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Denver’s Schools are a Dystopian Nightmare

4 Feb

By Thomas Ultican 2/4/2018

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bad Ideology Based on Bad Assumptions

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

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

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

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

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

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

Osborne’s Education Next article continued:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Another Non-Educator with No Training

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CSAP Data

Colorado Pol’s Graph of the CSAP data.

The Portfolio Model of School District Management is Ridiculous

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Running Multiple School Systems Adds Cost

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

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

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

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

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

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

TFA Teachers are Untrained and Ineffective

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

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

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

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

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

Some New Data

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

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

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

National Eighth Grade Test Scores

Interactive Simulation result from the New York Times.

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

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

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

 

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TNTP Making Big Bucks from the Destroy Public Education (DPE) Movement

13 Jan

By T. Ultican 1/13/2018

When TNTP comes to town, public school is targeted for education disruption. Clayton Christiansen probably thinks that is a good thing, but rational people who never went to Harvard correctly recognize that children need stability. TNTP tills the soil of privatization by undermining teacher professionalism and preaching a gospel of test-centric pedagogy.

Originally called The New Teachers Project, but like American Telephone and Telegraph becoming AT&T, they fancy TNTP.

In 2001 the TNTP web page described their founding:

“The New Teacher Project was formed in 1997 as a spin-off of Teach For America, …. Teach For America (TFA) has successfully recruited thousands of individuals into teaching in urban and rural areas, …. Wendy Kopp, the Founder and President of Teach For America, recognized the need for school districts to be able to replicate these effective recruiting and training practices. In this way, school districts could fill their classrooms with high quality teachers and begin to reduce teacher turnover. She established The New Teacher Project to address these very needs and promptly recruited Michelle Rhee to head up the new company.” (emphasis added)

In order to believe this, one must believe that a five-week course in the summer trumps a year at a college of education with at least a semester of supervised student teaching. It is also unlikely that significant numbers of these five-week wunderkinds will do much to reduce teacher turnover.

It is curious that TNTP reports their founding in 1997 but their tax returns show the year of formation to be 1995. Whatever the case, TNTP has struck gold.

The Money is Flowing

The big education philanthropies like the work TNTP is doing and are lavishing them with cash.

TNTP Money Graphic

Cash Flow Compiled from Tax Forms and Foundation Reports – by T. Ultican

In 2013 Mercedes Schneider reported on government grants to TNTP:

“Some TNTP initiatives also benefit from the support of federal grant programs and/or private funding. In 2010, TNTP was one of 49 organizations and institutions nationwide to win a federal Investing in Innovation (i3) grant.”

Schneider also wrote about the TNTP 2015 leadership shakeup in a post she called, “New TNTP President Among the First to Have Her NYC School’s Charter Revoked.” She shared:

“The TNTP bio blurb on Belcher includes a quick mention of her as founder of a New York City charter school: ‘Karolyn Belcher was one of TNTP’s first employees after its founding in 1997. After leaving for several years to found the John A. Reisenbach Charter School, one of the first three charter schools in New York State, she returned to TNTP in 2007.’

“What Belcher’s TNTP bio blurb does not mention is that Reisenbach, which operated only three years, from 09.2000 to 06/2004, has its charter revoked for its low test scores, teacher turnover, and financial issues.”

However, in a country dominated by big money education philanthropy, failure is not a big deal. In fact, by 2016, Belcher and several fellow early TFA cohort members were making big money at TNTP claiming to be education experts. Eleven of them were “earning” more than $200,000 yearly.

TNTP Top 15 Salaries edited

Snip Page 30 of TNTP Latest Form 990 filed in 2016

I suspect that most billionaires financing the DPE movement are true believers in their privatization and market theory of education reform. It is likely that they only talk with one another and have their damaging ideology ever further reinforced.

For the carpetbaggers from TFA, it looks like an old story. Reality is hard to recognize when your personal income is at stake; especially when that income is so grand.

Propagating the Billionaire Sponsored Education Ideology

Lubienski and Lubienski published “Why Public Schools Outperform Private Schools” in 2014. David Berliner a much published and widely respected scholar from Arizona State University, wrote of their paper:

“The Public School Advantage is a complete and thorough analysis of America’s many different kinds of schools—secular, charter, and public—and should end the arguments about which kind is better. Chris and Sarah Lubienski provide both the data and the clear explanations needed to understand the many false claims made about the superiority of schools that are not public. The result is a ringing endorsement of public school achievement.”

An excerpt from the Lubienski’s book was published by the National Education Policy Center (NEPC) in an anthology called “Learning from the Federal Market-Based Reforms.” Writing about researchers supporting market based reform and privatization they observe, “These … groups … having quite often declined or failed to pass their pro-market research findings through established, peer-reviewed academic journals, instead create alternative venues publishing and promoting their work – a strategy not unlike what is employed by corporate-funded deniers of climate change.” They also note that many authoritative claims about education are often little more the press releases with no evidence.

TNTP produced quasi-academic research papers like those described by Lubienski and Lubienski. A 2012 example is called “The Irreplaceables.” The paper defines the “irreplaceables” as the “top 20% of teachers in studied districts, as gauged by district data.” The gauge used is value added measures (VAM).

VAM has been widely discredited. By 2014, even the American Statistical Association weighed in with a paper concluding,

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

 “The Irreplaceables” was not peer reviewed, but Bruce D. Baker a Professor in the Graduate School of Education at Rutgers wrote a review for the NEPC. Professor Baker asked, “Among those 2005-06 Irreplaceables, how do they reshuffle between 2006-07 & 2007-08? His answer is in the graphic below.

Baker Graph

Professor Bruce Baker’s Graph

Professor Baker amusingly explains,

“Hmm… now they’re moving all over the place. A small cluster do appear to stay in the upper right. But, we are dealing with a dramatically diminishing pool of the persistently awesome here.  And I’m not even pointing out the number of cases in the data set that are simply disappearing from year to year. Another post – another day.

“From 2005-2010: Of the thousands of teachers for whom ratings exist for each year, there are 14 in math and 5 in ELA that stay in the top 20% for each year! Sure hope they don’t leave!”

Another poor paper by TNTP was called the “Widget Effect: Our National Failure to Acknowledge and Act on Differences in Teacher Effectiveness.” This paper made a significant contribution to the attack on teachers. The authors define the “Widget Effect:”

“The Widget Effect describes the tendency of school districts to assume classroom effectiveness is the same from teacher to teacher. This decades-old fallacy fosters an environment in which teachers cease to be understood as individual professionals, but rather as interchangeable parts.”

It was a follow-on report from the earlier “Unintended Consequences: The Case for Reforming the Staffing Rules in Urban Teachers Union Contracts.” That report had generated a wide spate of teacher bashing in California as the following headlines and comments demonstrate.

September 29, 2006

Los Angeles Times

Escape Hatch for Incompetent Teachers Closed

“The New York nonprofit group New Teacher Project found in a November 2005 study of five districts including San Diego Unified that administrators had little discretion in filling roughly 40% of their vacancies because of union rules. Researchers also found that poorly performing teachers were transferring from school to school.”

September 10, 2006

San Francisco Chronicle

California Schools May Get Break from Bad Teachers

‘”There are a lot of states watching what’s happening in California, and I think it’ll have significant ramifications nationwide,’ said Michelle Rhee, chief executive officer of the New Teacher Project, a national nonprofit group that worked on the Scott bill.”

September 1, 2006

San Jose Mercury News

State Needs ‘Lemon’ Law For

“Scott’s bill could slow down the “dance of the lemons” — the annual migration of a minority of veteran teachers who either were burned out or who didn’t get along. They agreed to take voluntary transfers and gravitated to low-performing schools, where principals were desperate and parents less vigilant.”

The “Widget Effect,” faulted the fact that less than 1% of veteran teachers in America were evaluated as ineffective. The report called for multiple teacher evaluation inputs including the use of VAM. Arne Duncan, the new US Secretary of Education made the VAM component a requirement for winning Race to the Top school grants.

In 2017, two researchers looked into the effect of widely implementing the “Widget Effect” policy recommendations. In Revisiting the Widget Effect – by Matthew A. Kraft, Brown University and Allison F. Gilmour, Vanderbilt University, they state:

“In 2009, The New Teacher Project (TNTP)’s The Widget Effect documented the failure to recognize and act on differences in teacher effectiveness. We revisit these findings by compiling teacher performance ratings across 24 states that adopted major reforms to their teacher evaluation systems. In the vast majority of these states, the percentage of teachers rated Unsatisfactory remains less than 1%. However, the full distributions of ratings vary widely across states with 0.7% to 28.7% rated below Proficient and 6% to 62% rated above Proficient.”

Nothing changed with unsatisfactory ratings, but TNTP had clearly shown to be a major player in the world of education policy. They seemed to have gained greater influence on teacher evaluations than UCLA, University of Texas and Columbia University’s Teachers College combined.

Audrey Amrein-Beardsley is a former middle- and high-school mathematics teacher who received her Ph.D. in 2002 from Arizona State University in the Division of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies with an emphasis on Research Methods. She commented in a blog for NEPC about the “Widget Effect” driven policies in New Mexico. Writing:

“While Kraft and Gilmour assert that ‘systems that place greater weight on normative measures such as value-added scores rather than…[just]…observations have fewer teachers rated proficient’ …, I highly doubt this purely reflects New Mexico’s “commitment to putting students first.”

New Mexico Bell Curve Evaluation

Professor Amrein-Beardsley’s Graphic

“I also highly doubt that, as per New Mexico’s acting Secretary of Education, this was ‘not … designed with quote unquote end results in mind.’ That is, ‘the New Mexico Public Education Department did not set out to place any specific number or percentage of teachers into a given category.’ If true, it’s pretty miraculous how this simply worked out as illustrated… This is also at issue in the lawsuit in which I am involved in New Mexico, in which the American Federation of Teachers won an injunction in 2015 that still stands today ….”

During my fifteen years as a classroom teacher, I observed that the students do a pretty good job of getting rid of poor teachers. Teaching is a demanding job and the ability to deal with students is not a gift that everyone has. Fifty percent of teachers quit the profession within the first five years and that significantly reduces the number teachers who should not be there. Good administrators get rid of the rest before they achieve full contractual rights. It makes perfect sense to me that less than 1% of teachers are evaluated as unsatisfactory.

Besides Pseudo-Academic Studies TNTP Undermines Teacher Professionalism

By 2001, TNTP was humming along. On its web site the advertising stated:

“We leverage the highly successful strategies of Teach For America to recruit, select and develop new teachers for difficult-to-staff school districts.”

“We create and run high-quality alternate routes to attract and prepare exceptionally talented people from non-traditional backgrounds to teach, particularly for high need areas and hard-to-staff schools.”

“We set up and run pre-service training institutes for high-achieving individuals without prior education backgrounds.”

The theory seems to be that anyone who went to college or worked in certain fields can teach. All that is required is a little summer training and “high-achieving individuals” will be good to go.

The new secretary of education, Arne Duncan, seemed to embrace this ideology when he visited Columbia University Teachers College in 2009. He said,

“More than half of tomorrow’s teachers will be trained at colleges of education. The U.S. Department of Education estimates that schools and departments of education produce about 220,000 certified teachers a year. Now I am all in favor of expanding high-quality alternative certificate routes, like High Tech High, the New Teacher Project, Teach for America, and teacher residency programs. But these promising alternative programs produce fewer than 10,000 teachers per year.” (emphasis added)

Conclusion

Instead of relying on our amazing stable of genuine scholars doing the hard work of researching, studying, practicing and writing, we are being bamboozled into adopting the theories of neophytes that would never bite the hand of their paymasters. If TNTP has a contract with a school district, it is certain that district is a target for privatization.

TNTP is important for the DPE movement. It produces papers that undermine teacher professionalism and it works to circumvent proven teacher training led by universities. It also works to gain control of pedagogy in a way that narrows curriculum. Why? It is all about cutting costs and business transactions. It does not improve the quality of education in America; it harms it.

