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Fake Teachers, Fake Schools, Fake Administrators Courtesy of DPE

By T. Ultican 4/11/2018

The destroy public education movement (DPE) has given us Teach for America (Fake Teachers), Relay Graduate School (Fake Schools) and from the Broad Superintendents Academy (Fake administrators). None of these entities are legitimately accredited, yet they are ubiquitous in America’s major urban areas.

There was a time in the United States of America when scoundrels perpetrating this kind of fraud were jailed and fined. Today, they are not called criminals; they are called philanthropists. As inequitable distribution of wealth increases, democratic principles and humane ideology recedes.

It is time to fight the 21^st century robber-barons and cleanse our government of grifters and sycophants.

Philanthropy in America is undermining the rule of law and democratic rights. Gates, Walton, Broad, DeVos, Bradley, Lily, Kaufman, Hall, Fisher, Arnold, Hastings, Anschutz, Bloomberg, Jobs, Zuckerberg, Dell and the list goes on. They have afflicted us with Teach for America (TFA), charter Schools, vouchers, phony graduate schools, bad technology and bogus administrators implementing their agendas.

Without these “philanthropists” and their dark money schemes none of this would exist. Public schools would be healthy and teenage suicide rates would be going down; not up. Instead we have mindless testing, harmful technology and teaching on the cheap.

This “philanthropy” is about profits, reducing tax burdens on the wealthy, imposing religious dogma and subjugation of non-elites. It is harmful to America’s children. The attack on public education was never primarily about benefiting children. It certainly was never based on concern for minority populations.

The Absurdity of Fake Teachers from TFA

Over the last five years, there have been several wonderful books written on the politics of education reform and the best of them all have a chapter on Wendy Kopp and TFA. Diane Ravitch gave us Reign of Error, Dana Goldstein wrote The Teacher Wars and Mercedes Schneider produced A Chronicle of Echoes. I wrote a review of Chronicle. These three books are masterpieces of scholarship and research, however, my favorite book about the politics of education is Why You Always Got to be Trippin by Ciedie Aech which is a masterpiece of sarcasm.

The basic pitch of TFA has changed since Wendy Kopp’s 1989 senior thesis, “An Argument and Plan for the Creation of the Teacher Corps.” Later when creating TFA, Kopp reached out to the National Education Association (NEA). NEA VP, Sharon Robinson responded, “Even a suggestion that acceptable levels of expertise could develop in short termers simply doesn’t mesh with what those of us in the business know it takes to do the job – much less with what our young need and deserve” (Goldstein).

Kopp replied that the new teacher corps was merely “an emergency response to a shortage of experienced, qualified teachers” in high-needs schools, “and would therefore not be telling the nation that its inexperienced members were preferable to, or as qualified as experienced teachers” (Goldstein).

However, in 1997, Kopp founded The New Teachers Project now called TNTP and installed first year TFA alum, Michelle Rhee, to lead it. TNTP advertised itself as an agency helping people transition into teaching from other careers and also providing professional development to school districts. The Rhee led TNTP infamously initiated a relentless campaign of teacher-bashing. TNTP was virulently anti-teachers’ union and anti-tenure. Rhee inspired headlines throughout the country like these from California, State Needs ‘Lemon’ Law For Teachers, California Schools May Get Break from Bad Teachers and Escape Hatch for Incompetent Teachers Closed .

The message was clear. Public education was failing because of bad teachers. TFA and TNTP offered the solution.

Mercedes Schneider described another TFA mission change:

“Though the TFA website notes that Kopp’s organization has ‘aggressively worked to grow and deepen [TFA] impact,’ Kopp’s initial push had nothing to do with placing former TFAers in educational leadership positions. By 2001, TFA began to clearly publicize its now-twofold mission: Yes, to continue to place ‘top talent’ in the classroom in two-year, Peace-corps style. However, in addition, TFA would enable those ‘teacher leaders’ to ‘force systemic change to ensure educational equity.’”

Wendy Kopp was a child of wealth from the tony Dallas neighborhood of Highland Park. She attended Highland Park High with a predominantly white student body and a 95% graduation rate (Schneider). That graduation rate was before the current credit recovery fraud.

While at Princeton, Kopp became editor-in-chief of the student magazine “Business Today” which was founded in 1968 by Steve Forbes. Having a circulation of 200,000 in 1987, it could charge businesses $5,000 a year for advertising (Schneider). She demonstrated her ability to raise money and developed many personal contacts with important CEO’s while running “Business Today.”

After graduating with a BA degree in Public and International Affairs, she went to New York to start her Peace-corps styled non-profit. Kropp’s first grant for $26,000 came from Exon-Mobil. Union-Carbide gave her free New York office space. She sent fellow Texan Ross Perot her business plan and he came through with a $500,000 challenge grant which helped TFA raise an addition $1.5 million. Her first hire was a friend of her brother’s, Whitney Tilson (Goldstein). Tilson would later create the Democrats for Education Reform (DFER).

Early on, there was serious push-back against TFA by education professionals. After observing the TFA summer training in 1990, Education Professor Deborah Appleman called it “ludicrous.” In 1994, Linda Darling-Hammond, then a researcher at Columbia University’s Teachers College, excoriated TFA for being “a frankly missionary program” that elevated the resume building of its recruits over the educational needs of poor children (Goldstein).

Because of this pushback and Kopp’s lack of management training and experience, TFA went through a series of existential crises. Schneider noted, “Despite the financial and organizational issues and bad press, Kopp managed to scrape by and carry TFA with her into the new millennium.”

Schneider also wrote about improving the financial fortunes at TFA,

“…Wendy Kopp declared that she had a force of young, predominantly-Ivy-League idealists for sale, and Big Money arrived on the scene to make the purchase. No more insolvency issues for Wendy Kopp and TFA.”

The money that came in is truly staggering to contemplate. Here is one paragraph from Diane Ravitch:

“When the U.S. Department of Education ran a competition in 2010 for the most innovative programs in education, with four top prizes of $50 million, TFA was one of the winners (the KIPP charter chain, headed by Wendy Kopp’s husband, Richard Barth, also won $50 million). In 2011, a group of foundations led by the Broad Foundation made a gift of $100 million to TFA. In the same year, the Walton Family Foundation – one of the nation’s most conservative foundations – pitched in $49.5 million, the largest single education grant made that year by a foundation committed to privatization. TFA also received federal funding through AmeriCorps grants and an annual congressional earmark of $20 million. In the five years from 2006 to 2010, TFA raised an astonishing $907 million in foundation grants, corporate gifts and government funding.”

TFA has been remarkably successful everywhere except in the classroom. These temporary teachers with virtually no training nor experience are not ready to run a class. Because a large percentage of TFA teachers do not stay past two years, it is impossible to run long term studies of their effect on students. However, it is well known that TFA induced teacher churn harms children. Today, a significant number of charter school teachers come from TFA.

Ciedie Aech faced some of the most virulent forces of the DPE movement while teaching in Denver, Colorado. Her comments about TFA are both amusing and prescient. She wrote,

“Good teachers; well, good teachers, and oh surely this was obvious – even glaringly self-apparent in the fast pace of magical days devoted to a truer national compassion: Good teachers? – Were young.”

“Oh, those Teach-For-A-Minute girls, he now declared snidely. Really, who was surprised? Everybody knew: You couldn’t count on them.”

“Despite their designated unreliability; despite, even, their surely ungrateful lack of loyalty for stoically sticking around and “taking” the abuses created by an ever-shifting, funding-lucrative reform – huge numbers of these oft-labeled undependable Teach-For-A-Minute girls (and oh, yes, a lesser number of surely just as undependable Teach-For-A-Minute boys) were now being ever more massively produced.”

“As a journalist followed the teaching year of a suddenly deployed troop of Teach-For-A-Minute miracle workers, ultimately, he found only one greenhorn to be exceptionally able. (And so many others who were both frighteningly and disastrously unprepared.)”

Charter Industry Has Created A Fake Education Graduate School

The well-known blogger, Peter Greene AKA the Curmugducator, has a knack for colorfully and accurately summarizing creepy agendas. He concludes an article about Relay Graduate School:

“Reformsters have managed to build and fund an entire alternate education universe in which they make up their own credentials, their own schools, their own entire system built on a foundation of nothing but money, connections, and huge brass balls. There’s never been anything like it since hucksters pitched medicinal snake oil off the back of a wagon, and it would be kind of awesomely amazing, like watching a python consume an entire elephant– except that instead of an elephant, this parallel shadow system is gutting public education in the communities where it is most needed.”

The Alliance for Philadelphia Public schools learned that their schools were using training materials from Relay Graduate School (RGS). Kate Peterson, a graduate student at Arcadia University, investigated Relay’s founders and programs for Alliance. Her policy brief apprised,

“Relay Graduate School of Education is a stand-alone school based in New York City. It began as Teacher U in 2007, when Dave Levin, co-founder of KIPP Public Charter Schools, and Norman Atkins, co-founder of Uncommon Schools, decided to develop a program that would supply their charter schools and others with high-quality teachers, which they deemed as scarce. They partnered with the founder of Achievement First, Dacia Toll, to create their program. Receiving $10 million from Larry Robbins, founder of the hedge fund Glenview Capital Management and current board member of Relay, and $20 million from the non-profit The Robin Hood Foundation, the three charter school leaders partnered with Hunter College in New York to implement their program ….

“In 2011, it was renamed Relay Graduate School of Education and was granted a charter by the New York State Board of Regents ….”

Peterson also pointed out that the lack of scholarship and experience in education among the three founders. She wrote,

“Based on their backgrounds, it is apparent that all three charter and Relay founders have little education and training in teaching. Atkins opened a charter a year after graduating with a M.A. in educational leadership with little to no experience teaching. Levin founded KIPP two years after working for Teach for America with no formal education in teaching as well. Toll too founded a charter a year after graduating with her J.D. and teaching certificate with very little experience in education. After founding these charters, they did not go on to be teachers in them, but rather managers of them. Thus, Relay’s founders began a teacher training program without much formal education and experience in teaching themselves.”

Mercedes Schneider took another look at RSG this March (2018) and began her piece,

“Relay Graduate School of Education (RGSE) is a corporate reform entity whose “deans” need not possess the qualifications that deans of legitimate graduate schools possess (i.e., Ph.D.s; established professional careers in education, including publication in blind-review journals).”

There are now fifteen “deans” of RSG each running a stand-alone campus that they themselves founded. Mercedes notess that twelve of the fifteen have light teaching experience with TFA and also reports on the qualifications of all the “deans.” She concludes with:

“There you have it: 15 “deans”; no Ph.D.s (but one almost); no bachelors degrees in education; no refereed publications, and not a one “dean” qualified for a tenure-track position in a legitimate college of education. But who needs legitimacy when you can franchise yourself into a deanship?”

The Unaccredited Broad Superintendent Academy Trains Public Education Destroyers

Eli Broad, estimated to be worth $6 billion, made his fortune by building two fortune-500 companies, KB Homes and Sun America. He is a product of public education but is determined to privatize the system.

The Broad Academy is an unaccredited administration training program for school leaders run by the Broad Foundation.

Broad’s theory is that public school administrators and elected school boards lack the financial background to run large organizations. Motoko Rich’s Times article explained, ‘“The new academy,’ he said, would ‘dramatically change this equation’ by seeking candidates in educational circles as well as recruiting from corporate backgrounds and the military, introducing management concepts borrowed from business.”

In her book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System, Diane Ravitch related what she learned about Broad’s thinking during a 2009 meeting with him. She wrote,

“He believes that school systems should run as efficiently as private sector enterprises. He believes in competition, choice, deregulation, and tight management. He believes that people perform better if incentives and sanctions are tied to their performance. He believes that school leaders need not be educators, and that good managers can manage anything if they are surrounded by smart assistants. Broad told an audience in New York City in 2009, ‘We don’t know anything about how to teach or reading curriculum or any of that. But what we do know about is management and governance.’ The Broad education agenda emphasizes the promotion of charter schools, the adoption of corporate methods for school leadership, and changes in the way teacher are compensated.”

