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“The Right to Read” is Horse Manure

By Thomas Ultican 5/27/2023

The new 80-minute video “The Right to Read” was created in the spirit of “Waiting for Superman.” It uses false data interpretations to make phony claims about a non-existent reading crisis. Oakland’s NAACP 2^nd Vice President Kareem Weaver narrates the film. Weaver is a full throated advocate for the Science of Reading (SoR) and has many connections with oligarch financed education agendas. The video which released February 11, 2023 was made by Jenny Mackenzie and produced by LeVar (Kunta Kinte) Burton.

Since 2007, Jenny Mackenzie has been the executive director of Jenny Mackenzie Films in Salt Lake City. Neither Mackenzie nor Burton has experience or training as educators. However, Burton did star on the PBS series “Reading Rainbow.” He worked on the show as an actor not a teacher.

One of the first media interviews about “The Right to Read” appeared on KTVX channel 4 in Salt Lake City. Ben Heuston from the Waterford Institute answered questions about the new film and the supposed “reading crisis” in American public schools. Heuston who has a PhD in psychology from Brigham Young University claimed that two-thirds of primary grade students in America read below grade level. That is a lie. He is conflating proficiency in reading on the National Assessment of Education Performance (NAEP) with grade level and should know better.

Diane Ravitch who served for seven years on the National Assessment Governing Board explained NAEP rating levels,

“Proficient is akin to a solid A. In reading, the proportion who were proficient in fourth grade reading rose from 29% in 1992 to 34% in 2011.”

“Basic is akin to a B or C level performance. Good but not good enough.”

“And below basic is where we really need to worry.”

Peggy Carr, commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, which administers NAEP, has stated that the basic level is generally viewed as grade-level achievement.

“The Right to Read” was filmed in Oakland, California with some of it done in first-grade teacher Sabrina Causey’s classroom at Markham Elementary School. There have been many public showings scheduled around the country but strangely none in Oakland. Causey claims she was using a bad Oakland Unified School District (OUSD) reading curriculum until Kareem Weaver brought her a program based on the SoR. She adopted it without OUSD approval. The film claims “The results were astounding.”

The Chart was Clipped from “The Right to Read” Trailer

Selling SoR

LeVar Burton and Jenny Mackenzie made media rounds to promote “The Right to Read.” They were booked on major shows like CBS’s “Good Morning America” and on cable news. US News conducted an interview sharing that Burton and Mackenzie spoke “about the film and what they are calling ‘the literacy crisis’ within the United States.”

In the interview, Mackenzie claimed, “We need to have policy that supports scientifically proven evidence-based curricula.” While Burton asserted,

“The balanced approach doesn’t work. Whole language doesn’t work.”

“We also have a sort of an old boys’ network that has been established, and there are companies that make millions of dollars a year publishing and selling to schools curricula that do not work.”

There are two obvious observations here. Number one is that neither Mackenzie nor Burton have any professional expertise in reading pedagogy. Number two, it is their team that is setting the stage for businesses to make “millions of dollars a year” selling phonics centric reading curricula.

The chart in the graphic above is the same lie Ben Heuston from the Waterford Institute told on KTVX. Heuston’s father Dustin founded the Waterford Institute in 1976 to develop computer based education. He was using the world’s first commercial computer with the Motorola 68000 chip. Today, the institute is selling the digitally based Waterford Upstart reading program.

Heuston and colleagues are making great money working at the nonprofit. The twenty-two employees listed in the 2021 form 990 tax document are averaging a yearly income of $225,571 (TIN: 51-0202349). Those are some big salaries out in Utah. Maybe that explains the lying to support SoR.

Ben has stepped down as Waterford CEO and Andy Meyer has assumed the role. Waterford reports that Andy’s background includes several leadership positions in sales and marketing before becoming COO for Pearson’s digital learning business unit and later Senior VP of Digital Product Development for Pearson’s U.S. K-12 curriculum division. More recently, Andy served as CEO at Scientific Learning and as CSO at Renaissance.

Kareem Weaver is a shameless promoter of anything oligarch funded. He is a Fellow at the Pahara Institute which was organized to train new privatization friendly education leaders. His bio there shares that he was a managing partner at the NewSchools Venture Fund and also executive director for the western region of New Leaders that received big financing from Walton, Broad, NewSchool Venture Fund and Gates. Weaver is also a member of the National Council on Teachers Quality.

Just this week Weaver was a featured presenter for a Reading Week edWebinar held by Lexia, a Cambium Learning Group company. They claim, “K12 educators and administrators will now have another opportunity to learn about aligning teaching practices with scientifically-researched methods.” Lexia is looking to cash in on SoR and Weaver is down in the muck slopping with them.

It is hard to imagine anyone being more sold out than Kareem Weaver.

Professionals Shake Their Heads in Frustration

Misinterpreting the data shown above is the basis for the specious crisis in reading claims. It is known that students develop at different rates and in the lower grades the differences can be dramatic. That explains some of the low scoring. All but a very small percentage of these fourth grader will be reading adequately when they get to high school.

America’s leading authorities on teaching reading are frustrated. Their voices are being drowned out by forces who want to monetize reading education and privatize it.

Peter Farruggio is a professor of bilingual education from the San Francisco Bay area and an organizer of anti-KLAN actions throughout California. Although his specialty was not teaching reading his experience with bilingual education and federal law caused him to work in the field. In our conversation, he explained to me how some of the data supporting high dose phonics instruction came about.

Farruggio observed that often when there were groups of students with reading disabilities, graduate students would take the opportunity to conduct a study. The treatment would be for the grad students to give intense phonics lessons. The children would learn to decode words including nonsense words from lists. Then they would be given a reading test on the lists. The students would successfully decode the words and the results would be pronounced successful but the children still could not read a sentence with comprehension.

Worst of all, Professor Farruggio fears this kind of teaching is undermining the ability to think.

Observations like this are wide spread among education professionals. This week Valerie Strauss put a piece in her Answer Sheet blog at the Washington Post written by three highly credentialed scholars dismayed by the oligarch financed nationwide push for SoR.

David Reinking, Professor of Education, Peter Smagorinsky, Professor of Language and Literacy Education, and David Yaden, Professor of Language Reading and Culture, state,

“As researchers and teacher educators, we, like many of our colleagues, shake our heads in resigned frustration. We believe phonics plays an important role in teaching children to read. But, we see no justifiable support for its overwhelming dominance within the current narrative, nor reason to regard phonics as a panacea for improving reading achievement.”

“Specifically, we do not see convincing evidence for a reading crisis, and certainly none that points to phonics as the single cause or a solution.”

“But crisis or not, is there evidence that more phonics instruction is the elixir guaranteed to induce higher reading achievement? The answer isn’t just no. There are decades of empirical evidence that it hasn’t and won’t.”

They point out that even the National Reading Panel report that all of this SoR malarkey is supposedly based on states, “Phonics should not become the dominant component in a reading program, neither in the amount of time devoted to it nor in the significance attached.”

This understanding is not new. The Reading First program during the George Bush years spent big dollars to study the use of intense phonics. Teachers were trained to deliver “scientific” reading instruction that included a numbing 1.5 to 3 hours of phonics instruction each day. The lead sentence in a 2008 Washington Post article stated, “Students enrolled in a $6 billion federal reading program that is at the heart of the No Child Left Behind law are not reading any better than those who don’t participate, according to a U.S. government report.”

Conclusion

Big money from billionaires is funding an effort to take control of primary education by selling the Science of Reading as a silver bullet. In the early 2000’s, schools were blamed for not fixing failing communities. The “proof” offered was students living in poverty stricken communities did not do well on standardized testing.

It put schools in a no win situation because the only strong correlation in standardized testing is with family income. Obviously, the broken communities were the problem not their schools. This subterfuge led to claims that reforming “failing schools” was the civil rights agenda of our time. Now “The Right to Read” is playing that same phony civil rights card. It is a contemptuous lie used to profit off the backs of the poor and people of color.

There is no reading crisis and the lionization of SoR is a push toward bad pedagogy. It is a sinister ploy that will harm each student and not just those living in poverty. There is currently a concerted effort to legislate SoR use in all primary classrooms which has either passed or is proposed in every state capital.

Tags: Ben Heuston, Jenny Mackenzie, LeVar Burton, Science of Reading, The Right to Read, Waterford Institute

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Categories DPE, education

Selling Denver’s Portfolio Model by Confusing Correlation with Causation

5 May

By Thomas Ultican 5/5/2023

The 74 published an article about a University of Colorado Denver study that shows what a great success school reform has been in Denver. The research paper attributes that triumph to the portfolio school management model introduced by now Senator Michael Bennett during the 2007/8 school year. While testing results have significantly improved in Denver’s K-12 schools, the paper’s claims confuse correlation with causation.

As is often the case with articles in The 74, there is a bias toward the billionaire favored education policies. The 74 correspondent states, “The results offer powerful evidence in favor of the so-called ‘portfolio management model,’ an educational strategy that began to take hold in major urban school systems in the mid-2000s.” And also reports the claim that the reforms “led to some of the most significant learning gains ever measured.”

To further establish how important and meaningful results in the new study are, The 74 turned to economist Douglas Harris from Tulane University. He has prospered producing studies touting New Orleans’s privatized school system. It is worth noting that the all charter school system in New Orleans is an inefficient disaster which still scores at the bottom in state standardized testing. Concerning the Denver study, Harris is quoted as saying,

“The effects are clearly large. Just as a loose approximation, if you leapfrog that many districts, clearly you’ve seen a lot of improvement.”

The data shows that Denver did make real progress based on testing data. The leapfrog that Harris mentions is that Denver went from near the bottom of the state’s districts on standardized testing to about the middle.

The 74 staff writer who produced the article is Kevin Mahnken. He makes a living writing articles that accentuate the message his billionaire paymasters want. His reports may not be exactly lies but are at the very least highly biased.

The 74 was founded in 2015 and originally funded by billionaires Dick and Betsy DeVos Family Foundation, the Walton Family Foundation, the Doris and Donald Fisher Fund, and Bloomberg Philanthropies. Since then, it has been the vehicle for spreading the billionaire message aimed at undermining public schools.

There are basically two groups of billionaires trying to privatize public education; libertarians and neoliberals. Both groups believe in markets and do not support democratic means. Libertarians like the Walton family and Charles Koch prefer vouchers. They think public programs like social security and public education are basically robbery and must be ended. Neoliberals like Bloomberg and Gates prefer charter schools. They feel that public programs should continue but are better run by private businesses. The 74 is their common vehicle for promoting their education perspectives.

The Portfolio Model

In 2009, the Center for Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) published “Portfolio School Districts for Big Cities: An Interim Report.” Lead author Paul Hill and his associates stated,

“The report introduces the idea of a ‘portfolio school district,’ and shows how some leading school districts have put the idea into practice. A portfolio district is built for continuous improvement through expansion and imitation of the highest-performing schools, closure and replacement of the lowest-performing, and constant search for new ideas.”

Bill Gates, John Arnold, Michael Dell, the Walton Family and other billionaires fund CRPE which is headquartered on the campus at the University of Washington.

