations I consult with out of hot water with rating sites like Guidestar. Guidestar's raison d'être is ostensibly to serve as a guide to philanthropists, donors, and funding organizations as to the fiscal health and financial responsibility of nonprofit organizations that approach them for donations. Guidestar has, over time, become the most powerful arbiter of legitimacy in the nonprofit world.

Now that it has that power, like other "venerable" nonprofit journals I won't name, Guidestar's leftist underpinnings are beginning to show. One would think that a nonprofit organization should be judged by whether or not it is responsible with its funding and whether it is accomplishing its mission. If it's mission is to promote the creation of a socialist/communist state in America, so be it. Does it accomplish that mission? If you support that mission, then that's something you will want to know before you give them money.

As to the value of that mission, Guidestar should have no judgmental power, at least if it is going to claim "neutrality" in its assessment of America's not for profits. It is not Guidestar's business to arbitrarily apply labels like "hate group" to the charities it rates, especially when their criteria appears to be that the group is conservative. Otherwise, Guidestar needs to label itself "The Liberal Guidestar" in the interest of full disclosure.

I'm just saying.

© 2017 by Tom King

* Or at least as venerable as anything gets in the digital age.

An Open Letter to Ruth McCambridge

Deja Vu all over again?

Ruth McCambridge, editor of Nonprofit Quarterly, gets a lot of hate mail, particularly since NPQ stopped talking about Donald Trump. She got this delightful missive the other day from a Trump supporter and shared it on her email newsletter today.

• “Notice Ruth, the writer of this, is a JEW and we know they are rarely honest. They are mad cause they can’t buy or control Trump.”

Since many on the left think conservatives love Trump (and Ruth is unabashedly left-leaning, which I can respect), I decided to respond to her letter.  My own letter is appended below.

Dear Ruth,

I am not surprised that you have been targeted with racist hate-mail from Trump supporters. As a conservative, I find Donald Trump to be appalling, perhaps even more than I find Hillary Clinton's and Bernie Sanders' open socialism objectionable, I find Donald Trump to be even more of a threat to the American ideal of preserving life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. As you have discovered, one of the groups Trump appeals most to are the xenophobes of both parties. He is gaining momentum by drawing from the angry fringe groups that drag down both conservatives and liberals. I think there needs to be a coming together among people with good hearts who want the best for America to oppose the extremists that are capturing what Rush Limbaugh calls the "uninformed voter". Limbaugh may make your eyes glaze over, but he does recognize the danger posed by those who refuse to engage in a debate of ideas and instead respond only viscerally without defining what they are angry about or what to do about it.

In Trump we have 1933 revisited. Hitler promised to make Germany great again. Trump promises to make America great again. Hitler tapped into the socialist sentiment and the economic woes of 20s and 30s Germany with a bunch of vague promises to take care of the German people. Trump makes the same kind of vague promises to his own followers and attracts radical right-wingers and left-wingers who hear only the angry words they too would speak if they had his microphone. Most frighteningly, he appeals to the racist tendencies in those outlying groups that accept all kinds of conspiracy theories without critical thought. The far libertarian right has gone so far out there that they have circled the planet and bumped into the loony Marxist left and there Trump has set up camp.

It's no accident that you are getting anti-Semitic hate male. Trump's support comes from a segment of the American population that mirrors the segment of Germany that propelled Hitler to power in 33.  A man like Trump purposely makes his positions so vague and changeable from audience to audience that he gets people to embrace highly-charged emotional ideas that in their cooler moments they would disavow. His "pledge of allegiance to Trump" exercise in Orlando was particularly chilling, but only to someone who actually stayed awake in high school history class.  In college we watched Leni Riefenstahl's "Triumph of the Will". I have little doubt that, should Trump win, someone is going to produce a film called "Triumph of the Donald". God help us if that happens.

Ruth, we may have political views that are polar opposite, but we share the same country. It would not surprise me if we shared many common beliefs as well. I want smaller, less intrusive government with power divested to the local and state as much as possible and more opportunity for individuals to succeed on their own power. I think it's more effective that way. My friends on the left want larger, more "involved" federal government that provides a universal safety net and something of a utopia on Earth. While I may disagree that any human utopia will ever work (I believe in original sin, so that's part of my intellectual makeup), it is a discussion we can have, so long as we are willing to keep it rational.

