Tag Archives: Charles Foster Johnson

NPE Going to Houston

23 Sep

By Thomas Ultican 9/23/2026

I am looking forward to the Network for Public Education (NPE) conference in Houston September 25-27. It seems when public schools and human rights are under attack that is where NPE schedules its conference. In 2015, we went to Chicago where I amazingly formed a relationship with Karen Lewis that lasted until she sadly succumbed to brain cancer. In 2016, we were in Raleigh, North Carolina where transgender students were under attack and succeeding conferences have followed a similar pattern. Why Houston, Texas? Houston has Texas’s largest school district. It was cynically taken over by the state as part of Governor Greg Abbott’s ongoing effort to privatize public education.

It is not just in Houston but public education in all of Texas is under attack by the Governor and his team. In 2015, Abbott appointed Dallas Independent School District (DISD) Trustee, Mike Morath, the state’s Commissioner of Education. Morath’s only education experience was as a substitute teacher in one class for part of a year and serving for two terms on the DISD board. When he ran for school board in 2011, he was unopposed and became the first of a new wave of pro-school privatization and business community PAC supported candidates. He initiated the Houston school takeover.

At the beginning of this month, ABC New Channel 13 in Houston reported that 14 districts in the state are under threat of takeover. The list includes the Clarksville, Cleveland, Coldspring-Oakhurst, Elgin, Judson, Kingsville, Manor, Nacogdoches, Poteet, Runge, San Angelo, San Antonio, Spring and Waco school districts. The schools all have a large percentage of low-income students and high rates of Black and Hispanic students.

The Absurd Houston Takeover

Abbott signed two laws that accelerated school takeovers and privatization efforts. In 2015, HB 1842 was passed and signed into law. It states that if a district has one school that fails testing for five years in a row that the state must close that school or takeover the district and appoint a new school board. In 2017, SB 1882 gave schools the option of turning over a failing school to a private entity such as a charter school. This is the legal machinery that is aligned against Texas public-school districts.

Make Morath originally attempted to takeover Houston Independent School District (HISD) in 2019. The takeover was blamed on poor testing results at Phillis Wheatley High School. The next year, HISD sued and, in 2020, a Travis County district judge halted Morath’s plan by granting a temporary injunction. The Texas Education Agency (TEA) got the states supreme court to overturn the injunction in 2022. They argued that a 2021 law, SB 1365, allowed the state to takeover HISD. It is notable that Harold Dutton, a state Representative from Houston, voted for SB 1365.

Houston ISD is the largest school district in Texas with about 200,000 students and 284 schools. The takeover was blamed on the venerable Phillis Wheatley High School which opened on January 31, 1927. Famous alumni include Archie Bell of Archie Bell and the Drells, actor Charles Robinson (Night Court), band director Freddy Gains, football star Lester Hayes and many more. U.S. Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee referring to Wheatley said,

“I’m emotional about it because Barbara Jordan went here. She held this office. Mickey Leland went there. He held this office.”

NPE Executive Director Carol Burris wrote about Wheatley for the answer sheet blog. She noted that Phillis Wheatley High School had been regularly rated as “academically acceptable” until YES Prep opened nearby in 2011. During the 2021-2022 school year, Wheatley served 10 times as many Black students and more than twice as many students with disabilities as YES Prep.

Still the district and the school were making excellent progress. According to the state’s measure in 2022 HISD was B-rated and in less than 2 years 40 of the 50 schools that had received a D or F ratings were rated C or better. Phillis Wheatley High School was rated a C with a score that was two points away from a B rating. Yet Morath and Abbott ignored reason and went ahead with their ill-conceived takeover.

At the time, New York University Professor, Domingo Morel, claimed:

“The Houston public school system is not failing. Rather, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, Education Commissioner Mike Morath, and the Republican state legislature are manufacturing an education crisis to prevent people of color in Houston from exercising their citizenship rights and seizing political power.”

