Tag Archives: education

Charter Schools in a Racist Big Easy

8 Dec

By Thomas Ultican 12/8/2025

New Orleans was the site of the largest slave market in America. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, more than 135,000 slaves were purchased in the Big Easy. This racist legacy has survived up until today in many of its White citizens, business leaders and politicians. The book William Frantz Public School states, “By the 1920s, Orleans Parish School Board members and district administrators vehemently voiced their belief that White supremacy should guide public policy and stated their willingness to employ any means, including the use of force, to maintain inequality between the two races.” (William Frantz Page 4) After the Supreme Court’s Brown decision, long-time state senator William Rainach headed a strategy committee that condemned integration as the work of communists and created the all-White Louisiana’s Citizens’ Councils (Overturning Brown page 34). Leading up to hurricane Katrina, many White citizens continued working to maintain the ideal of White supremacy.   

This summer, Tulane University’s Education Research Alliance (ERA) created and published “The New Orleans Post-Katrina School Reforms: 20 Years of Lessons.” This report was published June 2, 2025 by authors Douglas Harris and Jamie Carroll. In an alliance with Network for Public Education (NPE), Kristen Buras PhD, who has been studying New Orleans schools since the hurricane, wrote a paper countering many of the claims made in the ERA paper.

There is reason to believe the two ERA writers are incapable of doing unbiased research in the education realm.

In 2023, Diane Ravitch disclosed that while serving as Secretary of Education, billionaire Betsy DeVos gave $10 million to establish a research center on school choice. The longtime advocate of school choice was not apt to give the money to academics likely to throw cold water on her life’s work. The grant went to Tulane University in the only American city that has no public schools. Ravitch noted, “The organization she funded is called the National Center for Research on Education Access and Choice (REACH), led by economist Douglas Harris.”

Jamie Carrol who attended an all-girls high school in Maryland was a Teach for America (TFA) teacher 2008-2010 in New Orleans. She went on to earn a Doctorate of Philosophy from the University of Texas. Today, she works as a researcher for Betsy DeVos’s REACH.

In her Paper, “The Stories Behind the Statistics: Why a Report on “Large Achievement Gains” in Charter Schools Harms New Orleans’ Black Students”, Kristen Buras shares that the amazingly pro-charter school Arnold Foundation has spent lavishly to advance charter schools in New Orleans; in 2012 $15 million for “education reform” in New Orleans, then another $25 million to be managed by the Charter School Growth fund and New Schools for New Orleans (NSNO), and 2014-2017 grants to Tulane University and ERA of more than $5 million. Buras comments, “Grants from this consistently pro-charter foundation helped launch and sustain ERA’s work.”  (Buras Page 17) 

Recently, two of America’s most active funders of charter schools awarded nearly $1 Million to REACH: the Walton Foundation and the City Fund (Buras Page 18). The Walton family, who owns Walmart, is the wealthiest family in the world and the largest private funder of charter schools in the US. The City Fund was created by billionaires Reed Hastings and John Arnold. They each put in $100 million to create an organization specifically for spurring the spread of charter schools.

Do Not be Naïve

Even before hurricane Katrina, there were efforts for the state to take over New Orleans’s public schools. Tulane University President Scott Cowen was quite influential in the development of the state of Louisiana’s education policies. In 2003, Cowen was involved in the creation of the Recovery School District (RSD) that was to take control over “failing schools” in New Orleans and reform them. After Katrina, Cowen headed the education committee of Mayor Nagin’s Bring Back New Orleans Commission. In early 2006, Cowen’s committee released a report recommending that New Orleans become the nation’s first all-charter school district (Buras Page 18). 

Scott Cowen established Tulane University’s Cowen Institute, a predecessor of ERA. Buras reported on conducting interviews with Cowen’s staff in 2009 noting:

“I asked about the institute’s mission. Like ERA, they characterized their work as neutral. One staff member shared: ‘We don’t advocate for an all-charter system because we don’t feel there’s adequate research [at this point] to indicate that charters will outperform non-charters.’ Instead, the staff portrayed the Cowen Institute as an ‘honest broker’ and ‘objective observer.’ Yet, NSNO, TFA, and other pro-charter school groups were given free office space in the same suite as the Cowen Institute.” (Buras Page 18)

To this day, ERA shares office space on the seventh floor of 1555 Poydras Street with NSNO.

Since its inception, NSNO has been all about building the all-charter school system in New Orleans. A peak at their tax records (EIN: 02-0773717) shows Neerav Kinsland appearing on the board in 2010 and earning $117,000 as chief of strategy. In 2011 he became CEO earning $146,000 and over the next two years he was paid $207,000 and $223,000 as CEO. But that wasn’t good enough. Since then, he has worked for billionaires John Arnold and Reed Hastings, served on the California Charter School Association board and is now leading the City Fund.

After Katrina, Black teachers decreased from 71% in 2005 to 49% in 2014, then rose to 56% in recent years. They were paid less than white counterparts in the same teaching and administrative positions (Buras Page 13). Experienced Black teachers were replaced by mostly White college graduates from TFA with just 5 weeks of training as an educator.

Students in the Big Easy are forced to take long bus rides often past, within walking distance neighborhood schools, to get their assigned charter school. It is not unusual for them to soon be traumatized by one of New Orleans multiple school closures. Somehow, white children in New Orleans rarely experience school closures.

Ashana Bigard shared in her book “Beyond Resilience Katrina 20” about the racist enrollment process in the all-charter school system. To enroll children, parents must use OneApp. It runs the school choice algorithm but strangely only white children get into the best schools, not even if you’re a Black family in the upper middle class do you get a seat. It is common to see White people move to the city and magically get their children into schools with 100 children on the waiting list. Ashana notes, “They didn’t even know the school existed prior to moving to the city, but racism and classism still existed heavily within the new system.” (Bigard Page 268)

Cheating Charters

The state cheated to create the conditions for developing the all-charter school system. Before Katrina, the cut point for school failure was 60 on a 200-point scale. After Katrina, through Act 35, the state legislature raised the cut point to 87.4, which was just below the state average. This maximized the number of public schools that the RSD could seize. Then, as charter schools were opened, the cut point for failure was lowered back to 60 (Buras Page 19).

The Times-Picayune reported that “data published by the Louisiana Department of Education vastly underreported the number of expulsions in charter schools.” For the 2007-2008 period, state data from a sample of 19 RSD charter schools listed only 4 students as having been expelled. The Lafayette Academy admitted to the Times-Picayune that 14 students were expelled that year; the state reported zero for Lafayette. (Buras Page 16)

In 2011-2012, 34% of schools in New Orleans had an out of school suspension (OSS) rate at or above 20%. Since 2009, charter schools have suspended students at rates sometimes double and triple the state average which was not that great to begin with. (Buras Page 15)

In 2015, SciTech Academy allowed students to take tests for one another, at home or multiple times (Buras Page 21).

Students coded as “transferred out of state” are excluded from the state’s metric. The inordinate use of the out of state code by charters seemed to be masking the true dropout figures which improved their state ratings (Buras Page 21).

At Landry-Walker, 78% of students scored “good” or “excellent” on the biology EOC and 78% on the geometry EOC. Only “good” or “excellent” scores earn points on the state’s metric. Yet, 52 of the 257 students who scored “good” or “excellent” on the EOC exam received a D or F in the class. By 2017, the Louisiana inspector general’s office had uncovered enough evidence of criminal wrongdoing at Landry-Walker that the local district attorney was alerted (Buras Page 21).

In her report, Buras says these are likely just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to charter school test cheating. Yet these inflated scores and school ratings are used by ERA to claim good academic results in New Orleans’s charter system. The willingness to ignore the cheating problem is appalling.

