Tag Archives: Bruce Reed

Education with the Biden Team

16 Jan

By Thomas Ultican 1/16/2021 – Updated 1/19/2021

Joe Biden has garnered wide spread praise for his choice of Miguel Cardona as Secretary of Education; maybe too wide. The co-founder of Bellwether Education, Andrew Rotherham says Cardona is “a Goldilocks on charter schools.”  However, Goldilocks was a fairy tale and Rotherham is a well known neoliberal who campaigns for “school choice.”

At the Democratic convention in 2008, the largest groups of delegates cheering the loudest for their new standard bearers were teachers. They saw in Barack Obama and Joe Biden leaders who would end the destructive nightmare, No Child Left Behind. Linda Darling-Hammond the progressive education scholar advising Obama was viewed as someone who would bring professional sanity to national education policy and end the unjustifiable attacks on public schools and their teachers.

They were not aware of a pre-convention seminar billed “Ed Challenge for Change.” This seminar sponsored by Microsoft founder Bill Gates and real estate mogul Eli Broad included a new group of young wealthy hedge fund managers named Democrats for Education Reform (DFER). They had previously established a relationship with Senator Barak Obama. He seemed to share their ideas on education issues like charter schools, performance pay, and accountability. DFER, Gates and Broad viewed Darling-Hammond as a touchy-feely anti-accountability figure and believed she would destroy any chance that Obama would follow through on any of their education reform initiatives.

The seminar group began subjecting Darling-Hammond to withering criticism. They championed the non-traditional (meaning no education background) leader of the Chicago school system, Arne Duncan, to be the next Secretary of Education. Darling-Hammond was berated as favoring the status quo in education policy for her criticisms of alternative teacher certification programs like Teach For America (TFA) and was seen as too aligned with teachers’ unions. The education scholar was sent back to California without a government role and Obama’s basketball playing buddy joined the Obama-Biden administration.

Now, Joe Biden has chosen a person with an education background to lead the department of education but his experience running large organizations is almost non-existent. He was assistant superintendent of a school district with less than 9,000 students from 2013 to 2019. He then became Education Commissioner of Connecticut. That system serves less than 530,000 students. His primary strength seems to be he has not engaged with the controversial education issues of the day like “school choice” and testing accountability.

Which begs the question, will the Biden-Harris administration support and revitalize public schools or will they bow to big moneyed interests who make campaign contributions? Will Biden-Harris continue the neoliberal ideology of “school choice” or will they revitalize public schools? Will they continue wasting money on standardized testing that only accurately correlates with family economic conditions or will they reign in this wasteful practice?

The evidence is mixed.

The Biden-Harris Team

Miguel Cardona will be taking command at the Department of Education, however, there are many other forces accompanying Biden to Washington DC. One of those forces is the embrace of neoliberalism by people he selected to serve.

Dr. Jill Biden – The First Lady is one of the most important members of the Biden-Harris team in regards to education. She has 30 plus years experience as an educator mainly teaching Community College English. Dr. Biden continued teaching full time at Northern Virginia Community College while her husband served as Vice President of the United States. In 2017 she was named board chair of Save the Children, which works in 120 countries – including the United States – and focuses on the health, education and safety of kids.

Dr. Biden does not have much k-12 background and while serving as 2nd Lady, she did not speak out against the Race to the Top agenda. However, that does not mean she agreed with it.

Gina Raimondo – Biden’s selection for Commerce Secretary is the Governor of Rhode Island and a former venture capitalist at Village Ventures which was backed by Bain Capital. The neoliberal Democrat has pushed “school choice” and billionaire style education reform. Her first selection for Rhode Island Commissioner of Education, Ken Wagner, came from John King’s New York Department of Education. At the time, Wagner was given high praise by New York’s billionaire Chancellor Merryl Tisch. In 2019, Raimondo selected former Teach For America (TFA) corps member and New York City acolyte of Joel Klein and Michael Bloomberg, Angélica Infante-Green, to replace Wagner.

Neera Tanden – She is the selection to be Director of the Office of Management and Budget. Tanden was one of the many youthful neoliberals who were part of the Clinton administration. In 2008, she was a key player in Hillary Clinton’s first presidential campaign and is CEO of the left leaning Center for American Progress (CAP) which supports Clinton style neoliberalism. One of the Clinton emails that were released by Wiki-leaks during the 2016 campaign was a joint report on education policy from Tandan and a CAP Senior Fellow Catherine Brown. In it they informed Hillary Clinton,

“1. In spite of the challenges that remain, the standards-based reforms implemented over the last two decades have resulted in significant, positive change.