The Privatization Train

During the 2024, election, Abbott got rid of the rural politicians that did not support vouchers. According to Propublica he was able to get millions in contributions from billionaire donors to eliminate many fellow Republicans from the statehouse. TikTok investor Jeff Yass of Pennsylvania kicked in $6 million, a Besty Devos group put up $4 million and the federal Club for Growth coordinated with another PAC to add $8 million to the privatization effort.

The pro-voucher candidates Abbott supported won. The governor’s voucher crusade represents the culmination of more than three decades of work by Christian conservative donors, whose influence in Texas politics has never been more pronounced. They have poured millions of dollars into candidates and helped lead or fund a network of organizations, such as the influential Texas Public Policy Foundation to galvanize Republicans around public-school privatization.

Before being appointed by Morath to run Houston’s schools, Make Miles was leading Third Future Schools, a charter school in Colorado. TEA’s newly appointed leaders Sandi Massey in Beaumont ISD and Ena Meyers at Lake Worth ISD also worked at Third Future Schools.

Third Future has expanded into Texas. They operate the Texas Partnerships which is an option for saving a district with a poorly scoring school. By contracting out the operation of that school to Texas Partnerships the takeover onus is lifted. So far, 44 campuses have contracted with the Texas Partnership of which 14 are preschools that are not part of the state’s ratings system. The Texas Observer reported:

“Of the remaining 30 schools, 18 ended their time under private management with failing state overall accountability ratings, according to an Observer analysis of TEA ratings and academic performance reports. Eleven posted worse ratings in at least one of their two final contract years than those schools did in the year before the private partnerships began.

Hope to See You in Houston

NPE 2025 in Columbus, Ohio

This weekend in Houston, I expect to hear more details about the attack on public schools in the state and what efforts are being taken to counter them. Zeph Capo, President of Texas American Federation of Teachers, will most assuredly be a great source of information during his keynote speech. And the founder of Pastors for Public Education, Rev. Charles Foster Johnson, will also have some interesting items to share.

There are many speakers that I am looking forward to hearing and the author Katherine Stewart is one of them. Her three books, The Good News Club, The Power Whorshippers and Money Lies and God are master works of research and good writing. I consider Kathrine a friend and am excited to see her again.

Also speaking are Randi Weingarten, President American Federation of Teachers, Professor Maurice Cunningham from Boston and Professor Julian Vasquez Heilig from everywhere. These are some of my favorite people and I always look forward to tipping a few with them and hearing what they have to say. Because of word length limitation, there are many great speakers that I have not mentioned.

I am also looking forward to eating some Texas beef. It will be a special weekend.

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Just Finished Diane Ravitch’s New Book

25 Nov

By Thomas Ultican 11/25/2025

An Education; How I Changed My Mind About Schools and Almost Everything Else, is highly recommended especially for the thousands of us who consider her a friend. Diane is a very generous person with both her time and resources. I first met Diane through her blog in 2014, then in person at the 2015 NPE conference in Chicago. It was in this time period that she started posting some of my articles on her blog while simultaneously informing me about who was working to destroy public education. At the time, I did not realize what a privilege this was. Her latest book is an intimate memoir that introduces us to Diane Rose Silverstein of Houston, Texas born July 1, 1938. It tells the story of a Jewish Texan from of large struggling family becoming politically influential and a national treasure.

On a page following the dedication page, she quotes Ralph Waldo Emerson:

“Foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and devines.”

I knew that Diane had made a big change and reversed herself on test based accountability and other school reform agendas driven by conservatives and neoliberals. However, the courage this change took and the depth of her reversal were profoundly illuminated by reading this book.

Although growing up in a Roosevelt supporting family and being a registered Democrat, she became deeply conservative. Diane served on the board of the Thomas B. Fordham foundation, contributed to the Manhattan Institute and was a member of the Koret Task Force with the likes of Eric Hanushek and E. D. Hirsch Jr. Her best friends personally and politically all supported the ideas she abandoned. By reversing herself, she walked away from professional security and long held personal friendships. It was courageously principled but must have been a personally daunting move.