Tags: , , , , , ,

Crazy-Pants Makes Crazy Prediction

19 Nov

By Thomas Ultican 11/18/2025

A propaganda rag, ‘The 74’, reported, “[R]esearch from Stanford estimates learning loss over the past decade has cost our country over $90 trillion in future growth.” The article was written by Eric Hanushek, a Stanford University economist, and Christy Hovanetz, an education researcher from Jeb Bush’s pro-school choice and pro-education technology organization, ExcelinEd. Unsurprisingly, the article linked above is a paper Hanushek wrote. Crazy-pants Eric has a long history of using his own papers to support new research which is typically long on assertions and short on convincing analysis.

Last year, he claimed COVID-19 “learning-loss” could cost America $31 trillion in future economic development. Hanushek’s latest paper asserts, “The present value of future lost growth would be approximately three times current GDP (which is $30 trillion).” The justification for this new assertion is more than uncertain. The new paper refers to a model from his 2011 paper written with Ludger Woessmann­ for the Organization of Economic Co-operation and Development. That paper was long on Arithmetic with several assumptions short on common sense. In his latest paper and this article, he is claiming that a small drop in the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) scores added to what he calls “Covid learning loss” will cost America $90 trillion in future growth.

Eric Hanushek first gained notoriety with his 1981 paper, claiming “there is no relationship between expenditures and the achievement of students and that such traditional remedies as reducing class sizes or hiring better trained teachers are unlikely to improve matters.” This claim attracted conservative billionaires but had little relationship with reality. When providing solutions in ‘The 74’, Hanushek and Hovenetz contradict his 1981 paper writing:

“First, states need to invest in effective personnel. They can do this by incentivizing strong teaching and by supporting strong teaching through professional development in evidence-based practices such as use of high-quality instructional materials and assessment data to inform instruction.”

A few decades ago, a friend gifted me the book “An Incomplete Education” by Judy Jones and William Wilson. After my 1987 edition, Jones and Wilson have updated the book and republished several times. I fondly remembered their description of economists:

“Economists are fond of saying, with Thomas Carlyle, that economics is ‘the dismal science.’ As with much that economists say, this statement is half true. It is dismal.”

“Where once rulers relied on oracles to predict the future, today they use economists. Virtually every elected official, every political candidate, has a favorite economist to forecast economic benefits pinned to that official or candidate’s views.” (Incomplete Page 120)

It just so-happens that Eric Hanushek is an MIT trained economist who is good at creating reports that conform to the beliefs of conservative billionaires. His work is scientific propaganda masquerading as academic excellence.

Notices from Hanushek and Hovanetz

“No single event over the postwar period has had an impact on our educational system that comes close to that of the pandemic.” This statement from their article is hyperbole not fact.

The impact of vouchers in Washington DC and Ohio were worse than COVID-19. In his book, “The Privateers”, Josh Cowen shared that the losses due to COVID-19 were around -0.25 standard deviations while losses in DC due to vouchers were around -0.40 standard deviations and in Ohio they were as high as -0.50 standard deviations. (Privateers Page 6) However, these were not nationwide results. Unfortunately, we don’t have much information about the mumps, measles, flu and polio epidemics of the 1950s but there is every reason to believe their impact was close to that of the COVID-19 epidemic.

The authors hold up Mississippi, Tennessee and Louisiana as examples to emulate stating:

“Some states made noteworthy progress on NAEP this year: Mississippi, Louisiana and Tennessee. Each has a track record of high expectations and strong accountability.

“These states use an A–F school rating system that puts reading and math achievement front and center. They measure what matters — proficiency and growth — and they report results in a way families and educators can understand. Transparency and rigor are fueling their progress.”

The A—F school ratings system is worthless because it only measures parent income. As Diane Ravitch wrote on her blog:

“The highest rated schools have students with the highest income. The lowest rated schools have students with the lowest income.”

I wondered what Hanushek and friend were alluding to, so I graphed the average NAEP data for 4th and 8th grade reading and math since 2015 to see if it provided a clue.

NAEP Data for Louisiana, Mississippi and Tennessee

I added a bar indicating the NAEP cut scores for the 2024 NAEP designations of basic, proficient and advanced as a reference. It is well known that NAEP’s proficiency level is set well above grade level which means 70% of students not being rated proficient is not a bad score. Furthermore, writing in Forbes, Peter Greene shared, “An NCES report back in 2007 showed that while NAEP considers “basic” students not college ready, 50% of those basic students had gone on to earn a degree.”

The data graphed here indicates to me that all three states have solid public education programs. It is noteworthy that in reading their 4th graders only averaged basic but by 8th grade their average results were above basic. However, all three states are among the bottom 15 scoring states in the US and as we would expect are in the bottom 15 states in family income. What I do not see is why they are held out by Hanushek and Hovanetz as exemplars.

Concluding Remarks

The first blogger to label Eric Hanushek crazy-pants was Peter Greene. I have found Peter’s creativity worth stealing.

Let’s be clear, there is no such thing as “learning loss” involving students. This is a complete misnomer. Students may not achieve some state provided targets but they are always learning; maybe not what we want them to learn but always learning.

Eric Hanushek is a huckster for conservative billionaires. This latest claim is beyond farcical. Claiming to have knowledge of economic development in 40 years is fantasy and then tying that fantasy to NAEP testing data is bizarre. His $90 trillion claim for loss of future economic development would embarrass a carnival barker.

Hanushek is the guy who thinks education can be measured in days of learning which means that students learn in a near linear fashion. They absolutely do not but even this bogus claim would seem prescient when compared to this latest assertion.

Standardized testing only correlates with family income. To evaluate education based on this fictitious instrument is fraudulent. By extension, this makes economist Eric Hanushek a con artist.

Tags: , , , , , ,

Christian Nationalists and Texas Public Schools

26 Oct

By Thomas Ultican 10/26/2025

In September, the fifth largest school district in Texas, Fort Worth Independent School District (FWISD), adopted Bluebonnet Learning’s program of instruction. Three of the nine board trustees voted against the adoption, calling it “state-sanctioned indoctrination.”  Their concerns were well founded.

Bluebonnet uses Biblical passages in its lessons. The Texas Education Agency (TEA) contracted with Public Consulting Group in Boston to create the new curriculum. Public Consulting Group subcontracted with curriculum writers including Texas Public Policy Foundation, with radical Christian nationalist billionaire Tim Dunn serving as vice president on its board, and Hillsdale College, a rightwing Christian college and charter school organization from Michigan.  TEA also hired a conservative educational publishing company co-founded by former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee to provide content for the state’s proposed program. But so far, the state has refused to identify the authors who transformed Amplify’s program into the Bible infused Bluebonnet curriculum.

TEA has made adopting Bluebonnet attractive. FWISD estimates that implementing Bluebonnet will cost nearly $2.4 million, however, TEA is providing $60 for every enrolled student so the districts expects to receive $4 million from the state. In addition, the Amplify reading lessons required staff to create content, but Bluebonnet creates the content for them.

Many people believe the real reason FWISD adopted Bluebonnet’s lessons is an attempt to placate Mike Morath, TEA commissioner of education. One of FWISD’s schools, Leadership Academy at Forest Oak Sixth Grade, failed the Texas Starr Testing for a fifth straight year. This triggered a state law requiring Morath to take some form of action. His options include taking over the district and replacing its elected leaders.

Reverend Mary Spradlin of Pastors for Texas Children said the adoption of Bluebonnet looked like a move by the district to placate TEA Commissioner Mike Morath. She added, “If you feel like you must adopt it to avoid a takeover, we’ve already lost control.” Reed Biltz, governance chair of the League of Women Voters of Tarrant County, also opposed the adoption saying it looks like taking a bribe from TEA. Bilz noted, “The league opposes threats to basic constitutional rights.”

