Archive | September, 2021

Infrastructure for Ending the Public School System

29 Sep

By Thomas Ultican 9/24/2021

Educating children is expensive. Wealthy people like Charles Koch do not mind paying to educate their own children but they detest the idea of being taxed to pay for educating other people’s children. In the dystopian market driven system libertarians such as Koch espouse, people should only receive what they pay for. They believe almost all government programs should be ended including Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, the FAA, the EPA, the Department of Energy, the FDA, The Consumer Product Safety Commission and more. Libertarians contend that mail, schools and roads should be privatized plus personal and corporate taxes should be abolished (Kochland Pages 113 and 114).

Toward achieving their ends, Koch, Gates, the Walton family and scores of wealthy elites have been building an infrastructure to take over and privatize the public school system. By twisting the laws concerning tax free philanthropic organizations, wealthy moguls are funneling huge sums of money into creating privatized schools; thus eliminating local control by elected school boards. All the while, they illegitimately write off most of their spending to promote public school privatization as charitable giving.

In addition to spending to privatize schools, a key strategy employed to advance their market based agenda is the creation of alternate teacher professional development and certification. It is another new privatized system under their control and not influenced by university based programs or education scholars.

The third leg of their attack on public education is political spending to take over elected school boards and influence legislatures.

The New Schools Venture Fund (NSVF) and Teach for America (TFA) support all three of the ending public schools privatization pillars.

The article “Organized to Disrupt” gives many details about the founding, purpose and lavish financing for NSVF. A former CEO of NSVF, Ted Mitchell, was also simultaneously President of the California State Board of Education. He left NSVF to become Under Secretary of the United States Department of Education. NSVF is generating more than $100,000,000 yearly income which it uses to invest in edtech start ups, charter schools and political organizing.

The TFA story is well known. The post “TFA is Bad for America” gives some details about how through huge financing, TFA is providing its billionaire funders with a privatization army of youthful college graduates looking for a career. These temp teachers – 80% of whom are gone in three years – have no business in a classroom. Real teachers go through a rigorous college teaching curriculum and a year of student-teaching under the supervision of a master teacher. TFA teachers get no teaching curriculum and five weeks of teacher training in the summer.

These unqualified TFA teachers have become the backbone of the teaching core for no-excuses charter schools. They embrace market based reform as a mechanism for reforming schools (Scripting Page 173) and within two to three years after they leave the classroom, their TFA connections put them in good position to became district, state or federal education leaders. TFA also offers political help for corps members to run for school board positions through its associated Leadership for Education Equity (LEE) non-profit. The LEE board of trustees consists of Emma Bloomberg (Michael Bloomberg’s daughter); Steuart Walton (billionaire); Arthur Rock (billionaire) and Elisa Villanueva Beard (TFA-CEO).

Training Educators

Teacher fellowships are used to influence teacher training and develop neoliberal attitudes. The late Eli Broad created the Broad Fellowships which trained school leaders how to close schools, in the benefit of enabling privatized schools and about the superiority of a market based approach. Before he died, Broad transferred the program and monetary support for it to Yale University.

In Oakland, California, the billionaire funded school privatization group GO Public Schools offers teacher fellowships of $3500 for their two year program. In Indianapolis, the $15 billion Lilly Endowment runs a 100 teacher yearly $12,000 fellowship program.

Two early problems slowing school privatization efforts were that teachers were both opposed to it and were respected by their communities. The fellowships described above are just three examples out of the many funded by extremely wealthy people to shape young teacher attitudes. It is not an accident that few of these fellowship programs are run by education professionals or scholars.

In 1997, the founder of TFA, Wendy Kopp, started The New Teachers Project (TNTP) to provide professional development services. She chose Michelle Rhee to be its founding director. This organization designed to train teachers was founded by a person that has never taught and was led by an untrained teacher that had two years experience as a TFA temp teacher. Even though a reasonable school administrator would never contract with an obviously incompetent group such as TNTP, it has flourished due to a continuous influx of billionaire dollars and powerful political connections.

Besides helping to shape teacher attitudes, founding director Rhee was one of the loudest voices in America claiming teachers were incompetent and low IQ.