Portfolio School Districts is an organized idea for managing charter schools, innovation schools, public schools and voucher schools that make up the mix of schools in a district. Using standardized testing as a proxy for measuring quality, some percentage (5%) of the lowest performing schools will be closed every year. Invariably, the closed school will be replaced by a privatized structure outside of the purview of an elected school board. Also, because standardized testing only correlates with family wealth, the schools in the poorest communities will be privatized and subject to constant churn.

In 2018, John Arnold and Reed Hastings established the City Fund which has spent heavily to develop local organizations that promote the implementation of the portfolio model of public education management. Soon after the City Fund founding, Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer and Alice Walton also started funding the organization.

The leader of the Denver research project was Parker Baxter. In 2012, CRPE listed him as a “Senior Research Affiliate and distinguished expert in the field of education policy.” On that same page CRPE also declared, “CRPE is one of five national education policy organizations that co-founded the Policy Innovators in Education (PIE) Network, whose mission is to build, support, and promote a network of education advocacy organizations working to improve K-12 education in their states so that every student graduates world-ready.” One of the main points they advocate for is the portfolio model.

The System Level Effects of Denver’s Portfolio District Strategy

This study of school reform in Denver was conducted by the Center for Education Policy Analysis (CEPA). They state, “For the past three years CEPA has partnered with the Center on Reinventing Public Education to consider a paradigm-shifting approach to family and community engagement efforts in school districts.” CEPA director Parker Baxter led the study. The relationship with CRPE makes one wonder about bias in this study and Parker Baxter’s biography heightens that concern.

On his LinkedIn page Baxter shares that he was Director of Knowledge at the National Association of Charter School Authorizers (NACSA). He mentions being a Senior Research Affiliate at CRPE. Baxter asserts he was a Senior Legal Analyst working on the District-Charter Collaboration Compact Project and the Portfolio District Project. Says he served as Assistant Superintendent and the Executive Director of the Office of Parental Options at the Louisiana Department of Education and as Director of Charter Schools for Denver Public Schools (DPS). Parker claims being an aide to Senator Edward M. Kennedy where he worked on issues related to the No Child Left Behind Act. He is also a former special education teacher and an alumnus of Teach for America.

On page one of the report, it says, “This research is made possible by a multiyear grant from Arnold Ventures.” Just to be clear that is billionaire John Arnold the former Enron trader, co-founder of The City Fund and big spending advocate of the portfolio model of school district management.

The study did a lot of fancy arithmetic on state testing data and summarized their findings:

“Prior to the start of DPS reform efforts in 2008-09, DPS was among the bottom 10 districts in the state in ELA and math performance on state standardized assessments, ranking below the 5th percentile of districts. By 2018-19, DPS had risen to the 60th percentile of districts in ELA and the 63rd percentile of districts in math, outperforming more than 100 out of roughly 180 districts in the state. The 4-year high school graduation rate increased dramatically during the reform period as well, climbing from 43% in 2008 to 71% in 2019. Our results indicate that the reforms drove these improvements in student academic and graduation outcomes.” (Page 3)

The Denver study used school years 2004/5 through 2018/19 state testing data. The first 4-years of the research employed pre-reform data and the final 10-years were from the portfolio model reform period. The authors reported, “During the study period, the district opened 65 new schools, and closed, replaced, and restarted over 35 others.” (Page 7)

A Professional Review

Boulder, Colorado which is 30-miles up highway-36 from Denver is home to the University of Colorado Boulder which hosts the National Education Policy Center (NEPC). Early in the 21^st century purported research papers started being published that were never subjected to peer review. NEPC tried to address this problem by assigning independent education professionals to review these studies. They contracted with Robert Shand to review the Denver study. He is an Assistant Professor of Education Policy and Leadership at American University and an affiliated researcher with the Center for Benefit-Cost Studies of Education at Teachers College, Columbia University.

Professor Shand’s conclusion states:

“The recent study finds substantial system-level gains in math and ELA scores as well as graduation rates. These reported gains are indeed dramatic, but they were not experienced equally and may have widened achievement gaps. Further, attributing them specifically to the portfolio reforms seems premature for at least three reasons. First, many other changes, beyond the portfolio reforms, were occurring in the district at the same time. These included changes to funding, curriculum, leadership, teacher policies, and student demographics. Second, some gains, particularly among marginalized groups of students, predated the reforms. Third, the “portfolio” reforms themselves are diffuse and difficult to parse. For these reasons, the recent report succeeds in drawing attention to real academic gains in Denver over the past decade, but is less useful as a guide to how other districts could replicate that success.” (Page 3)

To substantiate these claims Shand shared the following points:

Demographics shifting to a larger percentage of white students in Denver coincided with the reforms.
Per-student revenues increased in Denver by 22% but only 13% across Colorado.
Student-to-teacher ratio in Denver dropped from 17.9 to 14.9.
DPS was already showing academic improvement before implementation of the portfolio reforms.
Black and Hispanic/Latinx students were growing at approximately 0.06 standard deviations per year pre-reform and 0.03-0.04 standard deviations per year post-reform.

Professor Shand succinctly determined, “Given the host of changes in the city and the district over the same time period as the portfolio reforms, attributing the gains to the portfolio reforms specifically is unwarranted by the evidence.” (Emphasis added)

Baxter and his team at CEPA surely are aware of the difference between correlation and causation as is the education reporter from The 74, Kevin Mahnken. This indicates strongly that they were being purposefully deceitful or more straightforwardly THEY WERE LYING.

Tags: Alice Walton, Bill Gates, Denver Public Schools, James Walton, John Arnold, Parker Baxter, Portfolio Model, Robert Shand

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Categories DPE

Education Profiteering Accelerates in Texas

12 Apr

By Thomas Ultican 4/12/2023

In March, the Texas house of representative’s education committee introduced House Bill 1605. Chairman Brad Buckley from Killeen was lead sponsor and 25 other members are listed as co-sponsors including one Democrat. The actual author of the bill and who if anyone paid for it to be written is not known. The legislation creates two major changes. It transfers purchasing power from the state education board to State Commissioner of Education Mike Morath and it opens the door for Laurene Powell Jobs’ Amplify to control instructional materials for the Foundation School Program.

The Texas Education Agency (TEA) explains,

“The primary source of state funding for Texas school districts is the Foundation School Program (FSP). This program ensures that all school districts, regardless of property wealth, receive ‘substantially equal access to similar revenue per student at similar tax effort.’”

Foundation curriculum includes the list of the big four subjects mapped out by the TEA curriculum division.

English Language Arts and Reading
Mathematics
Science
Social Studies

The material is to be delivered using open education resources (OER). This means content deliverance via interactive electronic screens. Districts will have the right not to use the curriculum however the structure of HB 1605 bribes them to employ it.

Under this new legislation, the state of Texas is contracting with Amplify to write the curriculum according to TEA guidelines. Amplify will also provide daily lesson plans for all teachers. The idea is to educate all Texas children using digital devices and scripted lesson plans while teachers are tasked with monitoring student progress.

Senate bill 2565 is the companion legislation. The language of neither HB 1605 nor SB 2565 mention Amplify. However, during the senate education committee public comments period on SB 2565 it was revealed that TEA had already given Amplify a $50,000,000 pandemic contract. When witnesses referenced Amplify as the purported contractor, senators did not push back and the only company the Senators spoke about themselves was Amplify. So it is clear that it will be Amplify and some people in the know believe Commissioner Morath has already made a deal with the company.

Who Likes this Idea?

On March 2, 2023 just one week before Buckley introduced HB 1605, a new organization called the Coalition for Education Excellence (CEE) announced its presence. They stated,

“CEE, made up of state and local education and public policy advocacy organizations across Texas, has been created to take the under-education crisis head-on. Founding members of CEE include The Commit Partnership, the Greater Houston Partnership, Teach Plus Texas, Texas 2036, the Texas Association of Business, the Texas Business Leadership Council, the Texas District Charter Alliance and the Texas Public Policy Foundation, with more members to be announced in the coming weeks.”

Everyone of their supporting “advocacy organizations” are either far right opponents of public education or are groups who have a long history of working to privatize public education.

CEE states in their announcement that “a recent study found that Texas students are being taught below grade-level content in our public schools.” The so called study was conducted by the Teach For America spinoff TNTP. It is a billionaire created organization working to privatize public education. Papers coming from leading education institutions like the University of Texas or Rice University are peer reviewed scholarly efforts. Whereas TNTP produces non-peer reviewed polemics like this bogus study called “The Opportunity Myth.” When Michelle Rhee led TNTP they made headlines by unfairly trashing public education teachers.

CEE disingenuously pretended that their support of this legislation is written to help overburdened teachers. They stated in their announcement,

‘“Many teachers in Texas are currently working two jobs—designing lessons and teaching them—which is contributing to their exhaustion and teacher shortages. Access to high-quality instructional material can reduce teacher workloads and play a critical role in delivering quality education to our students,’ said Kevin Malonson, Texas Executive Director of Teach Plus.“

Anyone who has spent significant time in a classroom knows scripted lessons are a disaster. I have personally experienced teaching the same high school class in three separate periods and even though the students were all peers, the levels of ability in the classrooms varied significantly. The differences were so great that I often had to modify my lesson plans to effectively teach the material during the different periods. Trying to write one lesson plan for thousands of students living in significantly different neighborhoods is a daft approach that devalues teacher expertise, undermines educator professionalism and will fail students.

Found on the CEE Web Page

Texas 2036 listed above was formed by Tom Luce in 2016. It publishes cyber page links to CEE letters and publications and generally supports the privatization agenda.

Tom Luce is a lawyer not an educator but his fingerprints are all over some of the worst education policies in the history of our country. His bio at the George W. Bush Whitehouse archives says, “… Luce is perhaps best known for his role in 1984 as the chief of staff of the Texas Select Committee of Public Education, which produced one of the first major reform efforts among public schools.” The chairman of that committee was Ross Perot and they gave us the disaster known as standardized testing.

In 2019, Tom Luce became Chairman Emeritus of Texas 2036 and Margaret Spellings returned to Texas to assume the lead as President and CEO. At the same time, Spellings who led George W. Bush’s failed No Child Left Behind education reform law became a board member for Laurene Powell Jobs’s Amplify. Of course, Board Member Spellings is supporting turning over Texas school curriculum to Jobs’s company.

Laurene Powell Jobs and Amplify

Laurene Powell Jobs has no respect for public school educators and the schools in which they work. When Wiki Leaks released the Clinton campaign’s emails, Powell Jobs’ four recommendations to Hillary Clinton were revealed:

“Re-design entire K-12 system – we know how to do it, but it comes down to political will.
“Think about Charters as our R&D … must allow public schools to have leaders that can pick their team and be held accountable.
“Need to increase IQ in the teaching sector: Teach for America; they are a different human capital pipeline.
“Need to use technology to transform – technology allows teachers and children to focus on content mastery versus seat time; …”

I disagree. Charter schools have been R&D for fraud, embezzlement, instability and abuse but not for innovations. Her slap at teachers unions and work place protections is consistent with other arrogant billionaires who support privatization. I came into education from working as a research scientist in Silicon Valley and found teachers every bit as intellectually equipped as my colleagues in the lab. Her support for Teach for America temp teachers demonstrates education ignorance.