 “2. Teach For America … offers a powerful proof point that it is possible to diversify the teaching force while retaining a high bar.”

Bruce Reed – He will be Biden’s Deputy Chief of Staff. Reed’s own bio states,

“Reed supervised the landmark 1996 welfare reform law, the 1994 crime bill, and the Clinton education agenda. In the Obama White House, he served as Assistant to the President and Chief of Staff to Vice President Joe Biden, working on economic, fiscal, and tax policy, education, and gun violence. … After leaving the Obama administration, Reed spent two years as the first president of the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, where he led nationwide efforts to strengthen public education in urban areas.” (Emphasis Added)

Reed also has served as President of the Democratic Leadership Council which embraced neoliberalism.

Reed’s 2016 advice to Hillary Clinton was also revealed in the Wiki-leaks dump. Reed states that choice in the form of charters and higher standards should be the center piece of what we do as a country for education reform. He claimed school districts with elected boards are another part of “broken democracy.” Reed praised the portfolio model of school reform and promoted edtech by holding up Summit Charters as a good example.

Kaitlyn Hobbs Demers – She has been appointed special assistant to the president and chief of staff for the Office of Legislative Affairs. Demers’ résumé includes advising TFA corps members and interviewing future candidates.

Dani Durante – She has been tabbed as Director of leadership and Training. Durante previously served as Senior Director of Operations at OneGoal: Graduation. OneGoal is a non-profit working to advance graduation rates in poor and minority communities. Its major funders include the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Susan and Michael Dell Foundation and the Walton Family Foundation.

Anne Hyslop is assistant director for policy development and government relations at the Alliance for Excellent Education. Alliance is the digital learning advocate (edtech sales) that former West Virginia Governor Bob Wise once led. She noted the new staff’s TFA experience observing it “has been a stepping-stone for a lot of Democratic political folks for some time, so that’s not a surprise.” Durante, like Demers, worked at TFA.

Some Known’s about Cardona

A former member of Bush 41’s education department, Diane Ravitch, has noted:

“The good thing is, first of all, he’s not Betsy DeVos, and every educator in America, or almost every educator, will be thrilled about that. But, secondly, he’s a public school person. He went to public schools. His children go to public schools. He’s been in public schools throughout his career. And that’s a big plus for many people who have been watching the attacks on public education and on teachers for the past four and more years.”

Cardona is a Puerto Rican born in a Meriden, Connecticut public housing project. He was a language learner upon entering primary school. He went on to earn a bachelor’s degree in bilingual and bi-cultural education and a doctorate in education.

His 2011 doctoral dissertation presented to the University of Connecticut’s Neag School of Education was titled, “Sharpening the Focus of Political Will to Address Achievement Disparities.” In it he highlighted “patterns of complacency” and “institutional predeterminations” limiting learning opportunities for English Learners. He concluded,

 “Without a focused commitment of political will among educational leaders to make the necessary improvements in academic programs, gaps in student achievement will likely persist.”

“From my perspective, it seems that the normalization of failure of the ELL students continues to influence practices.”

However, all is not sweetness and honey with this new nominee. According to EdWeek, Cardona has been affiliated with New Leaders where he participated in a fellowship program. This is concerning because New Leaders is a billionaire financed organization working to replace University based programs training education leaders with a program featuring their own reform ideology. New Leaders embraces the privatization of public schools and the “school choice” agenda.

In a Bloomberg opinion piece, Andrea Gabor gave this advice to Cardona,

“Eliminating or sharply curtailing standardized tests would save states as much as $1.7 billion and allow districts to reallocate resources. For perspective, that is over 4% of the $39 billion the federal government spends on K-12 education, based on 2018 figures.”

Gabor’s piece prompted Education expert Peter Greene to share a compendium of his articles written about the useless nature of the “Big Standardized Test.” He opened his compendium with this simple declarative sentence, “I’ve been banging the ‘Get Rid of the BS Test’ for years, but all the reasons it’s a lousy, toxic, destructive-and-not-even-useful force in education are amplified a hundred-fold by our current pandemess.”

Unfortunately, it appears Cardona disagrees. In 2020, the state of Connecticut got a waiver from testing but did not apply for a 2021 waiver. Cardona sent a memo stating, “State assessments are important guideposts to our promise of equity.” and “They are the most accurate tool available to tell us if all students … are growing and achieving at the highest levels on the state standards.”