Broad is rich so his ideas about education – which are based on little beyond opinion – are taken seriously. He has created an administrators school that ignores 200 years of public school and scholarly experience. It is ludicrous that any state would accept this kind of training as legitimate. Unfortunately, graduates from the fake Broad academy are working in school systems across America.

Past Time to Say, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore.”

Fake School

Time to stop the bi-partisan theft of public education from Americans. Stop fake teachers entering classrooms. Stop fake administrators doing damage like Deasy in LA or Bersin in San Diego or Wilson in Oakland or White in Louisiana or Bobb in Detroit or Klein in New York or etc. Perpetrators of a fake graduate schools are criminals. Temporary teachers with no credentials, no training and no experience are a hoax. Billionaire trained administrators are a menace. Time to end this charade.

Tags: Broad Administrators Academy, Darcia Toll, Dave Levin, education, Eli Broad, Norman Atkins, philanthropy, Politics, reform, Relay Graduate School, TFA, Wendy Kopp

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Categories DPE, education

St. Louis Public Education Theft Accelerates

30 Dec

By Thomas Ultican 12/30/2020

A proposal to close 11 more public schools in St. Louis came before the school board on December 15. Based on Superintendent Kelvin Adams’ recommendation the final decision was postponed until January. It is not clear why Adams pulled back his own recommendation, but it is clear that public education in St. Louis is being dismantled.

In 1967, St. Louis’s school population peaked at 115,543. It was by far the largest school district in the state of Missouri. In 2020, total enrollment sank below 20,000 to for the first time to 19,222 and St. Louis Public Schools (SLPS) is no longer the state’s largest K-12 district.

From 1967 to 2000 there was an enrollment decline of over 71,000 students. In a 2017 article, Journalist Jeff Bryant took an in depth look at the forces undermining St. Louis and its schools. He noted three defining events that turned St. Louis into the World’s most incredible shrinking city.

An 1876 home rule law enacted by city business leaders to keep control of the city’s economic engines created and locked in city boundaries. Today, there are over 90 municipalities surrounding St. Louis. After World War II, federal housing policies and racists lending practices created white flight to the burgeoning adjacent communities. Finally Bryant explains,

“Legislation passed in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s deregulating a number of key industries – including airlines and banking – put large St. Louis employers at a disadvantage. Then, new laws lifting anti-trust enforcement, passed during the Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton presidential administrations, subjected St. Louis’s leading industries to corporate takeover or rendered them uncompetitive.

“Consequently, St. Louis went from hosting 23 Fortune 500 headquarters in 1980 to hosting just nine in 2015.”

The Attack on Public Schools

From 2000 to 2020, the student population in St. Louis has again fallen by more than half from 44,264 to 19,222. Some of that decline can be attributed to the continuation of migration to the suburbs which now includes Black families. However, a large portion of the drop is due to the growth of charter schools. The charter school enrollment for 2020 was at least 11,215 students which represents 37% of the district’s publicly supported students.

Like the national trend, the privatized schools chartered by the state, educate a lower percentage of the more expensive special education students; charters 11.4% versus SLPS 15.1%.

In 1997, the Heartland Institute reported,

“Although Missouri does not yet have a charter school law, a Charter Schools Technical Assistance Conference was held in St. Louis on November 22 with Mayor Clarence Harmon as the keynote speaker. Sponsored by the Charter Schools Information Center, the Saturday workshop featured state legislators, business leaders, and national and local charter school experts, including the Center’s director Laura Friedman and Paul Seibert of Charter Consultants.

“Although a charter school law failed to win legislative approval last spring, there appears to be strong support for the concept and hopes run high for passage in the coming session.”

The Heartland Institute is an extremely conservative organization with Libertarian ideals including opposition to climate change legislation and support for privatizing public education. Two of Heartland’s key funders are the Bradley Foundation of Milwaukee and Charles Koch of Koch Industries.

Mayor Harmon and the Heartland team saw their hopes rewarded in 1998 when Missouri became the 27^th state to pass a charter school law. The University of Missouri notes, “Charters were one part of legislation designed to end three decades of court-ordered desegregation in Kansas City and St. Louis, and were limited to those two urban areas.”

In 2000, Mayor Harmon welcomed the first charter school in St. Louis, Lift for Life Academy.

The next year Francis Slay defeated Harmon in the mayoral race.

Slay like Harmon was a Democrat. He would serve for the next four terms. Over that time Slay developed a reputation as a charter school champion.

In 2002, Slay put together almost $800,000 to bring 50 fake teachers in from Teach For America (TFA). “Fake” because they have almost no training. It’s like calling a liberal arts college graduate with five weeks of summer training a lawyer or a dentist or an architect.

Slay increased his control over SLPS by putting together and financing a slate of four candidates for the seven member school board. A 2003 report in the River Front Times states,

“Slay loaned $50,000 from his campaign fund to support the slate. Major area corporations kicked in with Anheuser-Busch, Ameren and Emerson Electric each giving $20,000. Energizer Eveready Battery Company gave $15,000. The coalition raised more than $235,000.”

Within a month of taking their positions, the school board voted to hire Alvarez & Marsal (A&M), the corporate turnaround consultants. St. Louis paid A&M $4.8 million to run the district. A&M had never worked in a school system before. Former Brookes Brothers CEO William V. Roberti was to be superintendent of schools. His official title was changed to “Chief Restructuring Officer.” The clothing store leader had never worked in a school before.

Bryant reported, “Slay and this team attended training on how to remodel the district along business lines provided by the Broad Foundation, a private foundation that has long been a powerful advocate of charter schools.” However, their decision to bring in business professionals turned into a disaster. Deficit ballooned, teachers revolted, the district lost state accreditation and the state took over from the elected school board.

In 2005, the billionaire, Rex Sinquefield, returned to his roots in Missouri. Rex a former orphan became wealthy when he and a partner from the University of Chicago developed and marketed the first index funds. Rex also has economic views that align with the libertarian small government ideology of his Nobel Prize winning peers Milton Friedman and James M. Buchanan.

Rex and wife Jeanne are proponents of “school choice.” They fund the Children’s Education Alliance of Missouri (CEAM) claiming that the St. Louis based organization is the leading education reform organization in the state. They contribute millions to the right wing think tanks Show-Me Institute, which Rex also founded, and Missouri Club for Growth.

Sinquefield has made large campaign donations to Mayor Francis Slay plus Slay’s cousin, Laura Slay, is the Executive Director of CEAM. Laura is also owner of a public relations firm which regularly represents Rex.

In 2011, former TFA corps member Charli Cooksey and three other former corps members founded the now defunct InspireSTL. In 2016, Cooksey resigned from InspireSTL to run for the powerless school board. The leadership at InspireSTL went to another former TFA corps member, Adam Layne.

Susan Turk of St. Louis Schools Watch reported that Cooksey received a $30,000 campaign contribution from Leadership for Education Equity (LEE). LEE is a billionaire funded and directed organization spending to elect former TFA corps members to school boards and other political positions.

In 2018, a former TFA corps member and employee for 14 years, Eric Scroggins, founded The Opportunity Trust. That same year The City Fund gifted the newly formed Opportunity Trust $5.5 million. That is the fund started in 2018 by former Enron trader John Arnold and Netflix CEO Reed Hastings. They consider The Opportunity Trust their partner in St. Louis.

Charli Cooksey left the school board to found WEBPOWER, an organization meant to create community leaders to advance the privatization of public education and school choice.

In 2019, Cooksey’s successor at InspireSTL, Adam Layne, followed her path to the SLPS school board. He and fellow TFA alum Tracee Miller won the two seats available in 2019. That is the same year the state finally handed back control of SLPS to the elected school board. Miller raised local money and got a $1000 donation from LEE. Layne’s campaign raised almost no money but got a large donation from Public School Allies the political arm of The City Fund.

Tracee Miller has since resigned from the school board and written a scathing article about her experience:

“Shortly after my election to the BOE, I was approached by Eric Scroggins, founder and CEO of The Opportunity Trust, to visit The Mind Trust, an organization with a similar mission in Indianapolis. He personally selected three members of the BOE to attend. I am a person who is open to ideas and who believes in public education. I joined the trip with the understanding that it would be an opportunity to learn about innovative strategies being used in another Midwest city. However, the more questions that I asked and the more non-answers or unsatisfactory explanations that I heard, the more I realized that their agenda, and not students, was the priority.”

“I met with WEPOWER employee Gloria Nolan in what felt like a friendly conversation where the stated goal was to explore ways to bring the BOE and WEPOWER together; however, less than a week after this conversation WEPOWER attacked my credibility with false information and an out-of-context recording during the public comment portion of a BOE meeting. In addition, when I expressed concerns about the trip to Indianapolis, financial connections to school board members, or that these groups did not seem to focus on all education providers but only on SLPS, both WEPOWER and The Opportunity Trust ceased communication with me.”

“Mr. Scroggins eventually contacted me to let me know that he found my questioning of his approach to education reform to be misguided. He used patronizing and intimidating language to attack my ethics and integrity on account of my opposition to Senate Bills 525, 603, and 649 regarding the expansion of charter schools, and accused me of being uninformed and incapable of leadership, of ignoring science, and of perpetuating inequity.”

“Most notably, The Opportunity Trust funded the strategic plan for the Normandy School District, which resulted in the hiring of Marcus Robinson, former Executive-in-Residence at The Opportunity Trust, as its new superintendent. Normandy is opening their first charter school (also funded in part by The Opportunity Trust) in Fall 2021.”

In 2017, longtime 28th Ward Alderman, Lyda Krewson, became the next neoliberal Democrat serving as Mayor in St. Louis. After she doxxed people calling on her to de-fund the police, a large demonstration heading to her home made national news. Krewson’s gun toting neighbors, Mark McCloskey and his wife Patricia, threatened the passing crowd with guns, admonishing them to stay off their property.

Mayor Krewson has kept up the nepotistic schemes attacking public schools. Jack Krewson the mayor’s son is a co-founder of Kairos Academies along with creator Gavin Schiffres. The school’s design was developed in 2015 as a capstone project for Schiffres’s undergraduate degree at YALE. The Opportunity Trust also invested in the incubation and then launch of Kairos Academy, the first personalized learning school in St. Louis.

In other words, three TFA alums, Scroggins, Schiffres and Krewson, have teamed up to sell edtech to St. Louis. They have an “innovative” plan to put kids at screens, the last thing 21^st century kids need. At the same time excellent public schools with real teachers are being closed.

Developing the Portfolio District Model

The City Fund is known for its support of the portfolio district management model. It is a method that removes control of schools from elected boards and replaces them with private businesses either for profit or non-profit. The evaluations are based on standardized testing results meaning the lowest performing schools are closed and replaced invariably by a privatized school. Since standardized testing only measures relative family wealth accurately, this plan guarantees schools in poor communities will be privatized.

In 2008, the state overseers selected Dr. Kelvin Adams (is it OK to call him Dr.?) to be Superintendent of schools in St. Louis; the position he still occupies. At the time, Peter Downs the President of the elected school board called the selection unacceptable.

Adams came to St. Louis from the Recovery School District in New Orleans where he was second-in-command to the infamous Paul Vallas. Prior to the Saint Louis announcement, Vallas had stated publicly that Adams was his top choice as a successor. Being thought of as a successor to a known virulent opponent of public schools was a big concern. However, Adams took over the mess left by A&M; fixed the financial issues, raised attendance rates, lowered dropout rates and got the district accreditation restored.

Adams also continued to close schools. SLPS has gone from 93 schools when he arrived to 68 schools now and he wants to close 11 more.

A component of the portfolio model school districts in both Indianapolis and Denver is Innovation Schools. The American Legislative Exchange Council has created model legislation for the development of these schools which are removed from the purview of the elected school board and given to a non-elected board. The ultra-right wing billionaire Charles Koch of Koch Industries is the key funder of ALEC. Koch has a long history of opposing public education.