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The Mind Trust Attack of Public Education is Led by Democrats

4 Jan

By Thomas Ultican 1/4/2018

The Mind Trust is the proto-type urban school privatizing design. Working locally, it uses a combination of national money and local money to control teacher professional development, create political hegemony and accelerate charter school growth. The destroy public education (DPE) movement has identified The Mind Trust as a model for the nation.

A Little History

In 1999, Bart Peterson became the first Democrat to win the Indianapolis mayor’s race since 1967. Peterson campaigned on the promise to bring charter schools to Indianapolis. He claimed, “We are simply in an age where cookie-cutter, one-size-fits-all, 1950s style education just doesn’t work for a lot of kids. The evidence is the dropout rate. The evidence is the number of at-risk kids who are failing at school.”

The new mayor joined with Republican state senator Teresa Lubbers to finally achieve her almost decade long effort of passing a charter school law in Indiana. In the new charter school law, Lubbers provided for the mayor of Indianapolis to be a charter school authorizer. Then Democratic governor, Frank O’Bannon, signed the legislation into law.

During his first run for office, Peterson invited David Harris a 27-year old lawyer with no education background to be his education guy. Harris became the director of the mayor’s new charter school office. By the 2006-2007 school year, the Peterson administration had authorized 16 charter schools.

In the summer of 2007 David Skinner reported for Education Next,

“Peterson himself says, “I’m not interested in striking ideological notes,” but he has certainly struck a chord with education thinkers like Andy Rotherham, former education adviser to President Clinton and co-founder of Education Sector in Washington, D.C. Rotherham says Peterson’s example proves that school choice is perfectly compatible with the philosophy of the left.”

And:

“Andy Rotherham says when he heard the mayor’s office had been granted chartering authority, he wanted in. Then a policy analyst at the Progressive Policy Institute, he believed Indianapolis could be a “proof point,” demonstrating that the sky wouldn’t fall if mayors began authorizing charter schools.”

A brief description of the Progressive Policy Institute from Source Watch says,

“The Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) was established in 1989 “and after the 1992 election gained notoriety as ‘Bill Clinton‘s idea mill.'” and a proponent of the Third Way. PPI is the think tank of the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), founded in 1985 by PPI’s President, Will Marshall, and counts among its past chairs former President Bill Clinton, Congressman Richard Gephardt, and Senator Joseph I. Lieberman.”

These are the political theorists that gave us the “end of welfare as you know it,” the end of the Glass-Steagall banking regulations and the privatization of public schools.

By 2006, Peterson and Harris decided to start a non-profit organization to accelerate their charter school plans. David Harris left the Peterson administration and became a co-founder with Mayor Peterson of The Mind Trust.

The Money Came Flowing

Lately, The Mind Trust does not mention its funders, but in 2010 they almost gleefully shared the information. The Wayback Machine allows a peek at the December 2010 message about contributors:

“The Mind Trust is very grateful to The Richard M. Fairbanks Foundation, which provided critical start-up funding for the organization and a subsequent grant to pay for core operational expenses through 2010. The Mind Trust would also like to recognize the following funders for their generous support of our programs and operations. Through 2010, they have contributed mightily to the $10,967,356 raised since our inception, and most importantly, their contributions to children are incalculable and stand as testament to the importance of the mission we are all undertaking together.”

They also listed their contributors from 2006 to 2010.

  • The Richard M. Fairbanks Foundation
  • Lilly Endowment
  • The Cummins Foundation
  • The Challenge Foundation
  • Lumina Foundation for Education
  • The Annie E. Casey Foundation
  • The Joyce Foundation
  • Ann M. and Chris Stack
  • Ruth Lilly Philanthropic Foundation
  • The Indianapolis Foundation, an affiliate of the Central Indiana Community Foundation
  • The Lacy Foundation/LDI, Ltd.
  • Bowen Engineering Corporation
  • Carnegie Corporation of New York
  • The David and Anne Knall Family
  • Efroymson Family Fund, a CICF Fund
  • Rollin Dick
  • The Two Oaks Fund of the Indianapolis Foundation
  • The W. C. Griffith Foundation
  • The Ackerman Foundation
  • Eli Lilly and Company Foundation
  • Michael L. Smith and Susan L. Smith Family Fund
  • The Ayres Foundation
  • Blackwell Williams Fund, a fund of the Indianapolis Foundation
  • Education Reform Now
  • John and Sarah Lechleiter
  • Myrta J. Pulliam Charitable Trust
  • Arthur Jordan Foundation
  • Moore Foundation
  • Indianapolis Monumental Marathon
  • City of Indianapolis, Community Crime Prevention Program

Their impressive board of directors in 2010 was a virtual who’s who of Indianapolis elites.

The Mind Trust Board of Directors in 2010

Bart Peterson Senior Vice President of Corporate Affairs and Communications, Eli Lilly and Company, and Former Mayor, City of Indianapolis (Chair)
Jean Blackwell Executive Vice President of Corporate Responsibility, Cummins Inc. and CEO of the Cummins Foundation
Alecia DeCoudreaux Vice President and General Counsel, Lilly USA
Mark Miles President and CEO, Central Indiana Corporate Partnership
Ann Murtlow President and CEO, Indianapolis Power and Light
Jane Pauley Former Anchor, NBC’s TODAY and Founding Co-Host, Dateline NBC
Beverley Pitts President, University of Indianapolis
Joyce Rogers Vice President for Development, Ivy Tech Community College
Andrew Rotherham Co-Founder and Co-Director, Education Sector
Ariela Rozman CEO, The New Teacher Project
David Shane President and CEO, LDI, Ltd., LLC
Bill Shrewsberry President and CEO, Shrewsberry and Associates
Don Stinson Superintendent, MSD of Decatur Township
Eugene White Superintendent, Indianapolis Public Schools

It is noteworthy that no school teachers or parent organization leaders are on this board which is dominated by corporate leaders and politicians. It is possible that one of the four school organization chief administrators taught at one time during their career but no one with recent classroom experience is represented.

By 2007, David Harris was being recognized as a rising star in the DPE movement. The Wayback Machine made available this 2007 news release by the NewSchools Venture Fund:

“The Aspen Institute and NewSchools Venture Fund today launched the Entrepreneurial Leaders for Public Education Fellowship Program with the announcement of its inaugural class of Fellows from across the country. The program is designed to recognize and support a new generation of entrepreneurial leaders prepared to address the crucial challenge of transforming public education.”

David Harris was included in that list of education entrepreneurial leaders along with:

  • Russlynn Ali, Vice President, The Education Trust, Executive Director, The Education Trust – West
  • Chris Barbic, Founder & Head of Schools, YES Prep Public Schools
  • Richard Barth, CEO, Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP)
  • Michael Bennet, Superintendent, Denver Public Schools
  • Larry Berger, CEO, Wireless Generation
  • Phoebe Boyer, Executive Director, Tiger Foundation
  • Susan Colby, Partner & Head of San Francisco Office, The Bridgespan Group
  • Gretchen Crosby-Sims, Education Program Manager, Joyce Foundation
  • John Deasy, CEO, Prince George’s County Public Schools
  • Lauren Dutton, Formerly of City Year, Edison Schools and NewSchools Venture Fund
  • James Forman, Jr., Associate Professor of Law, Georgetown University, Co-Founder and Chairman of the Board, Maya Angelou Public Charter School
  • David Harris, President & CEO, The Mind Trust
  • Kaya Henderson, Vice President for Strategic Partnerships, The New Teacher Project
  • Hosanna Mahaley Johnson, President, Atlanta Local Education Fund, Former Executive Officer for the Office of New Schools, Chicago Public Schools
  • Kristen Kane, COO, New York City Department of Education
  • Dan Katzir, Managing Director, The Broad Foundation
  • Janet Murguía, President & CEO, National Council of La Raza
  • Jeremy Nowak, President, The Reinvestment Fund
  • Tony Recasner, CEO, Middle School Advocates, Head of School, New Orleans Charter Middle School, Head of School, Samuel J. Green Charter School
  • Ref Rodriguez, Founder & Co-CEO, Partnerships to Uplift Communities
  • Jon Schnur, CEO & Co-Founder, New Leaders for New Schools
  • Jim Shelton, Program Director, Education Division, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
  • Elisa Villaneuva Beard, COO, Teach For America
  • Joanne Weiss, Partner & COO, NewSchools Venture Fund

Now that is a motley crew of education “deformers.”

Lately the money has really been flowing. Five principals at The Mind Trust are “earning” more than $150,000 per year and David Harris is making double that. It might not be Eva Moskowitz money but in Indianapolis or anywhere else it is pretty good.

The big foundations are continuing to send big money:

Lilly Endowment

2014 Mind Trust $4,929,000

2015 Mind Trust $18,000

2016 Mind Trust $7,170,000

Total $12, 117,000

{Big Pharma Money}

 Gates Foundation

The Mind Trust

Oct. 2012 – $1,420,000

Aug. 2011 $539,334

Total $1,959,334

{Microsoft Money}

 
Walton Family Foundation

2013 Mind Trust $23,000

2014 Mind Trust $650,000

2015 Mind Trust $1,200,000

Total $1,873,000

{Walmart Money}

 

 Arnold Fund

The Mind Trust $11,075,000

{Enron Money}

The large contributions have allowed The Mind Trust to accelerate spending. The chart below details income and spending reported on the 2014, 2015 and 2016 tax forms, the last years for which data is available.

Mind Trust SpendingData taken for tax form 990 years 2014, 2015, and 2016

The Work of Privatizing Public Education

December 2016 the not so Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) published a lengthy piece lauding privatization and choice in public schools. They held Indianapolis up as being a leader in developing 21st century schools and The Mind Trust as the catalyst. The paper stated:

“A key reason is The Mind Trust, founded in 2006 by Mayor Peterson and David Harris as a kind of venture capital outfit for the charter sector, to raise money and recruit talent. The Mind Trust convinced Teach For America (TFA), The New Teacher Project (now TNTP), and Stand for Children to come to Indianapolis, in part by raising money for them. Since then TFA has brought in more than 500 teachers and 39 school leaders (the latter through its Indianapolis Principal Fellowship); TNTP’s Indianapolis Teaching Fellows Program has trained 498 teachers; and Stand for Children has worked to engage the community, to educate parents about school reform, and to spearhead fundraising for school board candidates. The Mind Trust has also raised millions of dollars and offered start-up space, grants, and other help to eight nonprofit organizations and 17 new schools, with more to come.”

The PPI claims that bringing in 500 teachers who commit for just two years and have only five weeks of teacher training improves education. This is supposedly better than bringing in experienced teachers or newly minted teachers who are committed to a career in education and have between one and two years of teacher training at a university.

They are also saying that having Stand for Children invade Indianapolis with their dark money and undermine local democratic processes is desirable.

Instead of raising millions of dollars to improve public schools, The Mind Trust is using that money in a way that undermines the education of two-thirds of the students in Indianapolis who attend those public schools.

PPI does admit that not everyone in Indianapolis likes what The Mind Trust is doing. I recently wrote about three scholars who are raising awareness of the resulting damage to Indianapolis schools. PPI tries to minimize their effect stating,

“There are a few headwinds, however. The local branch of the NAACP has long been anti-charter. Though it doesn’t have much of a following, its leaders, plus one outgoing school board member who opposes the innovation network and two local professors, staged a series of forums this fall, called ‘Rise Up Indy Against The Mind Trust.’

In an opinion piece for Campbell Browns 74-million, David Harris stated,

“Consider Ohio, which has had a charter school law on the books for nearly two decades. For years, communities there lacked long-term strategies to build strong charter schools and also lacked local agents pushing for change. As a result, charters in the Buckeye State have been mostly a disappointment, with gains among charter students lagging peers in traditional public schools.”

Doug Martin is an expert on the corporate and theocratic assault against public education. He is also the author of Hoosier School Heist, the book which exposes the corruption, scandals, and campaign financing behind so-called school reform in Indiana and elsewhere. In a post carried on Professor Jim Horn’s Schools Matters Blog, Martin suggests the motivation for Harris’s opinion piece. He notes,

“Besides having the Mind Trust’s David Harris and Earl Martin Phalen and corporate school grandfather Howard Fuller (a BAEO/Edison connected operative who played a role in school privatization in Indiana and Philly) as board members, the Mind Trust spin-off Education Cities is being funded by well-known school privatization billionaire organizations like the Walton Foundation, the Dell Foundation, the Gates Foundation, the Kauffman Foundation, and the foundation started by Eli Broad, the Broad Foundation.”