TEA Strips Democratic Rights in Fort Worth

Today’s (10/23/2025) Fort Worth Report announced, “Fort Worth ISD’s nine locally elected trustees are out as Texas officials stepped in Thursday after years of poor student outcomes.” Whether you believe FWISD Superintendent Karen Molinar’s claim that adopting Bluebonnet had nothing to do with a threatened state takeover or believe the opposite claims, it makes little difference now. The Report headline reads, “Texas takes control of FWISD in state’s second-largest public school intervention.”

Morath wrote, “Since the campus earned its fifth consecutive unacceptable academic rating in that year, the school’s subsequent closure has no bearing on, and does not abrogate, the compulsory action the statute requires the commissioner to take.” The commissioner was not required to get rid of the elected school board; that was his choice.

This is the same reason that the Houston ISD was taken over. One school in a high poverty community did not reach the designated cut scores on Texas Starr testing five years in a row.

Like all standardized testing, the Starr results only correlate strongly with family wealth. In FWISD, 85% of the students are either Black or Hispanic with 83% listed as economically disadvantaged. In Texas, this kind of data means a community’s democratic right to elect their school leaders will likely be stripped. Now the state’s largest and fifth largest school districts, which are in heavily democratic communities, have been taken over by the Christian nationalist running TEA.

Besides creating Bluebonnet, Texas political leaders are taking other measures to force Christianity into public schools. New state laws require displaying the Protestant version of the Ten Commandments in all classrooms. Gov. Greg Abbott also signed legislation in June that allows districts to offer a daily, voluntary period of time to pray and read the Bible or other religious texts. A 2023 law allows districts to hire chaplains as counselors.

Why has driving Protestantism into public schools become a state agenda?

Billionaire Dollars Driving Christian Nationalism

A year ago, Propublica published “A Pair of Billionaire Preachers Built the Most Powerful Political Machine in Texas. That’s Just the Start.” The article begins by telling the story of former Texas state representative Glenn Rogers. It would be hard to imagine a more conservative legislator, but he got crosswise with Billionaire oilmen and hardcore Christian nationalists Tim Dunn and Farris Wilks. Rogers believes two of his votes caused the problem. He voted against vouchers and voted to impeach Attorney General Ken Paxton, one of their most powerful allies.

In 2023, Hours before the Texas House overwhelmingly voted to impeach Ken Paxton in May, a well-funded supporter of the attorney general issued a threat to his fellow Republicans. A vote to impeach Paxton, Jonathan Stickland wrote on Twitter, “is a decision to have a primary.”

Stickland was the leader of Defend Texas Liberty, a political action committee that has donated millions of dollars to far-right candidates in the state. It is a key part of the constellation of political campaigns, institutions and dark-money groups that West Texas oil tycoons, Tim Dunn and Farris Wilks, have lavishly financed in their long-term crusade to push Texas to the extreme right. KSAT in San Antonio claims, “Over the past 20 years, Dunn and the Wilks brothers have sunk nearly $100 million into a sprawling mix of nonprofits, political campaigns, think tanks, fundraising committees and websites to advance their far-right religious, economic and anti-LGBTQ+ views.”

In October 2023, the Texas Tribune wrote, “Nick Fuentes is just the latest white supremacist embraced by Defend Texas Liberty.” The meeting between Defend Texas Liberty’s Jonathan Strickland and the pro-Nazi Fuentes caused such a backlash that Strickland was removed from his post. The political foes of Dunn and Wilks believed this issue would finally undermine their political juggernaut.

Instead, in 2024, Dunn and Wilks materialized large victories everywhere and grew stronger than ever. They defeated long time political foes and set their allies up to take over the state Legislature. According to KSAT, they left no doubt “as to who is winning a vicious civil war to control the state party.”

Too Much Money in Too Few Hands

This year, Texas Republicans finally forced vouchers onto a public that did not want them. In addition to the Christian nationalist money, Jeff Yass, the richest man in Pennsylvania, spent heavily to make vouchers a reality in Texas. Yass is a Jewish boy from the Bronx who co-founded Susquehanna, now a giant options trading and market making company. In the last year, according to Forbes, his net value has more than doubled from $27.6 billion to $59 billion.

Yass and his wife believe in school choice and that is their right. However, their unbelievably large fortune makes their opinion so much more important than those of the rest of us. It is the same with politics in Texas. Dunn and Wilks have such large fortunes they swamp the public’s will. Their lavish spending for Christian nationalism and Jesus in politics is overwhelming the majority of Texans.

This article provides one more piece of evidence making it clear something must be done about the growing menace of oligarchs in America. We need some sort of redistribution of assets in the United States and much higher taxes on the wealthy. The state of economic inequity is a major outcome of the Reagan revolution and it is destroying our democracy.

Tags: , , , , , , ,

Oakland Public Education Fund Questioned

23 Aug

By Thomas Ultican 8/23/2025

Recently the Oakland Public Education Fund (OPEF) posted, “OUSD Board of Education Renews Long-standing Partnership with The Ed Fund.” OUSD is the Oakland Unified School District and “The Ed Fund” is the latest of many names used to identify OPEF. A quick look at OPEF’s tax forms (TIN: 43-2014630) reveals that they have assets of about $25 million and a yearly income of more than $15 million. The question becomes who is this wealthy group and do their purposes include something more than just good education?

OPEF, formed in 2003 and was originally called “Oakland Autonomous Small Schools Foundation Inc.” EdWeek reported that in 2000 and 2003 the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation provided two grants totaling more than $25 million some of which was designated for small school incubators. It seems likely some of this money was used as seed money to establish OPEF.

The founding executive director of OPEF was Jonathan Klein, a 1997 Yale graduate who became a Teach for America (TFA) fifth grade teacher in the Compton Unified School District. After coming to Oakland in addition to founding OPEF, he went on to become CEO of GO Public Schools, became Bay Area executive director of TFA and chief program officer at the T. Gary and Kathleen Rogers Foundation. In 2013, he was named Change Agent of the year by New Schools Venture Fund. In other words, he is an education profiteer closely associated with enemies of public schools.

According to the OPEF web-page, the organization relaunched as the Oakland Schools Foundation in 2012 and then relaunched again in 2014 as the Oakland Public Education Fund. Today they refer to themselves as the “The Ed Fund.” In 2016, they put in motion a corporate partnership with Salesforce which provided $2.5 million for middle school computer science and math. This raises concerns that “The Ed Fund” is inappropriately employing wealth to drive public school curriculum using other than democratic means.

Billionaires Finance OPEF

A change in the way data was reported appeared in the OPEF tax forms for 2024. Previously, their reporting on the contributor’s page simply stated “RESTRICTED.” The new report still hides the contributor’s names but provides the amounts given by seven individuals.

In addition to the contributors not listed above, the T. Gary and Kathleen Rogers Foundation have granted OPEF a total of $785,833 (IN: 65-1202020), the East Bay Community Foundation contributed $557,760 (IN: 94-6070996) and the Silicon Valley Community Fund provided a whopping $8,349,085 (IN: 20-5205488). The Silicon Valley Community Fund is a dark money site where extremely wealthy people can provide money without their name being attached. It is worth noting that the T. Gary and Kathleen Rogers Foundation has granted the East Bay Community Foundation $6,165,000 since its founding in 2003.

Since 2014, OPEF has averaged giving more than $5 million a year to the Oakland Unified School District for a total of $51,885,477. However, their other spending undermines public education and promotes privatization. Educate78 has received significant support from both the Hastings Fund and the City Fund, known enemies of the public school system. GO Public Schools has been a consistent advocate for expanding the charter school movement. TFA has foisted unqualified teachers with 5 weeks of training on classrooms throughout America. The New Teachers Center is a Bill Gates developed center in Santa Cruz.