Superintendent Adams is an outspoken advocate of school choice, the portfolio model and innovation schools. In fact, he claims as an achievement, “Created a portfolio of schools to provide meaningful choices for students and parents.” In 2019, Adams introduced innovation schools to Saint Louis calling them the Consortium Partnership Network. The announcement on the SLPS webpage states,

“Beginning January 2019, the CPN school principal and teacher leadership teams began a 4-month planning process together to define school structures, working conditions, priorities and budgets. This process was facilitated by Bellwether Education Partners…”

Bellwether Education Partners came into being in 2011 when it was cofounded by New Schools Venture Fund founding CEO Kim Smith and former Clinton administration domestic policy advisor Andrew J. Rotherham. Both Smith and Rotherham have had lucrative careers attacking public education for their billionaire funders.

It is clear that St. Louis Public Schools are in trouble and the vultures are circling. They have been weakened and are targeted by billionaires like Rex Sinquefield, Reed Hastings, Alice Walton, John Arnold, Bill Gates…

A paper written by National Board Certified Teacher Ceresta Smith, Why People of Color Must Reject Market-Based Education Reforms, has a profound message for the large Black population in St. Louis. Their democratic right to govern their own schools is being stolen and they must resist. Most of the 23 page paper cites other studies that support her opening statements:

“Reformers assert that test-based teacher evaluation, increased school “choice” through expanded access to charter schools, and the closure of “failing” and under enrolled schools will boost falling student achievement and narrow longstanding race- and income-based achievement gaps.”

- “Test scores increased less, and achievement gaps grew more, in “reform” cities than in other urban districts.
- “Reported successes for targeted students evaporated upon closer examination.
- “Test-based accountability prompted churn that thinned the ranks of experienced teachers, but not necessarily bad teachers.
- “School closures did not send students to better schools or save school districts money.
- “Charter schools further disrupted the districts while providing mixed benefits, particularly for the highest-needs students.
- “Emphasis on the widely touted market-oriented reforms drew attention and resources from initiatives with greater promise.
- “The reforms missed a critical factor driving achievement gaps: the influence of poverty on academic performance.”

In the conclusion Ceresta says to care givers for students of color,

“Of high importance, they must not fall prey to the trap of “school choice,” which in itself is a method of racist exclusion that provides for a “few” at the expense of the “many.” Instead, they must first and foremost, stop allowing their children to be used to further the inequities in public education and ultimate wealth building.”

Tags: Charles Koch, Francis Slay, Heartland Institute, Kelvin Adams, Rex Sinquefield, Saint Louis Public Schools, SLPS

Comments 1 Comment
Categories Corporate Education Reform, DPE, education

TNTP is a Part of the Destroy Public Education Infrastructure

10 Aug

By T. Ultican 8/10/2019

TNTP is one of several organizations that only exist because billionaires have financed them. Wendy Kopp founded TNTP (originally called The New Teachers Project) in 1997. She assigned Michelle Rhee, who had recently finished a two year Teach For America (TFA) tour, to run TNTP. Along with TNTP and TFA there are also the Broad Superintendents Academy and the fake school for professional educators called Relay Graduate School forming a significant part of the infrastructure instilling a privatization mindset into the education community.

TNTP says it mission is to partner with educational entities to:

“Increase the numbers of outstanding individuals who become public school teachers; and
Create environments for all educators that maximize their impact on student achievement”

These are laudable goals but why would any school district or state education department turn to an organization with minimal academic background and experience to train teachers and school leaders? Michelle Rhee earned a B.A. in Government from Cornell and a master’s in public policy from Harvard with no education studies. In the Book Chronicle of Echoes, Mercedes Schneider observes that “Wendy Kopp was a child of privilege”. She left her exclusive Highland Park neighborhood in Dallas to study International Affairs at Princeton. Kopp had no education experience or training and Rhee had five weeks of training to go along with two years experience teaching elementary school in Baltimore.

Wendy and Michelle

Corporate Media Embraced Kopp and Rhee as Education Reformers (Google Images)

In 2001 despite lacking expertise in training educators, TNTP was able to report,

“In its first full year of operation, The New Teacher Project entered into 3 contracts, and in its second year of operation, the number of contracts jumped to 11. This year, The New Teacher Project has over 20 contracts, and is working with school districts, state departments of education and universities across the country.” And they stated, “We have worked with numerous clients across the country, including The New York City Board of Education, Massachusetts Department of Education, District of Columbia Public Schools and East Baton Rouge Parish School System.”

The Billionaire Drive to Privatize Public School

Before the billionaire driven push to privatize public education a “non-profit” company like TNTP would have gotten no consideration for training teachers because they were unqualified. If policy makers in New York wanted to create and alternative teacher certification path, they would have turned to an established institution like Columbia University’s Teachers College to create and manage the program. If Washington DC schools wanted to develop a teacher professional development program, they would have likely looked to the University of Maryland. These are places with more than a century of experience studying education and training its leaders.

Papers coming from leading education institutions like the University of Texas or the University of California are peer reviewed scholarly efforts. Whereas TNTP produces non-peer reviewed polemics like “Widget Effect: Our National Failure to Acknowledge and Act on Differences in Teacher Effectiveness” a paper that accelerated teacher bashing. It looked like a real research effort but it was submitted through friendly media avoiding professional criticism. In 2001, a banner on the TNTP web page falsely claimed, “No single factor has a greater influence on student achievement than teacher quality”. Of course family income, mental health and the language spoken at home are much more decisive.

Another faux non-peer reviewed paper produced by TNTP was called “The Irreplaceables”. The paper defines the “irreplaceables” as the “top 20% of teachers in studied districts, as gauged by district data.” The gauge used was the widely discredited value added measures (VAM) which the American Statistical Association weighed in on stating,

“The VAM scores themselves have large standard errors, even when calculated using several years of data. These large standard errors make rankings unstable, even under the best scenarios for modeling”.

Although not a peer-reviewed paper, Bruce Baker of Rutgers University commented on the paper for the National Education Policy Center. He bluntly called it, “a report that is utterly ridiculous at many levels”. Baker powerfully demonstrated his point with the following graphs.

Irreplaceables

Baker’s Graphics Showing the Absurdity of the TNTP Claim

A central business of TNTP today, is training principals through its Pathways to Leadership in Urban Schools (PLUS). PLUS has a presence in Camden, Kansas City, New York, Philadelphia and San Francisco. In this program, PLUS provides academic training and places principal trainees in local district schools with contracted mentor principals.

Kansas City PLUS has a contract with Kansas City Public Schools (KCPS). They share about themselves:

“Kansas City PLUS is a two-year, practice-based principal certification residency and master’s program that helps talented educators become capable school leaders. With support from a leadership coach and experience managing teachers in a local school, our residents learn how to create a school culture in which students are challenged and inspired, and where teachers receive the feedback and support they need to grow.”

PLUS inadvertently shares the real reason KCPS contracted them instead of the Universities of Missouri or Kansas. TNTP lists among its partners:

“The Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, which funds Kansas City PLUS, was established in the mid-1960s by the late entrepreneur and philanthropist Ewing Marion Kauffman.”

“The Hall Family Foundation is a private philanthropic organization that makes grants to community programs in the greater Kansas City area.”

“The Walton Family Foundation is working to expand opportunities and empower children and families with educational options. Since 1992, we have invested more than $1.3 billion in K-12 education and supported a quarter of the 6,700 charter schools created in the United States.”

At the end of 2016 the smallest of these three funds was the Hall Family Foundation with assets of $833,764,620. Without these monies, Kansas City would be training all of its principals through university programs.

The Kauffman Foundation is emblematic of a growing problem in the philanthropic world. Ewing Kauffman graduated from public school and supported public education with both time and money. It would be surprising if he supported the privatization effort his legacy is being used to promote. Today, the $2 billion fund he founded is led by Wendy Guillies. She serves on the boards of the Greater Kansas City Chamber of Commerce, KCSourcelink, MRI Global, Folience and the Enterprise Bank Advisory Board. The Kansas City Business Journal named her to the Power 100 list in 2016 and 2017, and TechWeek KC named her to the Tech 100 list. Obviously she is a very accomplished women but her resume is consistent with the pro-privatization views espoused by the American Legislative Exchange Council and their chief supporter, Charles Koch.

The PLUS Program has Issues

I became privy to some inside communications when contacted about the possibility of a class action suit against TNTP. The warning that follows summarizes some of the negative feelings percolating within the PLUS organization. With the heading “Beware” the following is from a Principal Intern:

“This organization advertises 60,000 – 100,000. This is to lure you to apply for the position. You will be paid teachers salary and that will be based on your years of teaching and the school district you are partnered with. They will not tell you this upfront. You will initially be contracted as a teacher under a title such as “Instructional Coach”. You will work the same hours as your Mentor Principal. Your will work days that teachers are off, even though you are contracted as a teacher. Be prepared for an unorganized bunch of Plus Leaders who are mean and evil spirited, that lie and have no clue as to what they are doing. Be prepared to be treated like your personal life doesn’t matter, under the direction of an insecure clueless coach and unstable PLUS Leader. Even the Program Manager was incompetent and was belittled by the PLUS Leaders on many occasions.

“PLUS promises so much and offers very little. You have been warned. They attack your personal character and take things personally. Once you challenge them about anything, you will be targeted and provoked.

“In the end they will decide if you will become a principal, not the university, based on TNTP standards. You will also pay expensive tuition for a degree and certification that is offered much cheaper at other universities (for non-university curriculum in coursework). This information was also not given in the beginning.”

Claims of racial discrimination were also raised as a motive for a class action suit.

Unaccountable and Absurd Organizations that Should be Stopped

The ridiculous contention that TFA, TNTP, Relay Graduate School and The Broad Superintendents Academy are organizations that local elected officials should embrace is detailed in the post “Fake Teachers, Fake Schools, Fake Administrators Courtesy of DPE.” These organizations have one purpose and it is NOT improving education. They exist to advance the privatize everything agenda most wealthy elites support. The super-wealthy fear democracy and do not feel it is right for “makers” like themselves to be paying to educate the children of “takers” who should be responsible for educating their own children.

Working for these want-to-be oligarchs is lucrative. The last tax return from TNTP (Sep. 2017) listed the top 12 paid employees and all of them made more than $200,000 per year. “Thirty pieces of silver” is not worth undermining democratic rights and free universal public education.

Twitter: @tultican

Tags: Broad Superintendents Academy, KCPS, Michelle Rhee, philanthropy, Relay Graduate School, TFA, TNTP, Wendy Kopp

Comments 14 Comments
Categories DPE, education, Law

School Transformation Without School Improvement in Atlanta’s all Charter District

1 May

Since the 2015 all charter district reforms in Atlanta, the so called “education gap” has grown significantly. This is reflected in both state and federal testing data.

I recently wrote about Superintendent Castarphen and her history of bullying staff and working to privatize public education. That post was motivated by an email from Ed Johnson providing his initial review of the just released TUDA (Trial Urban District Assessment) data from the 2017 testing cycle.

Mr. Johnson is a longtime advocate for public education. He is a native Georgian, a former NSA analyst and an expert in Deming inspired quality management. His writings have been published in many places including the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and he has been a candidate for the Atlanta Public Schools (APS) board. With his permission, I am posting his more deepened analysis of recent testing data from Atlanta.

NAEP TUDA 2017: A follow-on systemic look at Atlanta

The earlier preliminary look at NAEP TUDA (National Assessment of Educational Progress, Trial Urban District Assessment) biennial results for Atlanta Public Schools (APS; “Atlanta”) offered the immediate data story that, in recent years, since 2015, the district’s White-Black academic achievement gaps have been made unusually worse. It was also noted that Georgia Milestones Assessment System (GMAS) annual results for Atlanta, from 2015 through 2017, coupled with Georgia Criterion-Referenced Competence Tests (CRCT) annual results for Atlanta, from 2012 through 2014, tell the same story.