The Amplify education model puts children at digital devices where they learn in isolation. It is an unhealthy approach. Dr. Nicholas Kardaras wrote “Screens In Schools Are a $60 Billion Hoax” for Time magazine. When discussing health risks associated with student screen time, he stated, “over two hundred peer-reviewed studies point to screen time correlating to increased ADHD, screen addiction, increased aggression, depression, anxiety and even psychosis.”

Educators like Nancy Bailey have addressed problems with Amplify’s Core Knowledge Language Arts (CKLA) program for teaching reading. Teacher evaluation committees from Rochester, New York and Tulsa, Oklahoma condemned the program. An NPR report highlighted criticism of Amplify science and math noting,

“Former school board member Peters said it’s difficult to compare results the first year of a new test: Pass rates dropped across the board in 2018 when it was introduced. But her analysis shows pass rates dropped the most at the Seattle schools using Amplify Science — despite the curriculum’s promise to help students meet the new standards.”

‘“The students that fared the worst were low-income students using Amplify Science,’ Peters wrote in an email to the board.”

The Leaders of the Amplify Takeover

Before 2012, Dallas school board elections were very low key affairs. When Mike Morath ran for the district two trusteeship, it was pretty much unheard of for a school board candidate to have raised as much as $10,000 for a campaign; however even though running unopposed, Morath’s campaign contributions totaled $28,890.00 and he spent $16,773.07.

Morath had almost no background in education but he was supported by Dallas’s wealthiest conservatives. A 2014 article published by In These Times, explained the political change:

“But since the beginning of 2012, hundreds of thousands of Super PAC dollars from Dallas’ richest neighborhoods began flowing into nearly all of the district’s school board elections

“Since 2011, Educate Dallas, a PAC backed by the Dallas Regional Chamber (the local Chamber of Commerce), has raised $661,953 in cash on hand for its school board war chest, and the Dallas-based education reform PAC Kids First, led by millionaire tech CEO Ken Barth, has raised $661,616. The majority of their donations come from Dallas’ famous aristocrats, including Barth, Ross Perot, Ray Hunt—an oil heir with a net worth of $5.8 billion—and Harlan Crow, a real estate heir and buddy of Clarence Thomas.”

The big Dallas money aimed at privatizing public education has supported Morath all the way to the state’s highest education position. When Governor Abbott selected Morath to be commissioner, conservative writer Donna Garner declared, “I cannot think of very many people whom Gov. Greg Abbott could have appointed who would have been a worse choice than Mike Morath as Texas Commissioner of Education.”

In addition to contracting with Amplify to privatize curriculum, Morath has created a program called the System of Great Schools. It is a plan to implement the portfolio model of school governance throughout the state of Texas. It is identical to the plan that billionaires Reed Hasting, John Arnold, Bill Gates and Michael Dell are financing through The City Fund. The portfolio school system management model systematically removes public schools from governance by elected boards and puts them under private control.

Laurene Jobs Powell has hooked up with like minded billionaires in an effort to privatize the entire Texas public education system. Their guy Mike Morath is dutifully implementing the plans.

Tags: Coalition for Education Excellence, HB 1605, Laurene Powell Jobs, Margaret Spellings, Mike Morath, Open Education Resources, SB 2565, Texas 2036, TNTP, Tom Luce

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Categories DPE

The Oligarchs’ Education Propaganda Distributor

23 Mar

By Thomas Ultican 3/23/2023

In 2015, the Washington Post reported on the founding of The 74 by former CNN news anchor Campbell Brown along with Michael Bloomberg’s education advisor Romy Drucker. At the time, Brown who supported charter schools, opposed teacher tenure and was convinced schools were full of sexual predators stated,

“I agree we have a point of view; it’s a nonpartisan point of view. It’s a clear point of view, and that is that the public education system, in its current form, is broken, and there’s an urgency to fix it.”

The billionaires funding Brown’s startup included the Dick and Betsy DeVos Family Foundation, the Walton Family Foundation, the Doris and Donald Fisher Fund, and Bloomberg Philanthropies, all of which have opposed teachers unions and supported various school-privatization initiatives. From the beginning The 74 has been a mouthpiece for billionaires out to end publicly financed education.

Hit Piece on a Majority Minority City’s Schools

In February, The 74 published an attack piece on the Stockton Unified School District (SUSD).

Stockton is a small California city of about 322,000 people and is one of America’s most diverse cities. The US census bureau reports the demographics as 44.9% Hispanic, 20.9% Asian, 18.1% White and 11.3 % Black. The city has a 16.3% poverty rate; however, 82% of their 39,800 charter and public school students live in poverty. In Stockton schools, the Hispanic population accounts for 70% of the students while all other demographic groups contribute single digit percentages to the total.

In their headline, The 74 labels SUSD dysfunctional. However, a quick look at the California school dashboard shows a few things that one would not expect in a dysfunctional district. While dealing with chronic absenteeism, a large population of English language learners (24.6%) and a lot of students living in poverty (83.9%), SUSD’s graduation rate is over 83%, they meet all five of the basic standards for California schools and their English language learners are making above average progress. Are their students performing as well as students attending schools in upper middle class neighborhoods? No, but these schools are hardly dysfunctional. In fact, they seem to be achieving against all odds and in the face of an ongoing tycoon financed takeover bid.

This scathing article from the billionaire’s propaganda rag is just the latest in the ongoing raid on public education in Stockton. In 1999, Reed Hastings and his partner Don Shalvey opened Stockton’s first charter school, the Aspire Port City Academy.

Don Shalvey founded California’s first charter school in 1994. When Bill and Hillary Clinton came to Stanford in 1997 to enroll their daughter they held a charter school promotional meeting at Shalvey’s San Carlos Charter Learning Center (Left Behind page 249). It was there that Reed Hastings and Don Shalvey met. Soon after, the pair teamed up to establish Aspire as America’s first charter management organization. There are now ten Aspire schools in Stockton.

In 2018, Stockton Mayor Michael Tubbs who was heavily influenced by Michael Bloomberg pushed the school board to hire disgraced former LA Superintendent John Deasy. This was the beginning of SUSD’s financial problems. In the two years Deasy was in charge, the formerly financially stable district had a negative cash flow of $174 million. Much of this deficit were caused by a hiring binge.

Deasy resigned under a corruption cloud in 2020. That same year, Don Shalvey who went to work for Bill Gates in 2009 left the Gates foundation and became leader of San Joaquin A Plus Inc. (A+) (non-profit tax ID 51-0536117).

Along with Don’s hiring, Helen Schwab, President of the The Charles and Helen Schwab Foundation (Tax ID 94-3374170) gifted A+ $400,000. This low profile organization suddenly became a player in Stockton politics and school policy. A+ went from reporting $6,000 total revenue in 2019 to $3,176,833 in 2020. Unfortunately, the IRS is backlogged and the complete A+ 2020 form 990 with Shalvey’s salary listed is still not available.

The 74 features Shalvey’s completely unfounded and damaging statement that “I think Stockton Unified might be the worst system in the country.”

In addition to A+, it appears that the Community Foundation of San Joaquin has also become a champion of privatizing public schools. In 2019, The City Fund (Tax ID 82-4938743) gifted them $298,960 and Bill Gates (Tax ID 56-2618866) has also been granting them funds. In their latest tax filing (Tax ID 26-1476916), the foundation lists Don Shalvey’s wife Sue Shalvey as a board member.

The 74 contemptuously states, “But almost three years after the first relief dollars began flowing to school districts, Stockton has spent only a fourth of the $241 million it received, overcome by dysfunction in its central office and deep mistrust among board members.”

While it appears that there is mistrust amongst the board members between a former pro-Deasy faction and a newer anti-charter school faction, the board is functioning. The dysfunction at the central office was created by John Deasy when he did things like get rid of all senior management in the financial department and replace them with new hires. This destroyed critical institutional memory.

In their extremely biased article, The 74 also states,

“The pandemic was another blow to the region’s economy. Then, just as schools were trying to recover, separate grand juries in 2021 and 2022 issued scathing reports that didn’t inspire confidence in the district’s ability to manage a huge federal windfall.”

There are two internet based news sources in Stockton, the 209 Times with the most readers and Recordnet. Recordnet seems aligned with Stockton’s downtown business interests who appear to have forced these two grand jury investigations and the 209 Times looks like a muckraking publication focused on shenanigans by what they call the “Stockton Cabal.”

Concerning these two grand jury reports the 209 Times headline read “Biased ‘Grand Jury’ Issues Another Attack on SUSD” while the Recordnet headline was “Grand jury finds Stockton Unified trustees failed as district leaders in scathing report.” The fact is the reports were an attack on SUSD but contrary to the 209 Times reporting there was some valuable information there. However, the reports were not scathing condemnations of the SUSD trustees. The information presented did shed a bad light on Superintendents John Deasy and his replacement John Ramirez Jr.

For example, the 2022 Grand Jury report noted

“Selection of the current CBO was made contrary to Board Policy (BP) 4211.2. The CBO was hired without a search, screening process or interviews.” (Report Page 11)

Board member Ray Zulueta said that he assumed when Human Resources brought them a hire recommendation that they had correctly followed the process. Reading through the two reports it appears that the school superintendents who were pushed on the board by local elites were incompetent and had separate agendas beyond running the schools. Before the 2022 report came out, the trustees apparently forced John Ramirez Jr. to resign as superintendent. It is alleged that he was spending more time in Don Shalvey’s A+ office than he was in his own office at the district.

There were no smoking guns in either report and no one was charged with corrupt behavior.

There was one interesting lie in The 74 attack piece, “Since 2017, enrollment has declined from about 44,000 to 36,000 students, contributing to anxiety in a community where over 3,000 people work for the district.”

The following attendance chart was created using data from the California Department of education.

In the last eight years, there has been no change in enrollment anywhere close to equaling an 8,000 student decline. Even with the billionaire funded attack machine operating, SUSD has had an extremely stable enrollment. This is pretty good evidence that this is not a dysfunctional district. The classrooms must be functioning well.

After getting rid of Superintendent John Ramirez Jr. the trustees settled on Dr. Traci E. Miller as interim superintendent. She is a 25-year veteran of SUSD where she has served as middle school counselor, high school counselor, head counselor, Assistant Principal, Principal, and Director. From my perch 450 miles away, it appears she is doing a credible professional job. Isn’t it time to make her the permanent superintendent and bring stability to district leadership?

The 74 hit piece goes on to make several more bogus claims in an effort to denigrate the district. They all range from nitpicking to baloney.

Neoliberal and Libertarian Billionaires Use The 74 to Advance Their Agenda

The graphic above comes from The 74’s website and depicts their financial supporters. It shows billionaires and entities known to be working to privatize or end public education.

I asked ChatGPT, “Is The 74 a biased education publication?” The bot replied,

“As an AI language model, I am programmed to remain neutral and avoid making judgments on political or ideological biases. However, I can provide some general information about The 74, an American news organization that focuses on education policy and issues.