Anyone working in a public school knows that charter schools directly compete with and undermine public schools.

Many of the foundations that OPEF is supporting are supporters of school privatization or they just make us ask why. For example, why has OPEF sent The San Francisco Foundation over $2.5 million? Why are they sending money to obviously anti-public schools groups like the T. Gary and Kathleen Rogers Foundation, the Charles and Helen Schwab Foundation or the David and Lucille Packard Foundation?

What is the true purpose of the Oakland Public Education Fund? Do the billionaires who are financing it want to control OUSD and promote privatization or is this true philanthropy. It is hard to know but rich people giving away money based on the goodness of the hearts seems like a rare event. 

The T. Gary and Kathleen Rogers Foundation

T. (Thomas) Gary Rogers was the first non-family member to become chairman of the board at Levi Strauss. Before Levi Strauss, he and business partner Rich Cronk purchased Dreyer’s Grand Ice Cream. T. Gary was the CEO while he and Cronk were the principal shareholder for almost 30 years. They sold to Nestlé in 2002. T. Gary became chairman of the board of directors of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco and was once Chairman of Safeway Inc. This boy from Stockton became a highly regarded and respected businessman.

T. Gary and his wife founded the T. Gary and Kathleen Rogers Foundation in 2003. Looking through their tax filings, it seems there are two distinct periods. Period one is from the foundations start to the death of T. Gary Rogers on May 2, 2017.

In 2003, the Rogers family put $35 million in to start the foundation and the next year they put in another $13.25 million which put the total assets at $52 million. That included some return on investment.

The only giving cited, which started in 2006, was to an organization that became the East Bay Community Foundation. In 2010, they made their first two education related grants to Lighthouse Charter Schools for a total of $840,000. In 2011, in addition to giving to Lighthouse they started granting $50,000 a year to the Oakland Schools Foundation which was later renamed OPEF. By 2017, the Rogers Family Foundation had grown to $78 million in assets.  

Period two began after T. Gary died.

From the start, T. Gary’s son Brian has been significantly involved in leading the Foundation. In 2019, he dramatically increased the number of grants given and the money spent. He upped spending to support pro-science of reading organizations and individual charter organizations. He put money into organizations working to privatized public education and advance the charter industry.

The foundations 2022 Tax Form showed the total assets dropping to $55,367,184. However, this seems to be part of a plan. In 2020, Brian posted to the foundations web page:

“It is therefore with bittersweet emotions that we share with our grantees, partners, and fellow community organizations our planned spend down of the T. Gary and Kathleen Rogers Family Foundation. Within the next five years, we anticipate sunsetting our Oakland education grantmaking and operations.”

That $55 million left in 2022 still has the potential to reek a lot of havoc.

Conclusion

OPEF is a billionaire funded-organization that is exerting undo control on Oakland public schools. Some of their spending is laudable like their generous giving to OUSD. However, so much money in the control of a few not well-known individuals undermines the democratic process. I cannot help wondering if some of the odd decisions previous superintendent, Kyla Johnson-Trammell, made were coerced by the money this organization wielded.    

Tags: , , , ,

Bizarre WAPO Opinion Piece by Hanushek and Raymond

18 Jun

By Thomas Ultican 6/17/2025

It was “déjà vu all over again” when Eric Hanushek and his wife Macke Raymond shared their views in the Washington Post. They cited Michelle Rhee and Mike Miles as exemplary education leaders, merit pay as good education policy and turned to A Nation at Risk for support. Governor Abbott took over Houston’s schools and installed Miles as superintendent but here Hanushek and Raymond were referencing his long ago stint in Dallas.

I am no longer a reader of the Washington Post. When Bezos decided his paper would not endorse a candidate for president, I cancelled my subscription. However, a friend felt I needed to see this article and sent me a copy.

Billionaires like Bezos are destroying America and all of its venerable institutions. Hanushek and Raymond are Stanford based billionaire tools.

While working on her PhD in Political Science at the University of Rochester, Macky fell in love with her much older professor, Eric Hanushek, and eventually married him.

Today, Raymond is the director of CREEDO. Her 2015 Hoover Institute Fellow’s profile says in part, “In partnership with the Walton Family Foundation and Pearson Learning Systems, Raymond is leading a national study of the effectiveness of public charter schools.” 

Are the billionaires guarding the hen house?

Rhee and Miles

The Hanushek and Raymond opinion piece states:

“In 2009, under the leadership of then-Chancellor Michelle Rhee, Washington implemented the IMPACT program — a revamped teacher evaluation system that is linked directly to classroom effectiveness and that provides large increases in base salaries for the most effective teachers and dismissal for the least effective. This program has shown that focusing on student learning is rewarded with improved student performance, and that student-focused incentives work.”

This is a totally bunkum statement and is followed by another world of bunkum claim:

“Under the leadership of then-Superintendent Mike Miles, Dallas in 2015 switched to a salary system based on a sophisticated evaluation of teacher effectiveness. It then used this system to provide performance-based bonuses to teachers who would agree to go to the lowest-performing schools in the district. Two things happened: First, the best teachers responded to the incentives and were willing to move to the poorest-performing schools. Second, within two years, these schools jumped up to the district average.”

The linked evidence in the Dallas claim is to an Education Next article written by Hanushek and friends. In it, he claimed, “In the four years after Dallas adopted new performance-based teacher evaluation and compensation systems, student performance on standardized tests improved by 16 percent of a standard deviation in math and 6 percent in reading, while scores for a comparison group of similar Texas schools remained flat.”

Sixteen percent of a standard deviation of growth in math after 4 years sounds weak and 6% of a standard deviation growth in reading does not seem much more the noise in the data.

Hanushek gained notoriety with his 1981 paper, claiming “there is no relationship between expenditures and the achievement of students and that such traditional remedies as reducing class sizes or hiring better trained teachers are unlikely to improve matters.” This played well with billionaires from the Walton family but had no relationship with reality. The history of crazy pants unsupported statements like this have long caused me to seek verification for whatever he says.

Hanushek and Raymond claim that both Dallas and Washington DC saw comparatively superior testing outcomes than other urban areas in the US. The evidence they provide is a link to the NAEP Trial Urban District Assessment (tuda). I graphed 4th and 8th grade math tuda data between 2009 and 2024 for the Large City composite, Dallas, DC, Baltimore and San Diego. Nothing substantive popped out in my graphs.

I decided to subtract the 4th grade scores from the 8th grade scores to get a sense of how the students were progressing. The results graphed below stunned me with their clarity. Baltimore, which traditionally has low scores, San Diego, which traditionally scores well and the Large City composite had fairly consistent increases of about 40 points. Dallas and DC both fell below a 30 points increase.

Billionaires Take Over

Michelle Rhee came out of Teach for America (TFA) where she taught for three years in a Baltimore elementary school. She returned to New York, TFA and Wendy Kopp to help found the New Teachers Project which is now known as TNTP. New York Chancellor of Public Schools, Joe Klein, who worked for multi-billionaire Mayor Michael Bloomberg, recommended the 37-year-old Rhee to be Washington DC’s new superintendent.

During Rhee’s three year reign of terror, she replaced half of DC’s teachers and a third of its principals. She was consumed with raising test scores and scorned those who did not share her devotion to standardized testing. Her relentless pressure to raise test scores brought some early gains and produced a major cheating scandal.

DC principal, Adell Cothorne, lost her job for insisting upon increased test security when she learned that teachers were violating testing protocols. I had lunch with Adell at the 2015 NPE conference in Chicago. She struck me as a proud Black woman with poise, immense courage and profound character.