Told either way, negative contributing factors in the story are implicated to be, in general, disruptive school choice as charter schools and school turnaround without school improvement. Being driven more by ideology than pedagogy, and inclined to serve would-be oligarchs’ interests more than the public’s interests, the Atlanta Public Schools Leadership (APSL) have pressed these negative contributing factors into the district over just the past few years. It began in 2014, with the school board hiring Meria Joel Carstarphen, Ed.D., as Atlanta superintendent. Notably, Dr. Carstarphen once publicly proclaimed having been “trained,” presumably by her alma mater, Harvard University Graduate School of Education, to do the school turnaround work school board members wanted done.

Now by looking strictly district-level at APS, NAEP TUDA results tell a similar story of academic achievement made unusually worse since 2015. Here, however, the story is systemic and implicates, again, school choice as charter schools and school transformation without school improvement as having detectably disrupted for the worse the district’s continuous (not to be confused with continual) upward trend since TUDA inception in each grade and subject assessed, those being 4th Grade Mathematics (4GM) and 8th Grade Mathematics (8GM), since 2003; and, 4th Grade Reading (4GR) and 8th Grade Reading (8GR), since 2002. The “control charts” accessed in the PDF and PowerPoint links offer the story in pictures. (PowerPoint National Assessment of Educational Progress: Trial Urban District Assessment of Atlanta Public Schools through 2017, Revised. PDF here.)

Johnson TUDA Testing Atlanta Graphic

This Fourth Grade Math Chart is an Example of TUDA Data Mr. Johnson Shared.

Johnson State Testing Atlanta Graphic

This Chart is an Example of Georgia State Testing Data Mr. Johnson Shared.

However, before going to the control charts in the PowerPoint for the story in pictures, consider the following points by W. Edwards Deming and Donald J. Wheeler (my emphasis and inserts):

“Is this chart difficult? Patrick mastered it at age 11. This was his science project at school. A good start in life. Some essential theory of variation could obviously be taught in the 5th grade. Pupils would come out of school with knowledge in their heads, not merely information.”

—W. Edwards Deming. The New Economics for Industry, Government, Education Second Edition (pp. 209-210).

“Figures come in, but the figures go on to charts to detect trends. The management now understand the distinction between common causes of variation, and special causes [of variation].”

—ibid. (p. 40)

“It is a mistake to suppose that the control chart furnishes a test of significance—that a point beyond a control limit is ‘significant.’ This supposition is a barricade to understanding.”

—ibid. (p. 177)

“Certain patterns of points on a control chart may also indicate a special cause.”

—ibid. (pp. 201-202)

“Before you can use data to justify any action, you must be able to detect a potential signal within the data. Otherwise you are likely to be interpreting noise.”

—Donald J. Wheeler. Understanding Variation: The Key to Managing Chaos Second Edition (p. 31).

After considering the story the control charts in the PowerPoint portray, one might ask: Why might Atlanta NAEP TUDA results for each of MG4, MG8, RG4, and RG8 have so suddenly shifted down for the worse in 2015 and pretty much stayed there through 2017? And about MG8, ask: Why did it go “out of control” for the worse in 2017?

Luck, perhaps? Certainly, one might think it was inevitable that each of the four continuous upward trends in Atlanta NAEP TUDA results, from 2002 or 2003 through 2013, would end. After all, if one were to get six or seven heads in a row on as many flips of a coin then suddenly get tails on the very next flip, or if one were to get six or seven snake eyes in a row on as many rolls of two die then suddenly get seven on the very next roll, one might dismissively conclude: “About time.” Or, one’s curiosity might be aroused: “Hmm. What’s going on, here?”

Or, one might ask: What in Atlanta has been in effect since about 2015 likely to have caused the district to experience a sudden sustained shift down for the worse in each of NAEP TUDA MG4, MG8, RG4, and RG8 results?

Well, Atlanta has had school choice as charter schools and school reform without school improvement in effect since about 2015. This being the case, the research paper Social Class and Parent-Child Relationships: An Interpretation, by Melvin L. Kohn, offers insight more rational than, it’s luck:

“We, too, found that working-class parents value obedience, neatness, and cleanliness more highly than do middle-class parents, and that middle-class parents in turn value curiosity, happiness, consideration, and—most importantly—self-control more highly than do working-class parents. We further found that there are characteristic clusters of value choice in the two social classes: working-class parental values center on conformity to external prescriptions, middle-class parental values on self-direction. To working-class parents, it is the overt act that matters: the child should not transgress externally imposed rules; to middle-class parents, it is the child’s motive and feelings that matter: the child should govern himself.”

Arguably, APSL’s school choice as charter schools and school turnaround without school improvement lend credence to Kohn’s research findings. Specifically, simple observations of behavior make it clear that Harvard-trained Meria Carstarphen brought into APS with her hiring, in 2014, a way of thinking that calls for deliberately and intentionally playing on low- and working-class parents’ values of “obedience, neatness, and cleanliness” and “conformity to external prescriptions,” so as to manipulate the parents to believe and accept their children deserve training more so than education, even psychologically abusive training (i.e., operant conditioning, as developed at Harvard University). The picture below clearly illustrates the matter. And it is a matter that contrasts sharply with educating, more so than training, elite- and middle-class children rooted in their parents’ values of “curiosity, happiness, consideration, and … self-control” and “self-direction.”

Kindezi Charter School Picture

Photo from the Kindezi Charter Schools’ Facebook Home Page

Perhaps understanding this, the contrast, helps explain why, during this month’s school board meeting, the superintendent bristled at and pushed back on school board member Erika Mitchell’s proclamation to work with the Harper-Archer Elementary School community to include in the school’s reopening the planetarium the facility once housed when it was Harper-Archer High School. A planetarium in the school might, quite wondrously and experientially, arouse “curiosity” in the children presumed to be of low- and working-class parents. Can’t have that. Curiosity aroused in such children would, of course, be contrary and disruptive to obedience and compliance training the children must get, so as to prepare them to produce, on demand, high enough scores on standardized tests to evidence being on track to “college and career ready.”

And perhaps understanding the contrast also helps explain why the APSL gives no mind to the wondrous, experiential, highly accessible world of nature right out in the backyard of Beecher Hills Elementary School. Thus, yet another case of curiosity arousal suppression, and obedience and compliance reinforcement. Black children are deemed deserving, if only subliminally, because such is the state of their low- and working-class parents’ values.

Bottom line, results over time from both NAEP TUDA and Georgia standardized tests make it abundantly clear that, since school year 2014-2015, the APSL—the Atlanta school board and superintendent—have made schooling especially for Black children inherently more regressive, suppressive, oppressive, and untenable as a public good. Couple that with their having made schooling more insidious, immoral, unethical, unjust, unequable, and racially discriminatory than it has ever been.

So now the APSL would dare concern themselves with early childhood education, expressly directed at low- and working-class parents of children between the ages of birth and pre-K?

Just how boldly sinister can they be?

By the way, reading the superintendent’s take on 2017 NAEP TUDA results for Atlanta can be instructive. The superintendent demonstrates the usefulness of greatly restricting the scope and context of available data to extents that allow fabricating and serving up the best possible “good news” stories. The superintendent comes off looking good but at the expense of losing sight of facts that might arouse, well, curiosity—well-informed curiosity.

Ed Johnson

Advocate for Quality in Public Education

****************************************************************

I have slightly edited Mr. Johnson’s emailed article to better fit this publishing format.

Choice and separate but equal schools first arose in the deep south in 1869. Of course, schools were not equal especially in terms of funding, but they were segregated. Following the Brown decision, southern governors latched onto Milton Friedman’s privatize everything ideas and embraced voucher schemes and schemes that were very similar to charter schools as a way to maintain segregation.

But this time around it is different. It is not just about segregation. It is about reducing the cost of public education. It is about tax reduction for elites and profiting off education dollars.

Laws have already been passed to designate teachers with as little as five-weeks of training “highly qualified.” In Arizona, public schools are giving high school graduates emergency credentials to work as long-term substitute teachers. In North Carolina private schools receiving government vouchers are certified even though they openly hire new high school graduates as teachers.

The promise of public education is being dismantled. Public schools with real teachers trained at university-based teacher education programs were once the expectation in America. High quality professionally run schools in every neighborhood used to be a birthright. The super-wealthy want compliant workers and no longer see a value in educating too many creative thinkers. Plenty of creative thinkers will come from high end private schools. Plus, people who think for themselves are dangerous.

The American public will eventually figure this out and demand their schools back. The first steps for undoing the damage include stopping vouchers and a moratorium on charter schools. All charter schools should be put under the management of elected school boards and TFA should be run out of town. No more fake teachers, fake schools and fake administers.

Tags: Alanta Public Schools, APS, Carstarphen, Charter schools, education, NAEP, Public Schools, reform, testing, TUDA, vouchers

Comments 3 Comments
Categories DPE, education

Denver’s Schools are a Dystopian Nightmare

4 Feb

By Thomas Ultican 2/4/2018

A group of Democratic politicians aligned with local monied interests decided to “save” Denver’s public schools. The man chosen to turn-around the “failing” school system was Michael Bennet, now the junior senator from Colorado. His history of success working for Philip Anschutz and his complete lack of experience in education somehow made him the choice.

For the two years prior to becoming Superintendent, Bennet served as chief of staff for Denver’s new Democratic mayor, John Hickenlooper. John is now the governor of Colorado replacing Denver’s former district attorney, Bill Ritter also a Democrat. Bill chose not to run for a second term.

This group of liberal Democrats initiated the Destroy Public Education (DPE) movement in Denver.

Bennet originally came west with Susan Daggett, also a Yale law graduate who he soon married. She had accepted a job with the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund in Montana. Michael grew up in Washington DC, his childhood witnessed a who’s who of Democratic Party luminaries because his father served as an aide to Vice President Hubert Humphrey, among others. Bennett was born in India where his father was aide to Chester Bowles, then the US ambassador to India.

The Rocky Mountain News reported on Bennet, “He worked six years for billionaire businessman Philip Anschutz, helping engineer lucrative oil and movie-theater deals, making himself wealthy in the process.”

In her wonderful book Why is You Always Got to Be Trippin? Ciedie Aech explains how these liberals sold DPE style reform.

“… ‘I wouldn’t send my children there.’

“Progressive declarations like this one, coming as they did from privileged-class and generally non-minority but avowed open-minded citizens, oh, they just made so much sense – to other privileged-class and generally non-minority but compassionately troubled advocates. Holding test scores high, progressive thinkers waved what they argued to be incontrovertible truth.”

“What was undoubtedly required? Was the immediate “non-negotiable” reformation of our nation’s lowest-income, lowest-scoring schools.”

Bad Ideology Based on Bad Assumptions

David Osborne writing in the reliably pro-DPE publication Education Next stated,

“In 2005, DPS was floundering. Out of 98,000 seats, 31,000 were empty, and many school buildings were half full. Almost 16,000 Denver students had left DPS for private or suburban schools. A financial crisis loomed, in the form of pension contributions the district could not afford.”

The DPS superintendents position was open, graduation data looked bad and so did testing data. The Denver Public Schools (DPS) board wanted radical change. They blithely ignored two highly qualified female candidates – Dr. Patricia Harvey, Superintendent of Saint Paul Public Schools and Christine Johnson, President of the Community College of Denver – choosing Michael Bennett to be the next Superintendent.

In 1997, I took some business trips to the big Connor Corporation disk drive factory in Longmont about 35 miles north of Denver. IBM and other tech companies had built several large factories out on the grassy planes where the buffalo used to roam. These facilities were so big they had Burger Kings, Pizza Huts and other fast food outlets in the factory lunch rooms.

Several sizeable single-family housing projects were visible during the drive between Denver and Longmont. Housing and industrial policy made suburban living appealing, which meant DPS was losing students.

Concurrently with my visits, the state of Colorado started using standardized testing with its public schools.