Me and Diane

The best part of “An Education” for me was Diane’s recounting growing up in Houston and going to a segregated public school. Her experience was just so relatable. She liked all the music my oldest sister liked. Cheating was rampant in her school just like mine and like her; I let my classmates copy my work. My rural Idaho school was kind of segregated but that was because only white people and a few Mexican families lived in the community. The Mexican kids were very popular in our school. I never met a Black person until I was a senior in high school and had only seen a few through a car window when vacationing in Kansas City. It was wonderful to find some commonalities.

I had studied engineering, worked in Silicon Valley and pretty much ignored education. But I did hear from Diane and her friends about what a failure public education had become. By 1999, I became tired of hearing about people becoming rich off their stock options, working on the next greatest hard drive or dealing with the atrocious San Jose traffic. I decided to return to San Diego and do something to help public education by enlisting in a master of education program at the University of California San Diego (UCSD).

The UCSD program was oriented toward constructivist education which I really liked. I read books by Alfie Kohn and papers by Lisa Delpit and was ready to revolutionize public education. Then I got to my first job at Bell Jr. High School and discovered that the teachers there were well informed pros with lots of experience. By comparison, I was not nearly as competent as most of them.

It was then that I started to see that I had been bamboozled about how bad public schools were and began looking for like minded people. Two books, David Beliner’s and Eugene Glass’s “50 Myths and Lies that Threaten America’s Public Schools” and Diane Ravitch’s “The Death and Life of the Great American School System” were like water for the thirsty. Soon after that, I found Diane’s blog and joined the Network for Public Education (NPE) along with many other public school advocates.

I saw Diane at the 2015 NPE conference in Chicago’s Drake Hotel. It was an absolutely inspiring event with a keynote by the amazing Yong Zhao. Although we started communicating a little by email, I did not meet Diane personally until NPE 2016 in Raleigh, North Carolina. It was there that the Reverend William Barber gave a truly inspiring speech.

Tom Ultican and Diane Ravitch in Raleigh (by Ultican)

Over the years since, I have developed an ever growing admiration for this woman. She outworks everyone and never gives up. In 2021, Diane had a really difficult open heart surgery. In the book, she notes going into surgery on April 7 and waking up a week later. I wrote her that my chanting Nam-myoho-renge-kyo for her health and recovery had saved her life but she foolishly gave some credit to the other hundreds of people who were sending prayers and to her skilled doctors.

A year later, we had an NPE conference in Philadelphia. Diane was there and leading the proceeding but she was still weak. It was hardly noticeable but when she went to conduct an interview with Little Steven Van Zandt, he had to help her negotiate the two steps up to the platform.

Diane and Little Steven Van Zandt (by Ultican)

During my several trips to NPE conferences, I have met a Baptist preacher from Texas named Charles Foster Johnson. Charles has been a tireless fighter protecting public education and has developed an organization called Pastors for Children. I remember asking Diane if she ever thought she would be a friend and political ally with a Baptist preacher? She said, “No, never!” Earlier this year at NPE 2025 Diane and Charles asked me to take their picture. So there it was a Buddhist, a Jew and a Baptist working together and sharing friendship.

Diane Ravitch and Charles Foster Johnson 2025 (by Ultican)

Conclusion

Like I noted above, I had not paid any attention to public education so when I became aware of Diane, her blog and her book “The Death and Life of the Great American School System”, I was surprised to find how much seasoned educators despised Diane and could not trust her. Still to this day, I see education professionals taking shots at her and NPE. It is impossible for them to believe she changed her mind which brings to mind the words of Emerson, “Foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds…” They just cannot accept new evidence.

I really enjoyed Diane’s latest book and encourage everyone to read it. She probably thinks this is her last book a sort of swan song. Somehow, I don’t think so. She is relentless and will almost certainly want to teach all of us about something in the future. I expect that in two or three years we will see another powerful book by Diane Ravitch.