After Rhee left DC schools, she started StudentsFirst and led a national crusade to abolish teacher tenure and promote school choice. Billionaires and their friends provided her organization with millions of dollars. (Reign of Error Pages 145-155)

Before 2012, Dallas school board elections were very low key affairs. Two of the three incumbent school board trustees up for reelection ran unopposed in 2011.

Writing for In These Times, George Joseph explained the political change, “But since the beginning of 2012, hundreds of thousands of Super PAC dollars from Dallas’ richest neighborhoods began flowing into nearly all of the district’s school board elections.” 

The billionaires contributing included Ross Perot, Ray Hunt and Justice Thomas’s buddy Harlan Crow.

Once the new 2012 board was seated, it fired Superintendent Michael Hinojosa and replaced him with Mike Miles, a graduate of billionaire Eli Broad’s Superintendents Academy.

The article “Dallas Chamber of Commerce Disrupts Dallas Schools” summarized Miles three year tenure:

“Miles’s reforms included a new principal evaluation process which led to large turnover. He also instituted a merit pay system for teachers and hired Charles Glover a 29-year-old administrator of the Dallas TFA branch to be Chief Talent Officer in DISD. After just under three years, he had managed to alienate the black and Hispanic communities as well as many experienced teachers and principals.”

Like Michelle Rhee, he also believed in standardized test based accountability and merit pay.

Concluding Information

Reporting for NPR on the 35th anniversary of A Nation at Risk, Ana Kamenetz discovered, “They started out already alarmed by what they believed was a decline in education, and looked for facts to fit that narrative.”

A decade before Ana’s report, Florida education professor, James Guthrie, noted, “They cooked the books to get what they wanted.”

In 1990, Sandia engineers set out to add weight to A Nation at Risk. They disaggregated the data by race and sex and were surprise to find that every group advanced during the 1963 to 1980 period. The growing numbers of SAT test takers was driven by poor, minority and female students, causing the test averages to drop.

A Nation at Risk was a fraudulent paper and America’s students were actually healthy and doing well, which means public schools were healthy and doing well.

Merit pay is a Taylorist scheme that appeals to many American business leaders, but has a long history of employee dissatisfaction and output quality issues. Researchers at Vanderbilt University studied merit pay for teachers and found no significant gains in testing data and in New York researchers documented negative results.

Unfortunately, billionaires own the media and publish opinion pieces by hired frauds like Hanushek and Raymond.

Tags: , , , ,

The South’s Long War on Black Literacy

14 Apr

By Thomas Ultican 4/14/2025

Derek Black’s masterpiece of research, Dangerous Learning, reveals the centuries of struggle for Black Americans to become educated. When I arrived at the Network for Public Education conference April 4, I ran into Professor Black (University of South Carolina Law School) and mentioned to him I almost finished reading his book on the airplane. He absurdly wanted to know how boring I found it. The truth is that this beautifully written book is extremely engaging.

Denmark Vesey

Growing up in Idaho, my knowledge of American slavery is quite lacking. I had never heard of Denmark Vesey, who played a major role in the suppression of education for slaves.

Joseph Vesey was a slave trader who brought 390 enslaved people including Demark to St. Thomas and Saint-Domingue (now known as Haiti) in 1781. Joseph’s slave ship brings the first record of the approximately 14-year-old Denmark. He was sold in Haiti along with the other 390 people but it seems he feigned epilepsy and Joseph was forced to take him back. Soon after, Denmark became Captain Vesey’s trusted assistant.

Black tells this story in about 20 pages in the book. I will cut it down a little.

Denmark learned to read and in 1799 he won the lottery ($1500). He paid Joseph $600 for his freedom and through various means; Denmark became highly educated. He was also inspired by the slave revolution in Haiti. Denmark became an authority on the Bible being known in the community as “a man of the book”. (Page 16) He taught classes at the African Church which became the famous African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church also known as the AME Church. Denmark was obsessed with learning and read widely including classical literature.

In the Old Testament, Vesey found the story of the Israelites’ path from slavery. He taught his friends how the children of Israel were delivered from bondage in Egypt. Professor Black explains:

“In it [the Old Testament], Vesey found a God who stood on the side of the oppressed, not the oppressor, and who intervened in the world not to reinforce slavery but to free the Israelites from it. God consistently assured the Israelites that He would deliver their enemies into their hands if they would follow His will. And following His will did not mean turning the other cheek, fleeing from conflict, or suffering in silence. It often meant smiting those who stood against them, including women and children.”   (Page 20)

In 1822, Vesey having been deeply and fundamentally changed by his literacy planned a slave rebellion. He chose July 14th for the liberation of Black people in Charleston.  The plan was workable but an enslaved man came forward on May 30th claiming he had been recruited to participate in a slave revolt. After that, Vesey’s plans fell apart and he along with his co-conspirators were put to death. Black noted, “When Frederick Douglass implored crowds of Black men to join the Union Army in 1863, he offered a simple message: ‘Remember Denmark Vesey of Charleston.’” (Page 35)

Unfortunately, it was remembering Denmark Vesey that pushed southerners into an all out suppression of Black literacy that lasted well into the twentieth century.

Suppressing Education

The last open debate on slavery in the South was conducted by the Virginia legislature in 1832. William M. Rivas, a lawyer and member of a wealthy colonial family claimed that elite planters had “held the state’s democratic process in a death grip for decades.” (Page 107) He said they had intentionally limited education not just for slaves but for poor and middle-class White people as well.

While the North was engaged in developing a state supported public education system, the South, under the influence of wealthy elites, absolutely opposed state funding for education.

It was a shock for me to discover that Thomas Jefferson was a white supremacist. In Notes on the State of Virginia he wrote that Black people were “inferior to whites in the endowments of both of body and mind.” (Page 65) He said that this reality posed a powerful obstacle to emancipation.

After the 1832 debate, censorship and anti-literacy in the South took on a life of their own. The South became more and more isolated and intolerant.

For the slaves, seeking literacy was hidden and secretive. Finding the time to study was difficult and a flickering candle could draw attention and suspicion. It is reported that enslaved people would study in caves or in holes they created in the woods.

“In Mississippi, people told of holes large enough to accommodate a group. They called them ‘pit schools.’” (Page 188)

After the Civil War, former slaves were able to openly attend school and the Reconstruction Act of 1867 attempted to force states to pay for it. The Act created three requirements for states to be readmitted to the Union: extend the vote to black men, ratify the 14th Amendment and guarantee a republican form of government. Black noted, “A republican form of government meant, among other things, ensuring public education.” (Page 244)

However the citizens of the south were not going to accept Black people having equal rights. Terrorist groups attacked schools and teachers. The more Union troops were drawn down, the greater the violence became.

1874 Harper’s Political Cartoon by Thomas Nast

During Reconstruction, 631 attacks on black schools have been documented. White citizens of Tennessee under the leadership of the KKK destroyed 76 Black schools. (Page 261)

In order to secure victory in the 1877 Presidential race, Rutherford B. Hayes agreed to a compromise between southern Democrats and pro-business Republicans to end Reconstruction. Soon after, southern states started rewriting the required constitutions they needed to rejoin the Union. There was a two pronged agenda: “disenfranchise Black voters, and segregate and underfund Black education.” (Page 168) Jim Crow laws became enshrined in the new southern state constitutions.

In 1896, the Plessy v. Ferguson case held up the bogus concept of separate but equal facilities. That same year saw a new Louisiana law that took Black male voter registration from 95.6% of the population to 1.1% by 1904. In 1902, Nicolas Bauer, a man that would become superintendent of public schools in New Orleans, wrote:

“I realize from my limited observation that to teach the negro (sic) is a different problem. His natural ability is of a low character and it is possible to bring him to a certain level beyond which it is impossible to carry him. That point is reached in the fifth grade of our schools.”