Osborne’s Education Next article continued:

“DPS was so dysfunctional, Bennet concluded, that he could not fix it without significant outside pressure. So he asked several foundation leaders to create an organization of civic leaders, chaired by two former mayors, to push for change and support the board when it promoted reform. They called the initiative A+ Denver, and it has championed the portfolio strategy, along with the Piton, Donnell-Kay, and Gates Family foundations.”

A key DPE playbook move is to leverage out of town money with local money and political muscle to purloin control of public schools. DPS schools were not dysfunctional nor were they failing. In several Denver neighborhoods, the schools were the only functional government entity.

Ms. Aech identified the perceived problem in Why is You Always Got to Be Trippin?.

“With great fanfare, these vigorously charted and impressively color-coded scores were poignantly presented to the nation. Here, citizens, was ironclad proof. Proof that poor and minority schools – oh, undoubtedly, my, just look at those test scores; these schools were surely, wall to wall? – Filled with bad teachers.”

To retrain all those bad teachers in Denver, Bennet turned to the high priestess of the bad teacher movement, Michelle Rhee and her The New Teacher’s Project (TNTP). He also started importing Wendy Kopp’s Teach For America (TFA) candidates.

More wisdom from Why is You Always Got to Be Trippin?.

The portfolio management theory of education councils paring away the losers the way a stock portfolio is managed. Close failing schools and replace them with a more efficiently managed charter school like a KIPP school.

The year that Bennet became superintendent, the heirs of the Walmart fortune opened the Charter School Growth Fund just 20 miles up highway-25 from downtown Denver. Carrie Walton Penner, sits on the board of the fund and Carrie’s husband, Greg Penner, is a director. Annie Walton Proietti, niece of Carrie, works for a KIPP school in Denver. There are other Walton family members living in and frequenting the Denver area.

Joining the Walmart school privatizers is Bennet’s business mentor Philip Anschutz. He has a billion-dollar foundation located in Denver and owns Walden Publishing. “Walden Publishing company was “behind the anti-teachers’ union movies ‘Won’t Back Down’ and ‘Waiting for ‘Superman.’”

These wealth powered people along with several peers promote school privatization and portfolio district management ideology.

There is a widely held fundamental misconception that standardized testing proves something about the quality of a school. There is a belief among people who have never studied the issue that testing can be used to objectively evaluate teacher quality. It cannot! A roulette wheel would be an equally accurate instrument for measuring school and teacher quality.

Another Non-Educator with No Training

In 2007, Bennet asked Tom Boasberg, a childhood friend, to join DPS as his chief operating officer. Trained as a lawyer, Boasberg had worked closely as chief of staff to the chairman of Hong Kong’s first political party in the early 1990s, when the colony held its first elections in its 150 years of British rule. Before DPS, Boasberg worked for eight years at Level 3 Communications, where he was Group Vice President for Corporate Development.

In the spring of 2008, Bennet and Boasberg were ready to tackle the pension crisis seen as sucking money out of classrooms. One month after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, Boasberg and Bennet convinced the DPS board to buy a $750,000,000 complicated instrument with variable interest rates. During the melt-down of 2008 Denver’s interest rates zoomed up making this a very bad deal for DPS. (Banking was supposed to be Bennet and Boasberg’s strength.)

A brief produced at the Harvard Graduate School of Education provides some history (and cheers the privatization of Denver’s schools).

“In 2008, DPS launched its School Performance Framework (SPF), used to rate schools’ performance based on a series of indicators, the most important of which was the year to year academic growth of students on state assessments.”

“In 2009 Bennet was elected a U.S. Senator and the board appointed Boasberg as superintendent.”

Somehow, Boasberg graduated from the unaccredited Broad Superintendents Academy in 2009 while serving as Chief Operating Officer of DPS. He has since become a member of Jeb Bush’s national DPE oriented group, Chiefs for Change as has the new Colorado State Commissioner of Education, Katy Anthes.

When Michael Bennet was running for his Senate seat, Colorado Pol studied his effect as Superintendent by analyzing Colorado’s CSAP data. They noticed that “the composite, 2000/2001 – 2003/2004 was the best run for DPS.” That run spans the years just before Bennet became Superintendent.

CSAP Data

Colorado Pol’s Graph of the CSAP data.

The Portfolio Model of School District Management is Ridiculous

I recently went to Idaho for my high school reunion. There were six of us there from my first-grade class of eleven. Nearly all the living members from the 47 of us who graduated together were there. A special bond develops between people who spend their formative years together.

During my fifteen years teaching at Mar Vista High School, I witnessed the same phenomena occurring with my students. Students would often tell me stories about each other from grade school and middle school. When those children graduated, they had formed the same difficult to describe deep human bonds I experienced.

Destroying human development opportunities by closing schools to “fix” education does not just seem foolish; it seems inhumane.

The need for stability in education is overwhelmingly documented. Brooke Havlik writing for Nova Education’s Science and Learning published Psychologists Find School Stability a Factor in Achievement Gap. Brooke wrote in the lead paragraph, “Two new studies published this month suggest that changing schools may have a negative impact on cognitive development and student performance, especially for students experiencing chronic, high-levels of poverty.” (emphasis added)

Yet we read in the Tom Boasberg’s biography at Scholastic.com, “… each year it [DPS] closes a half-dozen schools and creates 10 to 15 new ones, all while raising the “on-time” graduation rate from 60 to 70 percent.” This is not a heartless educator; this is a banker.

A questioning observation from Ms. Aech in Why is You Always Got to Be Trippin?.

“Why was it, the question kept rising up over the years. Well, why was it that those schools most quickly and aggressively labeled as “drop-out factories” – schools slated for closure or an endless chain of reforms, schools forced through the fatal destabilization of restructure and redesign, schools branded publicly as being underused failures, schools negatively marked with the highly publicized letter grade of an F – well, why was it that such a large percent of these schools (shoot, pretty much all of them) had traditionally served as a home to non-dominant-culture, non-privileged-class, minority students?”

Running Multiple School Systems Adds Cost

The basic breakdown of K-12 schools in Denver; 104 traditional public schools, 58 innovation schools and 59 charter schools.

The 58 innovation schools belong to DPS but have contracts with the district giving them more autonomy. There is a process in place where a principal can write a plan about how his school will do things differently and will meet some specific testing targets. If the plan is accepted, the principal is free to run the school according to the plan and does not need to follow district operating procedures.

If the district operating rules are not important, why do any schools need to follow them? It looks like the district is abrogating its responsibilities to lead schools and institute wise policies through this Innovation school scheme.

The 104 traditional public schools have been led for the last thirteen years by non-educators.

The 59 charter schools have their own administrations. Some of them are independently run. Most of them are in various charter management organizations.

The fact is this kind of a system costs more to run. To hire competent teachers and maintain reasonable class sizes – taxes and spending need to be increased for a hybrid-system of both public and multiple private managements. Multiple management systems are more costly.

TFA Teachers are Untrained and Ineffective

According to Teach for America Colorado, this year there are 145 more TFA teachers in the Denver area. These kids get five weeks of training in the summer and then they are called teachers.

Putting untrained people in classrooms used to be against the law and it is still immoral.

Another observation from Ms. Aech in Why is You Always Got to Be Trippin?.

TFA has effectively become storm troopers for the billionaires trying to disrupt, privatize and end public education. They are cheap, young and follow orders, but they are not even minimally trained educators.

Some New Data

This past December the New York Times ran an interactive article about a new way to compare schools. Reporters Emily Badger and Kevin Quealy describe:

“It’s true that children in prosperous districts tend to test well, while children in poorer districts on average score lower. But in this analysis, which measures how scores grow as student cohorts move through school, the Stanford researcher Sean Reardon argues that it’s possible to separate some of the advantages of socioeconomics from what’s actually happening in schools.”

I ran a simulation comparing Anne Arundel County, Maryland, Milwaukee, Chicago and Denver. I only picked Denver. The New York Times picked the comparison schools. This simulator tries to correlate years of learning. The average between third and 8^th grade should be five years. After 13 years of disruption and “reform,” Denver is not quite average.

National Eighth Grade Test Scores

Interactive Simulation result from the New York Times.

It is time for common sense to prevail. Bankers and Billionaires don’t know how to run schools. College graduates with no training do not know how to teach. Running multiple school administrations costs more.

Denver’s public schools were never failing. They probably needed more resources especially in poorer neighborhoods, but the schools labeled as failures were the anchors of poor-minority neighborhoods. Destroying their schools was akin to a hate crime. Maybe it would be fairer to call it a stupidity crime.

I have become a one issue voter. I do not care if you have an R or D after your name on the ballot. I want to know if you are ready to defend public education against charter schools, vouchers and fake teachers? Do you respect professional educators or do you think politicians should run schools by top down fiat? Are you ready to stand up to the out of control billionaire class for the sake of students?

Tags: Democratic Party, DPE, education, Politics, Public education, Public Schools

Comments 16 Comments
Categories DPE, Law

Defend the People’s Schools

19 Apr

By Thomas Ultican 4/19/2024

I am sure you’ll be shocked to your core but there are some really bad people out there trying to end publicly-financed free education.

Since the beginning to the 21^st millennium, misguided wealthy people have been attacking public education. The reasons range from religion to hubris. Betsy DeVos thinks secular education is an insult to her Christian God. Bill Gates believes he knows more than anyone else and Charles Koch is opposed to all government-sponsored social action. That would all be fine if they were not billionaires, using immense wealth to impose their way.

Truth-in-Funding (TiF) offers tools for opposing their propaganda with a webpage providing links to 25 organizations, working to protect public schools. Organizations such as National Education Policy Center, Network for Public Education and Education Law Center share links to their research along with toolkits for delivering the message.

The Truth-in-Funding Group

TiF’s homepage states:

“School voucher programs use public funds to pay for private education costs. These programs are spreading despite overwhelming evidence that they are harmful public policy.”

And their about page says:

“This website offers a wide range of tools from groups that oppose vouchers and other efforts to divert public funding in education. We work to protect the vital institution of public education and ensure all students have access to welcoming, well-resourced public schools.”

Highlighted Materials

Network for Public Education (NPE) was founded in 2013 by a middle-school teacher from Oakland, California, Anthony Cody and former Education Department official and education historian, Diane Ravitch. Soon after the founding, past New York principal of the year, Carol Burris, came on board as director. NPE has focused on uniting friends of public schools, researching the reality behind school choice and creating tools to protect public education.

Ravitch Introducing Keynote Speaker Gloria Ladson-Billings

At NPE Washington DC October 2023

One of NPE’s many “Toolkits”, which are concise two-page documents, is “Do charter schools and school vouchers “hurt” public schools?” The answer is:

“Yes.

“Charter schools, vouchers, and other “choice” options redirect public money to privately operated education enterprises, some of which operate for profit. That harms your public schools by siphoning off students, resources, and funding and reducing the ability of public schools to serve the full range of student needs and interests.”

This conclusion was justified with four paragraphs of explanation and eight examples from across America.

Policy Matters Ohio is a non-profit policy research institute. Funded by mostly small foundations and individual donations they claim to “create a more vibrant, equitable, sustainable and inclusive Ohio through research, strategic communications, coalition building and policy advocacy.”

Their 2023 Ohio voucher study concluded:

“Ohio is currently ranked 46th for per-pupil equitable distribution of funding. State funding that is allocated towards vouchers should be directed to public schools so that students can get the resources they need to thrive.
“Ohio public schools need funding, especially our largest urban school districts with high concentrations of Black, Brown, and Economically disadvantaged students (CCS example)
“Ohio is ranked 40th in starting teacher salaries, and falls below the national average. Funding allocated towards vouchers takes away from money that should be invested in our educators. Can help us to recruit and retain more teachers in the state
“Private schools can choose to kick back a child, but as of right now they would be able to keep the money that was awarded, this needs to be changed so that private schools are not benefiting from public dollars for a child they are not educating .
“With universal vouchers comes universal bussing costs for public-school districts who bear the cost of transporting all district voucher students to private schools. Property taxes will continue to rise as the public is forced to pay a billion dollars for private school tuition, which will strain lower income districts.”

