By Thomas Ultican 7/13/2016

San Diego Foundation was established in 1975 and has grown to almost $700 million in assets. It’s self-described purpose: “As one of the nation’s leading community foundations, The San Diego Foundation strives to improve San Diegans’ quality of life by creating equity and ensuring opportunities to be WELL (Work, Enjoy, Live & Learn).” In 2014, they gave over $10 million to educational endeavors. The following table illustrates the spending bias against public education.

Competency Based Education (CBE)

Peter Greene an education expert from Pennsylvania discussed CBE in terms of education reform ideas that should die. He wrote:

“Two years ago, CBE was barely on my radar, and honestly, having lived through the early-nineties disastrous fiasco that was Outcome Based Education, I’m still kind of amazed that we’re back here. But we are. What has changed since 1991? Computers, the internet, the cloud, the sheer raw data collecting and crunching power that a company like Pearson now has at its command. In a CBE world, neither teachers nor schools are necessary– just students at their computer terminal being put through their software-controlled paces, each keystroke and answer filed away (and put to all manner of uses) in their new lifelong data record. Public education and citizen privacy would all be washed away. CBE fans are ju-jitsuing themselves some support for the approach (Quick! Run away from the evil test and take refuge in this CBE sanctuary over here!) and ESSA has opened the door wide for new “personalized” and non-BSTest-based measures of student achievement. I still think there are some serious hurdles in CBE’s path, but if it clears those obstacles, we’ll be looking at a huge threat to public education in this country (and the absolute end of teaching as a career).”

The SD Foundation granted the Girard Foundation of La Jolla $550,415 which they promptly spent on CBE development. They gave Gooru $300,000 and $105,850 went to Make It Matter LLC. Gooru is creating technology that enables CBE and Make it Matter specializes in marketing computer based “1:1” education. Personalized one to one education means a child is stuck in front of a computer with no real human exchange involved. It is terrible education policy with a huge profit potential.

SD Foundation also gave Kid Spark Education of Solana Beach $550,000 dollars to work on CBE development.

Foundations Join Forces and Support Privatizing Schools

Besides sending over $200,000 to seven charter schools in San Diego County, SD Foundation gave $30,000 to Teach for America (TFA). TFA is a program that give college graduates 5 weeks of summer training and then state education leaders allow them to teach classes mostly in charter schools. They are inexpensive unqualified teachers.

SD Foundation spending on Universities is surprising. Almost 40% of that spending is on schools outside of San Diego County totaling $2,409,711. Grants and scholarships given in the county totaled $3,696,341. One would expect an organization that “strives to improve San Diegans’ quality of life by creating equity and ensuring opportunities” would spend a greater share of their education dollars in San Diego.

The largest single grant bestowed by the SD Foundation was $2,6 5 0,7 0 9 to the Jewish Community Foundation of San Diego. The JC Foundation had net assets at the end of 2014 of $171,593,990.

The Jewish Community Foundation spending on education follows a similar pattern as the San Diego Foundation. They spent $466,830 for groups working to privatize public education most of which went to TFA ($406,330). They also spent lavishly on private schools including $146,000 to La Jolla Country Day, a decidedly upscale K-12 private school.

By far the largest grant by the Jewish Community Foundation was the $25,817,228 bequeathed to University of California San Diego. A major patron of both the Jewish Community Foundation and UCSD is the Qualcomm founder and billionaire, Irwin Jacobs.

Three more grants from the Jewish Community Foundation were interesting. They gave Cornell University $5,511,000. They also gave the Goldman Sachs Philanthropy Fund $6,362,171.  The Goldman Sachs fund asset total at the end of 2013 was $1,500,395,380. And the JC Foundation gave the SD Foundation $1,515,800. Why give money back? It is like the Charter School Growth Fund giving their benefactors from Walmart $15,000,000 in 2013. Why?

Do They Understand What They Are Supporting?

There is no denying that both of these funds contribute to a host of worthy efforts. However, are these large concentrations of wealth undermining democratic governance? Are the people making grants to advance the privatization of public schools and promotion of CBE even aware of the ramifications of their grants?

The reality is that these two funds are large but not in comparison with many other funds around California and the US. Yet, they did put a combined almost $2,000,000 towards privatizing public schools in 2014 and only about $425,000 toward support for public schools which went mostly to wealthy neighborhoods.

Our neighbors up in Los Angeles have multiple huge funds. The table below lists the seven largest.

The motives for today’s education reform ideology are complicated by greed and lack of understanding. Some people truly believe that America’s public schools are failing and need disruptive reform. They are wrong. For the past, 30-years public schools have been steadily improving. In a recent Atlantic Magazine article Jack Schneider wrote:

 “Finally, consider the outcomes produced by the educational system. Critics are right that achievement scores aren’t overwhelmingly impressive and that troubling gaps persist across racial, ethnic, and income groups. Yet scores are up over the past 40 years, and the greatest gains over that period have been made by black and Hispanic students. They’re right that the U.S. finishes well behind exam-oriented countries like Taiwan and Korea on international tests. But scores are roughly on par with countries like Norway, which was named by the United Nations the best place in the world to live; and students from low-poverty states like Massachusetts outscore most of their global peers. Critics are right that 40 percent of college students still don’t graduate. But almost half of all American high-school students now head off to college each year—an all-time high. And whatever the doom-and-gloom about schools failing to address workforce needs, it’s worth remembering that the U.S has the strongest economy in the world—by an enormous margin.”

 Save Public Schools and Taxpayers

It is time to support public education and stop tax dollar scammers. The main weapons in the drive to privatize schools and create new corporate profit centers are charter schools, standardized testing and CBE.

The charter industry has become fraud riddled. Being able to innovate by removing accountability has led to uncertified teachers, unsafe schools and unprofessional schools. California’s earthquake safety laws do not apply to charter schools. Many charter schools are basically publicly supported private schools. Charter schools have no accountability to taxpayers and no curricular accountability. It is time to end this dangerous, destructive and expensive experiment by immediately moving all charter schools under the management of publicly elected boards and state education laws. Anything less is to support this continued wanton and growing fraud.

Standardized testing is worthless. It does not measure student, school or teacher competence. Colleges are all well aware that the SAT is not a good indicator of student success; high school grades are better. The only valid outcomes from standardized testing are it correlates well to family wealth and it makes for good propaganda when taking over schools in poor communities. Other than that it is expensive and harmful.

CBE is the latest scheme to sell technology to schools, mine student data and sell testing services for outcome verification. It is a terrible idea if you want children to be well educated, creative and lifelong learners.

It is clear that all recent education agendas coming from corporate entities have been about what is good for the adults at those corporations. Reform has become almost exclusively about fleecing taxpayers at the expense of their children.

Tags: CBE, Charter schools, Corporate Education Reform, education, Education Reform, Jewish Community Foundation, San Diego Foundation, Standardized Testing, Walton Foundation