“The 74 describes itself as a non-profit, non-partisan news outlet that seeks to provide in-depth coverage of education issues affecting students and families across the United States. It was founded in 2015 by journalist Campbell Brown, with funding from various philanthropic organizations.

“While The 74 aims to maintain a neutral stance on political and ideological issues, it has been criticized by some for promoting a conservative or pro-charter school agenda. Some critics have pointed to the organization’s ties to conservative donors and its coverage of issues such as school choice and teacher unions as evidence of bias.

“However, others have defended The 74’s coverage as fair and balanced, and argue that the organization provides an important voice in the education policy debate.”

I am not programmed to remain neutral. The 74 is a propaganda rag supported by unbelievably rich people who are a menace. Some of them are neoliberals that have an almost religious belief in free enterprise, business management and the superiority of the market place. Others are libertarians who believe there should be no commons, no social services and no public education. The 74 is a biased publication that they finance out of their spare change.

If we desire democratic governance and quality public education, it is past time to tax billionaires out of existence.

Tags: Campbell Brown, Don Shalvey, John Deasy, Reed Hastings, Romy Drucker, Stockton Unified School District, The 74

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Categories DPE

11 MAGA Ladies against Public Education

20 Feb

By Thomas Ultican 2/20/2023

For the past few years, I have been increasingly impressed by the work of Boston’s Maurice Cunningham. He is a political science professor from the University of Massachusetts who also holds a Juris Doctorate. His latest work is “Merchants of Deception” published by the Network for Public Education (NPE). While reading the paper, I was struck by the dominant position of women in the classical liberal effort to end taxpayer supported free public education.

I met Professor Cunningham last spring at the NPE conference in Philadelphia. On the last evening there, we had a chance to share drinks in the hotel bar. I learned that he is a typically misguided Boston sports fan cheering for the Celtics, Red Sox and Patriots. However, he seemed like a good guy who will still talk to me even after my Padres purloined the Red Sox star shortstop Xander Bogaerts. But I digress.

“Merchants of Deception” documents the disingenuous framing around the establishment of organizations dedicated to destroying public education. In this piece, I focus on the leadership of the National Parents Union (NPU), No Left Turn in Education (NLTE), Parents Defending Education (PDE) and Moms for Liberty (M4L). They all claim some form of being created by moms upset at their public school and taking action. In Cunningham’s paper, he shows that with their funding and media connections these are not typical moms. They are mostly communications professionals with a long history of working for organizations on the right. In a previous post, Cunningham shared,

“Mercedes Schneider has figured out the grassroots angle in Parents Defending Education: Prefab “Grassroots”— …. Peter Greene minces no words in Parents Defending Education: Astroturf Goes Hard Right. PDE is particularly odious because of its whole “turn in any teacher or school that offends you” approach to chilling conversation and teaching. This is not just astrotyuf, but astroturf with its brown shirt on.”

Professor Cunningham used the Little Sis data base and orthographer to illustrate the support for three of these organizations. The live map for the image below which allows access to documentation can be accessed here.

Moms for Liberty

M4L was legally formed January 1, 2021. It is infamous for disruption of school board meetings over its opposition to critical race theory (CRT), teaching about race and LGBTQ+ rights or having any books on those subjects available in school libraries.

Bridget Ziegler is one of M4L’s three founding board of directors. She left the organization in 2022 for political reasons but still actively supports it.

Ziegler is a director on the Sarasota County School Board. In the lead up to the 2022 elections the Herald-Tribune reported,

“She followed a 2014 appointment from then-Gov. Rick Scott, now a U.S. senator, with two successful bids for re-election, raising tens of thousands of dollars each time in what used to be low-profile, low-dollar races.”

“Ziegler, who is seeking a third term on the School Board, has articulated deeply conservative Republican Party positions on critical race theory and parental rights, including speaking out against mandatory masking for students and staff during the COVID-19 pandemic last year.”

She won a third term.

Her husband Chris Ziegler is the Vice Chairman of the Florida Republican Party. He expects M4L members will become foot soldiers in Ron DeFascist’s political campaigns. Bridget Ziegler helped DeFascist shape his “parental rights” agenda and stood next to the governor when he signed legislation limiting discussion of LGBTQ issues in schools.

Tina Descovich is another founding board member of M4L. From 2016 to 2020, she served on the Brevard School Board. She lost her seat in the August 2020 primary election.

Descovich states on her LinkedIn page that she is, “A creative senior communications professional with experience in Strategic Message Delivery, Media Relations Management, Brand & Graphic Development, Stakeholder Engagement, Government Relations, Corporate Relations, Crisis Management, Critical Thinking and Problem Solving.”

Descovich served on the executive staff for the United States Army Commanding General at Fort Lee. For the past 15 years, she has worked as a communications consultant.

Tiffany Justice is the third founding board member of M4L. From 2016 to 2020, she served on the school board of Indian River County. Before the 2020 election, columnist Ray McNulty of the Vero News urged her not to run for reelection. He stated, “Besides, Justice has played her way out of the lineup, proving repeatedly over the past four years that she is ill-equipped for, and overmatched by, a job that requires more than caring about kids.”

Justice is a supporter of the “Don’t say Gay” law. NBC quoted her saying the law is needed to fight a “transgender contagion.”

Of the founders of these new culture war platforms used to attack public education, Justice has the fewest professional credentials. She shows no work background and though claiming to have attended American University in Washington DC, she lists no degrees earned.

Marie Rogerson replaced Bridget Zeigler on the M4L board and became the executive director of program development. This close friend of Tina Descovich earned a political science degree from Brigham Young University’s Rexburg, Idaho campus. She managed Descovich’s 2016 and 2020 campaigns for school board.

Rogerson is a campaign consultant who completed the Learning Institute’s Leadership Academy. Learning Institute was founded in 1979 by Morton C. Blackwell. Its web site states, “The Institute teaches conservatives of all ages how to succeed in politics, government, and the media.”

She previously worked for Rep. Randy Fine, who has widely spread anti-LGBTQ rhetoric and supported anti-LGBTQ bills including the “Don’t Say Gay” law, and pushed for bans on lifesaving, evidence-based healthcare for transgender youth. His campaign donated to M4L.

Julie Fancelli is the daughter of Publix grocery store chain founder George Jenkins. In 2020, Forbes magazine listed her family as the 39^th richest in America with assets of $8.8 billion. She is not a founder or a leader of M4L, but when she gifted them $50,000 that represented all but $762 that M4L had raised.

The Washington Post reports that Fancelli was a major donor to the former president and stated, “Eight days before the Jan. 6 rally in Washington, a little-known Trump donor living thousands of miles away in the Tuscan countryside quietly wired a total of $650,000 to three organizations that helped stage and promote the event.”

Parents Defending Education

PDE was incorporated as a nonprofit in Virginia on January 21, 2021. Because it is a relatively new organization, little is yet known for certain about the funders and how large that funding is. However, the founder’s relationship with Charles Koch sponsored organizations is abundantly clear. It is a hard right organization.

Nicole Neily the founder of PDE has a long history of working for Koch sponsored organizations. Her LinkedIn page shares that she worked for the CATO Institute from 2006 to 2009 and she described herself as a “Think tank executive specializing in coalition building, management, public relations, and fundraising in the nonprofit/advocacy sphere and private sector crisis communications.”

In 2018, Neily founded Speech First where she was the only employee and President. Source Watch reported,

“Speech First’s president and only listed employee, Nicole Neily has worked for many Koch-affiliated groups. Neily was the president of the Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity, the Cato Institute’s manager of external relations, the coalition relations manager for FreedomWorks’ Center for Global Economic Growth, and a “Koch summer fellow for both the Center for Financial Privacy and Human Rights and the Competitive Enterprise Institute.”

The PDE 2021 tax form shows that in their first year of operation, they took in $3,178,345 and that Neily’s salary and benefits totaled more than $195,000.

Erika Sanzi has a long history of profiting from supporting the privatization of public education. She is the new Director of Outreach for PDE. Her 2020 LinkedIn page shared this brief resume,

“Senior Writer Education Post Since October 2014; Senior Visiting Fellow Thomas B. Fordham Institute Since October 2016; Interim Dean of Students and Spanish teacher Blackstone Valley Prep Mayoral Academy Jan 2012 – Jun 2013 Rhode Island Charter; Dean of Students Paul Cuffee Charter School 2010-2012 Providence Charter School; Spanish Teacher Wellesley High School 1998 – 2002; BA Spanish University of Vermont.” (This information came from my 2020 notes and is no longer available on her LinkedIn Page.)

Like Neily, Sanzi is making big money attacking public education. Blogger Mercedes Schneider shows that in 2015 she was paid $84,000 by Education Post the billionaire financed media outlet. In 2016, they paid her $120,000, in 2017 $131,000 and in 2018 $121,000.

Karol Markowicz is a journalist from New York City where she writes for Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post and contributes to Fox News. The PDE 2021 tax form shows the she is on their board of directors.

A biography notes that she was born in the Soviet Union but grew up in Brooklyn. She keeps her private life very private. She is married but her husband’s name is not known. She has children.

In December 2021, Markowitz and her kids relocated to Florida, saying, “I am leaving New York City, the place where my husband and I both grew up and where we had planned to raise our own kids. The response to COVID-19 in New York, in particular where children are concerned, has driven our family out.”

Her opinion pieces make it clear she has very right wing views. She is a big fan of Ron DeFascist of Florida and has a very low opinion of anyone left of Kublai Khan. She actually wrote an article with the title “Democrats need to stop urging political violence.”

National Parent Union

Professor Cunningham observed, “Apparently, the Waltons [WalMart] were pleased with the progress of Massachusetts Parents United because in 2020, they promoted Rodrigues as the president of a new venture, National Parents Union”(Merchants page 18). The creation story presented says that two “Latina women” Keri Rodrigues of Massachusetts and Alma Marquez of Los Angeles joined together to create a new model in parent activism based on the labor movement. While NPU has shunned most culture war issues they do support school choice and oppose teachers unions. While some view them as being on the left, Charles Koch and the Walton family are sending them financial support.

Keri Rodrigues is the President and co-founder of NPU. She endured foster care, survived abuse, and was expelled from high school. Rodrigues eventually earned a GED and enrolled at Temple University to study broadcast journalism. She left school before graduating to take a job with CBS News radio.

After five years with CBS, she became a talk-show host at WSAR earning the moniker “pint-sized Portuguese pundit.”

She became a consultant to Democrats for Education Reform Massachusetts. Soon after, she was state director of Families for Excellent Schools. This is the organization that in 2016 directed massive amounts of dark money into “question 2” the ballot initiative to lift the states charter school cap. After that losing debacle, she founded the Massachusetts Parent Union.

Alma Marquez was an original co-founder of NPU which became a non-profit in March 2020. She was elected to a three year term as Secretary-Treasurer. Strangely and never explained, Marquez disappeared from NPU after mid-August 2020.