As a former community organizer, I was able to create coalitions of liberals and conservatives by focusing our attention on the issues and how to solve them. We all had to agree to leave ideology at the doors. Republicans had to learn to speak Democrat and vice-versa. We were the only initiative to get what we wanted from the newly minted Republican majority in the Texas legislature that year. We got justice by presenting the issue and a solution that worked, not by chaining ourselves to light poles in front of the governor's mansion.

We can solve problems without burning down barns if we focus on what we want to do, rather than on some notion of ideological purity. If we want to help poor people without insurance, for instance, let's do that. That's the issue. Nobody wants poor people to die from neglect of their health. You may believe in universal healthcare as the only solution as part of your ideology, but a whole lot of folk have a problem with that and the results have been uncomfortably similar to what the opponents of nationalized healthcare predicted - higher rates, poorer service. I made an eye appointment to get my free Medicaid glasses - I have to wait a month. If I pay the $78 for my contact exam, I can get an appointment in three days. When my Medicaid was canceled because one month I made some extra money to pay my landlord the back rent I owed, the Washington State Health Exchange gave me the good news that I could get health insurance through them for a mere $1,156 per MONTH. I had been forced to go on Medicaid or pay a large fine to the IRS. Now I'm on their books and either have to stay poor enough to stay on Medicaid or the IRS will force me to buy health insurance that will cost me more than I make most months (I care for a wife who is on full disability and can't be left alone).

I think there's a better way to deal with the problem that is more elegant and doesn't involve supporting a bloated federal bureaucracy and paying bureaucrats to generate paper for each other and to find out more and more personal information about me.

We could be discussing those kinds of solutions and still agree that we should find a way to care for the less fortunate in our society. As one of the "less fortunate", I don't want anyone to carry me. I spent 40 years in the nonprofit sector, started 5 agencies from scratch and discovered that they don't call 'em nonprofits for nothing. I chose that path. At the end of my life I'm scratching to make a living and keep my beloved wife alive. I'd like to do it with some dignity. Let's talk about how we can do that.

Because we have not talked about solutions and because we have spent decades tossing invective and lies back and forth across the ideological aisle at each other, we've reached a tipping point in America. If those of us who are reasonable were to join forces, we might just tip the nation back from the brink of some new brand of national socialism. Replacing Obamacare with Trumpcare is not a solution the sensible folk on either the left or right would like to see.

There is a powerful positive feeling toward Jews and Israel over here on the conservative side of the aisle. Know that we will stand with you. This is not 1933 Germany and a whole lot of us managed to stay awake in history class. We are with you. Please know that these racists are not us and we aren't even a little comfortable with them in our midst. And these folk are in the midst of both schools of thought. Neither the conservatives nor the liberals are free from these snakes crawling around on our ideological home turf. 

God go with you, Ruth.

Sincerely,

Tom King
Puyallup, Washington (late of East Texas)

© 2016

What’s Wrong With New Ideas in Education?

(c) 2012 by Tom King



Anyone?   Anyone?


Trick question. The answer is, “Nothing” or maybe “It’s about time we got some!”


When we built the US education system around the German model back at the beginning of the 20th century, we were in essence trying to fit a round peg in a square hole (the square hole being the German education system). The United States was settled by waves of people seeking opportunities outside the ancient and "ossified" societies of Europe. An unpopular Harvard sociologist once wrote a treatise suggesting that people with ADHD tended to migrate to the US at higher rates and because there is a genetic component, we, therefore, inherited a nation with an inordinate number of restless, high energy people in it. It accounts for the impulse people had to load up creaky Contestogas and move away from the more settled East Coast to the Wild West, which probably explains why the west was so wild in the first place. 

All these hyper people, goes the theory, continued percolating westward till they hit the Pacific Ocean where they piled up on the beach and invented California. (It explains a lot - this theory). So after filling up this country with people who didn’t fit in the Old World’s rigidly classed societies, what to 19th century progressive education theorists do?  They run right back to the Europeans and adopt an education system designed specifically for that stratified European culture. It seemed like a good idea at the time. We were, after all, entering an industrial boom at the time and needed lots of well-mannered factory workers and the Germans did have the ideal education system for that.