In other words, Harris is ready to expand his empire and he is explaining why Cincinnati and other cities need what he is selling.

Conclusions

Lubienski and Lubienski conducted a large scale research of education data and came to the surprising conclusion that public schools outperform privatized schools. They also saw that most of the “studies” that claimed otherwise were paid for by advocates and not peer reviewed. The claims of success by The Mind Trust seem to fit this description like print to wood block.

Twitter: @tultican

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Destroy Public Education (DPE); It’s a Billionaire Fueled Agenda

15 Dec

By Thomas Ultican 12/15/2017

Three researchers from Indiana coined the terminology Destroy Public Education (DPE). They refuse to call it reform which is a positive sounding term that obfuscates the damage being done. America’s public education system is an unmitigated success story, yet, DPE forces say we need to change its governance and monetize it.

We are discussing the education system that put a man on the moon, developed the greatest economy the world has ever seen and wiped out small pox. It is the system that embraces all comers and resists all forms of discrimination. In the 1980’s, it was laying the foundation for the digital revolution when it came under spurious attack.

Not only are great resources being squandered on DPE efforts but the teaching profession is being diminished. Organizations like Relay Graduate School and the New Teachers Project are put forward as having more expertise in teacher education than our great public universities. That would be amusing if wealthy elites were not paying to have these posers taken seriously.

The DPE Model Playing Out in Indianapolis

The researchers from Indiana who defined the DPE model are Gail Cosby, Nate Williams and Jim Scheurich. In 2012, Doctor Scheurich came to Indiana from Texas A&M to coordinate the Urban Education Studies doctoral program at the University of Indiana Purdue University Indianapolis (UIPUI). Gail Cosby is a former public-school teacher, a former school board member who won her seat in 2012 with DPE help and is presently in her second year of doctoral studies at UIPUI. Dr. Nate Williams received his doctorate in Urban Education Studies at UIPUI and is now teaching at Knox College.

Soon after becoming a school board member, Cosby realized the true nature of her benefactors and became an outspoken critic of the DPE agenda. While closely observing the events transpiring around Indianapolis public schools Cosby, Scheurich and Williams perceived a model for the destruction of public education. They believe that same model is being used throughout the nation.

Here are the key model components paraphrased from their work which Diane Ravitch posted:

  1. Business is the best model for schools.
  2. A local-national collaboration between wealthy conservatives. (Sometimes far right)
  3. Huge infusion of new dollars into school board elections. (Dark Money)
  4. Unified enrollment.
  5. Teach for America (or any instant-teacher-certification program) and groups like Teach Plus controlling professional development of teachers.
  6. Innovations Schools. An ALEC sponsored charter conversion model.
  7. A funding conduit for national-local wealthy individuals and organizations to support local DPE initiatives.
  8. Integration of charter schools into traditional public schools with rules favoring charter schools.
  9. Developing networks of local organizations or affiliates that collaborate on the agenda.
  10. Support for gentrification.

In Indianapolis, the big bopper is the Lilly Endowment. It has a total asset value of more than $10 billion making it three times larger than the Walton Family Foundation. The Lilly Endowment, which was established by Eli Lilly in 1937, presented grants totaling $458,522,495 in 2015. Of this total more than half went to Christian causes. As the endowment states, “The ultimate aim of Lilly Endowment’s religion grantmaking is to deepen and enrich the religious lives of American Christians, primarily by helping to strengthen their congregations.”

However, they also spend significant amounts of money on DPE efforts. Their education web-page lists the endowment’s partners in what amounts to the effort to destroy public education in Indianapolis. That list includes:

The Mind Trust – www.themindtrust.org
Teach for America – www.teachforamerica.org
The New Teacher Project – www.tntp.org

Lilly’s DPE grants in 2015 encompass:

Teach for America, The New Teacher Project and Teach Plus support DPE efforts to control teacher professional development and curriculum. The Mind Trust and Stand for Children function as money conduits for privatizing schools, lobbying state legislators and winning school board elections. All these organizations are operating in Indianapolis but most of their funding comes from outside sources. A very incomplete search revealed:

Gates Foundation

  • The Mind Trust Years 2011-1012 $539,334 + $1,420,000 = $1,959,334
  • Teach for America lists 97 entries the first 10 grants total more than $10,000,000
  • Stand for Children 111 entries fist grant listed was for $4,311,641
  • Relay Graduate School $8,954,644
  • Relay plus four other similar programs $34,700,000
  • Charter Fund the 1st of 302 entries was for $27,000,000
  • New Teacher Project Inc. in 2015 a total of $17,494,372
  • CEE Trust which is now SchoolSmart $1,250,000
  • Teach Plus total $19,094,388

Walton 2014

  • Charter Fund $6,638,000
  • Mind Trust $650,000
  • Stand for Children $350,000
  • Students First $1,250,000
  • Teach for America $22,019,240
  • Friedman Foundation for Education Choice In. $624,500
  • Relay Graduate School $1,500,000
  • Teach Plus $250,000 2013 and $250,000 2014

Broad 2014

  • Stand for Children $250,000
  • Students First $750,000
  • Teach for America $612,000
  • Charter Fund $350,000
  • Teach Plus $165,000

Arnold Fund

  • Charter Fund $10,000,000
  • Indianapolis Public Schools Education Foundation, Inc. $1,256,250
  • Kipp Foundation $10,000,000
  • Relay Graduate School $2,500,000
  • Stand for Children $6,640,000
  • Student First $7,850,000
  • Teach for America $9,482,369
  • The Mind Trust $11,075,000
  • The New Teachers Project $8,136,464

Both Stand for Children and Betsy DeVos’s American Federation for Children operate associated 501 C4 organizations. This means that instead of being a tax-exempt foundation operating under IRS section 501 C3 rules which limit political spending the C4s are not tax exempt and can spend directly on politics. What is even better for them is that they don’t have to reveal where they got the money. This kind of spending is known as dark money.

Betsy DeVos, then chairman of American Federation for Children did send DPE targeted funds to Indianapolis from the tax-free fund. Don’t know how much the C4 sent. The last form 990 filed by the C3 was in 2015. It showed:

  • Indianapolis Urban League for outreach $36,000
  • Institute for Quality Education Indianapolis $310,000
  • Network for Quality Education Indianapolis for strategic plan $100,000

Dylan McCoy of Chalk Beat Indiana reporting on the 2016 school board elections used a board seat in a small district with 11,000 students to illustrate the effect outside money is having. He wrote:

“In a district where candidates typically spend less than $10,000 on even the most competitive races, Deitric Hall, a local teacher, has raised more than $32,000. Nearly all that money is from a single political action committee: Leadership for Educational Equity, a Washington D.C.-based PAC that supports Teach for America alumni running for public office.

“It’s a small-scale version of a phenomenon that has played out in urban districts around the country as outside campaign contributions have increasingly influenced pivotal school board races. In Indianapolis Public Schools, outside contributions helped radically reshape the board in 2012 and 2014, when out-of-state funders backed a victory for charter-school supporters.”

An article in the Indystar about this situation says,

“Local democratic control of IPS schools by ordinary folks no longer exists. First, big outsider money has united with big insider money to make the cost of school board member elections far beyond the reach of ordinary folks. Second, a linked group of “local” “reform” organizations, funded largely by the same outsider-insider big money, are controlling IPS.”

Diane Ravitch summed it up:

“The business community, civic leaders, political leaders, DFER, the Mind Trust, and Stand for Children have joined together to Destroy Public Education. As they attack democratic institutions, they falsely claim that “it is all about the kids” and they claim they are advancing civil rights. Instead, it is about money and power and gentrification.”

Indiana has adopted Jeb Bush’s plan for grading schools with an A-F scheme. This plan is based almost exclusively on standardized testing which has zero ability to evaluate school or teacher quality. In addition, with the DPE forces pulling the strings, Indiana made it possible for Mind Trust to claim that six of seven Innovation schools in the Indianapolis public school system went from D and F grades to A and B grades in their first year.

The spectacular results are a ruse facilitated by having the option to use growth data instead of performance data. The scores for the schools are horrible. Gail Cosby shared the results:

“Let’s take a look at the actual percentages of students PASSING BOTH MATH AND ELA:

  • Cold Spring: 2%
  • Enlace: 28.0%
  • Global Prep: no data
  • Phalen 103: 8%
  • Phalen 93: 38.2%
  • Kipp Indy: 18.0%
  • Kindezi: no data”

DPE Model is Materializing Across the Country  

Another plan for destroying public education comes from The Gates funded Center for Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) at the University of Washington. It is called the portfolio model. The National Education Policy Center describes the portfolio model:

“Generally speaking, four reform strategies are combined, in varying degrees, in portfolio districts: (1) performance-based (generally test-based) accountability, (2) school-level de-centralization of management, (3) the reconstitution or closing of “failing” schools, and (4) the expansion of choice, primarily through charter schools.”

CRPE has produced a chart based on the implementation of the portfolio model. This chart is in effect a limited outline of the DPE movement in the United States.

Portfolio Implementation Map

A Screen Grab from Portfolio Model Implementation by CRPE at University of Washington

Another example of the DPE model in action comes from Kansas City, Missouri. Two giant foundations – The Ewing Marion Kaufman Foundation (nearly $2 billion in assets) and the Hall Family Foundation (nearly $1 billion in assets) are the big local funders.

The late Ewing Kaufman is the businessman hero who brought major league baseball back to Kansas City. His fund spends a lot of money on business analytics and developing entrepreneurship. They also have started their own charter schools, are funding several other charter schools and are contributing to the national DPE movement.

Some Kaufman Foundation Reported Spending, 2015-990.

  • Ewing Marion Kaufman Schools Inc. and School Buildings $12,527,932
  • KIPP Foundation $200,000
  • Teach for America $577,500
  • Leading Educators Inc. $100,000
  • The Third Way Foundation $75,000
  • Relay Graduate School of Education $135,000
  • New Schools for New Orleans $20,000
  • Data Quality Campaign $965,895
  • WestEd $258,694
  • IFF One North La Salle St Chicago – education facilities access $5,100,000
  • National Council on Teacher Quality $134,658
  • Bellwether Education Partners Inc. $87,951
  • Kansas City School district to support STEM and IB $25,235
  • Kansas City School District for expansion of New America’s Academy at Gladstone Elementary School $150,000
  • Kansas City School district to support charter school liaison position $25,000
  • City of KC, Mo. for adviser to Mayor on Ed Policy $50,000
  • The Lean Lab to promote education entrepreneurs $50,000
  • SRI International to advance STEM studies $93,670
  • Bishop Ward School $170,000
  • Various other Charter Schools $1,325,000

As listed above, the local school district did get three relatively small grants from the Kaufman foundation; two to implement charter schools in the district and one to promote the fraudulent STEM program and move curricular development out of Kansas City to the International Baccalaureate program.

Some Hall Foundation reported spending, 2015-990.

  • Plaza Academy (private school) $50,000
  • Academe Lafayette $550,000
  • Citizens of the World Charter School $650,000
  • Cristo Rey Kansas City high school private catholic $50,000
  • Crossroads Academy of KC $275,000
  • Leading Educators $452,207
  • Missouri Charter Public School Association $50,000
  • Prep-KC $523,671
  • Science Pioneers Inc. (STEM Program) $50,000
  • Teach for America – KC $1,013,000

Notice that Kansas City is not on the CRPE chart but DPE is certainly doing well there. Originally the DPE agenda was led by the Gates financed CEE Trust. That organization alienated residents. Now SchoolSmart KC is the new DPE leader and they have learned from the CEE Trust failure. Chalkbeat reports:

“SchoolSmart has carved out its own niche by backing community schools, while also embracing much of what is known as the “portfolio” model for managing schools. The idea — including common enrollment and accountability systems for district and charter schools — has gained traction in a number of cities nationwide as a growing network of well-heeled groups like SchoolSmart are pushing for districts to adopt this approach.