Her being an actual Latina is integral to the NPU creation story of two “Latina women” joining forces. It was probably more important that Marquez was well connected in LA school choice circles. The billionaire created Education Post reported on the NPU Los Angeles kickoff event,

“Among those standing with them were the former mayor of Los Angeles, Antonio Villaraigosa, Ilyasah Shabazz, the daughter of Malcolm X and Betty Shabazz, and Peter Cunningham, the former Assistant Secretary for the Department of Education under the Obama Administration. Cunningham is also the founder of Education Post, where Rodriquez and Marquez met two years prior to the launch of NPU.”

Marquez is a born and raised LA girl who was enticed into the school choice movement by her trusted mentor and LA school board member Monica Garcia. Marquez wrote, “I didn’t know what charter schools were, but I trusted her judgment so I met with Steve Barr and Marshall Tuck, who were then founders and CEOs of Green Dot Public Schools in Los Angeles, respectively.” Marquez took a position at Green Dot.

No Left Turn in Education

NLTE was founded in the fall of 2020. It may be the most virulently anti-public schools, anti-teacher, anti-CRT and anti-LGBTQ of all these new education “reform movements.” Its founder has equated “the efforts of educators to that of Pol Pot, Vladimir Lenin, and Adolf Hitler” and called black bigotry towards whites’ a “very real problem” plus pushed anti-LGBTQ rhetoric. The NLTE web page’s tab “Be Informed” leads to forceful articles claiming that public schools are indoctrinating students with a woke ideology and are sexualizing children. They take a strong stand against CRT, the 1619 Project and woke math and science.

Elana Yaron Fishbein is the founder, CEO and spokesperson for NLTE. She grew up in Isreal where Fishbein was awarded a bachelor’s degree in Social Work from Hebrew University. After immigrating to the United States, she completed a masters concentrated on social change from Rutgers University and earned a doctorate from University of Pennsylvania specializing in management and program evaluation.

She has been a repeat guest of Fox News. After her first interview with Tucker Carlson, her FaceBook following supposedly jumped from fewer than 200 to more than 30,000 followers. However, Dr. Cunningham reports (Merchants page 14), “Even though the Carlson segment had supposedly brought in thousands of new NLTE members in April of 2021, I couldn’t find them.”

Final Observations

These new groups promoting privatization of public schools are clearly not products of grassroots development. M4L, PDE and NLTE have engaged in a withering assault on publicly funded schools. The organizations were developed by professionals with a continuing history of support from the Walton Family, Charles Koch, The Bradley Foundation and others. So, what do these billionaires want?

The Have You Heard pod cast interviewed Christopher Leonard, author of Kochland. Leonard described Charles Koch’s libertarian views on public education.

“When you have public education … one of the biggest problems for the libertarians is that it’s funded through taxes. . . they see taxation truly as a form of theft and robbery.”

“The Koch influence machine is multifaceted and complex and I am just telling you in a very honest way, there’s a huge difference between the marketing materials produced by Americans for Prosperity (Koch’s political organization) and the behind the scenes actual political philosophy. There’s a huge difference.

“And here’s the actual political philosophy. Government is bad. Public education must be destroyed for the good of all American citizens in this view. So the ultimate goal is to dismantle the public education system entirely and replace it with a privately run education system, which the operatives in this group believe in a sincere way is better for everybody.”

Tags: Bridget Ziegler, Charles Koch, Corporate Education Reform, Elana Yaron Fishbein, Julie Fancelli, Keri Rodrigues, Maurice Cunningham, Moms for Liberty, National Parents Union, Nicole Neily, No Left Turn in Education, Parents Defending Education, Tina Descovich

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Categories DPE

The Phony NAEP Crisis

1 Nov

By Thomas Ultican 11/1/2022

The recent data release by the National Assessment of Education Performance (NAEP) for mathematics has inspired balderdash. Jeb Bush called it “Alarming.” A Chalkbeat headline characterized it as a “massive drop.” Harvard’s Tom Kane wrote that it signaled “ enormous learning losses.” The Heritage Foundation’s Lindsey Burke was able to place her article in many outlets with the subtle headline, “New NAEP Test Scores Are a Disaster. Blame Teachers Unions.”

In reality, the score drops were not massive and learning loss which probably isn’t actually a thing was not enormous. However, if the purveyors of doom can convince enough people it is a crisis, then they can advance their own pet agendas such as ending public education.

NAEP (pronounced nape) testing which is known as the nation’s report card was originally implemented in 1969. The tests use a combination of standardized testing and sampling. The Washington Post reports that this year 224,000 fourth-graders from 5,700 schools and 222,000 eighth-graders from 5,100 schools were sampled. Sampling certainly makes more sense than states paying testing companies to test every student but standardized testing is still not a capable tool for measuring learning.

It is not just me saying it. Unlike the scientifically well behaved data associated with genetics study, standardized testing data is extremely noisy. The famed Australian researcher Noel Wilson wrote a seminal work in 1998 called “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error.” His peer reviewed paper which has never been credibly refuted says error in standardized testing is so large that meaningful inferences are impossible. Unfortunately, the paper has been ignored.

Wilson’s paper was followed a year later by a paper from UCLA’s Education Professor James Popham which stated, “Although educators need to produce valid evidence regarding their effectiveness, standardized achievement tests are the wrong tools for the task.”

It does seem that with all of the tests taken, data gathered and arithmetic performed, the tests must be telling us something but what? We know that the one thing this kind of test correlates to is the student’s family wealth. Education researcher Linda Darling-Hammond puts that correlation at an r-value of 0.9. An r-value of 1 on the 0-1 scale says it is a dead certainty like men not becoming pregnant. No other variable studied has a strong influence meaning they mainly input noise into the data.

So what caused the downward turn in 2022 NAEP math data for 4^th and 8^th graders? Is it really related to learning and should it be a large concern?

Let’s Go to the Scoreboard

Everyone has the right to access the NAEP Data Explorer and create their own data reports and charts. The tested years, the jurisdictions, data types, the subject, etcetera may be manipulated to shape a report. It is possible to compare states, public schools and private schools, districts, etc. There are limitations such as charter school data being lumped with public school data.

In the following charts, I chose mathematics either 4^th or 8^th grade in tested years 2003, 2019, 2022. I selected the average scale scores which are based on a 500 point scale.

Data Explorer Graphed Fourth Grade State Comparisons

One of the first observations to make is that the 500 point scale scores are plotted on a 60-point graph scale which visually magnifies any differences by more than 8 times. The national average scores go from 235 in 2003 to 241 in 2019 and then 236 in 2022. If we use the lowest data point for a denominator that five point drop from 2019 represents a 2% drop, but if we use the 500 point scale as the denominator which we should that purported enormous drop is just 1%.

Of the five large states queried, only New York had a larger than 5 point drop. Its 10-point drop calculates to a 2% decline.

The Walton Family financed publication The 74 is known to support libertarian positions on education policy. Some people claim they are biased against public schools. The 74 recently claimed in a headline, “Strong Link in Big City Districts’ 4th-Grade Math Scores to School Closures.” Under the previous president, the political right railed against health care policies like masking, vaccination and closing schools. By September 2020 there were loud sometimes violent open-schools-now protests at school boards meetings in many states and jurisdictions. The 74 article looks like an attempt to say “see we were right” but the data does not support their specious claim.

For evidence, they turned to the Koch addled economist Emily Oster. She is the Brown University professor that argued in the summer of 2020 that children should be back in school. At the same time, she cast doubt on masking. With the new NAEP results, she again supports the libertarian cause stating, “The districts with more remote learning have larger test score losses.” This appears to be something she just said with no evidence.

If we look at the states graphed above, the only outlier is New York with its 10-point drop, but California, Texas, Florida and Massachusetts all had 5-point drops.

District Comparisons of Fourth Grade Mathematics Scale Scores

Oster’s claim was about big city districts. If we look at these big city data sets there does not appear to be real differences. All of the big city districts had an 8- to 9-point drops in their fourth grade test between 2019 and 2022. Whether they opened early or stayed closed longer.

Education reporters note that test score drops in eighth grade were worse than those in fourth grade. On the 500-point scale the average drop in fourth grade was five points while in eighth grade it was eight points or 1% and 1.6% respectively.

Eighth Grade Mathematics by District

It is true that the national math data for eighth graders showed an average 8-point drop in 2022. However, the declines were not uniform between districts. The country’s second largest school district in Los Angeles actually returned a positive result and the 4-point decline in the nation’s largest school district was relatively modest.

There is no way the eighth grade testing result for the nation’s two largest school districts could fairly be characterized as a crisis. It is also noteworthy that these two districts were closed longer than most others in the nation.

The Roots of the Down Turn

America’s students like everyone else suffered through a two year pandemic-inspired nightmare. Did anyone really expect that on average they would perform at par?

One of the difficult pandemic related student manifestations was increased violence. As schools were reopening, Homeland Security notified them, “The reduced access to services coupled with the exposure to additional risk factors suggests schools — and the communities in which they are located — will need to increase support services to help students adjust to in-person learning as they cope with the potential trauma associated with the pandemic response.” Schools around the country saw a dramatic increase in fighting and insolent behavior.

This past July, the Washington Post reported, “The data, collected as the 2021-2022 school year was winding down, also showed that more than 70 percent of schools saw increases in chronic student absenteeism since the onset of the pandemic and about half of the schools reported increased acts of disrespect toward teachers and staff.”

Many school districts started experiencing crippling staff shortages and the NAEP testing came at a particularly inconvenient time. During the January to March, 2022 testing window, the nation experienced the omicron variant infection explosion. CDC data shows that during the testing window infection rates grew to more than 200 people out of every 100,000 in population becoming infected daily.

Disaster Capitalism Needs a Crisis

Amway Billionaire and dominion supporter Betsy DeVos said the NAEP data showed that children should no longer be “hostages” in a “one-size-fits-none system that isn’t meeting their needs.” She has been spending for decades to get rid of the secular public schools she sees as an evil.

Like every education crisis since 1983’s “A Nation at Risk” this is another manufactured crisis. The crisis rhetoric used to justify incessant accountability layered onto a constant process of new standards and new tests is, as Berliner and Biddle documented, a manufactured lie.

In writing about the pandemic effects on schools, John Merrow reported, “Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona, who called the results ‘appalling and unacceptable,’ told a group of reporters that the results are ‘a moment of truth for education,’ adding ‘How we respond to this will determine not only our recovery, but our nation’s standing in the world.”’

And even more over the top than Cardona, Harvard’s Tom Kane wrote in the Atlantic,

“[S]tudents at low-poverty schools that stayed remote had lost the equivalent of 13 weeks of in-person instruction. At high-poverty schools that stayed remote, students lost the equivalent of 22 weeks. Racial gaps widened too: In the districts that stayed remote for most of last year, the outcome was as if Black and Hispanic students had lost four to five more weeks of instruction than white students had.”

When people start using the sham CREDO days of learning metric, I am pretty sure they are dissembling. This is the kind of stuff that caused Professor Paul Thomas to declare, “But mostly, I hate the lies, political, media, and commercial interests that are eager to shout “crisis!” because in the spirit of the good ol’ U.S. of A., there is money to made in all that bullshit.”