The German graded system was designed specifically to teach kids to show up on time, sit still and do repetitive work all day while their supervisors kept up a steady monitoring of their production. In essence, the graded school system was designed as a production line to produce production line workers.  Great if you are training future workers for arms factories and munitions plants (which, as it turns out, was what the Germans were up to). Not so great for the kind of kids we have in great abundance in America. Don’t get me wrong. Some kids do quite well in a graded setting. I, myself, made good grades, but was bored to distraction and never quite found a job that matched my training.

So I gave teaching a shot.

I once taught at a one teacher school in New Mexico where I had 14 kids in 6 grades on 7 reading levels and at least 8 of them were diagnosable with ADHD. This is not uncommon, especially in rural areas, or at least that was my experience. When I started the kids were an average 3 grade levels behind. Their previous teacher was a rigid, old school teacher, much loved by the school's board of directors (4 of the five of whom were retired or former teachers). The parents, on the other hand, did NOT like the teacher and had demanded a new teacher, threatening to pull their kids out of the school en masse because they hated school and were learning nothing. I took the job because my previous school let me go. I was the last hired, so I was the first to go when the school lost a lot of kids at once. I needed a job. They needed a teacher.

I enjoyed the challenge of my new school. My classroom was a moveable feast. I had to keep the kids going all the time. Our recesses were sometimes rather long to allow the kids to blow off steam. We did a lot of cross-grade mentoring in the classes with older kids helping younger kids with their work. I must have done something right. That year my class reached grade level on average on their achievement tests - some exceeded it. My parents were meeting in their homes for prayer groups at the end of the year, praying I would stay. The school board, meanwhile, asked me to leave. Apparently my school room didn't look like a school room was supposed to.  What I learned was that "old school" was more about appearance than results.

Yesterday I wrote about the objections being floated about corporate foundations like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation funding new ideas like those proposed by groups like Teach For America and Students First. I think Gates' support for these new education entrepreneurs is admirable. The children of America are not square pegs. They come in a beautiful array of shapes, sizes and learning styles. We need some fresh ideas in education that utilize new technologies and capabilities. Computers, as it turns out, really work with ADHD kids. Maybe that’s Gates’ angle – teach the kids to use computers to educate themselves, so Microsoft will have more customers. I want to know what the heck is wrong with that?  All opponents can give me is either that it threatens the teacher unions or that the funders might make a profit doing it.

Education that makes a profit?  How cool would that be?

What was it Alvin Toffler said? “The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.” The tools being offered by the Gates Foundation and others are just the tools that kids need to learn, unlearn and relearn throughout their careers.

If Gates sells a few extra copies of Windows or Apple sells a few more Macs as a result of their investments in education, I can live with that. If they make it possible for young education entrepreneurs, freed from the shackles of teacher’s unions and politically polarized school systems, to figure out more effective ways to teach kids, I say, “Good on ‘em.”

The old fossils in the education establishment, however, are really gonna hate it.

Tom King

Defending the Phrog Farm - Education "Experts" Opine on Gates Foundation 'Meddling' in Education

Diane Ravitch is puzzled by the Gates Foundation.  Apparently Diane thinks " their efforts to “reform” education are woefully mistaken."  It seems, to Ms. Ravitch's horror, the Gates Foundation is funding "astroturf” groups of young teachers who insist that they don’t want any job protections, don’t want to be rewarded for their experience (of which they have little) or for any additional degrees, and certainly don’t want to be represented by a collective bargaining unit.

And there is the key to Diane's anger with Gates. His foundation supports "non-unionized" groups.

(insert gasp of collective horror)

Also, apparently, Diane can't get a meeting with Bill to tell him her opinion and she seems more than a little upset about that.

Rick Cohen over at Nonprofit Quarterly is also righteously indignant and pulls together a lot of supporting commentary in his article, opining that the Gates Foundation is promoting an anti-teacher, anti-public education agenda in state after state.

I understand Rick and Diane's concern. Education is a frustrating issue, whichever side of the fence you sit on. If you're on the blindly pro-union side, however, all that loose money, uncontrolled by some "collective bargaining unit", must make them nervous. Some schools might take the money and be 'corrupted'.

Diane seems most worried, about the supposed deleterious effects of the Gates Foundation's support for a non-unionized, dare I say, free market approach to education. As soon as anyone funds a group that is even looking at an approach that rewards performance rather than time served, the pro-union crowd rises up with pitchforks and torches.