This is sad because it has been widely demonstrated that the BS test is useless for measuring student achievement. Their only values are as a profit generating business and creating propaganda to privatize schools.

During his Connecticut confirmation hearing, Cardona responded to a question about charter schools with “Charter schools provide choice for parents that are seeking choice, so I think it’s a viable option.” Hopefully when he gets out of a state that only has 24 charter schools, he will recognize the devastation they are wreaking on public schools.

The other issue Cardona will face immediately is reopening schools for face to face classes. The AP reports that Biden wants all schools opened within 100 days of his nomination. That means all schools open by May 1. If Biden gets his announced recovery package through and 100 million people vaccinated by then, it seems doable. It is concerning that Cardona tried to get Connecticut schools open with the pandemic raging.

A coalition of Connecticut labor unions said in a joint statement. “If selected as Secretary of Education, Dr. Cardona would be a positive force for public education — light years ahead of the dismal Betsy DeVos track record.” That may be true but the labor leaders don’t seem to be in touch with their rank and file.

Nicole Rizzo an organizer for Connecticut Public School (CTPS) Advocates conducted a survey on the (CTPS) Advocates Facebook page in reaction to the Education Union Coalition’s endorsement of Cardona. She found that an extremely small percentage of the 392 educators polled supported his nomination (7.1%), while a big majority did not (92.9%).

Final Comment

At the Education Forum 2020, Joe Biden’s responded to Dr. Denisha Jones’ question will you end mandated standardized testing in public schools? He answered with an unequivocal “yes.” Biden then went on for more than five minutes about why he opposed testing. However as Diane Ravitch has observed, he did not include this policy change on his education agenda webpage.

Jan Resseger shared, “President Elect Joe Biden prioritized public school funding as the center of his education plan during his campaign to be the Democratic nominee for President.”  Although he does not specifically commit to ending standardized testing, he does commit to significantly increasing public school funding and elaborates on these five listed points of emphasis:

  1. “Support our educators by giving them the pay and dignity they deserve.“
  2.  “Invest in resources for our schools so students grow into physically and emotionally healthy adults, and educators can focus on teaching.”
  3. “Ensure that no child’s future is determined by their zip code, parents’ income, race, or disability.”
  4.  “Provide every middle and high school student a path to a successful career.”
  5. “Start investing in our children at birth.”

There are many reasons for students, parents and teachers to be hopeful that responsible leadership has come to national education policy after a fifty-year drought. On the other hand, it is not clear that the new administration will oppose the destructive “school choice” ideology as a central focus. There are reasons to pay close attention to the neoliberal anti-public school forces embedded throughout this new administration and be ready to once again man the ramparts. In the words of Ronald Reagan, “trust but verify.”

Update added 1/19/2021: Today, Cindy Marten was nominated by Joe Biden to be Deputy Secretary of Education. I have met Marten a few times and believe she is a special kind of leader committed to public education. This gives me great hope. For the first time, we have two educators with deep k-12 experience running the Department of Education. This article from the San Diego Union gives a good synopsis of her education career. In his announcement Biden noted, “Superintendent, principal, vice principal and literacy specialist are all job titles Marten has held in her 32-year career as an educator.”

The appointment makes me think the Biden administration may become the best friend public education has had in Washington DC since the Department of Education was created. Of course, Marten does not walk on water but from my perspective she is the real deal.

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Maybe Betsy DeVos was a Good Thing

17 Oct

By Thomas Ultican 10/17/2019

It is clear that President Trump selected a billionaire enemy of public education to be in charge of schools. However, Betsy DeVos is so easy to dislike and has shined such a big light on the destroy-public-education (DPE) movement that Democrats are fleeing the school choice agenda. If Hillary Clinton had become President, her policies may have permanently damage universal free public education. When WikiLeaks leaked John Podesta’s emails, Hillary Clinton’s campaign Policy Book and its K-12 public education policy recommendations were revealed. Those recommendations were aligned with the DPE playbook supported by neoliberals.