With the advent of billionaire-financed attacks on public education, non-peer reviewed policy reports and education outcome studies have become prevalent. In response, a group of scholars created the National Education Policy Center (NEPC), housed at the University of Colorado to test the claims being made.

In 2023, there was a legislatively mandated report by the Georgia Department of Audits and Accounts estimating costs and benefits of the state’s new Qualified Education Expense tax credit (QEEC). It is a tax credit school voucher scheme that provides families with “scholarships”. These programs can be controversial because they send taxpayer funding to private schools which serve primarily religious schools that regularly exclude students based on faith, sexual orientation or disability. The Georgia report concluded the state would save money with these vouchers.

David S. Knight, University of Washington, studied the report for NEPC and concluded:

“Taken together, little evidence or data supports the report’s main findings and conclusions. If more accurate parameters are used to generate cost estimates, particularly for the switcher rate and for the cost savings of declining enrollment, a different picture emerges. While the report concludes that the tax-credit scholarship program will have a positive fiscal impact, a far more likely scenario, and one that has already played out in other states, is that the tax credit will cost Georgia taxpayers millions of dollars, potentially requiring future cuts to public services, while providing a cash bonus to many wealthy families.”

A visitor to the TiF library page discovers 13 hyper-linked categories including “Graphics” where I found this:

A Big Concern

At the bottom of TiF’s main page, below the 25 hyper-linked partners, is a link to Partnership for the Future of Learning (PFL) with an invitation to visit their website.

Learning Policy Institute is listed as a member of the PFL network, founded in 2015 with Stanford professor Linda Darling-Hammond in charge and offices in Palo Alto and Washington DC. San Francisco-based Sandler Foundation was the lead funder with Atlantic Philanthropies, S.D. Bechtel, Jr. Foundation, Ford Foundation, William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. Stuart Foundation also provided initial support.

The Ford, Bechtel and Hewlett foundations have often supported initiatives that undermine public schools. The Hewlett foundation joined Zuckerberg and Kellogg in funding PFL. Hewlett’s 2022 form 990-PF (EIN: 94-1655673) reports grants of $600,000 to NWEA, $533,336 to Education Trust and $1,935,000 to the Aspen Institute.

Learning Policy Institute’s 2022 tax report lists Darling-Hammond’s salary at over $500,000 (EIN: 47-2772048). She has a history of being both supportive of public education and a problem. My friend, Steven Singer, titled his 2018 post about Darling-Hammond, “Linda Darling-Hammond vs. Linda-Darling Hammond – How a Once Great Educator Got Lost Among the Corporate Stooges.” While often brilliant, she does not seem to value the importance of school governance.

Another PFL partner, WK Kellogg Foundation, is one of America’s largest grant-making organizations. A quick perusal of their 990-PF tax forms (EIN: 38-1359264) showed many grants to clearly worthwhile causes. Unfortunately they also give money to organizations like Teach For America, who pawns off fake temp-teachers on America’s students. Their 2021 form gives the most recent spending data available from Kellogg, with the following partial table of giving:

PFL cites Teach Plus as a network partner. It is a private company trying to monetize teacher-training, established in 2007 by Celine Coggins, a professor at Harvard Innovation Labs. Her Harvard resume says, “Under Celine’s leadership, Teach Plus grew to over 30,000 participating teachers and a $10M annual operating budget by offering groundbreaking programs in leadership development and advocacy.” The actual groundbreaking was the effort to replace teacher-leadership and -training by established public universities like UCLA, University of Texas and University of Illinois, with a for-profit company.

PFL may be a true friend of public education but some of the organizations they listed are not. Until they clean their house of organizations that harm public education, TiF should reconsider giving them a link on their otherwise pristine webpage.

I do not want to overemphasize TiF’s one questionable link but am sensitive about the issue. Every national education news source now receives funding from Bill Gates. In addition, other billionaire enemies of public schools also contribute to school news outlets like The 74, education week etc. There are few places for the public to get true un-slanted education news.

So far Truth-in-Funding appears to be a valuable resource for fighting misinformation and saving universal free public education.

Tags: David S. Knight, Learning Policy Institute, Linda Darling-Hammond, National Education Policy Center, Network for Public Education, Partnership for the Future of Learning, Policy Matters Ohio, Truth-in-Funding

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Categories education

ETS and Carnegie Team Up for ‘Zombie’ Ed Policy

4 Jun

By Thomas Ultican 6/4/2023

Educational Testing Service (ETS) and Carnegie Foundation are partnering to create assessments for competency-based education, claiming it will revive the zombie education policy tainted by a five decade record of failure. The joint announcement was made at the April 2023 ASU+GSV conference in San Diego with Bill Gates as the keynote speaker. Ultimately, it was to make the Orwellian-named “personalized learning” viable for issuing digitally earned certifications.

ASU is Arizona State University and GSV is the private equity firm, Global Silicon Valley. GSV advertises “The sector’s preeminent collection of talent & experience—uniquely qualified to partner with, and to elevate, EdTech’s most important companies.” It profits from the corporate education ideology that holds job training as the purpose of public education.

Unfortunately, the US Department of Education is on board with digital learning and competency based education claiming,

“Digital tools can shift the focus of learning environments away from traditional metrics of progress — such as the number of hours spent in a classroom—toward more meaningful indicators of learning.”

“Digital learning can support competency-based education, in which students advance after demonstrating mastery of a key skill or concept. In a competency-based system, students work individually and in teams to continuously learn content and develop skills (e.g., communication, critical thinking, problem solving, creativity) and receive timely, differentiated support based on their individual needs. In this sense, competency-based education enables personalization and learning continuity, regardless of location.”

The 1970’s “mastery learning” was detested and renamed “outcome based education” in the 1990s. It is now called “competency based education” (CBE). The name changes were due to a five-decade long record of failure. CBE is a move to use “mastery leaning” techniques to create individualized certification paths. However it is still the same mind-numbing approach that the 1970s teachers began calling “seats and sheets.”

In the book A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door, Jack Schneider and Jennifer Berkshire explain, “Because learning is deeply rooted in relationships, it can’t be farmed out to robots or time-saving devices.”

Unfortunately the potential for large profits is huge and serially failed education policies are zombies that will not die.

Selling CBE and Testing

‘The 74’ is an oligarch funded online, daily education publication, promoting the neoliberal agenda. Their cheerleading article about the Carnegie-ETS proposal had no pushback when quoting Carnegie President Timothy Knowles’ unlikely to be true statement,

“We’re in a position to do something that we hadn’t before. Unlike 20 years ago, we can actually reliably measure the skills that we know are predictive of success in postsecondary education and work”

Closest thing to any questioning of this came when the author quoted Michael Horn, a co-founder of Harvard’s Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Education. This loud voice advocating the destruction of public education through privatization said,

“This part, from my reading of the literature on assessment, is both unproven and underdeveloped. So the how is going to be very important. I’m going to be very curious to see what the investments look like as they go forward, and I hope they don’t overpromise.”

‘The 74’ post also claims, “Competency-based learning and assessment has long been theorized as a preferable alternative to existing educational models.” These theories come from a range of philanthropic foundations and education-focused companies, many in attendance at ASU+GSV. Education professionals, not on some billionaire’s payroll, have completely different opinions.

Renewed neoliberal effort to revive CBE now has new players seeking to be big contributors while old hands are filling leadership roles. For example, at the best-known new group called Mastery Transcript Consortium, board member, Tom Vander Ark, the former education director at the Gates Foundation 1999-2006 remains engaged in pushing edtech.

There is very little real change. CBE continues to put kids at computers learning scripted chunks of information and testing for mastery, promising to increase edtech profits and reduce education costs especially teacher salaries. It is awful education and the children hate it.

Guys like Carnegie’s President Tim Knowles and ETS’s CEO Amit Sevak must justify 7 figure salaries by creating new tools and revenue streams for their benefactors. This begs the question, “How can an organization like Carnegie (TIN: 13-1628151) and ETS (TIN: 21-0634479) that pay salaries of more than $1,000,000 a year still be called non-profits?”

The Big Push for CBE

Former reporter for Inside Higher Ed, Paul Fain, shares insights into the new push for CBE. He wrote,

“Skills were a hot item at the summit in San Diego, particularly tech-enabled tools that seek to measure the knowledge and abilities of learners, and to convey them to employers. These discussions are drawing energy from the campaign led by Opportunity@Work and the Ad Council, which calls for employers to drop four-year degree requirements and to move toward skills-based hiring.”

Much of the momentum behind this thinking is the move toward a belief that the preeminent purpose of education is employment readiness. Philosophy, literature, art etc. are possibly only meaningful for children of the wealthy. The new push for CBE is toward a skills based education which wastes no time on useless frills. It is a system where children study in isolation at digital screens and earn skills badges at their own pace as they move through the menu driven learning units.

The big obstacle for this system of education is that testing has not proven reliable. Not only has it struggled to assess skills mastery it has not been proficient at predicting future success. This of course completely ignores the reality that CBE is a god awful theory of pedagogy.

In 1906, the Carnegie foundation developed the Carnegie Unit as a measure of student progress. For example, a student attending a class meeting one hour a day 3 times a week for 40 weeks earns one “unit” of high school credit for that 120 hours in class. Based on this, schools all over America pay attention to how many instructional minutes they schedule for every class.

In 2015, Carnegie completed a two-year study of the Carnegie Unit and proposals to revise the unit-based competency established on time. They concluded, “The Carnegie Unit continues to play a vital administrative function in education, organizing the work of students and faculty in a vast array of schools or colleges.” The report did not embrace competency-based standards. Now, Carnegie Foundation President Tim Knowles is calling for just such a change.

Education writer Derek Newton in an article for Forbes says he is hostile to the Carnegie-EST idea for a host of reasons but the major one is cheating. He shares,

“Cheating, academic misconduct as the insiders know it, is so pervasive and so easy that it makes a complete mockery of any effort to build an entire education system around testing. From middle school to grad school, from admissions tests to professional certifications, cheating is the bus-sized hole in the hull of assessment that renders any real voyage implausible. Right now, anyone can pretty easily buy a test-based credential without knowing anything at all. Just pay the fee, get the credential. And people do, every day.

“I am not talking about fake credentials. They are real, provided by the certifiers themselves. The sellers use software to take remote control of a test-taker’s computer and have a ringer take the exam for them.”

It is easy to cheat with rampant digitally enhanced systems. Newton observed, “But because of the credit hour system, which is designed to measure classroom instruction time, it’s still relatively hard to cheat your way to a full college degree.”

Conclusion

Derek Newton’s concern about cheating, difficult and expensive to combat, is valid.

To me, the biggest problem is that “mastery learning” is proven lousy pedagogy that is unaligned with how learning happens.

In his book Soka Education, Daisaku Ikeda writes,

“Recognizing each student as a unique personality and transmitting something through contacts between that personality and the personality of the instructor is more than a way of implanting knowledge: it is the essence of education.”

Socrates likened this education process to being “kindled by a leaping spark” between teacher and student. CBE, “mastery learning,” “outcome based education” or whatever name is given to teaching students in isolation is bad pedagogy, bordering on child abuse.

Tags: ASU+GSV, Bill Gates, Competency Based Education, Gold Standard Ventures, Mastery Learning, Outcome Based Education

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Categories Corporate Education Reform

Why Tax Billionaires Out of Existence

22 Apr

By Thomas Ultican 4/22/2021

Twenty years of studying education policy, politics and practices has been awakening. Seeing billionaires inflict their often misguided and unpopular beliefs on our nation’s public schools has made it clear how undemocratic and dangerous extreme wealth is. They have established voucher programs routinely sending taxpayer money to religious schools even though these programs have lost decisively whenever submitted to voters. In her book Slaying Goliath, Diane Ravitch labeled these 0.1% of Americans as disrupters. She asked and answered the question “what do disrupters want?” They want:

Inexperienced teachers with little or no training from organizations like Teach For America.
To replace teachers with machine teaching (“blended learning” – “personalized learning”).
To move fast and break things including school systems, historic schools and communities.
To eliminate local democratic control over schools.
To eliminate teacher tenure and seniority rights.
To eliminate teacher defined benefit pensions.
To eliminate teachers unions.
To evaluate teachers and schools with standardized test scores.
To lower taxes and reduce spending on education.