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Network for Public Education Was in Washington DC

2 Nov

By Thomas Ultican 11/2/2023

NPE met at the Capitol Hilton for a weekend conference beginning on Friday, October 27. The old hotel seemed well maintained. That first evening, Diane Ravitch interviewed James Harvey who was a key contributor to “A Nation at Risk.” We gathered in a larger conference room which caused Mr. Harvey to comment, “I remember being at a meeting in this room fifty years ago when we heard that Alexander Butterfield had just testified that there were tapes of the oval office.”

With that historical reference, the conference was off to a wonderful start.

“A Nation at Risk” is seen as an unfair turning point that undermined public education. Mr. Harvey’s job was to synthesize the input from members of the National Commission on Excellence in Education, created by Secretary of Education, Terrence Bell, and produce the report. He shared that two famous academics on the panel, Nobel Prize winner, Glen Seaborg, and physicist, Gerald Holton, were the driving forces for politicizing public education.

Diane Ravitch and James Harvey

That first night’s presentation was actually an added event for the benefit of us coming in on Friday afternoon. The conference had three keynote addresses, two panel discussions and seven breakout sessions. It was difficult to choose which breakout sessions to attend.

Pastors for Children

For session one, I attended “Mobilizing Faith Leaders as Public Education Allies.”  The amazing founder of Pastors for Children, Charles Foster Johnson, and his two cohorts were well reasoned and did not proselytize us. Their movement really does seem to be about helping communities and not building their church. Among Johnson’s points were:  

  • “Privatized religion teachers believe ‘God likes my tribe best.”‘
  • “We are the reason there is not a voucher program in Texas.”
  • “Conservatives and liberals come together over education.”
  • “Faith leaders have a different effect when lobbying politicians.”
  • “We are making social justice warriors out of fundamentalist Baptist preachers.”

Houston School Takeover

I have no intention of writing about each of the 7 sessions I attended, but the session on the Houston School District takeover needs mention.

Texas took-over Houston Independent School District (ISD) on June 1, 2023. It is the largest school district in the state and eighth largest in the country with more than 180,000 students attending 274 schools. The student demographics are 62% Hispanic, 22% African-American, 10% White and 4% Asian, with 79% identified as economically disadvantaged.

In 2021, Millard House II was selected by a unanimous vote of the Houston ISD school board to be Superintendent. Under his leadership, Houston ISD was rated a B+ district, a school in one of Houston’s poorest neighborhoods, and used to excuse the takeover received a passing grade on Texas’s latest STAR testing. The takeover board replaced House with Mike Miles, a charter school operator from Colorado, previously lasted 2 years of his five-year contract, to lead the Dallas ISD.

Ruth Kravetz talked at some length about the how angry Houstonians are and their effective grassroots organizing. Kravetz stated, “We want Mike Miles gone.” She noted that the local media started turning against the takeover when citizens were locked out of the first takeover board meetings.

Kravetz intoned:

  • “Teachers no longer need a certificate or college degree to teach in Houston ISD.”
  • “Seven year-olds are not allowed to use restrooms during instructional times. They must wait.”
  • “People are being fired for ridiculous reasons. Five people were fired last week over a made up story.”
  • Expect more student action against the takeover.
  • “Rolling sickouts are coming.”

Jessica Campos is a mother in one of Houston’s poorest communities. She said her school is made up of 98% Mexicans with 68% of them being Spanish speakers. She claims, “Our school community has been destroyed”, and reported all teachers were removed with many, replaced by uncertified teachers.

Daniel Santos (High School social studies teacher) said:

“It is all about dismantling our school district. We wear red-for-Ed every Wednesday and Mayor Turner lights up city hall in red.”

The Keynote Addresses

Gloria Ladson-Billings from the University of Wisconsin Madison delivered the first Keynote address on Saturday morning.