Myself, I've watched too many outstanding teachers over the years fired because they rocked the union boat, made other teachers look bad, taught in ways that upset their colleagues or drifted outside the holy curriculum. One of my favorite teachers, Marva Collins, left the public school system and started a private school in a garage that quickly filled up with kids who had been kicked out of the Chicago Public School system. I've met some of those kids and they are miles ahead of their peers. Marva could never have taught like she did in the unionized public school system. Her teaching methods would not long have been tolerated.

What the Gates Foundation's support of non-unionized teachers does is add a competitive element to education. (And, yes, Virginia, there are teachers who don't want to be in teacher's unions.) How that having a place in education for nonunion teachers profits Microsoft is something of a mystery to me.

Any school that doesn't want Gates' money is, of course, free to not take it and go ahead and do what they want, just as my own alma mater chose not to accept government education grants and the strings that come with them.

Let's face it, the public school system is in dismal shape in much of America. Even the kids know it and are rebelling even more than we were back in the 60s. What's wrong with trying something different?

Kids and parents both want education that teaches our young-uns to do something valuable, something marketable so they have good jobs when they grow up and don't have to live in our basements. Companies (including the evil corporations) want trained workers too. So why is it so bad to teach kids more of the kinds of things that get them good jobs and start successful careers? Foundations wanting to fund innovation in education shouldn't damage the unionized education system if, as the unions claim, their system is better. If kids aren't getting a good education, parents will simply refuse to pay for it and send their kids back to class with a suitably reliable union teacher.

Why not, let's try something new and see if it works better before we summarily pitch out the bath without checking if the baby is still in there? The biggest complaint parents like me have with education is that the teachers unions protect bad teachers, reward them with steady raises and benefits no matter what sort of miserable teacher they prove themselves to be. All they have to do is mark time and not do anything spectacular.

I'm wondering why paying teachers by how well their kids learn isn't a good idea. So what if some students are poorly motivated, poorly disciplined and troubled. Shouldn't we as parents be willing to pay teachers who have the ability to handle those tough kids, motivate them and inspire them. And I'm tired of hearing teachers whine about the poor quality of their students.

I worked with multi-diagnosis emotionally disturbed kids. They came from horrific homes. I did things with my kids that people said couldn't be done. My kids struggled; a few let me down, but for the most part, they made me proud to be their teacher. I worked outside the teacher's unions and the education system. Our kids had the best outcomes records in the state next to other treatment centers and we were hated by our colleagues and our government supervisors for showing them up.

I'm tired of the teacher's unions complaining that we are teaching children to be good test takers and yet quote the results of those same tests to prove that we need to spend more money (largely on union teacher salaries and dues) ostensibly to enable our kids able to pass those same tests with as good a grades as their Japanese or Europeans counterparts.

Little secret here - that's going to take more than a little "teaching to the test" to kick up those test scores and prove that all that money was well spent.

The problem with governments and unions and even schools is that they mistake sameness for fairness. If they could make us all "C" students, I think they might be happy.  They know damned good and well they're not going to make "A" students out of all of them. 

In so-called "progressive" societies and organizations, if you do too well, if you stick your head above the crowd, the rest of the group WILL lop your head right off for making the rest of them look bad.  It's well known that at Harvard and other progressive Ivy league schools that the quickest way to not get tenure is to win the teacher of the year award. Unions all meant well in the beginning, but, especially in the field of education, they've turned schools into swamps.

Management guru, Dr. Jerry Harvey, once pointed out in his insightful 1977 paper, "Organizations as Phrog Farms" that:

"The Job of most swamp managers is to maintain and enhance the swamp, not to drain it.... The purpose of swamp consultants—in the eyes of swamp managers—is to help the swamp operate more effectively."

Simply substitute "school superintendents" for "swamp managers" and "teacher's unions"  for "swamp consultants".

You should read professor's Harvey's wonderfully subversive book: The Abilene Paradox and Other Meditations on Management.  It explains what happened to education and why many big corporations, especially the ones that are "too big to fail" aren't much better off.

Dr. Harvey's paper "The Abilene Paradox" explains as well as any book on management I've ever read, why groups of people try to make good decisions about what to do and with the best of intentions, manage to decide to do what nobody wants to do and make themselves miserable in the process.  I recommend reading the book curled up in a chair with no distractions.  You can get the two key articles at the above links in a pdf file, but be warned:  there is a danger of spewing coffee all over your computer monitor.  Just so you know the risk.

Just one man's opinion.

Tom King

The IRS Thinks Something's Sinister at the Tea Party?