The lack of justice and abundance of ignorance is what the Supreme Court tried to rectify with Brown v. Board of Education.

The fact is these two centuries of hostility toward educating all American citizens is still causing harm. Derek Black’s Dangerous Learning is a must read for anyone that cares about justice.

Tags: , , , , , , , ,

NPE2025 Columbus Impressions

8 Apr

By Thomas Ultican 4/8/2025

Last weekend, it was a rainy sad environment greeting the 2025 Network for Public Education (NPE) conference but inside the Columbus Hyatt it was blue-skies. When I left Ohio Monday morning, the local environment matched the hope and determination generated for three days.

The first conference event was a Friday evening session with Diane Ravitch and Professor Josh Cowen discussing vouchers. They made three things abundantly clear. As Cowen noted, “By every standard of the policy debate, vouchers have failed.” They always get defeated by voters at the poles and have become welfare for the wealthy. Funding for vouchers is wrecking state budgets.

As people were exiting the room, I got Diane and Pastor Charles Foster to pose for a picture. This created a wonderful example of tolerance and communication needed today. Ravitch is a Jew from New York City, Charles is a devout Baptist from Texas and I am a Nichiren Buddhist from California; yet we are all three genuine friends.

Charles and Diane

Day 2, Saturday

It was a marathon of sharing. At 8 AM, participants gathered in a large room for breakfast and speeches. Ravitch shared that “The Department of Education was not created to raise test scores but to raise equity.” She noted that America is a diverse country and that we must live with diversity and not deny it.

Jesse Piper, an NPE board member from rural Missouri, passionately ended the breakfast meeting claiming that when you start defunding schools, the community goes next. Jesse used the demise of her on small town as an example. Piper also stated, “Christian nationalism is teaching women to be submissive to their husbands and husbands to be submissive to their bosses.” She concluded by asserting to this large room full of public school educators, “You’re not indoctrinating students, that is what religious and private schools do.”

Jesse Piper

From there we broke into sessions in several rooms. Unfortunately, wonderful sessions were occurring at the same time making it hard to pick which one to attend. I presented on Science of Reading (SoR) in the first breakout presentations of the day. Nancy Bailey and Elena Aydarova PhD joined in the sharing. We had a large audience and people kindly told us they liked the presentations. (I am willing to share the Power Point file I used.)

Nancy Bailey

After lunch and a wonderful speech by John H. Jackson president of the Schott Foundation, I went to learn about Lifewise. I had no idea how fast that organization is growing. It was founded in 2018 in Ohio. There are now organizations in 26 states including California. Lifewise promotes RTRI (Release Time for Religious Instruction). Schools that participate must release children during the school day for a bus trip to the Lifewise facility where they learn a benighted form of Christianity based on the ancient Nicene Creed.

There are two types of states that authorize Lifewise, may-states and shall-states. Ohio just became a shall-state that mandates schools to participate if it is offered.

Lifewise wants kids younger than 14 because they are more successfully indoctrinated. When the kids come back to class, they show their presents and tell stories of ice cream parties. Kids that are at Lifewise often miss out on important learning. An Ohio science teacher showed pictures of his kids getting ready for the total eclipse that the Lifewise students missed.

That evening, we enjoyed a speech by the 2022 national teacher of the year, Kurt Russell. Russell says he no longer thinks of public education as important. Rather because it is the foundation of our democracy, it is vital, it is essential and “it is bigger than that; it is life.” Usually I am not impressed by someone being named teacher year whether it is of the school, district, county, state or the country. In this instance, he seemed totally deserving of the accolade.

Kurt Russell

Day 3, Sunday

I was really moved by the New Orleans presentation. We heard from a former charter school student and a brilliant mom. They made it clear that control is the byword in the district’s charter schools. The young man, a former charter school student, described a hair-raising ordeal which sounded like child abuse designed to keep the black community in its place.

Last year, when a charter school failed the superintendent replaced it with the first New Orleans public school since 2017. She was fired, but that is what the mom speaking to us claimed parents want. She said they desire that every time a charter school fails it is replaced by a more stable public school. Charter schools have become a revolving door with a large percentage of schools going out of business every year. Unfortunately, those in power want to maintain their portfolio model school district that does not include public schools.

She also said that charters in New Orleans are being sued regularly for some of their practices with children. However, there is almost no reporting about the suits because the settlements always include a non-disclosure agreement (NDA). She told the story of asking a KIPP administrator how many NDA’s they had created. He said none but when she retorted that she was in court just the week before and saw a KIPP NDA created, he backed off and promised to get back to her. She is not holding her breath.

The New Orleans Panel

The brunch time speaker was state representative from Texas, Gina Hinojosa, who has been in an all out battle with Texas Governor Greg Abbott to stop his universal voucher scheme. She says private equity is the plan that is causing billionaires Dunn, Wilks, Yass, Musk and others to finance vouchers in Texas. Hinajosa stresses that the most sinister aspect of the voucher plan is profiting through finance. She reports that a Texas Catholic Credit Union has already been established.

Gina Hinohosa

The last event on Sunday afternoon was special. American Federation of Teachers President, Randi Weingarten, presented us with a fiery speech when she introduced the final keynote speaker of the conference, Governor Tim Waltz of Minnesota.

Waltz was definitely not a disappointment. He made many vintage Waltz type statements:

“I know in this room I’m preaching to the choir. The choir needs to sing louder.”

“Some people say ‘I’m just not into politics.’ Well too damn bad, politics is into you.”

“We should not call them oligarchs, we should call them what they are greedy bastards.”

He was proud of the fact of being cited as the least wealthy person ever to run for Vice-President of the United States.

Waltz asserted that the middle class was built by public education and labor unions. As for what we are going through now, he speculates that it will get worse; so be ready for it.

Governor Waltz surprised us by staying in the room and taking picture with hundreds of us.

Tom and Tim

My impression was that this was the best NPE event to date. The breakout sessions that I attended were amazing and I did not hear of any disappointments. The keynote speakers were excellent and finishing with Governor Waltz was the cherry on top.

Tags: , , , , ,

Teach Truth

23 Feb

By Thomas Ultican 2/23/2021

In “Teach Truth: The Struggle for Antiracist Education,” Author Jesse Hagopian takes his readers inside the struggle and shares Black culture. At the 2018 Indianapolis Network for Public Education conference, Journey for Justice Chairman, Jitu Brown, introduced Jesse as “a freedom fighter who happens to be a teacher.” What I did not understand then is that he also happens to be man who can write.  This book is exceptional.

Jesse defines two concepts that he uses throughout the book: uncritical race theory and truthcrime law.

He states, “Uncritical race theory denies that racism exists at all, or maintains that racism primarily victimizes white people, or rejects any systemic or institutional analysis in favor of an inter personal explanation that understands racism as only sporadic and merely the product of individual bias.” (Page 7)

He explains:

“A truthcrime is any act of honest pedagogy in a jurisdiction where truthful teaching has been outlawed. Truthcrime is enforced disremembering. A truthcrime law, then, is one that makes lying to children obligatory and effectively renders honest educators as truthcriminals.” (Page 16)

Interesting Take on CRT

A goofball white guy from Seattle, Washington became famous by attacking critical race theory (CRT) in a completely dishonest way. Unfortunately, right-wing billionaire money trumpeted his assertions. At a time when the vast majority of America’s teachers had never heard of CRT, he claimed that public schools were indoctrinating students with CRT. For a short period of time, CRT became the racist rights number one anti-public schools slogan and a Republican campaign tool.