Cardona’s Department of Education is known to embrace at least three methods for helping struggling students raise their test scores: 1) extend school day and year, 2) mandatory summer school and 3) ‘high-dosage tutoring,’ where one trained tutor works with no more than four students, three times a week for an entire year. In other words our Education Secretary who is a former New Leaders Fellow embraces a method that may raise test scores but promises to undermine engagement and the joy of learning. It is a corporate solution, not an educator’s solution.

The NAEP test scores are not a crisis but bad education leadership, suspect scholarship and billionaire meddling are. It is time to get out of the road of educators and let them do their job. No high-dosage tutoring, no extended days and no forced summer schools.

The children are not broken. If they missed some lessons over the past two years, unfettered educators will quickly resolve the issues. Students who have not been convinced that education and learning are onerous and hateful will be fine. Cardona, Kane and DeVos are the crisis.

Tags: Betsy DeVos, Emily Oster, Jeb Bush, Miguel Cardona, NAEP, testing, Tom Kane

Comments 8 Comments
Categories Corporate Education Reform, DPE

Community Schools Promises and Pitfalls

28 Sep

By Thomas Ultican 9/28/2022

Community school developments are surging in jurisdictions across the country. Since 2014, more the 300 community schools have been established in New York and this month Education Secretary Miguel Cardona was touting them at an event in Pennsylvania. In May, the California State Board of Education announced $635 million in grants for the development of these schools and in July, they disclosed a $4.1 billion commitment to community schools over the next seven years. However, some critiques are concerned about a lurking vulnerability to profiteering created by the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA).

What are Community Schools?

For decades America has turned a blind eye to the embarrassing reality that in many of our poorest communities the only functioning governmental organization or commercial enterprise is the local public school. No grocery stores, no pharmacies, no police stations, no fire stations, no libraries, no medical offices and so on leaves these communities bereft of services for basic human needs and opportunities for childhood development. Community schools are promoted as a possible remedy for some of this neighborhood damage.

The first priority for being a community school is being a public school that opens its doors to all students in the community.

A Brookings Institute study explains,

“According to the Coalition for Community Schools, a community school is ‘both a place and a set of partnerships between the school and other community resources. Its integrated focus on academics, health and social services, youth and community development, and community engagement leads to improved student learning, stronger families, and healthier communities.’ In community schools, every family and community member is a partner in the effort to build on students’ strengths, engage them as learners, and enable them to reach their full potential.”

The Brookings article notes that although community schools have a different looks in different communities they all have four common pillars: (1) “Expanded and enriched learning time,” (2) “Active family and community engagement,” (3) “Collaborative leadership and practices” and (4) “Integrated student supports.”

That means health care including vision and hearing is available through the schools as well as family housing and nutrition support. Families and other community members are encouraged to contribute both labor and leadership to the schools. Community services provided by governmental agencies also have site based coordinators.

Joshua Starr is the CEO of PDK International and the former Superintendent of Montgomery County Schools in Maryland. In a recent article for Kappan, he claims to “strongly support the community school model” but perceives some speed bumps. He asks, “Does the community school movement suffer from the “give me more stuff” syndrome? And concludes it probably does. However, his two biggest concerns are (1) the use of resources and (2) the use of data.

He points out that there are multiple streams of revenue coming into Title I schools and worries that these streams, meant in part to promote parental engagement, need to be administered wisely. He makes clear his belief in the importance of family engagement but asks, “However, before agreeing to fund additional staff positions, shouldn’t we make sure that every staff member who has a family-facing responsibility in their job description is actually doing that work (and doing it effectively)?”

Starr claims that by the end of the first quarter of 1^st grade, it is possible to identify whether or not a student is on track to graduate. He notes that a student who is failing every class and has accumulate many absences is quickly noticed but the students who fail one class and only has a few absences are often overlooked.

He concluded,

“All of this is to say that the process of identifying and responding to students’ needs is enormously complicated. Ideally, schools will begin with early warning indicators to identify kids who aren’t on track to graduate on time, teachers and staff will know how to interpret that data, school leaders will give them time and resources to build relationships with students and families, and school teams will coordinate among district resources and community assets to provide the supports children and families need.”

Profiteering Hawks Looking to Feast on Community Schools

There has been some encouraging anecdotal evidence from several of the original community schools. In March, Jeff Bryant wrote an article profiling two such schools for the Progressive, but there are also bad harbingers circling these schools. In the same paper from Brookings quoted above, there is a call to scale the “Next Generation Community Schools” nationally. They advocate engaging charter school networks and expanding ArmeriCorps. Brookings also counsels us, “Within the Department of Education, use Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) guidance and regulations to advance a next generation of community schools.”

Brookings was not through promoting a clearly neoliberal agenda for community schools. Their latest paper about them notes,

“There is a significant and growing interest in the community schools strategy among federal, state, and local governments seeking to advance educational and economic opportunities and address historic educational inequities exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Building off this momentum and with support from Ballmer Group, four national partners—the Center for Universal Education at the Brookings Institution (CUE), the Children’s Aid National Center for Community Schools (NCCS), the Coalition for Community Schools (CCS) at IEL, and the Learning Policy Institute (LPI)—are collaborating with education practitioners, researchers, and leaders across the country to strengthen the community schools field in a joint project called Community Schools Forward.” (Emphasis added)

Steve Ballmer was Bill Gates financial guy at Microsoft and is the billionaire owner of the Los Angeles Clippers. His Ballmer Group recently gifted $25,000,000 to the City Fund to advance privatization of public education in America. This is the group that funded the supposedly “unbiased” report from Brookings.

John Adam Klyczek is an educator and author of School World Order: The Technocratic Globalization of Corporatized Education. New Politics published his article “Community Schools and the Dangers of Ed Tech Privatization” in their Winter 2021 Journal. Klyczek declares,

“Bottom-up democracy through community schools sounds like a great idea. However, the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), the federal legislation funding pre-K-12 schools that replaced “No Child Left Behind,” requires ‘full-service’ community schools to incorporate public-private partnerships that facilitate ‘wrap-around services’ managed by data analytics. Consequently, ESSA incentivizes the corporatization of community schools through ‘surveillance capitalism.”’

He contends that ESSA’s mandate for “full-service” public-private partnerships creates “structured corporatization” paths similar to those in charter schools. Klyczek claims the mandates are a greater threat to privatization than current high stakes testing because in addition to academic data they are mandated to collect data on health care, crime prevention, workforce training and other wrap-around services. He states, “In other words, community schools are required to track data pertaining to the health, crime risk, and workforce readiness of community ‘stakeholders.”’

A Washington DC educator and union leader, Dylan Craig, responded to Klyczek in the same 2021 Winter Journal. He wrote,

“This leads me to what is perhaps the most striking assumption in Klyczek’s response: Union and community pressure is not just prone to but will inevitably succumb to corporate co-optation. Again, I find this reading deterministic and overly pessimistic. It is due to public pressure that the ESSA included language for community schools.”

“Now, if democratic control were to be gained in individual schools as I propose, local community members and unions could better organize around the issues that Klyczek discusses, potentially finding methods to meet the current data-reporting requirements in ways that serve the individual school and not tech oligarchs. If a suitable method cannot be found, communities can fight to change the language.”

Conclusion

Although I appreciate the positive we-can-do-it attitude Dylan Craig exhibits, I find John Adam Klyszek’s analysis more persuasive. Klyszek may be a little over the top, but seeing the wealthiest owner in the NBA, Steve Ballmer, underwriting research on community schools shows me that these schools are certainly privatization targets. The 2015 rewrite of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act was a delight for neoliberal politicians and their billionaire patrons. It opened the door to market based solutions for many education needs including community schools.

In the 1930’s the great historian Arnold Toynbee observed in his masterpiece, A Study of History: “The bread of universal education is no sooner cast upon the waters than a shoal of sharks arises from the depths and devours the children’s bread under the educator’s very eyes.”

It is going to be a challenge to keep profiteers from devouring the promise of community schools.

Tags: community schools, ESSA, Joshua Starr, philanthropy, Politics, Standardized Testing, Steve Ballmer

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Categories Corporate Education Reform, DPE, education

Stockton Schools after Deasy

17 Aug

By Thomas Ultican 8/17/2022

The infamous John Deasy resigned his post as Superintendent of Stockton Unified School District (SUSD) on June 15^th, 2020. That made his tenure two weeks more than two years which further exacerbated the longtime administrative instability at SUSD. He apparently steered the district budgets toward deficit spending and left a decimated finance department in his wake while other administrative positions multiplied. Concurrent with his two years in Stockton, money and leaders from organizations bent on privatizing public education were bolstered and became more active.

Stockton is an interesting place with vibrant political activity. The 209Times a Facebook based news outlet claims over 200,000 readers. It is not a slick publication but it does seem effective. 209 is the Stockton telephone prefix. Another internet based news outlet Recordnet.com is often an adversary of the 209Times.

The city 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. That valley has the most productive farm land in the world and a significant portion of its bounty ships from Stockton. Just 13 miles north of downtown is where John Fogerty got “Stuck in Lodi Again.”

Stockton is a city of 315,000 people and one of America’s most diverse communities. The demographic makeup is 42.1% Hispanic, 21.6% Asian, 20.8% White and 11.8 % Black. It has a 20% poverty rate and a stunning 82% of its K-12 students come from families in poverty. SUSD enrolls around 34,000 students into its 54 schools. Charter schools enroll close to 6,000 students.

With high poverty rates, Stockton has naturally underperformed on standardized testing which is significantly more correlated with family wealth than anything else. Linda Darling-Hammond pegs that correlation at 0.9 which is an almost certainty. The education writer Alfie Kohn suggested we could replace standardized testing by asking students just one question, “How much money does your mom make?” (Kohn page 77)

Breaking the Bank

In California, schools are required to submit a budget progress update each November called the First Interim Report. Because this report is formulaic, it provides a way to compare a district’s finances over time. The SUSD reports for 2018-2019, 2019-2020 and 2020-2021 reveal what appears to be a deliberate attempt to financially harm the district. In an era with declining enrollment both teaching staff and management permanent positions were increased significantly while cash flow turned steeply negative.

In teacher jargon, FTE stands for full time equivalent. Between the times John Deasy was hired until he resigned the full time staff at SUSD increased by more than 500 people. In terms of money, that represented a $9 million increase in yearly spending on salaries. During this same period, attendance declined by more than 1,300 students. That represented about a $9 million dollar loss in revenue from the state. SUSD had an $18 million dollar negative structural budget change.

SUSD board of trustees contracted with the Fiscal Crisis Management Assist Team (FCMAT) to review their financial situation and processes. The executive summary of the January 2022 report noted,

“At the time of FCMAT’s fieldwork, there had been significant employee turnover and the elimination of some management positions in the Business Services Department. Key budget management personnel had been in their positions for only a brief time; therefore, there was a lack of historical institutional knowledge about the district’s 2021-22 budget development and 2020-21 financial closing processes.”