“Kansas City is a case study in how that vision is being advanced city by city — and why some national groups that continue to fund and support the approach have taken a backseat in favor of local actors.”

Conclusion

DPE marketing has gotten better and it definitely has huge money fueling it. However, they are selling an inferior product. That is why more than 90% of America’s students remain in public schools run be elected boards. We must protect those boards from being defiled by monied elites and save our schools.

Twitter: @tultican

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California State Board of Education is a Corporate Reform Tool

1 Dec

By Thomas Ultican 12/1/2017

For three decades, California’s State Board of Education (SBE) has embraced a neoliberal agenda. It has promoted school privatization; embraced standards based education; and advocated for the STEM fraud.

The eleven current members of the SBE were all appointed by Governor Jerry Brown.

State school Board

Photos Gathered from the SBE Web Page

The board is representative of most of California with members from the central coast, the inland empire, the San Joaquin valley, the bay area, LA county, Orange county and San Diego county.

SBE is organized like K-12 boards throughout the state including a high school student member who is appointed by the Governor. The big difference is the members are appointed not elected.

The student member is appointed for a one-year term and the ten voting board members are appointed to a four-year term. On the surface, this board looks like a highly qualified group of professional educators with stellar credentials.

Neoliberalism Guides

Jenifer Berkshire published an article titled “How Education Reform Ate the Democratic Party.” In this brilliant piece, Berkshire clearly elucidates the term neoliberal. She writes:

“By the early 1980s, there was already a word for turning public institutions upside down: neoliberalism. Before it degenerated into a flabby insult, neoliberal referred to a self-identified brand of Democrat, ready to break with the tired dogmas of the past. ‘The solutions of the thirties will not solve the problems of the eighties,’ wrote Randall Rothenberg in his breathless 1984 paean to this new breed, whom he called simply ‘The Neoliberals.’ His list of luminaries included the likes of Paul Tsongas, Bill Bradley, Gary Hart and Al Gore (for the record, Gore eschewed the neoliberal label in favor of something he liked to call ‘neopopulism’). In Rothenberg’s telling, the ascendancy of the neoliberals represented an economic repositioning of the Democratic Party that had begun during the economic crises of the 1970s. The era of big, affirmative government demanding action—desegregate those schools, clean up those polluted rivers, enforce those civil rights and labor laws—was over. It was time for fresh neo-ideas.” (emphasis added)

Board President Michael Kirst’s CV resume references his Ph.D. awarded at Harvard University in 1964 for Political Economy and Government. Soon after Harvard he joined the Johnson administration working as a budget analyst in the Office of Education. He became a Whitehouse Fellow and then director of the Bureau of Elementary and Secondary Education. When Richard Nixon was elected President, Kirst became a senate staffer for the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Manpower, Employment and Poverty.

In 1969, Kirst left Washington for Stanford University. Governor Jerry Brown appointed Kirst to the SBE in 1975. Brown would subsequently appoint Kirst to a four-year term three more times.

The 1970’s revealed Kirst to be a highly educated and experienced liberal; working to advance the Democratic party and education.

When Jerry Brown’s first stint as governor ended, Kirst returned to Stanford.

Kirst rejoined Brown, who became the new Mayor of Oakland in 1999. Kirst was a member of the Mayor’s Commission on Education. In Oakland, this once champion of public education and labor rights helped Brown make Oakland’s schools the most privatized in California.

Around the same time, Kirst became a board member of EdVoice. When EdVoice sued the Los Angeles Unified School District for not using standardized testing results to evaluate teachers, education historian, Diane Ravitch explained who EdVoice is:

“EdVoice was founded in 2001 by Reed Hastings (CEO of Netflix, Microsoft board member, Green Dot founding funder) and John Doerr (venture capitalist, investment banker), along with and former CA state Assembly members Ted Lempert and Steve Poizner. Eli Broad and Don Fisher (deceased CEO of The Gap and major KIPP supporter) once served on EdVoice’s board.”

“Back in 1998, Hastings also co-founded Californians for Public School Excellence with Don Shalvey. This is the organization that pushed for the Charter Schools Act of 1998, the law that lifted the cap on the number of charter schools in the state.”

EdVoice gives unstinting media support to the California Charter Schools Association (CCSA) and standardized testing.

SBE is Responsible for Academic Standards

The SBE adopted standards developed through the aegis of Bill Gates, CEO of Microsoft and Louis Gerstner, former CEO of both IBM and RJR Nabisco. This is “corporate education reform.” It is reform led by amateurs instead of education professionals.

California is one of the few states that has continued with the common cores state standards (CCSS) which were written in secret by mostly testing corporation employees.

Media from the right, left and center are routinely running headlines calling Bill Gates’ CCSS a disaster: Stick A Fork In Common Core—It’s Done – The Federalist; Analysis: Top 5 Reasons Common Core Has Been a Disaster – The Christian Post; Another Common Core disaster: Corporate-education reformer John King is exactly the wrong man to be secretary of education – Salon; PARCC Gets Parked: What Testing Companies Don’t Want Parents to Know – Huffington Post.

While most states have abandoned the CCSS, SBE is enforcing them.

Louis Gerstner’s Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) are even worse. He personally oversaw the NGSS development. They are so bad that even SBE recognized something had to be done, so they had the standards rewritten into a more usable form. However, they are still a science education plague.

The newest board member, Trish Boyd Williams, exemplifies the nexus between corporate education reform and the SBE. She served for 19-years as the Executive Director of Edsource which describes itself,

“Since its founding in 1977, EdSource has broadened its focus to include a broad range of education reforms, including early education and preschools, charter schools, school accountability, STEM education, teacher evaluation and obstacles students face in the math pipeline from pre-kindergarten to college. In 2012, it launched its journalism and communications arms, EdSource Today, which now comprises the largest education reporting staff of any newsroom in the state.”

The secret of Edsource’s success is keeping happy its big pocketed contributors including The S. D. Bechtel, Jr. Foundation; The California Endowment; The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation; The Stuart Foundation and several more.

Of course, this required a careful editorial policy. For example, the stated purpose of 2016’s $1.3 million dollar contribution to Edsource from the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation listed this purpose: “to deepen knowledge and awareness of state and federal reforms, including the Common Core standards and the Every Student Succeeds Act, through regular reporting on successful strategies as well as challenges that need to be overcome.”

It is not likely that Edsource will have a bad thing to say about CCSS.

Williams also served from 1993 to 2011 as the design architect, first author, and project lead with a team that included faculty from Stanford and researchers from the American Institutes for Research and WestEd doing large-scale survey studies, including the “Gaining Ground in the Middle Grades” study released in February 2010.

Gaining Ground in the Middle Grades says on the author’s page, “EdSource thanks Reed Hastings, CEO of Netflix, for his generous support of this study.”

The central question asked was, “Why do some middle grades schools clearly outperform others on standards-based tests even though they serve a similar student population?”

The first problem with this study is that standardized testing has no ability to identify good pedagogy or learning. It has been a corporate reform delusion since “Nation at Risk” was published that standardized testing could accurately assess schools and teachers. It’s a scheme that began failing in China 1,500 years ago.

Of course, the answer discovered was that fidelity to the standards was the key. In other words, this paper found that higher test scores are possible. Teachers and schools just need to teach to the test.

Standards based education is bad education. It is founded on a delusion.

SBE Responsible for Charter Schools

Here we have the fox guarding the hen house. The SBE responsibility:

“All-charter district petitions are submitted directly to the SBE and the State Superintendent of Public Instruction, who have joint approval authority. In addition, the SBE has the authority to approve statewide benefit charter schools that operate at multiple locations throughout the state. As a charter authorizer, the SBE has monitoring and accountability responsibilities for the schools and all-charter districts it approves. The SBE also considers appeals of decisions made by local educational agencies to revoke a charter school’s operating petition.”

Districts and counties have turned down charter schools for various reasons only to have the SBE routinely authorize them. Some board members are charter school enthusiasts.

Board member Ting Lan Sun is the co-founder and Executive Director of the Sacramento-based Natomas Charter School.

Ting was Vice President of Leadership and Quality for the California Charter Schools Association (CCSA) from 2003-2006 where she developed and implemented the Association’s quality assurance strategy and initiatives. The CCSA tax form 990 from 2010 shows Ting receiving $158,000 in compensation.

Board member Bruce Holaday served in multiple positions at the Culver Academies from 1976 to 2004. He was formerly the Director of Newpoint Tampa High School from 2009 to 2010 (a charter school that went out of business in 2013) and Director of the Oakland Military Institute from 2004 to 2009. Mr. Holaday never attended a public school nor worked in one.

Oakland Military Institute is where he met then Mayor Brown. The OMI web-site relates its history:

“OMI was founded in 2001 after a hard-fought two-year campaign led by then Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown. Governor Gray Davis helped secure the charter after local school boards rejected it. It was the first charter ever sponsored by the state, the first public military school and the first school sponsored by the National Guard.”

Cyber charters managed by K-12 Inc. and mall schools are ubiquitous in California and have a history of terrible outcomes. This November, the NPE released a major report on charter schools in which the history of malfeasance and bad public policy are documented. NPE Executive director, Carol Burris, spent a year researching and writing the report. She apprises,

“A bill that would have banned for-profit charters in California was vetoed by Governor Jerry Brown in 2015. An additional bill, which would have prevented financially troubled districts from authorizing charters in other districts, was vetoed by Governor Brown in 2016. The president of the California State Board of Education, Michael Kirst, worked as a K12 consultant, prior to his appointment by Governor Brown.”

Is anyone on California’s State Board of Education trying to protect the 90% of students in public schools, or is it a neoliberal free for all decimating a legacy?

SBE Responsible for Curriculum

In the 1990’s, a great hue and cry arose from the titans of Silicon Valley claiming, “The US has a shortage of science, technology, engineering and math professionals (STEM).” They called for the H1B visa program to be greatly expanded.

These fraudulent STEM claims were trumpeted so widely they became common knowledge.

By 2004, The Rand Corporation and others were publishing studies poking holes in the claims but few heard. Rand observed:

“Concerns about the size and adequacy of the U.S. scientific, technical, engineering, and mathematics workforce have grown amid fears of a dwindling labor pool and concern that this may erode U.S. leadership in science and technology and could complicate mobilization of appropriate manpower for homeland security. In the past, such fears have failed to materialize, and surpluses have been more common than shortages.”

Professionals should be aware that STEM claims are not based on evidence. Perhaps at SBE they are and have other agendas.

Board President Kirst became a board member of the Silicon Valley Education Foundation in 2008. The foundation’s spending is almost exclusively for STEM education. The charity navigator website details that spending:

The Elevate Program                           $1,219,440   31.8% (math education program)

49ers STEM Leadership Institute       $850,500    22.2%

STEM Initiative                                      $739,574    19.3%

Board member Williams says she “has focused her service on the SBE priorities of charter school policy and appeals, Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), and Computer Science.” (Computer science is a subset of STEM fraud.)

Board member Ortiz-Licon says she is focusing on, among other things, college and career-readiness and STEM initiatives.

The result is that school curriculums have been deformed based by a lie. There is even a push to make computer science a requirement for high school graduation.

Next year, California selects a new governor. Democrats, please avoid neoliberals like Villaraigosa.

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Roll Up the Failed Charter School Experiment

24 Nov

By T. Ultican 11/24/2017

This month the, NPE (Network for Public Education) released a stunning report called “Charters and Consequences.” NPE Executive Director Carol Burris stated, “… nearly every day brings a story, often reported only in local newspapers, about charter mismanagement, failure, nepotism or outright theft and fraud.” About the report she writes, “This report … is the result of a year-long exploration of the effects of charter schools and the issues that surround them.”

This 50-page report’s conclusion is shared on the last page:

“For all of the reasons above and more, the Network for Public Education regards charter schools as a failed experiment that our organization cannot support. If the strength of charter schools is the freedom to innovate, then that same freedom can be offered to public schools by the district or the state.

“At the same time, we recognize that many families have come to depend on charter schools and that many charter school teachers are dedicated professionals who serve their students well. It is also true that some charter schools are successful. We do not, therefore, call for the immediate closure of all charter schools, but rather we advocate for their eventual absorption into the public school system. We look forward to the day when charter schools are governed not by private boards, but by those elected by the community, at the district, city or county level.”