Today, TNTP has a new initiative called PLUS to train principals. PLUS has clients in Camden, Kansas City, New York, Philadelphia and San Francisco. Billionaire spending is the reason school districts turn their back on established administrative programs at local universities for this unqualified group. In Kansas City, three billion-dollar foundations, Kaufman, Hall and Walton, are funding the PLUS program. 

Relay Graduate School of Education is a private stand alone graduate school created and led by people with meager academic credentials. It was founded by officials from the no-excuses charter school industry and lavishly financed by billionaires. This completely bogus graduate school was certified after New York’s billionaire Chancellor of Education, Merryl H. Tisch, tapped David Steiner to be Commissioner of Education. Steiner, who is closely aligned with Jeb Bush’s Chiefs for Change, officially certified Relay. He was also a founding board member and still serves on the Relay board.

Control School Boards

School boards are being controlled in several ways. One obvious way, was covered in the article “School Board Elections 2020: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly.” It tells the story of a small group of super wealthy individuals spending to put their preferred candidates on school boards in Los Angeles, Oakland and Indianapolis. In California, this group also contributed to almost every senate and assembly race.

Billionaire Spending in the 2020 LA School Board Election

More than money is required to politically control local school boards. The Mind Trust in Indianapolis became an example of developing a local political group working on education issues along with spending by local plutocrats. This method has led to the public school system there being the second most privatized system in America; second only to New Orleans.

In 2018, billionaires Jon Arnold and Reed Hastings claimed to be investing $100 million each to establish a new anti-public school non-profit they called The City Fund. Since then several billionaires including Bill Gates and Michael Dell have started contributing to the fund. To advance their privatization agenda, The City Fund is spending significant amounts developing local political organizations. The following are examples.

Saint Louis – The Opportunity Trust: In 2018, a former TFA corps member and TFA employee for 14 years, Eric Scroggins, founded The Opportunity Trust. That same year The City Fund gifted it $5.5 million.

San Antonio – City Education Partners: Listed as being for community engagement efforts including the development and launch of San Antonio School Finder and correlated operations support. $4.98 million

Oakland – Educate78: Cited as a continuation of support previously provided by The Hastings Fund for work to improve public education including the expansion of high quality schools and support for the development of diverse teacher pipelines. $4.25 million

Memphis – Memphis Education Fund: Noted as support for operational budget and community engagement effort. $5 million

Newark – New Jersey Children’s Foundation: Stated as support for the launch of the new organization and ongoing operating budget support. $5.325 million

Baton Rouge – New Schools for Baton Rouge: Cited as support for expansion and launch of high quality nonprofit schools in Baton Rouge. $13,487,500

New Orleans – New Schools for New Orleans: Listed as support for the expansion of high quality schools and training for school leaders. $7,750,000

Oakland – Oakland Reach: Cited as operating budget support for ongoing parent and community engagement. $500,000

Atlanta – RedefinEd: Noted as operations support and support for work to empower communities, build teacher and leadership development pipelines, and expand high quality schools. $2,750,000

Denver – RootED (formerly Blue Schools): Listed as operating budget support and support for expansion of high quality schools. $21,000,000

Oakland and Stockton – Silicon Schools Fund: Cited as support for expansion of innovative public school models. $1,566,666

Indianapolis – The Mind Trust: Noted as operating support and support for expansion of high quality schools. $18,000,000

Privatizing Schools

Several billionaires have been spending large amounts of money for three decades to advance the growth of charter schools in America. Today, fortunately, they are seeing some resistance to the non-stop expansion. As Network for Public Education Director Carol Burris noted,

“Everything changed when DeVos was in charge. Progressives and moderates started to see that charter schools were really a ‘gateway drug’ for the libertarian right, a means to further the destruction of public education.”

However, with the Supreme Court destroying the separation between church and state, private schools have been growing rapidly in states with voucher programs. Almost all of these private schools are religious schools.

The economist Milton Friedman is one of the godfathers of the current movement to end public education. Duke University’s noted historian and the author of Democracy in Chains, Nancy MacLean, shared the following quotes from Friedman. They leave no doubt about the true purpose of the choice movement in the mind of one of its creators. The first comes from 2004 and the second is from a 2006 speech at a meeting of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).