CRT emerged amongst scholars and lawyers in the late 1970s and early 80s as a way to understand the forces upon Black citizens after Brown v. Board of Education in 1955, The Civil Right act of 1964 and the Voting Rights act of 1965. It was pretty much the purview of graduate school seminars. (Page 6)

At a June, 2022 “Road to Majority Policy Conference” in Nashville, Tennessee, Texas Senator Ted Cruz declared, “Let me tell you right now, critical race theory is bigoted, it is a lie, and it is every bit as racist as the Klansmen in white sheets.” Hagopian observed, “The irony here is profound; while Cruz compares those who teach CRT to the KKK, his own attack on antiracist education aligns with one of the Klan’s primary objectives: thwarting Black education and antiracist pedagogy—which they have done ferociously throughout US history.” (Page 40)

Hagopian discusses why feckless Democrats did not effectively respond to the GOP’s CRT attacks. He gives the example of Democrat Terry McAuliffe’s race for the Virginia Governorship against Glenn Youngkin. When Youngkin made a full throated attack on CRT calling it “toxic” and “flagrant racism, plain and simple” that is a “poisonous left-wing doctrine,” McAuliffe replied, “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.” This response might have cost him the race. (Page 150)

Why was McAuliffe’s answer so weak in this contest between two multimillionaire white men? Hagopian think he knows. He says, “Because many liberal politicians don’t actually support CRT, they are placed in a difficult spot during elections when Republicans attack it.” Although opposing bigotry, they do not want to support a movement that could upset their corporate sponsors. (Page 150)

Diane Ravitch wondered why so many people were silent in the face of a coordinated effort to teach inaccurate history? She wrote:

“Where was Bill Gates? Although right-wing nuts attacked Bill Gates for spreading CRT, Gates said nothing to defend schools and teachers against the attacks on them. He is not known for shyness. He uses his platform to declare his views on every manner of subject. Why the silence about teaching the nation’s history with adherence to the truth? Why no support for courageous teachers who stand up for honesty in the curriculum?” (Page 153)

Hagopian concludes, “Their lack of gusto for racial, economic, and social justice stems instead from the fact that, as with the GOP, they are predominantly funded by white billionaires who see no advantage to teaching students about systematic racism or capitalist exploitation.” (Page 156)

President Trump invokes maximum hyperbole with his unenlightened view of CRT:

“Getting critical race theory out of our schools in not just a matter of values, it’s also a matter of national survival. We have no choice, the fate of any nation ultimately depends upon the willingness of its citizens to lay down—and they must do this—lay down their very lives to defend their country” (Page 79)

Billionaire Dollars Push the Lie

Jesse began his career as a teacher at Hendley Elementary School in South Washington DC. The school’s neighborhood had a dearth of grocery stores and jobs. Hendley had a completely segregated 100% African American student population. It was 2001 and that September, the World Trade Center attack was coincident with him becoming an educator.  (Page 223)

He tells the story of his first year teaching noting seeing a police officer jack-up a fifth grade boy against a wall; the boys feet were dangling. The student was accused of throw paper in class. Jesse also describes a whole in the middle of the classroom chalkboard that his students called a bullet hole.

A poster session on US history revealed another hole in the classroom. The posters were all hung on a Friday and that weekend it rained. Upon arriving at school on Monday morning, Jesse found the floor flooded and the posters soaked. After the second classroom flooding, he wised-up and put a large trash bin below the hole in the roof. His work orders to fix the roof were never filled.

Hagopian observes, “I received a graduate degree in education theory that year by witnessing the cynicism of our nation’s ability to mobilize armies to bomb people on the other side of the world while refusing to find the money to fix the hole in the ceiling of my classroom or properly care for these children in the shadow of the White House.” (Page 224)

The attack on teaching truth in America’s classrooms is being financed by right-wing billionaires. People like Julie Fancelli, an heir of the Publix grocery fortune, former secretary of public education, Betsy DeVos, oil magnate, Charles Koch, the secretive electronics billionaire, Barre Seid, and so many more.

Jesse notes that:

“Maintaining an economic system such as ours, where eighty-one billionaires have more wealth than the bottom half of all people on Earth, doesn’t just happen by accident. It takes careful investment in institutions that shape ideas, and those investments see the biggest returns in the mass media and the system of schooling.” (Page 157)

A Surprise to Me

I was aware that homosexuality was illegal in America until the 1970s and that the legal turning point came in 1969 at the Stonewall Inn. This gay bar in Greenwich Village was the site of a gay uprising when police raided the bar. Today’s annual pride festivals originate from and celebrate the Stonewall riot.

What I did not know until reading Teach Truth is that the rebellion was led by Marsha P. Johnson and a host of Black and Brown queer people. (Page 97-98)

I highly recommend reading this book. It is full of surprises like this one.

Tags: , , , , , , ,

FCMAT Attacks Weed Elementary

28 Jan

By Thomas Ultican 1/28/2025

In 1992, California inaugurated the Fiscal Crisis Management Assist Team (FCMAT) in the aftermath of the Richmond School District bankruptcy. It was set up as a quasi-autonomous non-governmental organization headquartered in Bakersfield. Unfortunately, from the beginning, FCMAT functioned as a tool of the politically connected and never provided actual assistance to districts dealing with financial matters. FCMAT, which is pronounced fick-mat, recently started attacking the Weed Union Elementary School District, a single-school district, based on little more than feelings and rumors.

Weed Elementary School is in Weed, California on the foothills of Mount Shasta, one of the twelve 14,000+ feet high mountains in California. Weed is 230 miles north of Sacramento along interstate-5 in Siskiyou County. Abner Weed came to the county in 1889 and became a business and political success. Weed founded the Weed lumber company and at one time his sawmills were the largest producers in the world. The town he built and its schools bear his name.

Weed California Entrance

Today, this small town of 2,900 people is not wealthy. The Weed Elementary school accountability report card shows 78% of its students are socioeconomically disadvantaged. This is the target of FCMAT’s warrantless attack.

Attack Background

Over the Thanksgiving break in 2019, there was some sort of flood at Weed Elementary School. The district took measures to clean up the district office, a conference room, two special day classrooms and the library. They believed that this was all that was required.

Soon after, the superintendent resigned and the district hired Jon Ray for the job in April, 2020. When Ray entered the school, he smelled an odder reminiscent of the mold infestation at a school where he previously worked. Ray hired a vendor to investigate and they found significant mold hidden in the walls.

Weed Elementary School

It seems that there was some bad blood between the Siskiyou County Office of Education and Jon Ray at Weed Union Elementary School District. In an interview, Ray voiced the opinion that most of those bad feelings were generated by his decision to open school for in person classes in August, 2020.

When the county superintendent received anonymous allegations of possible fraud, misappropriation of funds or other illegal fiscal practices at the Weed Union Elementary School District, he decided to call in FCMAT at a cost of $250,000. This is probably a decision he now regrets.