She said that we were really dealing with 4 pandemics:

  1. Covid-19
  2. George Floyd murder
  3. “Economic Shesession” (Large numbers of women were forced to leave the workforce.)
  4. Climate catastrophe

Professor Ladson-Billings claims the larger agenda is the complete eradication of public education in what she sees as an evolving effort:

  • The evacuation of the public spaces which are being privatized.
  • Affordable, Reliable and Dependable (public space keys) is being undermined.
  • Public housing is closing.
  • The last domino is public education!

Ladson-Billings says, “choice is a synonym for privatization.” There is money in the public and wealthy elites do not think the public should have it. Also noted was “We are in the business of citizen making.”  We do not want to go back to normal because it was not that great and ending on a positive note, “All is not lost – people on the ground in Florida are working hard to reverse it.”

History Professor Marvin Dunn from Florida was the lunch time keynote speaker. He has been working hard to educate the children of Florida about the states’ racist past, including giving guided tours of the site of the 1923 Rosewood Massacre of an African American community.

He noted that “Racism is in our national DNA” and shared that George Washington owned 500+ slaves. When he was 11 years-old, Washington was given his first slave. Still, 500 black soldiers were with him at the crossing of the Delaware river.

Another American icon mentioned by Professor Dunn was Thomas Jefferson. The third president of the United States was 41 years-old when first having sexual relations with Sally Hemings; she was 14.

Julian Vasquez Heilig, Josh Cowen and Jon Hale held a late afternoon public discussion on Saturday. The moderator, Heilig, made the point that instead of funding one system, now many states are funding three systems with the same amount of dollars.

Josh Cowen, from Michigan State University, noted that using evidence based data since 2013, vouchers have been catastrophic. If we were using evidence informed education policy, vouchers would have died 5 years ago. Test score losses from voucher students are greater than those experienced in either Katrina or Covid-19. He also noted that 20% – 30% of children give up their voucher each year.

He added don’t believe a word coming out of Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds’ mouth. She has instituted vouchers, opposed abortion and supported child labor.

Reynolds is pushing Christian nationalism.

Jon Hale, from the University of Illinois says white architects of choice have a 70 year history. He says it was never about improving schools. The white supremacist movement sprung up after Brown versus the Board of Education in 1954.

Becky Pringle of the National Education Association and Randi Weingarten of the American Federation of Teachers joined in conversation with Diane Ravitch.

Becky Pringle stated that the attack on public education is deliberate and schools must be reclaimed as a common good noting that more than 50% of today’s students are of color.

Pringle claimed that every single social system in the country is under attack and declared forcefully that elections matter!!

Weingarten asked how many schools are not talking about what is going on in the Middle East right now because they are scared stiff? She made three important points:

  • “The tool of the autocrat is apathy.”
  • “Find the things that unite us.”
  • “Make schools fun.”

The last Keynote speaker was Georgina Perez, Texas State School Board member from 2017 until January 2023.

Georgina introduced herself as a chick from west Texas and obviously there was real steel there. She said, regarding vouchers, “It is completely asinine to take a nickel from the 95% of students and give it to the 5%.”

Being from the border area, she naturally was looking out for the border raised students. Georgina said I could see that all of the “Spanish language EL’s were not dropping out; they were being pushed out.” In order to get what she wanted for them, she needed to work with some very staunch conservatives and was quite successful at it. For example, she got ethnics studies by having a steak dinner and drinking with David Bradley, making a friend. She is a powerful example of how conservatives and liberals can work together for education.

What I Found

Several participants showed up kind of down in the mouth. However, by the end of the conference they were heading back home with new energy and resolve. Billionaires are spending vast sums of money trying to end public school because if public education goes then all of the commons will follow. Their big problem is that vast wealth and spending is not a match for the grassroots organizing that is happening throughout America.

Diane Ravitch, Carol Burris and the members of NPE have become a bulwark for democracy and public education.

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