Controlling the Political Process

In 2018, the Network for Public Education (NPE) produced a masterful report detailing how school board elections are being stolen from local residents. In the introduction to “Hijacked by Billionaires: How the Super Rich Buy Elections to Undermine Public Schools,” the authors state, “This report provides some insight into how the very wealthy insert themselves into local elections through direct contributions, Independent Expenditure Committees and even non-profit organizations.”

The Billionaires Cited in “Hijacked by Billionaires”

In my post-election analysis of three elections, “School Board Elections 2020: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly,” I show that billionaires Alice Walton of Bentonville, Arkasas, Michael Bloomberg of New York, New York and Stacy Schusterman of Tulsa, Oklahoma poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into the school board races in Oakland, California and Indianapolis, Indiana.

In that same election, the spending in Los Angeles and for California state offices was enormous. Through a combination of direct contributions and political action committees, seven billionaires put more than $14,000,000 into the 2020 election. The bulk of it went into the Los Angeles school board election with over $1,000,000 going to state assembly and senate races plus more than $1,000,000 went into five county board of education elections.

The Path of Billionaire Spending in California’s 2020 General Election

Similar election spending went on in New Orleans, Camden and many other jurisdictions mainly through Public School Allies the political arm of the City Fund founded by billionaires John Arnold and Reed Hastings.

In 2014, SFGATE reported, “Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, who suggests that democratically elected school boards are the problem with public education, says they should be replaced by privately held corporations.” Hastings said out loud a belief held among many of his anti-democracy peers.

Creating an Alternate Teacher Training Path

In their effort to privatize public education, billionaires have created alternate paths for teacher credentialing and professional development.

Mercedes Schneider writes in her book Chronicle of Echoes, “Wendy Kopp declared that she had a force of young, predominantly-Ivy League idealists for sale, and Big Money arrived on the scene to make the purchase.” Wendy Kopp is the founder of Teach For America (TFA) and the young idealists for sale were her “temp teachers” who have no intention of staying in the classroom. In 2011, the Walton Family Foundation donated $49.5 million to TFA. Many corporate donors also sent TFA $100,000 to $999,000: “Anheuser-Busch, ATT, Bank of America, Blue Cross/Blue Shield, Boeing, Cargill Chesapeake Energy, Chevron, Emerson, Entergy, ExxonMobil, Fedex, Fidelity Investment, GE, Marathon Oil, Monsanto, Peabody, Prudential, State Farm, Symantec, Travelers, Wells Fargo.”

These unqualified “temp teachers” have not studied teaching and they have no experience. A new teacher coming through a traditional program has taken many education courses and spent a year working with a master teacher as a supervised student teacher. TFA teachers typically have no education courses in college and get just five-weeks of classroom training in the summer.

TNTP is one of several organizations that only exist because billionaires have financed them. Wendy Kopp founded TNTP (originally called The New Teachers Project) in 1997. She assigned Michelle Rhee, who had completed a two year TFA tour, to lead it. Along with TNTP and TFA there are also the Broad Superintendents Academy and the fake school for professional educators called Relay Graduate School instilling the billionaire inspired privatization mindset.

Selling Technology and School Choice

With their enormous wealth, billionaires have poured more than $200,000,000 into organizations like New School Venture Fund to sell edtech and school choice; also funding think tanks (CREDO and CRPE) to provide a veneer of academic credibility.

To advance these sales they have created their own education media empire with The Education Post and The-74 as their flagships. Bill Gates has spent lavishly on publications like EdWeek turning them from a teacher resource into an edtech promoting outlet.

“An imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics.” —Plutarch (c. 46–120 ce)

In 2017, Bill Moyers wrote,

“The top 1 percent owns more than 30 percent of America’s wealth. The poorest half owns just 2.5 percent. Wall Street bonuses alone are twice the amount of all the combined earnings of minimum-wage workers in this country. We are grotesquely, bizarrely, grossly unequal — unequal in cash, health care, schooling and access to clean air and water. Unequal in our access to power. And we are becoming more unequal by the year: Since Ronald Reagan became president, the income of the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans has doubled.”

As Louis Brandeis famously stated, “We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.”

Tags: Alice Walton, Arthur Rock, Bill Gates, Carrie Walton Penner, Doris Fisher, Eli Broad, James Walton, John Arnold, Michael Bloomberg, Reed Hastings

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Categories Corporate Education Reform, Justice

Infamous John Deasy Resigned under Suspicious Circumstances Again

29 Jul

By Thomas Ultican 7/29/2020

April 21, the Stockton Unified School District (SUSD) board accepted John Deasy’s letter of resignation effective June 15, 2020. His quitting mid-contract marked the third straight superintendent position he ended in a similar fashion. All three time, the resignation came with ethical charges and legal suspicions.

Stockton, California, was a gold rush town established in 1849. Situated 75 miles down the San Joaquin River from the Golden Gate Bridge at the north end of the San Joaquin valley, it is the farthest inland deep water port in California. Several waterfront scenes for the movie “On the Waterfront” were shot there.

Brando “On the Waterfront” in Stockton 1954

Stockton is a small city of about 315,000 people and one of America’s most diverse. The demographic makeup is 42.1% Hispanic, 21.6% Asian, 20.8% White and 11.8 % Black. The city has a more than a 20% poverty rate; however, SUSD reports that 82% of their students live in poverty. The district enrolls 40,000 students into 54 schools.

Why Deasy resigned is not clear. Upon his resignation the 209 Times reported,

“Controversial superintendent John Deasy is out of Stockton Unified School District effective June 15th after agreeing to resign tonight amidst an investigation sources tell us into his actions and possible conflict of interests regarding a contract between board trustee Lange Luntao and the organization he is director of on behalf of Mayor Michael Tubbs, Reinvent Stockton Foundation.”

Bob Highfill of Record Net observed that there has been a 4-3 split on the school board for some time, which was reflected in the 4-3 decision to accept Deasy’s resignation. Board member Scot McBrian said that until this year he had been happy with Deasy’s work.

However, recently Deasy pushed for a $2 million waiver of development fees for a low-income housing project within the district. The reduction in fees to the school district was part of a project being pushed by Stockton Mayor Tubbs. When he did not get the required votes, an angered Deasy reworded the proposal and submitted it again. It was voted down again 4-3.

McBrian also mentioned problematic issues with the unions, the addition of six charter schools and a simultaneous roll-out of English and math curricula objected to by a number of teachers. Controversies surrounding the superintendent were mounting at the time of his resignation.

A 209 Times investigative article delved into the push to privatize public schools in Stockton and the three board member allies Deasy had helping him:

1. “SUSD Trustee AngelAnne Flores is a current employee of Aspire Charter Schools in Stockton, and is part of a public alliance and voting block along with Lange Luntao and Candelaria Vargas.
2. “Lange Luntao is not only the best friend of Mayor Michael Tubbs …, but also simultaneously an SUSD Trustee and the Executive Director of Reinvent Stockton Foundation which is also the “Stockton Schools Initiative” and “Stockton Scholarship”. The Reinvent Stockton Foundation also has a contract with SUSD to farm data of students as well as promote their “stockton scholarships” scheme.
3. “Candelaria Vargas, is married to Max Vargas who is the personal assistant for Mayor Tubbs who endorsed and pushed for all three of these Trustees to be elected.

“All three of these SUSD Trustees are not only part of the “Reinvent” network, but are also members of an organization called School Board Partners that are seeking to push a Wall Street inspired “Portfolio” model of big corporate charter schools under the guise of “reform”, in “urban” cities across America including Stockton.”

In 2018, when billionaires John Arnold and Reed Hastings put up $100 million each to found The City Fund, other organizations they support were repurposed. Education Cities was divided into two new school choice promoting organizations, the above mentioned School Board Partners and Community Engagement Partners.

“DoWopDon” Don Shalvey (twitter handle @doWopDon), who joined with Netflix CEO Reed Hastings to found Aspire Charter Schools in 1998, has been working to enhance charter school penetration in Stockton. Today, Aspire is one of three charter schools looking to expand in Stockton. Shalvey left his post as the Gates Foundation Deputy Director of Education Programs, to lead the A+ non-profit organization in Stockton supporting Charter School growth.

As part of their investigation, the 209 Times reviewed and published emails between Shalvey, Deasy and others. They concluded, “What was hidden from the SUSD Board Members was the intimate relationship and secret communications the Superintendent had with Mr. Shalvey and his associates, which led to the fast-tracking of 6 Charter School petitions in SUSD, which were all amazingly approved via Consent Agenda – eliminating any discussion or input from the public.”

John Deasy and the Mayor Providing Local Political Support

Mayor Michael Tubbs, a youthful African-American politician, was extremely angered by Deasy’s departure and blamed the four member faction that opposes his personal agenda. Tubbs stated,

“Given the gravity of the circumstances, there should be a serious discussion about whether Mendez and McBrian should be recalled, which I would be in favor of. I’ve heard from community members that are interested in considering a recall and I would be in 100% in favor of that. Our kids deserve nothing less than the best.”

There is a recall the school board effort underway in Stockton.

The obvious question is does Mayor Tubbs realize he has adopted the education agenda of US Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, the very conservative Walton Family Foundation and the ultra-conservative libertarian mogul Charles Koch? Does Tubbs understand that he has embraced education policies Cornell’s Professor of African-American studies, Noliwe Rooks, derisively labels “segrenomics”; the profiting from selling education to segregated poor communities?

A Legacy of Controversy and Ethical Issues

In 2004, reporter Juliet McShannon writing for the Lookout News in Santa Monica, California noted, “Controversy seems to follow John Deasy.” At the time he had been leading Santa Monica Unified School district for almost three years.

Deasy came to Santa Monica after a five year stint as Superintendent of Coventry School District in Rhode Island. At the relatively small district of 6000 students, Deasy obtained one of the first small school development grants given out by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. He also made national news when he launched a “pay for performance” initiative with Coventry teachers.

Standardized testing became his main metric for evaluating teachers, and he terminated the contracts of a number of teachers who did not meet his expectations.

In April 2001, Deasy abruptly resigned from Coventry effective June 1 to take the superintendent’s job in Santa Monica. He left behind financial problems and a small district that did not have time to find a new leader for the 2001-02 school year.

In 2006, Deasy graduated from Eli Broad’s superintendent’s training academy, which trains its candidates in a market-based data driven methodology. Billionaire Eli Broad is well known for his determination to privatize public education.

Deasy left Santa Monica to become superintendent of the very large Prince George’s County Schools in Maryland, the largest majority African-American county in the United States. This would be the first of three straight superintendents’ positions he would resign under suspicious circumstances.

When he arrived in Maryland, Deasy immediately started promoting charter schools and a teacher “pay for performance” agenda.

There was buzz in the area. Baltimore had Andres Alonzo firing teachers and closing schools and just a few miles the other way Michelle Rhee was promising to “fix” Washington DC’s schools by firing teachers and principals. These three superintendents were given the undeserved label “reformers.” It has become clear that they were just “disrupters.”

After two years on the job in Maryland, Deasy resigned.

That October 2008, the Baltimore Sun’s Liz Bowie speculated, “John Deasy is denying there’s any connection, but many people in the education community will continue to wonder whether the Prince George’s County superintendent would be moving on if there hadn’t been a dust-up in the past several weeks over how he got his doctoral degree.”

Bowie reported that “Deasy had been awarded a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Lousville in 2004 although he had only completed nine credits, or about a semester, there.” She also noted that Deasy had given his advisor, Robert Felner, a $125,000 contract from Santa Monica Unified and that Felner’s group received a total $375,000.