In other words, despite all of the hiring Deasy left the financial department in chaos. The FCMAT study claimed that SUSD was headed for serious financial difficulties when the one time spending from the federal government is gone in fiscal year 2024-25. Currently they say the district is spending one time funding on $26.3 million in salaries, benefits and services that appear essential.

DooWop Don in Charge

Don and Sue Shalvey live in Linden, California a small rural community 10 miles east of Stockton. When they actually moved there is unknown. Don is a bit of a rock star amongst neoliberal Democrats. His San Carlos Learning Center was the first charter school in California and the site of Bill and Hillary Clinton’s 1997 round table discussion on charter schools. In Lily Geismer’s book Left Behind, she describes the meeting at the round table between Don and “a thirty-something man with a goatee and Birkenstocks.” That was Reed Hastings who Geismer claims needed someone like Shalvey to give his education plans credibility. (Left Behind Page 249)

Together, Shalvey and Hastings successfully campaigned to end the charter school cap in California. At the same time Hastings was starting his new company Netflix. The two soon hooked up with John Doerr and the NewSchools Venture Fund to invent a charter network called a charter management organization (CMO). Shalvey did most of the leg work in developing University Public Schools which later changed its name to Aspire. It was America’s first CMO. (Left Behind Page 249)

From 2009 to 2020, Don served as a Deputy Director for K-12 Education at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, where he oversaw charter schools and teacher preparation. Before he was a charter school founder and before he was a school teacher, he was a disc jockey. That is why his twitter handle is @dooWopDon.

In 2020, Don assumed leadership of San Joaquin A Plus Inc. (A+)

Before he arrived, A+ was a modest organization working with a total of about $50,000 annually. On their tax forms (Tax ID: 51-0536117) A+ is listed as a public charity and it states, “The primary exempt purpose is to support and enhance the education of the community’s youth and to create responsible employable and productive citizens through tutorial and other services and the teaching of school literacy, school readiness, and parent education.”

With Don’s arrival, Helen Schwab, President of the The Charles and Helen Schwab Foundation (Tax ID 94-3374170) gifted A+ $400,000. This low profile organization suddenly became a player in Stockton politics and school policy.

Researchers at University of Indiana Purdue University Indianapolis noted as a key component in their model of billionaire funded attacks on public education the development of local organizations to collaborate on the agenda. In addition to A+, it appears that the Community Foundation of San Joaquin has also been converted to this roll. In 2019, The City Fund (Tax ID 82-4938743) gifted them $298,960 and Bill Gates (Tax ID 56-2618866) has also been granting them funds. In there latest tax filing (Tax ID 27-1476916), the Foundation lists Don’s wife Sue Shalvey as Chairman.

Larry Tramutola is a political organizer for hire. He represented Michael Bloomberg in his $18 million dollar support for San Francisco’s successful soda tax referendum. Last year, he launched the Stockton Education & Outreach Project. Their first report seemed designed to put public schools in as bad as light as possible. The funding for Tramutola’s project is unknown.

A Leadership Nightmare

After John Deasy stepped down as Superintendent, Recordnet.com reported,

“Biedermann was selected by the Board of Trustees to serve as interim superintendent after John Deasy stepped down April 21, 2020. In 2018, Deasy became the district’s 12th interim or full-time superintendent over the past 30 years. Deasy succeeded current Stockton City Councilman Dan Wright, who took over as interim superintendent in August 2017 for Eliseo Davalos, who lasted 13 months. Carl Tolliver served two stints from Sept. 14, 2005, to June 30, 2006, and from July 2010 to June 2012.”

Brian Biederman who is mentioned above had served as head of educational services for Stockton Unified under Deasy and appears to have been his choice as a successor. This June, when Biederman ran for Superintendent of San Joaquin County Department of Education, the required form 460 campaign reports show that Napa resident John Deasy contributed $100.

However, when it came to creating district stability, Biederman was not the answer. In January 2021, just 8 months into his tenure he resigned claiming personal health issues.

Left in a difficult situation, the district board hired former Monterey County Superintendent John Ramirez Jr. as acting Superintendent with the intention of eventually naming him Superintendent. He was already serving as a consultant to the district. Ramirez came with some baggage. In 2016 while serving as Alisal Union School District’s superintendent he admitted personal use of district credit cards which he repaid and also drew a sexual harassment complaint filed by a former district employee. However, he had strong support from within SUSD and the community.

Just over a year later, Ramirez resigned. The district announced that they accepted his resignation so he could care for the health of his elderly parents. However, the executive session agenda item that led to accepting the resignation by a 4-2 vote was listed as item 2.1 discipline/dismissal/release. A person in the know said that Ramirez was removed because he was spending more time in Don Salvey’s office than his own district office.

Going into the 2022-23 school year, the SUSD board has settled on Dr. Traci E. Miller as interim superintendent. She is a 25-year veteran of SUSD where she has served as middle school counselor, high school counselor, head counselor, Assistant Principal, Principal, and Director.

In June, there was a Grand Jury report on SUSD. It drew two different public responses. The 209Times wrote “Biased ‘Grand Jury’ Issues Another Attack on SUSD” stating.

“While Stockton Unified was dedicating its new headquarters after a 40 year inspirational music teacher Arthur Coleman Jr, operatives of the power brokers who ram Stockton into the ground that we refer to as the “Stockton Cabal”, tried to overshadow the progress with yet another “special report”. This one comes less than a year since the last ‘grand jury special report on SUSD’.

“The major point of contention? A potential $30 million deficit. Only problem is that’s exactly what was already mentioned last year. Yet, the report again failed to mention that ousted Cabal approved Superintendent John Deasy left the district in a $100 million deficit.”

Recordnet.com had a quite different response. Their article “Grand jury finds Stockton Unified trustees failed as district leaders in scathing report” states,

“A San Joaquin County civil grand jury has found the Stockton Unified School District Board of Trustees have failed as district leaders and will likely continue to do so.

“A scathing 33-page report released by the 2020-21 grand jury says Stockton Unified trustees are the direct reason for what’s been called the district’s ‘revolving door’ of superintendents.”

A close reading of the Grand Jury report is not a scathing report on the district trustees nor is it a completely biased attack with no value.

Page 12 in the report states,

“Selection of the current CBO was made contrary to Board Policy (BP) 4211.2. The CBO was hired without a search, screening process or interviews.” (Report Page 11)

CBO stands for chief business officer. When asked about this finding, school board Vice President Ray Zulueta said that he assumed when Human Resources brought them a hire recommendation that they had correctly followed the process. This looks like an example of the superintendent not getting the job done. The board hired the guy but they have no choice but to believe people are doing their job.

The grand jury was also was critical about the way change orders were being handled. They shared,

“For example, athletic facility projects at Franklin High School had an overrun of approximately $6 million. No change order was submitted to the Board for approval.” (Report Page 12)

This makes clear to the trustees how critical it is to put people in place who have both competency and integrity, but this was not an attack directed at the board.

The charge of bias does ring true when discussing the budget issues. On page 22, The Grand Jury regurgitates information from the January FCMAT report about possible deficits and unprofessional financial processes. It does not indicate that the SUSD trustees caused the report to be generated nor does it mention the huge out of budget spending during the Deasy administration. Many district leaders believe Deasy’s spending led to more than $100 million dollars missing from district total assets. That looks like something on which the Grand Jury should have focused.

After looking at the issues swirling around SUSD, I believe the district is in damaged but decent shape. As Dr. Miller takes charge, it seems like a great time for a new beginning. Her résumé indicates a professional educator with deep experience. She has administrative experience and a twenty-five year relationship with the community. The board now has the opportunity to see if she can make the trains run on time, cross all the t’s and dot all the i’s. There is every reason to think she can. If she proves herself, 10 or 15 years down the road she could still be superintendent.

Tags: 209Times, Don Shalvey, John Deasy, Recordnet.com, Stockton Unified School District, SUSD

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Categories DPE, education

Petaluma Charter School Lessons

23 Mar

By Thomas Ultican 3/23/2022

A Petaluma Argus-Courier headline read, “Petaluma could soon welcome charter school.” Local prodigy, Gianna Biaggi, had come home to establish the Magnolia Global Academy for Leaders (MGAL). Biaggi had spent the previous year as a New School Creation Fellow at the High Tech High Graduate School of Education. She was exited to use her new training to establish a High Tech High inspired school where she grew up.

Petaluma is a unique community with a lot of appeal. In the 1990’s, I was invited to a celebration of the 1968 Monterey Pop Festival’s 30^th anniversary hosted by a Buddhist family in Petaluma. Picked up my date in San Francisco, headed across the Golden Gate Bridge and in less than a 40-mile drive up highway 101 we were there. It would be one of the more memorable evenings of my life.

I met a musician named David Freiberg at the party and asked him what bands he had been in that I might know. David responded, “I was in Jefferson Airplane and Quiz Silver Messenger Service.” I was impressed and his Wikipedia page is even more impressive. He was there with Linda Imperial who currently had the world’s number one solo jazz vocal album. Somehow, I ended up in the kitchen with David and Linda where I asked them to sing the spiritual “Amazing Grace.” They gifted me an amazing a cappella performance.

Petaluma is a community of mostly white liberals. The racial breakdown is 70% White, 1.3% Black, 21% Hispanic, 4.4% Asian and 3.3% other. It is in Sonoma County which has a Democratic Party voter registration of 57.7%, a no preference voter registration of 19.2% and a Republican Party voter registration of 17.5%.

Gianna Biaggi attended Sonoma High School in nearby Sonoma, California. In her 2013 graduation speech, she spoke of being a part of the Youth Ambassador’s program and how that led to a wonderful three weeks in Paraguay. She also proudly noted, “Through the support of my favorite teacher, Ms. Manchester, I created the Wolf Club, named after Jack’s [Jack London] illustrious nickname, ‘Wolf.’” She also stated, “With the help of Wolf Club members, Ms. Manchester, and the director of Jack London State Park, I was successfully able to create Jack’s Ambassadors, a program for middle school students that is based off of my experience with the Youth Ambassadors.”

After graduating from high school, Gianna continued down the path of seeking to be of public service and creating for the community. Following earning a 2017 bachelor’s degree in international studies from Kenyon College in Ohio, she won a Samuel Huntington Public Service Award and became an Interexchange Christianson Grantee. That took her to Nairobi, Kenya where she created a community library in the Kibera slums and established Sunflower Fellows, a 4-year literacy and leadership program for low-achieving girls attending informal schools.

Gianna’s story about her time in Africa is really impressive. However, Petaluma is not Nairobi. The US education system is sophisticated and staffed by a huge number of highly educated and experienced professionals. Siphoning money from public schools to create a parallel school system negatively affects public school students. It creates irrecoverable stranded costs that drain per-capita resources.

High Tech High Graduate School of Education

High Tech High (HTH) graduate school of education is in a different category than Relay Graduate School or the training provided by TNTP. Relay and TNTP were created to undermine the role of public universities in training educators and to promote school choice. Both organizations have shallow academic and profession depth. Conversely, HTH graduate school was created to teach HTH teachers the school’s brand of progressive education and it undeniably has academic and professional depth starting with founders Larry Rosenstock and Rob Riordan.