Group Thinks’ Historical Background

In the last two decades of the 20th century, there was a general consensus reached by governing elites that America’s public education system was in dire straits and needed reform. The impetus for this goes back to the Reagan era’s “A Nation at Risk”.  It masqueraded as a research paper, but was actually a polemic based on faulty understanding and a misreading of data. In 1991, researchers at the Sandia Laboratory in New Mexico debunked the main points of “A Nation at Risk,” but their report was barely noticed. A growing consensus based on a century old illusion had developed among policy wonks, politicians and leaders in education philanthropy. They all accepted beltway common knowledge and agreed on a broad outline of what needed to be done to confront the “undeniable failure” of public education:

  • Institute standards
  • Use testing to hold schools accountable
  • Apply business based leadership principles and personel
  • Create alternate pathways for teacher certification
  • Develop competition
  • Provide school choice
  • Marginalize teachers unions
  • End the federalist system of school governance (i.e. locally elected school boards)

In 1985, the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) was established by Al From. Politico described the DLC thusly:

“The DLC was formed in the 1980s – the debacle of the 1984 Mondale campaign was a key motivator – to wage just that kind of intra-party war against what From and his allies saw as interest-group liberals content to consign the Democratic Party to minority status. The group and its best-known chairman, then-Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton, pushed balanced budgets, free trade, tough-on-crime policies, and welfare reform – all of which alienated the base, but became a key part of Clinton’s “New Democrat” agenda and his presidential legacy.”

The DLC was made up of a group of neoliberal politicians who took over the Democratic Party in the 1990s.  

When Bill and Hillary arrived in Washington DC, a large number of youthful “New Democrats” with elite educations joined them. Many, like Bruce Reed, had already worked in Clinton’s presidential campaign. Marc Tucker, a leader in the standards-driven education reform movement, saw like-minded reformers who also believed that the public school system was outdated and failing. In the infamous “Hillary Letter,” which Tucker began with the salutation “Dear Hillary,” he laid out several reform ideas that would completely change how education is done. He began:

“First, a vision of the kind of national — not federal — human resources development system the nation could have. … What is essential is that we create a seamless web of opportunities, to develop one’s skills that literally extends from cradle to grave and is the same system for everyone — young and old, poor and rich, worker and full-time student. It needs to be a system driven by client needs (not agency regulations or the needs of the organization providing the services), guided by clear standards that define the stages of the system for the people who progress through it, and regulated on the basis of outcomes that providers produce for their clients, not inputs into the system.”

In 1989, Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton had joined President George H. W. Bush at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville for an education conference. The Charlottesville joint communiqué listed the four areas of agreement reached at the summit:

“The President and the nation’s Governors have agreed at this summit to:

  • Establish a process for setting national education goals;
  • Seek greater flexibility and enhanced accountability in the use of Federal resources to meet the goals, through both regulatory and legislative changes;
  • Undertake a major state-by-state effort to restructure our education system; and
  • Report annually on progress in achieving our goals.”

Clinton’s 1994 reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) embodied these principles. It called for all states to create standards and curricular frameworks. Though not mandatory, the Act along with the Clinton’s proposed goals 2000 prepared the way for the No Child Left Behind Act in 2001, which was a federal takeover of public education.

In 1998, Bill Clinton wrote: “We have worked to raise academic standards, promote accountability, and provide greater competition and choice within the public schools, including support for a dramatic increase in charter schools.”

The Position Book

In December 2014, Dan Schwerin, Hillary Clinton’s speech writer, wrote in an email to John Podesta,

“We wanted to share with you this long book of policy memos that we gave to HRC for vacation reading.  As noted in the cover memo, this reflects months of work by a team of about a dozen volunteers who conducted more than 100 interviews with thought leaders in a wide range of fields.”

The K-12 section of the Position Book was presented by Ann O’Leary, who is now California Governor Gavin Newsom’s chief of staff. A Fortune magazine biography of O’Leary described her:

“O’Leary is a diehard policy wonk, especially keen on anything that affects families or education. As Clinton’s Senate aide in 2001, she was at the center of No Child Left Behind—a once popular education initiative that has since soured in the public mind. ‘It was a really important moment,’ she says of the law, which Ted Kennedy crafted and George W. Bush signed. ‘When you look back at what happened, this was serious, bipartisan, constructive work. We were committed to high standards and helping states get there.”’

In the Position Book, O’Leary informs Clinton,

“In preparing for our thinking on K-12 proposals, I solicited a memo from Chis Edley, who recently chaired the National Commission on Educational Equity and Excellence, to go along with the memo you previously received from Neera and Catherine Brown. I also had good conversations with Laurene Powell Jobs and Bruce Reed (highlights of my conversation noted below), and Dan solicited some thoughts from Kate Childs Graham (who is Randi’s speech writer). I have reached out to Linda Darling-Hammond and Randi Weingarten to solicit their ideas as well, and will schedule those conversations after the holidays.