On September 29, 2008, a press release stated “The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation announced today that Dr. John E. Deasy has been named deputy director of its education division within its United States Program.”

Two years later, with a big push from Eli Broad and the LA Mayor he politically supported, Antonio Villaraigosa, Deasy was hired as Deputy Superintendent of Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD). In January, 2011, he was named Superintendent.

At the time, other billionaire groups were also spending to influence the district. The LA-based Wasserman Foundation gave a $4.4 million grant, another $1.2 million came from the Walton Family Foundation, and smaller grants came from the Ford and Hewlett foundations to pay the salaries of more than a dozen key senior staffers in the district.

The staffers were working to advance the market-based data driven school reform agenda, charter schools, testing and competition.

Controversy came to LAUSD soon after Deasy took charge. When he walked into a classroom at Washington Preparatory High School being led by substitute teacher Patrena Shankling, he got into a dispute with her over the quality of the lesson plan and fired her on the spot. When a school teacher was implicated in an ugly sex scandal at Miramonte Elementary school, Deasy removed the entire staff from janitor to principal completely ignoring due process but gaining tough-guy headlines.

Deasy pushed charter school expansion and implementation of education technology. Two technology agendas appear to have led to his demise as Superintendent. He rolled out a completely incompetent student digital data system. It failed at scheduling students for classes, recording attendance and inputting grades; it was a disaster. But his I-pad fiasco was worse because it brought legal charges and an investigation by the FBI.

There were many things wrong with the $1.3 billion plan to put I-pads in the hands of every student but the suspicion that the bidding had been rigged put Deasy in legal jeopardy. Emails showed that he had been in negotiations with Apple and curriculum provider Pearson before any competitive bidding process started.

Interim Superintendent Ramon Corzine noted the bidding process had been plagued by “too many innuendoes [and] rumors.”

Deasy resigned before the legal investigation by the FBI and LA County District attorney got under way. This time the Broad Academy stepped in to hire him as “superintendent-in-residence.” That was in 2015.

In 2018, Deasy was off to be Superintendent in Stockton, resigning this year with ethical and legal malfeasance charges mounting.

Tags: Don Shalvey, John Arnold, John Deasy, Michael Tubbs, Reed Hastings, School Board Partners, Stockton Unified School District, SUSD, The City Fund

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Categories DPE, education, Justice

Reopening Schools and Debunking Demagoguery

21 Jun

By Thomas Ultican 6/21/2020

Education professionals throughout America are feverishly engaged in preparing for the first school year in the unprecedented Sars-Cov-2 era. Simultaneously, demagogues are pushing an often uninformed agenda.

For example, congressmen Jim Banks of Indiana and Tom Tiffany of Wisconsin have introduced legislation to force all schools to open with in-person classes by September or else lose federal funding.

At the same time McKinsey and Company, the 74 and other school privatization friendly groups are loudly proclaiming that an education gap disaster will devastate Black and Brown children if we do not reopen brick and mortar schools immediately.

Education Leaders are Getting Ready for Fall

Across California and the whole of the US, parents, students, teachers and administrators are involved in intense school reopening discussions with less than two months to go in some cases. County Health Departments in both Los Angeles and San Diego have indicated that masks will be mandatory for all students and school personnel.

California’s second largest school district, San Diego Unified School District (SDUSD), and other districts plan in-person, online and “hybrid” learning options. However, SDUSD will need an infusion of federal dollars to operate for the full year. Board President, John Lee Evans, says without financial help they will be forced to revert to all online learning in the winter semester.

On June 18^th, Sweetwater Union High School District in Chula Vista, Calafornia held a virtual meeting for all stakeholders to lay out plans for starting school on August 3^rd. It will include distance learning through August 28^thand then implements students on campus in three phases. The initial transition to on campus learning limits the number of students to 10% of the student body at any one time. This would be ramped up to 20% and then eventually 50% of students would be allowed on campus at one time.

Districts are busy stockpiling surgical face masks and placing future orders. They are also ordering infrared thermometers, specialized cleaning supplies and personal protective equipment.

This kind of reopening planning is happening everywhere in America as the new school year approaches.

Perspective of the Pros in the Field

With school teachers facing a new school year, five veteran educators from San Diego County were interviewed. When all school campuses closed on March 13, these teachers participated in distance learning for the final three months of the school year.

They all felt that because of the hold harmless policies their districts embraced, the three months were not representative of what is possible. These five educators all taught at the high school level and when their students realized grades could only go up many students completely disengaged.

There was a large difference in engagement correlated with age. The more mature students were more engaged.

Student performance was related to type and level of classes. An AP physics teacher saw 90% attendance and felt most of his students did okay but not as well as his previous in person classes. He commented that, “some students seem to need the social environment in the classroom and became lost.”

On the other hand, the special education teacher co-teaching entry level math and English classes saw attendances of 25%-30%. As soon as his students found out about hold harmless, only a minority of students who were trying to raise their grades participated.

The Spanish teacher with 170 students on her rolls reports that 150 checked in but only about 40 who were trying to raise their grade actually engaged.

An AP literature teacher said that all of his AP students stayed with him until the AP exam but his one English 12 class, with the few exceptions of those who needed to raise their grades, basically checked out on March 13.

The literature teacher also mentioned that he felt like 100% distance learning was undermining his in-person credibility. Students communicate about their teachers and pass on who are the good teachers, whose classes are fun and who is interesting. They give each other tips on how to best navigate a certain teacher’s class. In cyber space, student-to-student communication is limited and it is almost impossible for a teacher to express their personality; be humorous, subtly sarcastic or employ irony.

The English and AP psychology teacher said after shifting to distance learning she thought she had found “nirvana.” Working from home, no commuting, grading was easy and then she started teaching a summer school session with 45 students who are re-taking a class they failed. She says, “Now, I am dealing with a different student population, the workload is overwhelming and students fake being in class.” She misses face to face classes.

The oldest teacher interviewed said if the fall reopening safety precautions were not robust, he might quit. One teacher was concerned about the possibility of bringing the virus home to her 85-years-old mother and another expressed mild concern about the implications of having been asthmatic as a child. The two youngest teachers expressed no concern about risk to their own health.

All five teachers were in favor of some form of hybrid model this fall. That would entail meeting all of their students on a weekly basis and conducting most lessons using distance learning principles. They seemed quite confident that this could be a successful model given the circumstances. Learning would still be at a high level but the social engagement teenagers need for mental health would be undermined.

Echelon Insights at the Harvard Kennedy School recently queried parents about their concerns regarding education and Covid-19. Weekly surveys (April 27 – May 25) of 500 K-12 parents were conducted. It seems the San Diego teachers and American parents have aligned beliefs about the need for safety and the promise of strong learning.

Parents are more concerned about safety than getting school opened as fast as possible and it appears they believe their child will continue learning.

Schools Must Reopen Immediately!!!

The headline on a June 1^st article by McKinsey and Company screams, “COVID-19 and student learning in the United States: The hurt could last a lifetime.” The sub-title says, “New evidence shows that the shutdowns caused by COVID-19 could exacerbate existing achievement gaps.”

Much of the McKinsey article is based on the theoretical work of Erik Hanushek and Paul E. Peterson who have made careers out of creating biased studies designed to promote privatization of public education and undermine teacher professionalism. In addition, McKinsey relies heavily on information developed by Curriculum Associates the owners of I-Ready and data from NWEA the Portland based testing publisher that sells MAP testing.

Sounding very much like the authors of the infamous “A Nation at Risk”, McKinsey claims:

“All told, we estimate that the average K–12 student in the United States could lose $61,000 to $82,000 in lifetime earnings (in constant 2020 dollars), or the equivalent of a year of full-time work, solely as a result of COVID-19–related learning losses.”

“Furthermore, if other countries mitigate the impact of lost learning and the United States does not, this will harm US competitiveness. By 2040, most of the current K–12 cohort will be in the workforce. We estimate a GDP loss of $173 billion to $271 billion a year—a 0.8 to 1.3 percent hit (Exhibit 5).”

Exhibit 5 – What Magic Algorithms Produced this Fantasy?

At the billionaire created publication, The 74, a June 9^th article ran under the heading, “New Research Predicts Steep COVID Learning Losses Will Widen Already Dramatic Achievement Gaps Within Classrooms.” The widening is supposed to happen because of poor parenting, lack of resources at home and learning gaps expanding during school closures.

They also make the senseless claim, “But now, especially without spring exams to guide them, schools will have no idea on day one of the 2020-21 school year what the array of needs in each class is.”

It should be noted that most teachers do their own student evaluations because they find the standardized testing data almost useless even if it is available when needed.

Republican Congressmen Jim Banks of Indiana and Tom Tiffany of Wisconsin have introduced the Reopen Our Schools Act. Congressman Banks stated,

“Reopening our schools is the lynchpin to reopening our economy. Many parents rely on their kids going to school so they can go to work. To get our society up and running again, we need our children back in school.”

Congressman Tiffany who joined congress this May added,

“These open-ended school shutdowns have set students back, made it harder for teachers to teach, and pushed parents to the breaking point. It’s time to reopen America and get back to school.”

In their announcement the congressmen referenced a Wall Street Journal report claiming remote learning this spring “didn’t work.” Like McKinsey and The 74, the Wall Street Journal references projections made in a May 27 paper by NWEA.

The Northwest Evaluation Association was founded in 1977 when a group of researchers and testing directors met at the Jolly Roger restaurant in Chehalis, Washington. The participants were unhappy with current standardized testing in the United States because it was the same test everywhere and unaligned with curriculum. They chose the small town of Chehalis because it was half way between Portland, Oregon and Seattle, Washington where most of the members lived. Today, the organization is known as NWEA.

NWEA is another education service business that abuses the non-profit federal tax laws. In 2018, they sold over $148,000,000 in testing services and their tax document shows sixteen people with salaries ranging from $200,000 to $513,172.

NWEA publishes MAP testing which tests mathematics and English three times each school year; fall, winter and spring. The tests are not aligned to one class level so they are only partially aligned with state curricular standards. That is in part why teachers at Seattle’s Garfield High School boycotted MAP testing contending, “the MAP is not worth the time and energy it takes to give.”

Using data from approximately 350,000 students who took MAP tests in school years 2017-18 and 2018-19, analysts at NWEA created a report based on projections that guessed at what the negative education effects from the school shut downs would be.

NWEA is known to have first rate psychometricians, however their expertise cannot make up for the noisy data known to exist with education testing or the fact that the growth models they use has never been satisfactorily validated or that their parabolic data fits might be inappropriate.

NWEA’s paper is well documented but still little more than a guess about education results made by people who are not professional educators. This is hardly the basis for insisting that we recklessly endanger the health of students, teachers and families by opening schools without making safety the number one priority.

Conclusion

The hybrid model for opening schools appears to be the best pandemic alternative. Students attend schools that are employing best health practices once a week. The rest of the week they participate in distance learning.

It has been widely espoused that poorer children do not have adequate equipment and connections for distance learning. However, most school districts have been providing devices and it should be possible for schools to setup socially distanced homework centers for students who don’t have available internet connections. For example, high school gymnasiums could easily accommodate 70 students safely distanced.

The reality is that we are facing a highly contagious virus to which human beings have no defense. This means that some cultural norms are not possible. Formerly in addition to academics, schools also were effectively daycare centers. In this environment, they cannot safely perform that function. Businesses, parents, schools and communities must work together to mitigate this unmet need.

Extra-curricular activities like sports, chorus, band and club meetings are not possible. That is a harsh consequence of the pandemic.

However, if professional educators and schools are supported, there is every reason to believe student learning can safely continue at a high rate, academic gaps will not increase and intellectual development will remain on track.

Tags: Achievement Gap, Hybrid School Model, McKinsey and Company, NWEA, San Diego Unified School District, Sweetwater Union High School District, The 74, Wall Street Journal

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