For several years Professor Riordan while a faculty member of the Harvard Graduate School of Education led the practicum seminar for Harvard’s student teachers. He has a wealth of education credits to his name. Professor Rosenstock also taught at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and the University of California, Berkeley School of Education. He holds a Juris Doctor from Boston University, and an honorary doctorate from Cambridge College. It was fascinating to learn that while Rosenstock was at Brandeis University he developed a close relationship with Abe Maslow the originator of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. They regularly carpooled to school.

In 1998, Larry Rosenstock and Rob Riordan were on a team at Harvard that won a large grant from the Clinton administration to design a new American high school. They traveled around the country looking for existing models when a teacher in San Diego got them exited. So they moved there to study his approach and soon after were offered a job to create High Tech High.

At the time, neoliberal thinking was permeating the Clinton administration and America’s business community. The analysis in Reagan’s “A Nation at Risk” was widely accepted as basic fact. Business leaders were convinced public education was failing and market based solutions were the required answer. In San Diego, a 40-person committee of business elites led by Gary Jacobs decided they wanted to create their own independent public school. They contacted Rosenstock for his advice and he explained charter schools.

Gary Jacobs is the former director of education programs at Qualcomm but more importantly, he is the son of Qualcomm founder and billionaire Irwin Jacobs. These wealthy San Diegans knew nothing about education, but perceived no problem with experimenting on other people’s children. They appeared convinced that if they hired the right consultant, they could create something new and wonderful that would lead the way to education reform.

The education model they embraced was similar the progressive education ideas first suggested by John Dewey at the beginning of the 20^th century. Problem based education was their focus. It was reminiscent of the experimental school developed by Corinne Seeds at UCLA.

Tufts University Education Professor, Kathleen Weiler, wrote Democracy and Schooling in California: The Legacy of Helen Heffernan and Corinne Seeds. She shared,

“Helen Heffernan and Corinne Seeds were nationally recognized as leaders of the progressive education movement and were key figures in what was probably the most concerted attempt to put the ideals of progressive education into practice in a state-wide system of public education in the United States.”

Heffernan was the California Commissioner of Rural and Elementary Education between 1926 and 1965, and Seeds was the Director of the University Elementary school at UCLA between 1925 and 1957.

Professor Larry Lawrence worked at the Seeds school under Jonathan Goodlad. He observed that when the charismatic Goodlad left in 1987, the school floundered. When Heffernan retired, the progressive education movement in California slowed and reversed. After meeting with HTH founding principal and CEO, Larry Rosenstock, and touring one of the schools, Professor Lawrence concluded that when Rosenstock leaves, the HTH system will falter.

Professor Lawrence also questioned the quality of the school’s math education. A science professor from Southwestern Junior College regularly complained during committee meetings I attended about how unprepared for college academics the incoming HTH students were.

As appealing as progressive education is, there is some reason it has never blossomed.

Magnolia Global Academy for Leaders (MGAL)

In November 2020, the Sonoma Index-Tribune ran the headline, “Local grad to launch new all-girls high school in Sonoma County.” The article began,

“Gianna Biaggi is a Sonoma Valley native and a graduate of Sonoma Valley High School. She is currently a New School Creation Fellow at High Tech High, an education charter school incubator in San Diego.”

Evidently nothing developed with the girl’s school but a few miles away in Petaluma she found a lot of support for her new school idea. It helped that the new Superintendent of Petaluma City Schools, Matthew Harris, is a pro-choice former Teach For America corps member.

Gianna is a well liked local girl. She was able to quickly gather 50-people willing to have their names added to a supporters list on the new MGAL web-page.

Included on the supporters list were Iliana Madrigal-Hooper, Commission on the Status of Human Rights; Dr. Matthew Long, Santa Rosa Junior College, Petaluma Campus; Dr. Lena MacQuade, Sonoma State University, Women’s and Gender Studies and Rob Riordan, President Emeritus, High Tech High Graduate School of Education. It seems that the main motivation for several people on the list was doing a favor for Gianna.

On August 24, 2021, Gianna formerly submitted her 800 page charter petition to the Petaluma City Schools board. That is when the delusion was pierced. The district staff came back with a powerful rejection recommendation that included:

“The charter school presents an unsound educational program for the pupils to be enrolled in the charter school.”

“The petitioners are demonstrably unlikely to successfully implement the program set forth in the petition.”

“The charter school is demonstrably unlikely to serve the interests of the entire community in which the school is proposing to locate.”

“The Petition submitted is for the establishment of a district-operated ‘dependent’ charter school. … First, as a dependent, District-operated charter school, MGAL could not legally operate in most private facilities. School facilities for public school districts are highly regulated as to location, condition and safety, and the kind of space available in the local community does not meet applicable legal standards as dictated by the Field Act.”

The board voted unanimously 5-0 to turn down the charter petition.

A Few Observations

One of the major flaws in charter school legislation is that people with minimal background in teaching and administering schools are allowed to petition for charters. This has resulted in horrible schools like KIPP, Uncommon Schools and Yes Prep with their test prep and “no excuses” agenda.

In Petaluma’s case, Gianna Biaggi seems like a well intentioned bright young women but she does not have the experience to start and run a school. However, a dependent charter is an intriguing idea. It is a charter that is created by a school district to operate within and be governed within the District’s family of school options. It must follow all state facility laws. Shouldn’t all taxpayer funded schools be required to provide the same level of safety as a public school?

Deborah Meier has long been an advocate of progressive education and smaller democratically operated schools. In 1974, she founded Central Park East and latter the Mission Hill School in Boston. These very successful programs have made her more open to charter schools because of the possibility for developing smaller progressive schools. It seems like the dependent charter school model could be a path for this kind of development. That explains her willingness to serve on the advisory board for HTH Graduate School of Education. However, she also believes schools must practice and model democracy. She has written, “We can learn a lot from charters about autonomy, but not much about democracy.” (Public Education Page 164)

An illusion underlies the “public education is failing” meme. It has been propagated relentlessly by corporations and billionaires ever since the Reagan administration published “A Nation at Risk.” That publication was based on misunderstood statistics and sold a belief that schools were failing. A study at Sandia lab seven years later showed that not only were schools not failing but that they had been delivering steadily improving test results if you compared apples to apples. The whole premise of “A Nation at Risk” was based on misguided bad scholarship.

Birthed in the bowels of the 1950’s segregationist south, school choice has never been about improving education. It is about white supremacy, profiting off taxpayers, cutting taxes, selling market based solutions and financing religion. School choice ideology has a long dark history of dealing significant harm to public education.

Tags: Corinne Seeds, Deborah Meier, Gary Jacobs, Gianna Biaggi, Helen Heffernan, High Tech High, Larry Rosenstock, Petaluma, Rob Riordan

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Categories DPE, education

Enabling the Privatizers – The End Game is Finally Here

8 Feb

Guest post by an Oakland parent and teacher, Jane Nylund 2/8/2022

Lest we all forget, from six years ago, here was the plan: 50% of our kids into charter schools. https://capitalandmain.com/oaklands-charter-school-tipping-point-0531

And now, it looks like that plan is coming to fruition. You are following the privatization playbook to the letter.

When the well-paid accountants arrive and show a slide comparing Oakland Unified School District (OUSD) to other districts of similar enrollments/socio-economic status (SES), and make the simplistic assumption that OUSD has too many schools compared to the others and that we have to be just the same, here’s what you are really saying.

Lesson 1) High poverty children don’t deserve smaller schools and class sizes, anywhere in the state of California, unless it’s a charter.

Lesson 2) It isn’t acceptable for a high-needs district to appear to have it “better” than the others with smaller schools. Smaller schools are meant for wealthy people.

Lesson 3) Because we don’t have the political will to invest in the other comparison districts, we need to continue to dis-invest in Oakland instead, thus creating “equity” at the bottom. Nothing new, we’ve been doing that for years. See Lesson #1

Lesson 4) It’s okay to let Bill Gates experiment with small schools for our kids, until he becomes bored and pulls funding.

Here is the equivalent of that purported “savings” that really isn’t:

1) Recent HQ pay for two years. OUSD used to have 14 positions at $200K+; in 2020 they had 47.

2) Lease at 1000 Broadway.

3) Cost of a new school site kitchen.

So, by closing all these schools, OUSD can now have the cost equivalent of a kitchen. Maybe.

Turn this entire idea on its head. The continued austerity measures for high-poverty districts like Oakland are a clear message to these families that they don’t deserve a mix of schools, like, say, San Francisco.

Have you ever looked at the school mix in San Francisco, our neighbor across the bay? You should. I recently noted that they have a mix of 122 schools, give or take. They have 14% charter enrollment, and several comprehensive high schools. They also support a mix of much smaller schools from 100-500 kids each, of all types. They don’t use an “ideal” size. That doesn’t exist, and research bears that out, no matter how many presentations and how many consultants you pay to come up with an “ideal” number. So, if you are arguing that Oakland has too many schools, then you need to head over to SF and advise their board to also close schools. Oh, that’s right, they have wealthy families there. Don’t want to rock the boat. See Lesson #2

The accountants never look at San Francisco as a comparison district because of socio-economics, but SF still comes in at 57% free and reduced price lunch. Clearly, San Francisco does something we don’t, even as elite San Franciscans are trying to shut down their elected school board. The obvious answer is that San Francisco is not a top-heavy, privatized, portfolio district.

No one in OUSD, Financial Crises and Management Assist Team (FCMAT), or local and state government has ever answered the obvious question: find me a comparison district in California, the same as ours, that has all the community services/pay/benefits/supports/enrichment as a result of having 40-50 schools. This nonsensical premise is what you are trying to sell us. What is a model district that you can reference that has successfully achieved and implemented this accounting miracle? Stockton, Sacramento, Long Beach? Where?

Answer: none of the above. You can’t find any high-needs district that has all of this because it supports a magical number of 40-50 schools. So you are asking us to just go along to get along with Stockton, Sacramento, and Long Beach, and many others. All that “savings” simply evaporates, along with enrollment, and the status quo remains. It is truly mind-blowing that you are promising community schools to magically appear, when there is no other district model in the state that supports this idea that you can close dozens of schools, and expect tax dollars to rain down upon school sites. The consultants will be falling all over themselves to be first in line for the money grab. It would be laughable if it wasn’t such a tragedy.

Go back to my point #1 in case you forgot about the entire argument about why this exercise isn’t about children. It isn’t about savings. It isn’t about more money for school sites. It isn’t about teacher pay. It’s about not having the guts to stand up to bullies like FCMAT and their state overlords. It’s about taking the easy way out because of a “belief” system. It’s neat and tidy, and pencils out nicely. But once you put down those pencils, the disaster you have created for our communities will be irreparable and will change the fabric of the Oakland community forever. But John Fisher doesn’t care. The chaos will make it that much easier for the luxury A’s stadium to go in. But you already knew that.

Tags: Closing Schools, Education Reform, John Fisher, Oakland Unified School District, Public Schools

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Categories Corporate Education Reform, DPE, education

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