 “In my ideal world, government would not be responsible for providing education any more than it is for providing food and clothing.”

“The ideal way would be to abolish the public school system and eliminate all the taxes that pay for it.”

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No Excuses Schools: Bad Theory Created by Amateurs

4 Sep

By Thomas Ultican 9/4/2021

Vanderbilt Professor Joanne Golann recently published Scripting the Moves. It is a book which expands on her research into no-excuses charter schools. Beginning in March of 2012, Golann spent 18-months doing an ethnographic study of a representative school employing the no-excuses approach. She discovered many unintended consequences.

In 2019, the leader of the Ascend Charters, Steven Wilson, wrote,

“And even when No Excuses was best realized at Ascend, its ceaseless structure was doing little to prepare our students to function autonomously in college and beyond.”

“Princeton sociologist Joanne Golann, in a groundbreaking ethnography of one high-achieving No Excuses school, identifies the “paradox” of the school’s success: ‘Even in a school promoting social mobility, teachers still reinforce class-based skills and behaviors. Because of these schools’ emphasis on order as a prerequisite to raising test scores,’ she argues, teachers end up stressing behaviors that would undermine middle-class students’ success.”

“Golann ends by asking: ‘Can urban schools encourage assertiveness, initiative, and ease while also ensuring order and achievement? Is there an alternative to a no-excuses disciplinary model that still raises students’ tests scores?”’

It is not just Ascend. In an August 2021 post at Princeton Press, Professor Golann reported,

“In March, Noble, the largest charter network in Chicago, apologized to its alumni for its ‘assimilationist, patriarchal, white supremacist and anti-black’ discipline practices. Last June, Achievement First promised not to ‘be hyper-focused on students’ body positioning,’ and ended its requirement for students to sit with their hands folded at their desks. KIPP, the nation’s largest charter school network, retired its founding motto, ‘Work hard. Be nice,’ explaining that it ‘ignores the significant effort required to dismantle systemic racism, places value on being compliant and submissive, supports the illusion of meritocracy, and does not align with our vision of students being free to create the future they want.’ (KIPP began plans to change the motto in 2019.)*

“The Wall Street Journal described KIPP’s statement as ‘woke nonsense.’”

Bad Practices at No-Excuses Charters Came from Amateur Founders and Funders

Perhaps the best known no-excuses charter schools are the KIPP schools. Two Yale graduates David Levin and Michael Feinberg founded KIPP in 1994. They were both members of Wendy Kopp’s third cadre of Teach for America (TFA) teachers who had five weeks of training; no education classes and no teaching experience. After the founding, Feinberg stayed in Texas to run KIPP Houston. Levin moved back to New York and founded KIPP Academy in the South Bronx.

To put it succinctly, two guys with recently minted bachelor degrees and a 5-week summer seminar founded the first no-excuses charter school.

 Professor Golann explained how they gravitated to the model,

“After a difficult first year struggling with classroom management, Levin and Feinberg were beginning to improve. They attributed their success to intensively studying and imitating the methods of effective teachers in their schools. Their most influential mentor was Harriett Ball, a charismatic and celebrated forty-six-year-old African American teacher who stood over six feet tall and who worked down the hallway from Levin. From Ball, Levin learned that what worked, in addition to songs and chants, was ‘instant and overwhelming response to any violation of the rules.’” (Scripted page 120)

The story of KIPP’s growth is intertwined with another no-excuses school founder, Stacy Boyd. She was working for Chris Whistle’s Edison Project when a Boston dentist selected her to be the founding principal of the Academy of the Pacific Rim (APR). Boyd hired her friend Doug Lemov to teach at the school that she ran while also finishing her MBA. When Boyd married Scott Hamilton and moved to San Francisco, Lemov took over at APR.

Scott and Stacy met while working at the Edison Project. They were moving to San Francisco because Hamilton was now working for two of the richest people in the country, GAP founders, Don and Doris Fisher.

It was 1999 and “sixty minutes” did a puff piece on KIPP. All of the sudden the possibility of going national arose. Feinberg’s first call was to his friend Stacy Boyd who knew something about developing large organizations. Stacy’s husband Scott sold the Fishers on creating business fellowships for KIPP school founders who would take the brand nationwide.  