The Charter School System is Not Sustainable

The report begins with a relatively deep dive into the wild west of charter schools, California. It summarizes:

“Everyone I spoke with accepted that charters have a place in the state, and in many instances, they acknowledged that charters serve children well.  However, all had deep concerns about the lack of charter transparency, accountability, and their fiscal impact on public schools.”

NPE held a conference in Oakland this past October. One breakout session was titled, “Holding the Line, Fighting Charter Growth in Oakland, CA.” The presenters explained why they view charter expansion as an existential threat to public education.

Shelly Weintraub introduced the four members of the expert panel starting with herself:

“I taught in Oakland for 15 years and then coordinated the history social science program for the next 20.

“Jan [Malvin] was a researcher from the University of California and a parent activist who helped gather a lot of data for our presentation.

“Alison [McDonald] taught with me at Fremont High. She became a principal of a small school called Life Academy, and then went on to become the assistant superintendent in charge of all the high schools in our district.

“Renee [Swayne] was an elementary teacher, focusing on 3rd grade. She also helped to run the History-Social Science program and then taught middle school in Oakland Unified Schools.”

Chater schools by city

Weintraub used the graphic above to introduce the subject of the session:

“Why is Oakland important? We feel this graphic helps answer that question. Oakland has a larger proportion of students in charter schools than any other large urban district in California. …. That’s why we fear that we’re reaching a tipping point, beyond which our district will no longer be able to exist as a viable school district.”

She explained:

“Many costs associated with the student stay with the district – for example, the cost of the school itself or the maintenance of the facility. The cost that remains is sometimes referred to as a “stranded cost.” Researchers in other areas have estimated that the stranded cost to a district of a student’s departure can be almost 50%. Thus, Oakland’s huge proportion of charters is leaving us with immense debt that likely means school closures, staff reductions, and more.”

The bottom line is that adding a privately-operated charter school system to public education drives up costs and introduces inefficiencies into the system. As a result, the vast majority of children who attend public schools in cities like Oakland, San Diego and Los Angeles have their resources reduced (mainly by larger class sizes and reduced facilities maintenance) to cover the unreimbursed costs engendered by charter school expansion.

Big Profits, Big Salaries and Marketing

“Charters and Consequences” documents the rise of the mall schools:

“In addition, running independent learning centers can be very lucrative. One of San Diego County’s largest networks of independent learning centers is the Altus Institute. It advertises on billboards and runs ads in movie theaters and on television.  Altus operates Audeo Charter, Audeo Charter II, the Charter School of San Diego and Laurel Academy. It has a total K-12 enrollment of about 3,000 students and takes in tens of millions of dollars in state and federal revenue.”

Charter administration pay is amazing. From the report:

“In 2014 compensation for Altus Institute president Mary Bixby was $371,160—exceeding the total pay plus benefits of the Superintendent of the San Diego Unified School District that serves nearly 130,000 students. Bixby, a board member of the charters and a full-time employee of one of the schools, also receives compensation for being “on-loan” to two other Altus schools. Such obvious conflicts of interest would be illegal in a public school.”

These mall schools have terrible graduation rates and students that do graduate may have cheated their way to a diploma. One of the big money-making schemes of the last decade is “credit recovery” at learning centers. America’s high school graduation rates peaked at about 77% in 1970 and then drifted down for almost four decades to 69% in 2007. Astoundingly, even with increased graduation requirements rates have shot up.

In 2016, over 83% of California’s freshman cohort graduated on time. In 2012, 81% of the freshman cohort in America graduated on time. These record setting numbers are the result of cheating and credit recovery.

Because of political connections, these absurd practices are not being checked. For example, in 2015, billionaire Penny Pritzker, then Secretary of Commerce, presented Mary Bixby the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award which recognizes U.S. organizations in the business, health care, education, and nonprofit sectors for performance excellence. Naturally, the award is a marketing tool for Bixby’s schools.

Mary Bixby’s salary looks inflated next to a public-school administrator, but others in the charter school industry are making much more as documented in the report:

“In 2014, KIPP co-founder, David Levin received a compensation package of nearly $475,000 from the Foundation. Co-founder Mike Feinberg received $219,596 from KIPP Inc., which manages the Houston charters, and still another $221,461 from the KIPP Foundation. According to the organization’s 990s, Feinberg works 50 hours a week for the Houston Schools, plus 40 hours a week for the Foundation—clearly an impossibility.”

In New York city, Eva Moskowitz runs the Success Academy system of charter schools. Based on test scores, her schools have pundits praising them as miracle schools. No accolade seems too grandiose for the schools run by this former New York City Councilman and Democrat. Moskowitz has cashed in. From the report,

“Levin’s and Feinberg’s salaries are dwarfed, however, when compared with the compensation package of Success Academy’s Eva Moscowitz, who received $600,000 in 2014 as the CEO of 41 charter schools.”

The profits at cyber charters are enormous as this antidote illustrates:

“Profits can become so lucrative, that Pennsylvania Cyber Charter founder, Nick Trombetta was able to siphon off $8 million dollars of taxpayer dollars for extravagant homes and an airplane. When Trombetta was finally arrested, it was not for the exorbitant profits, which were legal, but for tax fraud.”

Newsweek and the Washington Post regularly list Arizona’s Basis schools as the best schools in America. With this kind of publicity, the Basis owners get away with paying their management company, which they own, outsized fees. From the paper:

“BASIS General Administrative costs alone amounted to nearly $12 million for less than 9,000 students, while the six largest public school districts serve a quarter million students for less than $10 million in General Administrative costs.”

The Key to Success in Charters is Not Great Pedagogy – It’s Creaming

Both Basis Schools and Success Academy use the same tactics. Set up methods to selectively enroll more desired students, drive out students that do not meet expectations and do not accept new students into a cohort. See the following tabular evidence prepared from data in the NPE report.

Basis and Success Academy

On Wednesday (November 22), the New Orleans Tribune ran a scathing editorial about the complete failure and the fraudulent imposition of the post Katrina Recovery School District (RSD). The editorial cites the same tactics Basis and Success Academy use as tools employed to venerate some RSD schools. The editor writes:

“We know the truth. Schools like Benjamin Franklin, Lusher, Warren Easton and a few others have always been top performers. They were the schools OPSB were left with after the reformers pillaged and plundered. Decades before Katrina, long before the RSD and even before high-stakes testing became the order of the day, these schools benefited from selective admission processes and extraordinary resources that were not available at many other public schools in the city.”

“So that Lusher and Ben Franklin are two of the top 10 schools in the state does little to impress us. When these campuses get to cherry-pick who they want to educate and weed out others, it becomes a lot easier to get results.”

The Charter School Experiment Failed and It is Time for Change

The New Orleans Times editorial summarizes the after Katrina reality:

“To be sure, some of the same media outlets finally reporting the near truth about the failure of these schools as if it is some eye-opener have been some of the same outlets responsible for driving the false narrative of the reform’s success by either suppressing the truth or pushing falsehoods.”

And continues:

“It’s been 12 years since our schools were hijacked. And 12 years later, many of them are performing just as poorly as they were before they were stolen. To learn that charter operators set up goals they knew were unattainable just to get their charters approved and their hands on public money and facilities is indefensible.”

Public education in America is one of the world’s great success stories. A combination of foolishness, arrogance and greed led to a continuous drumbeat of slander for America’s pillar of democracy, equity and freedom. This nonsense has opened the door to harm for our country and its values. We must again embrace democracy when governing education paid for by public dollars and reject totalitarian schemes. After all, democracy is one of the great American values, if we lose that we lose America.

The NPE paper “Charters and Consequences” is an honest, unbiased study that should be read and shared widely. We should all embrace the papers concluding call for legislative action to institute the following:

  • An immediate moratorium on the creation of new charter schools, including no replication or expansion of existing charter schools.
  • The transformation of for-profit charters to non-profit charters.
  • The transformation of for-profit management organizations to non-profit management organizations.
  • All due process rights for charter students that are afforded public school students, in all matters of discipline.
  • Required certification of all school teaching and administrative staff.
  • Complete transparency in all expenditures and income.
  • Requirements that student bodies reflect the demographics of the served community.
  • Open meetings of the board of directors, posted at least 2 weeks prior on the charter’s website.
  • Annual audits available to the public.
  • Requirements to follow bidding laws and regulations.
  • Requirements that all properties owned by the charter school become the property of the local public school if the charter closes.
  • Requirements that all charter facilities meet building codes.
  • Requirements that charters offer free or reduced-price lunch programs for students.
  • Full compensation from the state for all expenditures incurred when a student leaves the public school to attend a charter.
  • Authorization, oversight and renewal of charters transferred to the local district in which they are located.
  • A rejection of all ALEC legislation regarding charter schools that advocates for less transparency, less accountability, and the removal of requirements for teacher certification.

“Until charter schools become true public schools, the Network for Public Education will continue to consider them to be private schools that take public funding.”

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White Man Fights Slavery; Calls for Ending Public Education

17 Nov

By Thomas Ultican 11/17/2017

Lee W. Olson feels enslaved by having to pay taxes especially those that go to pay for public education. Taking action to end slavery, he filed three citizen initiatives with the Attorney General of the State of California. His “California Freedom from Slavery Act” initiative would end state and local taxes after 55-years of age. The “California Parental Rights Act of 2018” puts parents in charge of education standards. And the “California Education Tax Relief Act” exempts people with no children in public schools from paying taxes to support public schools.

Perhaps Olson would be better served to find another metaphor than slavery. People from a legacy of slavery, might be a little offended by the whining of a well-off white man. However, he is persistent.  In 2009, he filed three similar ballot initiatives addressing the same principles, if you can call them that.

Slave Home

Home of a Self-Identified California Tax Slave

Olson must be sincere in his motives; each of these initiative filings includes a $2000 fee. The Attorney General must “request the preparation of a fiscal impact analysis from the Department of Finance and the Legislative Analyst’s Office” before issuing a circulating title and summary. The state has less than 65 days for this process. The fee helps defray the cost of the approximately 200 of these proposals the state receives every election cycle. The proponents will get the fee back if they gather enough signatures to put the initiative on the ballot. Lee’s initiatives have yet to make a ballot.

Curmudgucation Inspired this Story

I read education blogs and one of my daily reads is a blog by Peter Greene of Pennsylvania called Curmudgucation. I met Peter at a National Public Education conference in Chicago. He is one of those guys that knows everything. Not in a know-it-all kind of way but in a he really has a great breadth of knowledge way. His blog is witty, creative and somehow, he is often one of the first people on the blogosphere to spy a new development.

November 10th, Peter wrote a piece he called “CA: A Silly Proposal.” His lead sentence, “It should be said right up front that this measure has little chance of making it all the way to becoming an actual law, and the only big mystery here is why a local news station would bother to cover it at all.” It seems that Peter somehow noticed the story of Lee’s no kids – no taxes for school initiative on a local Sacramento, California CBS affiliates morning news show.

I became intrigued and soon found that there was a trio of initiatives filed including the one Peter Greene referenced all submitted by:

Signature

Now that we have evangelical Christians setting up church in public schools and also running after school programs, plus corporations are legally identified as people with first amendment rights – I take kooky ideas seriously. Who is Lee Olson? How strong is the Committee to End Slavery? Do they have the ability to gather the required 585,407 signatures for each petition in the next six months?

Bolsa Chica

Google Maps Satellite View – 16458 Bolsa Chica Street, #165 Huntington Beach, CA 92649

The address appears to be an office for Olson Leland and Edwards, LLC, a real estate investment company. There promotion at connected investors reads, “Olson Leland & Edwards, LLC is a real estate company with 1 employee(s). This company has been part of Connected Investors since 07/24/2009 – Olson Leland & Edwards, LLC is a real estate company in HUNTINGTON BEACH, CA.” WPnumbers lists Lee Olson as chief executive.

A public records search finds that Lee W. Olson is 72 years old and lives in Westminster, California. A search of a real estate data, shows the Olson is 75 years old and retired. It also says a 2014 property assessment valued his home a little more than $500,000 which is modest by California standards.

