By Thomas Ultican 2/4/2020

Ivy League schools are losing their luster to the stranglehold of billionaire money. The Program on Education Policy and Governance (PEPG) at the Harvard Kennedy School produces Education Next. It is not the kind of objective journal expected from an academic institution. The driving force behind PEPG is Paul Peterson a choice zealot who trained many of the academics contributing to Education Next.

Influenced by super-wealthy people like Bill Gates and the Walton family, Education Next’s reform ideology undermines democratic control of public schools. It promotes public school privatization with charter schools and vouchers. The contributors to the Education Next blog include Chester E. Finn, Jay P. Greene, Eric Hanushek, Paul Hill, Michael Horn, Robin J. Lake and Michael Petrilli. Robin Lake’s new article “The Hoosier Way; Good choices for all in Indianapolis” is an all too common example of Education Next’s biased publishing.

The Propaganda Source

The portfolio model was a response to John Chubb’s and Terry Moe’s 1990 book, Politics, Markets, and America’s Schools, which claimed that poor academic performance was “one of the prices Americans pay for choosing to exercise direct democratic control over their schools.” It is interesting that the late John Chubb was a committed conservative living in Charles Koch’s hometown of Wichita, Kansas. His widow, Angela Kennedy-Toon, still lives there and is a Managing Partner at an Ed Tech company. Her company profile lists Angela’s close education follows as Chester Finn, Michael Horn, Frederick Hess, Wendy Kopp and Jeanne Allen.

It was a social scientist Paul Hill who developed the portfolio model of school management.

Paul Hill studied political science at Seattle University then completed a Masters in political science at Ohio State in 1966. With the election of Richard Nixon in 1969, Hill, who was working as a Republican congressional staffer, got an administration job as a Research staff member, Office of Economic Opportunity. In 1972, Hill was awarded a Doctorate in Political Science by Ohio State University and became Assistant Director for Policy Studies, The National Institute of Education,U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. He was there until Democrat Jimmy Carter was elected president in 1977. After leaving government service, Hill worked as a social science researcher at the Rand Corporation for the next two decades.

In 1993, Hill founded the Center on Reinvention Public Education (CRPE) on the campus of the University of Washington. While building his organization, he also worked out the mechanics of ending democratic control of public education. His solution is known as the portfolio model of school governance.

The portfolio model directs closing schools that score in the bottom 5% on standardized testing and reopening them as charter schools or Innovation schools. In either case, the local community loses their right to hold elected leaders accountable, because the schools are removed from the school board’s portfolio. It is a plan that guarantees school churn in poor neighborhoods, venerates disruption and dismisses the value of stability and community history.

Robin Lake was one of Hill’s first hires at CRPE. She became his closest confederate and when he decided to reduce his work load in 2012, Lake took his place as the Director of CRPE. Lake and Hill co-wrote dozens of papers almost all of which deal with improving and promoting charter schools. Since the mid-1990s Lake has been publishing non-stop to promote the portfolio model of school management and charter schools. Lake’s new article up on Education Next is her latest in praise of the portfolio agenda for resting school control from local voters.

Like a large number of the contributors to Education Next, neither Robin Lake nor her mentor Paul Hill have practiced or formally studied education. None-the-less, they have been successful at selling their brand of education reform; which is privatization. They describe their organization, CRPE, as engaging in “independent research and policy analysis.” However, Media and Democracy’s Source Watch tagged the group an “industry-funded research center that . . . receives funding from corporate and billionaire philanthropists as well as the U.S. Department of Education.” A report from Seattle Education lists some of the funders:

• The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
• The Broad Foundation
• Fund for Educational Excellence
• Michael and Susan Dell Foundation
• National Alliance for Public Charter Schools
• The Seattle Foundation
• US Department of Education
• Walton Family Foundation
• The Brookings Institute
• The Business Roundtable

Harvard’s Education Next Makes Propaganda Look Swell – Lake’s Article Header

Undermining Public Schools

“The Hoosier Way” recounts what Lake depicts as the heroic history of Republican State Senator Teresa Lubbers’ seven-year long campaign to enact a charter school law in Indiana. It explains that in 2001, Lubber finally won when Democratic Governor Frank O’Bannon signed her bill into law. Lake goes on to explain, “Over the next decade, under Governor Mitch Daniels and state schools chief Tony Bennett, state legislators passed a whole package of reform bills: launching a voucher initiative, expanding charters and giving them rights to unused district buildings, allowing virtual charters, and overhauling teacher accountability.”

These are all presented as positive things for students in Indiana and especially in Indianapolis where newly elected Democratic Mayor Bart Peterson embraced charter schools.

During the 1999 mayors race Peterson hired David Harris a 27-year old lawyer with no education background to be his education guy. Under the states new charter school law, mayors were given the power to bestow charters. David Harris was soon running Mayor Peterson’s charter school office. By 2007 Harris and Peterson had authorized 16 charter schools in Indianapolis.

Today, charter schools which are not accountable to local residents of Indianapolis are serving nearly 50% of the cities students. Plus, 10,000 of the 32,000 Indianapolis Public School (IPS) students are in Innovation schools which are also not accountable to local voters. The organization most responsible for the loss of democratic control over publicly financed schools in Indianapolis is The Mind Trust.