Media pundits, political operatives and the Obama Adminstration keep trying to "discover" something sinister going on with the Tea Party. Now the Nonprofit Quarterly's Rick Cohen gets into the act, reporting gleefully that the IRS is going after the Tea Party.

First, there is not a "Tea Party" so far as a national organizations goes. The Tea Party is a loose collection of individuals who share a desire for smaller, less intrusive government (not nonexistent government as Mr. Cohen snarkily suggests). Many Tea Parties are only organized in the sense that some guy made T-shirts and we all bought them with our own money and showed up at a park to rally for a specific candidate. We communicate by bulletin boards and websites that some of us donate money to in order to pay for the hosting charges.

NPQ's Cohen is rather tickled that the IRS is going after the Tea Party.  The IRS is going to be monumentally disappointed after it spends all that money trying to find out where the Tea Party is making money off the Koch brothers or whatever conservative bugbear they and the left believes is funding the whole thing. The administration and its allies on the left can't seem to imagine that regular raggedy people like me would care about politics without being paid to.

I spent 30 years in the nonprofit industry helping raise millions of dolllars for small nonprofits that couldn't afford to pay me to do it. I was always the development director AND something else that took up most of my time. And there's a reason they called those agencies "nonprofit". I'm 57 and have no retirement, no savings, no home and no health insurance. If I get sick I either pay for it or die and that's okay by me because I chose to do what I did. I worked with seriously troubled kids, many with disabilities on top of abuse and mental illness, adults with physical, mental and developmental disabilities, seniors with age-related disabilities, preschoolers with learning disabilities and the 1 in 5 citizens in East Texas who cannot drive due to age or disability. I started an independent living center for people with disabilities. I worked for six months to write the grant, organize the board, raised nearly 2 million dollars and then gave the organization over to people with disabilities to run and walked away to work on transportation issues. I worked side by side with conservatives and liberals to create fair funding for transit across my state, testified before the state legislature and was warned to check under my car before starting it because I was messing with somebody's "deal".

And, largely because of what I saw in government and quasi-government agencies, I am a Tea Party Activist. I've never received a cent to show up at a rally nor has anyone I know of. We all pay our own way, make or buy our own signs and T-Shirts, volunteer to organize and bring food to rallies. How the hell is the IRS going to tax that. The Tea Party where I'm from only exists when a bunch of us come together to howl. The only real way you can tell what we think is to ask us and pollsters do.

We've learned a bit about community organizing from the left. We kept some parts and pitched the other, less savory bits. NGOs and government officials kept asking me what I was trying to get out of the transportation advocacy I was doing. I told them nothing, but they didn't believe me. They kept telling me I couldn't get any grant money. I kept telling them I didn't want any. I wanted fair funding for East Texas rural transit - two very political Democrat leaning district were taking 60-75% of all the rural transit dollars. My group took them on head-on. I was attacked verbally, reviled and appointed to the Public Transportation Advisory Committee for my state by the governor. We got the job done, but it was because we all worked together to do it - progressives and conservatives. We just had to figure out that we wanted the same things, only disagreed on how to do it. Once we figured out what we all wanted, it was easier to figure out how to get it.

When we were done, we didn't organize a nonprofit to do something we no longer needed done. We just let our legislature know we'd be back if they messed with East Texas again. It was my introduction to the kind of real community organizing that led to a Tea Party organizing in my neck of the woods.

My tea party associates help fund charitable organizations all over the region. They are neighbors, friends and decent people. I really resent the implication that there is something sinister going on with the Tea Party. I know well what they charge for helping the nonprofits I've worked with - $0. So, I do get a bit impatient with folk who complain because some mega-corporation's CEO gets a bonus that's bigger than their salary when they've chosen, of their own free will, to work for a nonprofit organization, knowing full well that it's a "nonprofit". I agree that the laborer deserves his hire, but to complain that they are not making what someone who has dedicated his life to making money is rather disingenuous.

The angst among left leaning politicians and career nonprofit managers over taxing the Tea Party reminds me of my Uncle Bob, who once borrowed his son's electric car. He called home from the gas station frustrated. "I've circled this thing have a dozen times and can't figure out where to stick the gas nozzle in."

The IRS is going to have the same devil of a time figuring out how to tax Tea Parties as the British did trying to find the "Indians" who threw all that tea into the bay.

(c) 2012 by Tom King