To sum up, Lee Olson is a retired real estate dealer over 70 years-old and lives in Westminster, California. He still has some relationship to Olson Leland and Edwards, LLC and maintains a business address in Huntington Beach, California about 3 miles from his home. Except for the six state initiatives he has filed there are few other mentions of him in the media. He does own a web domain, http://www.lovetrumpseverything.com/, but there is nothing on it.

The Committee to End Slavery does not seem to be a functioning body. It has no web presence and there is not a mention of the group in the media that is not tied to Lee Olson’s state ballot initiatives.

Gathering over 700,000 signatures to ensure that 585,407 of them are validly registered voter signatures looks to be out of the realm of possibility. Peter Greene’s observation that why a media outlet would run this story is well founded.

Yet, A Dark Motivation Appears Here

It is the same motivation that is pushing Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos’s drive to privatize public education. It is motivated by a fundamentlist religious belief.

Lee Olson calls one of his proposed initiatives “California Parental Rights Act of 2018.” California’s Attorney Generals official summary says in part:

“PROHIBITS GOVERNMENT FROM ENFORCING EDUCATIONAL STANDARDS AND MAKES PARENTS AND GUARDIANS SOLELY RESPONSIBLE FOR THEIR CHILDREN’S EDUCATION. …

“Changes Constitution to prohibit state and local government from requiring parents and guardians to meet educational standards.  Gives parents and legal guardians the sole authority and responsibility to educate their children, including the right to determine the venue, curriculum, and methods of education.”

Olson’s web domain name seems related to the Christian oriented love trumps everything key to life or a similar evangelical groups. The findings he wrote for this initiative would at one time have been deemed the hateful discourse of a kook. Now they are a serious and dangerous attack on constitutional guarantee of the separation of church and state.

In the findings for this initiative Olson writes:

“(1) The responsibility for the raising of children lies solely with parents, or legal guardians, in accordance with our Creators command given to parents, not the government, to “Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.”

“(2) The government has immorally usurped, at gun point, the Creator endowed inviolable right of parents to control the education of their children.

“(3) The government has used its powers of coercion not only to usurp the Creator endowed inviolable parent’s rights but also to promote immoral teachings contrary to the way the Creator has said the child should go.

“(4) The government schools reject abstinence from sexual activity outside the bounds of marriage and teach that fornication is not only okay but it’s expected.

“(5) The government schools teach that homosexual behaviors are morally acceptable and should be praised, contrary to the Creator’s instructions for healthy living, by idolizing and establishing Harvey Milk Day honoring a man known primarily for his homosexual exploits rather than any good done for the public. …

“(6) Government schools have a full court press on to eradicate Judeo-Christian moral principles from any discourse in the lives of California residents.

“(7) Government school promotion of immoral sexual behaviors, especially fornication and homosexuality, …”

How did Christianity become so infused with hate and bigotry? Are these really the views of Jesus of Nazareth? I certainly don’t believe he taught discrimination against gays and lying about sex education.

I heard the points Olson made about sex education at the July 24 San Diego Unified School District board meeting. A new sex education program was being adopted. A relatively large group of people apparently from the same Christian sect started denouncing the sex education curriculum as pornographic and against God’s Law. People in the audience were holding up Bibles and cheering on their speakers. One speaker who identified himself as Mr. Brookes said that this sex education program was against God’s Law and that it promoted deviance and rebellion. He also said that Planned Parenthood is evil and that they support this curriculum.

Olson is not just one crackpot looking for attention. He seems to be part of an American religious movement working to end public education and establish a Christian theocracy.

In Olson’s initiative that could be called “No Tax Money for Government Schools”, he also has a long list of frothy findings. Here are three:

“Parents pursuing alternative education are penalized unfairly by having to not only pay for their children’s education but also by being forced to pay for the education of other children (and university/college students) enrolled in government schools via various government taxes, or other schemes, which extract their financial resources at gun point.”

“The Committee to End Slavery fully supports the inviolable right of parents to control the education of their children, including in whatever setting they choose, even the uninformed choice of enrolling in government schools. Our Creator never assigned the right and responsibility of a child’s education to a government entity; the government has usurped that inviolable right and responsibility at gun point.”

“The Committee to End Slavery condemns the theft of property (money) from Californian’s, euphemistically called taxation, to pay for government schools. Especially when their primary purpose is to create a dumbed down populace easy to control and prepared only to service the (slave) labor needs of the oligarchy that rules over us.”

It appears there is very little reason involved here and disdain for our government at all levels. This kind of thinking seems like a natural development from Ronald Regan’s nine most terrifying words in the English language; “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.” I find this kind of hatred of America and its institutions worrisome.

It is About Ending Public Education

Olson’s three initiatives are aimed at the November 2018 ballot and were certified for signature gathering on November 9, 2017. Each initiative was given an ID and a cost estimate.

17-0028, “California Education Tax Relief Act” aka “No Tax Money for Government Schools”, cost $30 billion-dollar reduction in revenue.

17-0029, “California Freedom from Slavery Act” aka “Geezers Don’t Pay”, cost $60 billion-dollar reduction in revenue.

17-0030, “California Parental Rights Act of 2018” aka “Government Schools Are Evil”, cost cannot be calculated but possibly a lot.

Lee W. Olson’s initiatives are the work of a crackpot with too much money. However, he is not that far from our present mainstream school reform. Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos has an agenda that is not all that different from Olson’s. There is a dangerous sectarian attack being waged against both public schools and the constitutional guarantee in the second amendment of a separation of church and state.

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American Style Taliban Invading Public Education

26 Oct

By Thomas Ultican 10/26/2017

Christian soldiers have been marching off to war and elementary school is the battle ground. Writer Katherine Stewart’s book, The Good News Club, The Christian Right’s Stealth Assault on America’s Children provides the disturbing evidence.

The Good News Clubs are after school programs, sponsored by evangelical Christians, in elementary schools across America. Stewart begins her narrative by describing how the 2001 arrival of a Good News Club in Seattle’s Loyal Height’s Elementary School splintered the community and created enduring angst.

Some parents reacted by removing their children from the school. Stewart quotes one dispirited parent as saying:

‘“Before, we were all Loyal Heights parents together,’ sighs Rockne. ‘Now we’re divided into groups and labels: you’re a Christian; you’re the wrong kind of Christian; you’re a Jew; you’re an atheist.’”

The wrong kind of Christians include all New Age churches, United Methodists, Congregationalists, Catholics and Episcopalians. We Buddhists, Hindus, Jews and Muslims can just forget about it.

The episode in Seattle conjures images of the nineteenth century religious riots in America.

Horace Mann, a Unitarian, became Massachusetts’s secretary of education in 1837. He resolved the conflicts around religious ideology being taught in school by restricting religious teachings to commonly shared Protestant values.

Stewart informs about the result, “Representatives of a number of sects immediately and vigorously attacked him, but large majorities agreed with this policy, and it soon became the norm in the ‘common school,’ or public school, movement.”

She continues, “Common school textbooks at the time were filled with racist characterizations of the Irish, and the Pope and his clergy were described as ‘libertine, debauched, corrupt, wicked, immoral, profligate, indolent, slothful, bigoted, parasitical, greedy, illiterate, hypocritical, and pagan,’ according to … Professor of History, David Nasaw.” Of course, the growing immigrant Catholic population did not like it.

  • In 1844 religious riots broke out in Philadelphia.
  • In 1859 Boston had its turn for rioting. A Catholic boy refused to recite the Protestant version of the 10 commandments and was beaten for thirty-minutes.
  • In 1869 a Bible War raged in Cincinnati when the school board tried to assuage sectarian conflict by banning reading the Protestant Bible in school.

Stewart apprises her readers of how seriously America’s leaders took these disputes, “In 1874, President Ulysses S. Grant declared that if a new civil war were to erupt, it would be fought not across the Mason-Dixon Line but at the door of the common schoolhouse.” Stewart says concerns over religion in public schools continued growing and prompted another Grant speech in 1876:

‘“Leave the matter of religion to the family altar, the church, and the private school, supported entirely by private contributions,’ he said. ‘Keep the church and state forever separate. With these safeguards I believe the battles which created the Army of Tennessee will not have been fought in vain.’”

Great landmark decisions on the relationship between religion and school were decided by the Supreme Court in the 1962 and 1963 with eight to one decisions banning formal prayer in school. Stewart observes that these decisions received three votes from the four conservative judges on the panel. She explains the reasoning:

“This approach drew principally upon the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, which, according to Thomas Jefferson’s interpretation, erects ‘a wall of separation between church and state.’”

Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia Tear Down that Wall

The evangelical Christian movement gained prominence beginning with Jerry Falwell’s moral majority in 1979 and the arrival of in 1977 of Pat Robertson’s 700-Club on ABC. These two movements developed large followings and generated huge sums of money. A significant portion of that money was spent on legal activism.

Stewart quotes Clarence Darrow who is famous for among other things representing John Scopes in Tennessee’s “monkey trial.” Darrow declared:

“I knew that education was in danger from the source that has always hampered it – religious fanaticism.”

In the same vain, when discussing the legal strategy of the Christian right, Stewart asserts:

“It is an attempt to use the principles of tolerance to secure a place for intolerance, discrimination and religious bigotry in the public schools and elsewhere.”

A significant figure in the tearing down of the separation of church and state is Jay Sekulow, who as general counsel for the “Jews for Jesus” began arguing cases before the Supreme Court. Sekulow was born to a Jewish family in Brooklyn. He converted to evangelical Christianity while attending Atlanta Baptist College (now Mercer University).

In 1990, Pat Robertson brought Sekulow together with a few other lawyers to form the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ).  Stewart conveys:

“The new outfit lined up alongside the Liberty Counsel, which was founded in 1989 by Mathew and Anita Staver and became affiliated with Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University in 2004. In 1994, the Alliance Defense Fund, or ADF, added its name to the growing roster of Christian legal defense organizations with the backing of a group that reads like a Who’s Who of the new Christian Right: Bill Bright, founder of Campus Crusade for Christ; D. James Kennedy, founder of Coral Ridge Ministries; Larry Burkett, founder of Christian Financial Concepts; James Dobson, founder of Focus on Family; Marlin Maddoux, President of International Christian Media; Donald Wildmon, founder of American Family Association; and more than two dozen other prominent Christian ministries and organizations.”

In 2001, this massive legal artillery succeeded in undermining the separation of church and state most significantly with its victory in Good News Club v. Milford Central School. The upstate New York K-12 school denied a Good News Club’s application to run an after-school club. The denial was based on school policy and concerns about violating the Establishment clause. Stewart laid out the history and arguments for this case and concluded:

“The explosion of school-based church-planting in New York and across the nation that began in 2002 did not reflect a spontaneous eruption of religious enthusiasm. It was simply the direct consequence of the Supreme Court’ decision in the case of Good News Club v. Milford Central School in 2001. An alien visitor to planet First Amendment could be forgiven for summarizing the entire story thus: Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia, together with a few fellow travelers on the Supreme Court and their friends in the ADF and ACLJ, got together and ordered that the United States should establish a nationwide network of evangelical churches housed in taxpayer-financed school facilities.”

Church-Planting

 On Sunday Morning in San Diego, California if you are driving up Genesee Avenue toward the University Town Center mall you will pass the Grace City church. Most residence would think of it as University City High School, but starting in 2015 it became the domain of an evangelical Christian sect on Sundays.

UC High_Grace City

University City High School/Grace City – Photo by T. Ultican

Originally proposed in 1962, bonds to build University City High School were not passed until 1976. Legal roadblocks delayed the construction until 1980. The schools web site concludes its history of the school’s founding:

“In September 1981, the school opened. Twenty years of effort finally bore fruit. In every phase of the battle, the crucial factor to success was the willingness of the concerned, active and involved University City community who gave time, effort and money to carry the project through to its successful conclusion. A grassroots effort to build a community high school resulted in the beautiful, well-equipped complex.”

It is certain that many of the community residence who worked for and paid for University City High School would be shocked that the facility is now in regular use to advance a particular religious sect. Even more disturbing, that sect did not originate from within the community but was “planted” by non-resident proselytizing evangelicals.