The First Charter Schools in Indianapolis Opened in 2003

Tony Bennett served as Superintendent of public schools in Indiana during the administration of Republican Governor Mitch Daniels. Bennett was “widely known as a hard-charging Republican reformer associated with Jeb Bush’s prescriptions for fixing public schools: charter schools, private school vouchers, tying teacher pay to student test scores and grading schools on a A through F scale.” He left Indiana to become Florida’s Education Commissioner in 2013, but soon resigned over an Indiana scandal involving fixing the ratings of the Crystal House charter school which was owned by a republican donor.

In 2011 before leaving, Bennett was threatening to take action against Indianapolis schools. The Mind Trust responded to Bennett with a paper called “Creating Opportunity Schools.” Lake writes,

“In response to a request from Bennett, The Mind Trust put out a report in December 2011 calling for the elimination of elected school boards and the empowerment of educators at the local level. … At the same time, Stand for Children, an education advocacy nonprofit, was raising money to get reform-friendly school-board members elected, and much of the public debate centered on The Mind Trust’s proposal. … A new board was elected in 2012 (the same year Mike Pence became governor) and the board quickly recruited a young new superintendent, Lewis Ferebee, to start in September 2013.” (Emphasis added)

Lewis Ferebee was a member of Jeb Bush’s Chiefs for Change. He was selected to continue the Jeb Bush theory of education reform. It is the theory Bush developed while serving on the board of the Heritage Foundation in the 1990s.

Stand for Children is the infamous dark money organization that funnels money from financial elites into local school board elections. The organization began after Jonah Edelman helped his mother Marian Wright Edelman, founder and president of the Children’s Defense Fund, with a 1996 rally. He took advantage of the situation and the contacts to start Stand for Children. In the early 2000s, Edelman’s pro-privatization anti-union agenda alienated many of his early supporters.

A 2016 paper from the neoliberal organization Progressive Policy Institute explains how The Mind Trust looked to attract like minded national organizations to Indianapolis:

“The Mind Trust convinced Teach For America (TFA), The New Teacher Project (now TNTP), and Stand for Children to come to Indianapolis, in part by raising money for them. Since then TFA has brought in more than 500 teachers and 39 school leaders (the latter through its Indianapolis Principal Fellowship); TNTP’s Indianapolis Teaching Fellows Program has trained 498 teachers; and Stand for Children has worked to engage the community, to educate parents about school reform, and to spearhead fundraising for school board candidates.”

Lake states, “Ferebee, Harris, and Kloth formed what one observer called a civic triangle to focus on creating high-performing schools.” By “high performing schools” they mean charter schools dominated by unqualified TFA temp teachers who have assimilated the school privatization philosophy. The third member of the “civic triangle” is Jason Kloth, a Teach for America alumnus, named deputy mayor of education by Republican Mayor Greg Ballard.

Lake also informs us that “The Mind Trust brought school-board members and local civic leaders to New Orleans, which was implementing the portfolio model—characterized by broad school choice for families (based on a “portfolio” of charter and district-run schools), plus autonomy paired with accountability for educators.”

However, members of the black and brown community including the NAACP started realizing that it was their communities that were being robbed of public schools. Lake noted, “Despite support from local newspapers’ editorial boards, the black community recoiled and many people saw The Mind Trust as a group of elitists writing plans to take over the local schools.”  In 2013, to counter these problems, The Mind Trust hired a beautiful young black female lawyer, Kameelah Shaheed-Diallo, to change its approach to minority communities and solve the issue.

Robin Lake concludes that testing data from a recent CREDO study at Stanford University shows the success of the portfolio model in Indianapolis. Dr. Jim Scheurich, Urban Education Studies Doctoral Program Indiana University – Indianapolis (IUPUI), points out that Lake didn’t mention that the CREDO report and its methodology have been criticized by the University of Colorado’s National Education Policy (nepc.colorado.edu) center multiple times. Scheurich also notes that CREDO “receives large pro-charter funding.”

The CREDO study claims to meaningfully measure learning growth to 0.01 of a standard deviation (σ). The reality is Growth models are plagued by error and do not give reliable measurements. There is no way a difference of 0.01 σ can be measured meaningfully. Furthermore, the CREDO studies are not peer reviewed which makes them clearly untrustworthy.

The Metastasizing Affliction

Robin Lake is the director of CRPE which birthed the portfolio model and is engaged in pushing the model into schools nationwide. In 2018, two billionaires, Reed Hastings and Jon Arnold, agreed to put up $100 million each toward promoting the portfolio model of school management. Since then, billionaires Bill Gates, Michael Dell and Steve Ballmer have all contributed to their new organization, The City Fund.

Ethan Gray was Vice President of The Mind Trust before he and David Harris founded an organization called Education Cities. Education Cities became the national organization spreading their ideology. In the summer of 2018, David Harris, Ethan Gray and Kameelah Shaheed-Diallo all left their respective organizations to become founding employees of The City Fund.

There is a deep corruption infesting elite institutions in America. For Harvard University to publish biased articles by people with well known agendas exemplifies this metastasizing affliction.

Denver, Colorado has a school district that is often held up as an exemplar of the portfolio model. Far from being an exemplar it is a dystopian nightmare and warning. This year, Denver voters defeated the dark money controlling their school board. Big money was no longer enough. Indianapolis voters need to follow Denver’s example and throw off the billionaire’s yoke.

Twitter: @tultican

Tags: Bill Gates, billionaires, CRPE, Jon Arnold, Portfolio Model, Privitization, Reed Hastings, The City Fund, The Mind Trust