On O’Leary’s conversation with Bruce Reed: Reed worked as a policy director in the 1992 Clinton-Gore campaign and then worked in various capacities throughout the duration of the administration. In 2001, he became CEO of the DLC and served there until it shut down in 2011 at which time he became Chief of Staff for Vice President Joe Biden. In November 2013, Reed left the Obama administration to become President of the Broad Foundation. Professor Jim Horn notes, “This is someone who has never taught a day in his life at any grade level nor had any background in pedagogy or education.”

Hillary-Clinton-Eli-Broad

Hillary and Her Long Time Friend Ely Broad at a Wedding – Google Images

The Reed highlights include;

  1. Hillary’s initial instincts still hold true – choice in the form of charters, higher standards and making this a center piece of what we do as a country
  2. Challenge of education reform: school districts are pretty hard, if not impossible, to reform – they are another broken part of democracy
  3. If you create the Silicon Valley of education improvement, which is what New Orleans has, you can get there; Denver does it, …. pro charter; pro portfolio system for public schools
  4. Personalized learning tools – modeled in Summit Charters

Here is a different perspective. Summit learning has big money behind it but it is encountering big resistance from students and parents. The reality is that New Orleans’ schools are inefficient, undermine communities, have extremely high management and transportation costs, and still struggle academically. Denver’s schools have turned into a dystopian nightmare since neoliberal Democrats and big money Republicans took control. Democratic local control of schools is the bedrock of American democracy. The portfolio system in an undemocratic scheme to privatize public schools.

On O’Leary’s conversation with Laurene Powell Jobs: Laurene Powell Jobs is famous for having been married to technology genius Steve Jobs. She is a billionaire and co-owns Atlantic magazine. She studied economics and political science at University of Pennsylvania and received an MBA from Stanford; no education training. In 1997, she founded the Emerson Collective which promotes impact investing. She is board chair of The XQ Institute and College Track.

Highlights from Jobs recommendations;

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

Some tough realities undermine Jobs’ ideas. Her experiment in redesigning schools has met with failure and it is much more likely that new innovative education developments will come from public schools than charters. Jobs believes teachers are dim bulbs and that Teach For America (TFA) youths with no academic training and a five week summer course are better than the teachers she disrespects. TFA is a plague on American education and there is no way they should be receiving teaching credentials that take more than a year to earn. Her technology claim is also specious. The Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development’s Andreas Schleicher noted when discussing a recent OECD study,

“In most countries, the current use of technology is already past the point of optimal use in schools. We’re at a point where computers are actually hurting learning.”

Some input from Neera Tanden and Catherine Brown: Neera Tanden served in both the Obama and Clinton administrations. She is currently the President of the Center for American Progress (CAP). Catherine Brown is a Senior Fellow at CAP. She worked on NCLB author George Miller’s congressional staff prior to becoming vice president of policy at TFA. She was also a senior consultant for Leadership for Educational Equity which is an organization that works to get TFA alumni elected to school boards. Neera and Catherine mainly presented political analysis but share these ideas.

  1. In spite of the challenges that remain, the standards-based reforms implemented over the last two decades have resulted in significant, positive change.
  2. Teach For America … offers a powerful proof point that it is possible to diversify the teaching force while retaining a high bar.

These points were both complete fallacies.

Ann O’Leary also informed Clinton, “There is strong agreement that we need high academic standards in our public school system and that the Common Core will help us to be more globally competitive.”

The Policy Book had no voices championing the public education system or suggesting it needed protecting.

Observations

The Clinton team was going to advance the DPE agenda. Unlike Betsy DeVos, they were not going to alienate neoliberal Democrats. In the final analysis, she and her policy wonks would have done far more damage to public education than we are seeing now.

This history also highlights the importance of being relentless in discovering what is the real education agenda of our Presidential candidates? Trump gave us DeVos. Enough said. Biden was part of Race to the Top, his brother is a charter school entrepreneur and his chief of staff became President of the Broad Foundation. Bernie Sanders is very clear and supportive of public education. He has put out a wonderfully thought-out Marshal Plan for Public Education. Elizabeth Warren has come out in full voiced support for public education and her plan zeros out federal dollars to charter schools. She has published a well thought out plan for public education. Pete Buttigieg is raking in large donations from DPE proponents like Reed Hastings.

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