Grace Citie’s founding family is Randall Tonini who served in the Compassion Christian Church of Savannah, Georgia and his wife Laura who met Randall at Johnson University in Knoxville, Tennessee. Johnson University is a private Christian University. They left Savannah to come to San Diego on a religious mission.

The Grace City web presence states, “We are a part of a larger network of churches planted with the partnership of Stadia to bring the Gospel throughout San Diego County.”

Stadia’s “who we are” statement proclaims:

“Stadia began in the fall of 2003, when leaders of the Northern California Evangelistic Association (NCEA) met with leaders of the Church Development Fund (CDF) to create a nationwide church planting organization called Stadia. Since then, Stadia and our partners have planted almost 289+ U.S. churches and 189+ global churches and has mobilized sponsorship of over 25,000 children in impoverished communities.”

And about children they state:

“Children are close to the heart of God. So they are close to the heart of Stadia. “And whoever welcomes one such child in my name, welcomes me.” 85% of those who make a decision to follow Jesus do so between the ages of 4 and 14.”

Luis Bush, a Christian big picture strategist, was the first to call it the “4/14 Window.” Stewart discusses this issue at length and adds profound context and insight. One of her many paragraphs on the subject reads:

“Bush’s ideas lit up the skies of the missionary community like a bright flare in the night, illuminating the path for evangelicals worldwide and missionaries in particular. ‘Political movements (like Nazism and Communism) trained legions of children with the goal of carrying their agenda beyond the lifetimes of their founders…. Even the Taliban places great emphasis on recruiting children,’ wrote Dr. Wes Stafford, president of Compassion International, one of the largest worldwide missionary groups, in an introduction to Bush’s 2009 book, The 4-14 Window: Raising Up a New Generation to Transform the World. ‘May God inspire you to join us in His battle for the little ones!’”

In discussing this ominous ideology towards other people’s children, Stewart’s thoughts resonate:

“It is easy enough to dismiss these new missionaries on account of their extremely narrow notion of what constitutes Christianity. It is easy to disdain them in the same way that they disdain United Methodists, Roman Catholics, and U.S. Episcopalians. It isn’t hard for most observers to detect the authoritarian impulses and undercurrents of hostility and aggression that drive them to seek ‘spiritual’ authority over others and embolden them to pit children against children, children against schools, children against their own parents.”

Fellowship of Christian Athletics

For the past few decades, I have been seeing more and more athletes at every level pointing skyward when they hit a home-run or score a touchdown. As a kid, I saw BYU players joining in public prayer after games, but now I see public high school kids doing that. From Stewart, I learned that this did not just happen. It is a result of a well-funded campaign led by a group called the Fellowship of Christian Athletes (FCA).

With funding from people like Truett Cathy, founder of Chick-Fil-A, and non-profits like the Bradley Foundation, FCA has infiltrated sports programs at all levels, marketing their version of “muscular Christianity” to impressionable young men and women. FCA leaders imbed themselves in teams and form sports “huddles.” Thus a peer pressure forms that indicates not precipitating in the prayers and the overt religious gestures means not being a team player. Stewart shared:

“In San Diego, California, a long-serving vice principal who wishes to remain anonymous observes that thirty years ago, prayer played a peripheral role in high school sports. Now, he says, there are FCA huddles at nearly every high school in the region.”

Conclusion

Katherine Stewart’s book is written in an enjoyable and fascinating fashion and her personal research is extraordinary. The account of witnessing the infamous Texas school book wars of 2010 or her telling of attending evangelical missionary conferences or her description of the misinformation being disseminated to teenagers in the now federally financed “abstinence-only” sex education programs are illuminating. All Americans concerned about – freedom of religion; Shielding children from unwanted religious indoctrination at school; and protecting public education – should read this book. Reading this book has been an eye-opening experience.

U.S. Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos is a devout member of an evangelical church, Mars Hill Bible Church. It is a widely held view within the evangelical movement that public education is a godless secular movement that provides an opening for Satan. That explains why so many evangelicals home school their children. It seems likely that our education secretary has an evangelically based anti-public education agenda. Arguing the relative merits of school policies misses the point.

It is more likely that religious ideology is the point.

Twitter: @tultican

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NMSI Pushes Bad Education Policies Based on Junk Science

12 Oct

By T. Ultican 10/12/2017

Last Week, I got this message from a colleague in the Sweetwater Union High School District: “you doing ok, brother Ultican? I have a question for you.  In your tireless research and writing on education schemes and scams, what have you learned about NMSI?  They’re in our district now and I’ve got a bad feeling about the direction it’s taking.” In the words of Dr. Johnny Fever, “Sometimes paranoia is just good thinking.”

The National Math and Science Initiative (NMSI) was founded by a group of Dallas area lawyers and businessmen. Tom Luce is identified as the founder and Rex Tillerson, the CEO of ExxonMobil and present US Secretary of State, provided the financing.

An ExxonMobil web-page announced:

“ExxonMobil became a founding sponsor of the National Math and Science Initiative (NMSI) in 2007 with a $125 million commitment to the non-profit organization, which provides scalable and rigorous program solutions that empower school communities to prepare all students to succeed in college and the workforce.”

Some Background on the Founder

NMSI founder Tom Luce’s bio at the George W. Bush Presidential Center states:

Tom Luce

From the George W. Bush Presidential Center

“Tom Luce, Chief Executive Officer, was a founding partner of Hughes & Luce, LLP, a prominent Texas law firm. … He served as U.S. Assistant Secretary of Education for Planning, Evaluation and Policy Development during the George W. Bush administration ….”

“From 2007 to 2011, he was founding CEO of the National Math and Science Initiative, Inc. Additionally, Tom served on Dell, Inc.’s Board of Directors from 1991 until 2012. … He presently serves as the Chairman of the Board for the National Math and Science Initiative.”

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.

A former Texas Lieutenant Governor, Bill Hobby, wrote in 2010 about that 1984 education reform law:

“Remarkably, most of the reforms initiated in House Bill 72 persist to this day. The teacher test was never repeated, but the statewide student tests are a hallmark of Texas education. They also served as the model for President George W. Bush’s ‘No Child Left Behind’ federal legislation.”

Mark Twain said, “To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” For Ross Perot, the founder of Electronic Data Systems the problems in education looked like data problems. He and his Chief of Staff, Tom Luce, decided standardized testing and data analysis were the prescription for failing public schools. Unfortunately, standardized testing is totally useless for analyzing learning and public schools were not actually failing.

Tom Luce was also directly involved in implementing NCLB (a spectacular education reform failure) while serving at the US Department of Education.

A Fraudulent Paper from the National Academies Motivated the Formation of NMSI

“RISING ABOVE THE GATHERING STORM” was published by the National Academies in 2005. The title of this paper echoes Winston Churchill’s The Gathering Storm which chronicled the lead up to World War II. The name like its predecessor “A Nation at Risk” indicates that the United States is in imminent danger of losing its superior economic and scientific lead in the world and education is the fundamental problem. Like “A Nation at Risk,” “Rising Above the Gathering Storm” is also a polemic that cannot stand up to scrutiny.

The late Gerald W. Bracey from Stanford University illuminated several false claims that were foundational to the papers arguments. He recited the Academies declaration, ‘”Last year more than 600,000 engineers graduated from institutions of higher education in China, … In India the figure was 350,000. In America, it was about 70,000.'”

Bracey continued,

“Naturally, given this lofty pedigree, the statistics then materialized in the New York Times, Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune and on many Web sites. While Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman did not use these specific numbers in his 2005 bestseller, ‘The World Is Flat,’ he did write that Asian universities currently produce eight times as many bachelor’s degrees in engineering as U.S. universities do.”

Bracey discussed the growing doubt about these numbers and cited credible peer reviewed research:

“After an exhaustive study, researchers at Duke University also pummeled the numbers. In a December 2005 analysis, ‘Framing the Engineering Outsourcing Debate,’ they reported that the United States annually produces 137,437 engineers with at least a bachelor’s degree while India produces 112,000 and China 351,537. That’s more U.S. degrees per million residents than in either other nation.”

This is an example of the kind of subterfuge that is being used to promote the unsupportable claim that education in America is not producing enough science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) workers.

The impetus and money for writing “RISING ABOVE THE GATHERING STORM” came from the United States Senate:

“Senator Alexander indicated that the Energy Subcommittee of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, which he chairs, had been given the authority by the full committee’s chair, Senator Pete Domenici, to hold a series of hearings to identify specific steps that the federal government should take to ensure the preeminence of America’s science and technology enterprise. Senator Alexander asked the National Academies to provide assistance in this effort by selecting a committee of experts from the scientific and technical community to assess the current situation and, where appropriate, make recommendations.”

By 2006 that series of hearings seemingly led to President Bush proposing legislation to solve the “crisis” in STEM education. Senate Bill 2198, “Protecting America’s Competitive Edge” came before the senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions committee on March 6, 2006. Although, the PACE bill never became law, the record of this senate hearing chaired by Lamar Alexander is instructive. It is also where the birth of NMSI came to light.

Arden L. Bement, Jr., Director, National Science Foundation, (one of the academies) said during his testimony:

“As you are well aware, the National Science Foundation has been selected to play a major role in the President’s American Competitiveness Initiative. One of the cornerstones of our involvement is preparing the Nation’s scientific, technological, engineering, and mathematics workforce for the 21st century while improving the quality of math and science education in America’s schools.”

“When three quarters of American colleges find it necessary to offer courses in remedial mathematics and 22 percent of entering freshman take these courses, it is clear that our high schools are not doing the job they should be doing.”

Here a spokesman for the National Academies is revealing that they have a big government contract to fix education. They are not likely to say, “public schools don’t need fixing” and the comment about remedial courses for freshman is meritless. There has always been a substantial number of students needing remedial courses – see the 1892 committee of 10 report.

James B. Hunt, the former Governor of North Carolina testified,

“A recent report on 30 countries and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development showed that of those 30 countries–you have probably heard these figures–the United States is 15th in reading, 18th in science, 24th in math. Of the G-8 countries, the eight countries, we are 7th in 10th grade mathematics.

“Now, those are the facts, folks.”

Governor, that was lame. Researchers around the world have been questioning the methodology employed by PISA and especially the value of their international rankings. For a good discussion of the useless nature of PISA comparisons see Yong Zhao’s Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Dragon? starting on page 167. Or take a peek at Noel Wilson’s paper “Education Standards and the Problem of Error” for a discussion of the absolute folly of standardized testing.

James B. Hunt Jr. also testified. He said, “It is a well-documented fact that the single most important element in a student’s academic success is that student’s teacher.”

That is just ignorance. Parents and their economic conditions are far more important.

Senator Edward Kennedy remarked,

“By 2009, 6 million jobs will go unfilled because our youth will not be qualified to hold them. To keep America competitive, we need more students with degrees in math, science, and critical-need foreign languages.”

That is at a minimum uninformed. Kennedy repeats the lack of STEM educated graduates misinformation. He is selling the big lie.

Lamar Alexander announced one of the day’s star witnesses,

“Peter O’Donnell is here, who is a member of the National Academy’s Committee that produced ‘The Gathering Storm,’ and his work in Dallas is one reason for the inclusion in ‘The Gathering Storm’ report of the advanced placement recommendations.”

Peter O’Donnell is a wealthy businessman from Dallas, Texas and a huge contributor to the University of Texas at Austin. He is described by the American Statesman:

“O’Donnell is something of a godfather in the state Republican Party, having chaired it for several years in the 1960s. He was a top adviser to Bill Clements during his successful 1978 campaign to become the state’s first GOP governor in more than 100 years, and he has contributed to many Republican candidates in Texas and across the nation.”

Like most modern edu-philanthropists, he has no education experience or training. He testified about his foundation’s Advanced Placement Initiative which became NMSI:

“The Advanced Placement Incentive Program succeeds because of three fundamental concepts: the high standards of Advanced Placement, which is built on a strong curriculum, rigorous national exams, and measurable results; emphasis on excellent teacher training; and financial incentives for teachers and students. Incentives are key to the success of our program. They provide extra pay for extra work and are paid by private donors.”