The San Francisco billionaires who are obviously astute business people started pouring money into an education system being developed by people with limited knowledge and experience. They would have never turned over leadership at the GAP to people with little background and limited experience. Somehow, many of America’s financial elites believe that they understand education well enough to know how to improve it, and don’t recognize that they are amateurs.

Besides no-excuses charter schools, billionaire education amateurs have spent lavishly to finance TFA. At the beginning of the millennium TFA was struggling, but then the money started flowing. In her book Chronicle of Echoes, Mercedes Schneider recounted, 

“Despite the financial and organizational issues and bad press, Kopp managed to scrape by and carry TFA with her into the new millennium. TFA faced insolvency a number of times – until corporations and foundations began funneling money into the struggling organization. In 2001, TFA’s net assets totaled over $35 million. By 2005, TFA’s net assets totaled over $105 million. Finally, by 2010, TFA’s net assets had increased almost tenfold from 2001 to $350 million. And in 2011, the Walton Family Foundation gave TFA $49.5 million ‘to help double the size of Teach for America’s national teaching corps over the next three years.” (Chronicle page 47)

TFA teachers are unqualified to lead a classroom. However, Professor Golann notes, “It is not that Dream Academy did not have the option of hiring more seasoned teachers; they deliberately chose not to do so, which may be surprising given that teachers significantly improve in effectiveness during their first years of teaching.” (Scripted page 139) Teachers with experience and training were not as likely to embrace their no-excuses scheme. (Dream Academy is the pseudonym Golann chose for the school in which she was embedded.)

Stacy Boyd’s friend, Doug Lemov, started gathering no-excuses techniques and wrote them into a book called Teach Like a Champion. Today, this compendium of methods serves as a handbook for no-excuses schools. One of the main objectives of the handbook is efficiency. It brings the early 1900s Taylorism into the classroom.

In the post “Teach Like its 1885.” published on Jenifer Berkshire’s blog, Layla Treuhaft-Ali wrote, “Placed in their proper racial context, the Teach Like A Champion techniques can read like a modern-day version of the *Hampton Idea,* where children of color are taught not to challenge authority under the supervision of a wealthy, white elite.” In addition to its racist implementation, the no-excuses model certainly elicits images of 19th century school discipline.

No-excuses Model a Disaster in Public Schools

The Tennessee’s Achievement School District (ASD) was launched in 2011 by the Commissioner of Education, Kevin Huffman, a TFA alum and for a short time Michelle Rhee’s husband. He brought in fellow TFA alum Chris Barbic – the founder of the no-excuses charter school YES Prep – to run ASD. Golann observed,

“Unlike typical no-excuses charters, in which families must apply and agree to certain commitments, these charters had to accept all students from the zoned neighborhood, which resulted in low levels of commitment from families to the school’s disciplinary practices, along with a student population that the school was unprepared to serve (e.g., students with special needs, students with high levels of residential mobility).  (Scripted page 173)

By 2016, the lofty goal of raising the bottom scoring 5% of the state’s schools into the top 25% was a complete flop. Even with concentrated test prep, most of the schools were still in the bottom 5%.

Some Conclusions

Two important points:

  1. On page 64 of her book, Golann references University of California San Diego Professor Hugh ‘Bud’ Mehan. From the two graduate school classes I had with Bud, I learned something about what good ethnographic studies looked like and it is clear that Golann’s scholarship is excellent. The book is well written and takes the reader inside the study. Anyone interested in education policy would profit from reading it.
  2. Without the unbelievably large amounts of money being spent by billionaire amateurs to drive education policy, there would be no TFA or no-excuses charter schools.

I will end with one last quote from Professor Joanne Golann’s Scripting the Moves:

‘“Ultimately no-excuses charters schools are a failed solution to a much larger social problem,’ education scholar Maury Nation has argued. ‘How does a society address systemic marginalization and related economic inequalities? How do schools mitigate the effects of a system of White supremacy within which schools themselves are embedded?’ Without attending to these problems, we will not solve the problems of educational inequality. ‘As with so many school reforms,’ Nation argues, ‘no-excuses discipline is an attempt to address the complexities of these problems, with a cheap, simplistic, mass-producible, ‘market-based’ solution.’” (Scripting page 174)

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