He went on to describe the principles which were adopted by NMSI:

“These recommendations will provide public schools in the U.S. with outstanding math and science teachers on a scale equal to the size of the problem. The recommendations are based on six concepts:

  1. High standards;
  2. Measurable results;
  3. Integrated curriculum for math and science for grades 6-12;
  4. Quality teacher training that is based on content;
  5. Incentives to teachers and students based on academic results;
  6. Implementation vehicle in each State to manage the programs to ensure quality control and accountability.

There is general agreement that these six concepts will strengthen education, especially in math and science.”

In other words, NMSI calls for teacher merit pay, a hundred-year-old idea with a hundred years of failure to back it up. It employs top down control by using College Board to design curriculum and train educators. It calls for bribing students to study hard which most education theorists would agree is a way to undermine a student’s need to know and harms self-motivation.

NMSI has been moving into San Diego for a while. It is not just in the Sweetwater School District, in 2015 Serra High School of the San Diego Unified School District held an NMSI AP Incentive Awards Night. The announcement says, “Over $32,000 will be given out to 178 current students and graduates. Three students will be given $500 checks!”

Wealthy Texas conservatives say we should turn away from education professionals at Stanford or those at the California State University and the University of California systems. We should embrace the teach to the test education philosophy of College Board and bribe students to get them engaged. We should do this even though there is no independent evidence supporting NMSI’s claims of success.

I Will Let the Curmudgucator Conclude my Article

Three years ago, Peter Greene wrote about NMSI:

“While there may be similar-ish programs in districts across the country, the big dog in the AP bribery biz is the National Math and Science Initiative. NMSI is an organization that was launched ‘to address one of this nation’s greatest economic and intellectual threats – the declining number of students who are prepared to take rigorous college courses in math and science and are equipped for careers in those fields.’ You may recognize that as a classic reformster talking point– low test scores are a threat to our national security– and in fact, the big launching funders of NMSI include Exxon, the Michael and Susan Dell foundation, and the Gates Foundation. Partners also include the US Department of Education and the College Board, because why not fund an advocacy group that is telling everyone that your product is really important. This isn’t philanthropy– it’s marketing.”

Twitter: @tultican

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Personalized and Blended Learning are Money Grabs

5 Oct

By T. Ultican 10/5/2017

Big tech and their friends at big banking have turned to public education budgets for a new profit center. In the latest version of the federal education law, compliant legislators provided for both industries. They gave bankers social impact bonds and incentivized education technology. There are solid reasons to think both decisions harm most Americans while lining the pockets of corporate elites. I discuss some of the technology portion here.

The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) is a reauthorization and amendment of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965. Big money for technology is written into Title’s I and IV of ESSA. This federal law specifies large grants to promote both “blended learning” and “personalized learning.” It also legally defines “blended learning.”

‘‘(1) BLENDED LEARNING.—The term ‘blended learning’ means a formal education program that leverages both technology-based and face-to-face instructional approaches—(A) that include an element of online or digital learning, combined with supervised learning time, and student- led learning, in which the elements are connected to provide an integrated learning experience; and (B) in which students are provided some control over time, path, or pace.” (From official pdf of the law page 1969)

The term personalized learning is somewhat nebulous so I will define it. “Personalized Learning” is a euphemistic term that indicates lessons delivered on a digital device. These lessons are often organized with a playlist and come with a claim of using artificial intelligence to tailor the lessons to the recipient. The scheme is related to competency base education (CBE) and normally includes conferring micro-credentials or badges for competencies completed.

Title-I of ESSA authorizes the following spending schedule:

‘‘(1) $15,012,317,605 for fiscal year 2017;

‘‘(2) $15,457,459,042 for fiscal year 2018;

‘‘(3) $15,897,371,442 for fiscal year 2019; and

‘‘(4) $16,182,344,591 for fiscal year 2020.” (pdf page 1815)

A large percentage of this spending is earmarked for digital education; however, it is difficult to tell what the exact percentage is. However, it is clear that Title-I authorizes spending tens of billions of tax payer dollars on education technology.

Title-IV also authorizes spending on technology and this spending is 100% for technology. Title-IV states:

“There are authorized to be appropriated to carry out this subpart $1,650,000,000 for fiscal year 2017 and $1,600,000,000 for each of fiscal years 2018 through 2020.” (pdf page 1982)

Title-IV also specifies what uses can be made of the funds:

‘‘(1) providing educators, school leaders, and administrators with the professional learning tools, devices, content, and resources to—(A) personalize learning to improve student academic achievement; (B) discover, adapt, and share relevant high-quality educational resources; (C) use technology effectively in the classroom, including by administering computer-based assessments and blended learning strategies; and (D) implement and support school- and district-wide approaches for using technology to inform instruction, support teacher collaboration, and personalize learning;

“(2) building technological capacity and infrastructure, which may include—(A) procuring content and ensuring content quality; and (B) purchasing devices, equipment, and software applications in order to address readiness shortfalls;

‘‘(3) developing or using effective or innovative strategies for the delivery of specialized or rigorous academic courses and curricula through the use of technology, including digital learning technologies and assistive technology …” (pdf page 1981)

Old Rock School

Reputable Education Research Does Not Support this Spending

The Canadian Publication, “The Walrus” distributed a piece called “The Failure of the iPad Classroom.” In the article, author, David Sax, shared some insights from Larry Cuban, a professor of education at Stanford University. Cuban, lives and works in Silicon Valley. Like myself, he began as a hopeful evangelist for education technology, but slowly turned into one of education technologies most prominent skeptics. Sax wrote:

“Cuban cites three reasons that policymakers typically use to justify the purchase of new technology for schools. First, the technology will improve student achievement and marks. Second, the technology will change traditional teaching to nontraditional teaching. Third, the technology will better prepare students for the modern workplace. At best, Cuban says, there is contradictory evidence for the third reason, little for the second, and none for the first.”

Mr. Sax made many cogent statements about education technology in “The Failure of the iPad Classroom.” This statement is a good example:

“Dollars spent on digital education technology are dollars that cannot be spent on teachers, building maintenance, or textbooks. It is money that has been pulled from programs in art, sports, music, and drama. Even though the research shows one of the greatest factors in reading improvements in students is the presence of school libraries, the number of libraries across school boards in the United States has declined dramatically. The logic behind this is often that libraries are pointless in the age of Google and eBooks, and that money would be better spent buying tablets or drones.”

The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development said in a 2015 report that heavy users of computers in the classroom “do a lot worse in most learning outcomes” and that: “In the end, technology can amplify great teaching, but great technology cannot replace poor teaching.”

John Vallance, a Cambridge scholar and headmaster of Australia’s top K-through-12 school, Sydney Grammer, has said: “I think when people come to write the history of this period in education…this investment in classroom technology is going to be seen as a huge fraud.”

There has also been surprising research coming out of Canada: Students don’t prefer e-learning over traditional education. In a 2011 study, researchers found that students preferred “ordinary, real-life lessons” to using technology.

Researcher Dr. Kentaro Toyama, expecting to find a digital educational cure for the perceived ailments in education, came to understand what he calls technology’s “Law of Amplification.” Technology can help education where it’s already doing well, but it does little for mediocre educational systems. Worse, in dysfunctional schools, it “can cause outright harm.”

The Dark Side of Screen Time

Education psychologist and author of “Failure to Connect: How Computers Affect Our Children’s Minds”, Jane Healy, spent years doing research into computer use in schools and, while she expected to find that computers in the classroom would be beneficial, now feels that “time on the computer might interfere with development of everything from the young child’s motor skills to his or her ability to think logically and distinguish between reality and fantasy.”

Dr. Nicholas Kardaras (Aug 31, 2016) 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.”

Jean M. Twenge, professor of psychology at San Diego State University and the author of Generation Me and iGen recently wrote an article for Atlantic magazine about the damage screen time is doing. She shared about the current group of teenagers she labels iGen,

“Psychologically, however, they are more vulnerable than Millennials were: Rates of teen depression and suicide have skyrocketed since 2011. It’s not an exaggeration to describe iGen as being on the brink of the worst mental-health crisis in decades. Much of this deterioration can be traced to their phones.”

Reasonably Unbiased Research Instigated by an Industry Supporter Not Supportive

When the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation contracted with the Rand Corporation to make a study of digital learning, the results were not very supportive. The best the lead researcher could say to the Hechinger Report was, “What I hope happens is people see this is a promising approach, but it requires a lot of things to fall into place for it to work right,” Pane said. “People need to have patience; they need to do it a while. Teachers and students need to get used to it.”

In other words, he is saying digital learning is “promising” but not proven. In this country, it seems we have an exaggerated belief in the capabilities of technology to improve anything. I personally had little doubt that education technology would lead to dramatic improvements. It does have positive uses but our refusal to see its limitations is causing damage.

The Rand study collected data on schools that received funding from the Next Generation Learning Challenges (NGLC). A note from the report describes NGLC:

“The NGLC initiative is managed by EDUCAUSE, a nonprofit association dedicated to advancing the use of information technology in higher education, in association with other organizational partners, including the League for Innovation in the Community College, the International Association for K–12 Online Learning, and the Council of Chief State School Officers. NGLC receives primary funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, with additional support from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, and the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation. The initiative supports school districts, charter management organizations, and partner organizations that embrace PL as a means to dramatically increase college readiness rates, particularly among low-income students and students of color.”

There were 40 participating schools in the study and the data generated was predominately surveys of students, teachers and administrators. There was a small-scale analysis of standardized testing data based on MAP testing at 32 of the schools. Comparisons were made with a “virtual comparison group.” The study noted several possible biases in the data. The conclusion for one-year achievement comparisons says:

“We estimated positive treatment effects of approximately 0.09 in mathematics and 0.07 in reading, as shown in …. Only the mathematics estimate is statistically significant. These effect sizes translate to gains of about 3 percentile points; specifically, a student who would have performed at the median in the comparison group is estimated to have performed 3 percentile points above the median in an NGLC school in both subjects.” (Rand study page 34)

Let us ignore the fact that standardized testing is useless. Since the advent of No Child Left Behind’s test and punish philosophy of education improvement, every educator knows that teaching to a test will improve test scores. Computer based education is fundamentally a method for drilling for the test. It is surprising that these estimated effect sizes are so small and even insignificant for reading.

The survey data in the Rand study compares the NGLC schools in the study group with a national sample. I was surprised to learn that NGLC students do not feel as safe.

Rand Student Opinion Survey

From page 24 of the Rand Study

Bad Education Philosophy is the Source of “Personalized Learning” Failure

The behaviorist ideology of B.F. Skinner informs “competency based education.” CBE is the computer based approach that replaces the failed 1990’s behaviorist learning method called Outcome Based Education. Outcome Based Education is a renamed attempt to promote the 1970’s “mastery education” theory. Mastery education’s failure was so complete that it had to be renamed. It was quickly derided by educators as “seats and sheets.” These schemes all posit that drilling small skills and mastering them is the best way to teach. It has not worked yet.

Today’s proponents of behaviorist education hope that technology including artificial intelligence backed by micro-credentials and badges will finally make behaviorism a winner. It will not because little humans are not linear learners. Non-alignment with human nature is a fundamental flaw in this approach. In addition, behaviorism is not known as a path to creativity or original thinking. Those paths are created between teachers and students through human contact; paths undermined by “digital education.”

Artificial intelligence is more science fiction than reality. Computer scientist Roger Schank, a pioneering researcher in artificial intelligence notes,

“The AI [artificial intelligence] problem is very very hard. It requires people who work in AI understanding the nature of knowledge; how conversation works; how to have an original thought; how to predict the actions of others; how to understand why people do what they do; and a few thousand things like that. In case no one has noticed, scientists aren’t very good at telling you how all that stuff works in people. And until they can there will be no machines that can do any of it.”

With no unbiased positive proof of concept, hundreds of billions of taxpayers’ dollars which were earmarked for education are being spent on technology. It is likely that much of this spending will cause harm and that schemes like “personalized learning” will not deliver benefit to anyone who is not invested in a hi-tech industry.

These dollars could have been spent on better facilities, smaller classes, and better teacher education. Instead, the money is wasted on dubious theories propounded by leaders in hi-tech industries and forces looking to privatize public education.

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