As Superintendent Ray was informed, FCMAT was not here to help. They were there to find issues and concluded in their report, “Based on the findings in this report, there is sufficient evidence to demonstrate that fraud, misappropriation of funds and/or assets, or other illegal fiscal practices may have occurred specific to bid splitting and other areas reviewed.”  (Report Page 28)

However, Mr. Ray’s response to FCMAT’s report is more convincing than the report. Most of the criticism of Weed Elementary was cited as feelings. For example, FCMAT stated:

“The district’s decision to use construction management multiprime (CMMP) as its construction method seemed questionable to both FCMAT and the county superintendent. … To the county superintendent and FCMAT, it seemed the district was reacting to issues as they arose rather than following a comprehensive plan”. (Report Page 6)

Superintendent Jon Ray responded:

“These comments are exemplary of the type of impressions and feelings that permeate the entire Report. Since FCMAT is claiming that its evidence supports grave accusations like fraud and misappropriation, it is shocking to find so many instances where the basis for these charges is solely the way it ‘seemed’ to FCMAT.” (Response Page 3)

Once you go thru the FCMAT report and all of its feelings you come to one substantive charge, bid splitting. The California Department of Education web site definition of bid splitting states:

“Bid splitting is intentionally dividing purchasing to avoid getting price quotes or going out to bid using a more formal procurement method. Per Public Contract Code 20116, It shall be unlawful to split or separate into smaller work orders or projects any work, project, service, or purchase for the purpose of evading the provisions of this article requiring contracting after competitive bidding.

Mr. Ray and the district responded, “FCMAT has not provided any evidence, fact, or document indicating that the District ever split any bid to avoid a bid limit; they did not because none exists.”

Several of the FCMAT report findings seem to undermine the fraud and bid splitting allegations. Starting on page 6 in the report they site (1) the District determined that managing smaller contracts without paying a general contractor’s mark-up provided a cost savings; and (2) the district determined that it could purchase equipment, materials and supplies for projects to both reduce a contractor’s mark-up and to ensure supplies would be available during a country-wide supply chain crisis.

In 2021 and 2022, due to COVID, prices for raw materials were exploding and contractors were reticent to make commitments. Jon Ray and the board at Weed Elementary saw no choice but to act as contractor and purchase the needed materials. This was not something they wanted to do but while operating their K-8 school, concluded it was something they had to do.

Michael Fine Behind the Scenes was the Problem

Michael Fine is the chief executive officer of FCMAT. He and his team have found a Bakersfield, California money tree. Transparent California reveals that in 2023, Fine was paid $383,879.87 and there were 11 other FCMAT employees who received more than $279,000 for the year and five more workers made more than $158,000. It is a lot cheaper to live in Bakersfield than Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco or Sacramento. To keep their money tree alive, they just need to keep the rich and powerful happy. That is not the people in Weed, California.

The Data Center Reported that in 1992 that FCMAT had a budget of $562,000 which ballooned to $35.6 million by 2002. They also criticized its use of no-bid contracts and lack of accountability. Los Angeles State Assembly Woman Jackie Goldberg called for an audit of FCMAT in 2003. The state auditor reported that FCMAT was providing value to districts but did criticize the over use of no-bid contracts. That appears to be the only audit ever done of FCMAT.

FCMAT actually does bad financial investigating. For example, in 2022, a FCMAT study claimed that Stockton Unified School District (SUSD) was headed for serious financial difficulties when the one time spending from the federal government is gone in fiscal year 2024-25. They said the district is spending one time funding on $26.3 million in salaries, benefits and services that appear essential.

It turned out that a FCMAT consultant who previously worked for the Stockton schools, Susan Montoya, apparently created phantom positions that were the source of the $30 million dollar shortage. It was SUSD that discovered that the $30 million budget deficit was a rouge not FCMAT.

Time to Audit and End FCMAT

There are terrible FCMAT experiences all over the Golden state. What is never found is a good experience or a story of how FCMAT helped a school district. School leaders just talk about how they survived FCMAT, how costly it was and in the happy cases how they finally got FCMAT off their back.

The money going thru FCMAT needs to be examined. The salaries are outrageous and the services worse than stink.

California schools could use some expert help not a police force making money from struggling schools by finding something on them so the state can takeover.

Time to end FCMAT and start over.

Tags: , , , , ,

San Diego School Board Election Outcomes

17 Dec

By Thomas Ultican 12/17/2024

Before the recent election, I wrote recommendations for several school board seats in San Diego County. The San Diego County Registrar of Voters has posted the final official results which are transcribed here with a few comments.

San Diego County Board of Education

Gregg Robinson in district-1 and Guadalupe Gonzalez in district-2 ran unopposed and were easily reelected.

In district-4

ERIN EVANS174,25368.29%My Recommendation
SARAH SONG80,91631.71% 

NOTE: Song was an enthusiastic candidate with some support but Evans was clearly more qualified. The county board of education looks to be in good shape.

San Diego Unified School District (SDUSD)

Richard Barrera district-D and Sharon D. Whitehurst-Payne district-E, ran unopposed and were elected. 

SABRINA BAZZO40,28950.93%My Recommendation
CRYSTAL TRULL38,81849.07% 

NOTE: This result surprised me. Brazzo is a very qualified member of the board supporting public education. Trull has the academic qualifications to serve but she is also a Howard Jarvis anti-tax ideologue and seems to base her education evaluations exclusively on standardized testing. It appears SDUSD dodged a big problem by less that 1% of the vote.

Sweetwater Union High School District (SUHSD)

Trustee Area 2

ADRIAN E. ARANCIBIA21,22656.72%My Recommendation
ANGELICA S. MARTINEZ16,19543.28% 

Trustee Area 4

RODOLFO “RUDY” LOPEZ19,19262.68%My Recommendation
OLGA ESPINOZA11,42637.32% 

NOTE: Both outcomes seemed reasonable and SUHSD should be well served.

Poway Unified School District (PUSD)

Trustee Area A

TIM DOUGHERTY10,06355.09% 
DEVESH VASHISHTHA8,20544.91%My Recommendation

Trustee Area E

DAVID CHENG6,52838.34% 
CRAIG POND6,38637.51% 
CINDY SYTSMA4,11124.15%My Recommendation

NOTE: In Poway Area E, I recommended for Systema because of her strong background as an educator and former county sheriff however I think David Cheng is also an excellent choice. In Area A, I was bothered by two of Dougherty’s listed supporters, Carl DeMaio and Michael Allman. However, Dougherty looks like a normal civic minded guy and to be a supporter of public schools.

Chula Vista Elementary School District (CVESD)

Seat Number 2

LUCY UGARTE80,82469.85%My Recommendation
SHARMANE ESTOLANO34,88530.15% 

Seat Number 4

FRANCISCO TAMAYO34,22729.61% 
KATE BISHOP27,68123.94%My Recommendation
TANYA WILLIAM26,23222.69% 
JESUS F. PARTIDA15,97713.82% 
ZENITH KHAN11,4919.94% 

NOTE: Educator Lucy Ugarte was the logical choice for seat 2. I have always liked Francisco Tamayo but his odd decision to run for seat number 4 while holding seat 1 caused me to recommend against him. For outsiders, it is difficult to get a good feel for what is happening. It seems that incumbent, Kate Bishop, had alienated several people in the district including Tamayo. The new board should be fine but now has two seats to fill with Tamayo moving to seat 4 and seat 5 member, Caesar Fernandez, becoming a Chula Vista city council member.

Vista Unified School District (VUSD)

Trustee Area 1

MIKE MARKOV6,72851.91%My Recommendation
AMANDA “MANDY” REMMEN6,23448.09% 

Trustee Area 4

CIPRIANO VARGAS3,37139.06% 
FRANK NUNEZ3,07535.63% 
ZULEMA GOMEZ2,18425.31%My Recommendation

Trustee Area 5

SUE MARTIN9,54060.39%My Recommendation
ANTHONY “TJ” CROSSMAN6,25839.61%   

NOTE: The outcomes here seem fine for the school District. Incumbent, Cipriano Vargas, was the pick of the Democratic Party and many political heavy hitters but I was more moved by Gomez’s support from sitting school board members and fellow educators.

San Marco Unified School District (SMUSD)

Trustee Area A

HEIDI HERRICK7,04756.04% 
CARLOS ULLOA5,52743.96%My Recommendation

Trustee Area B

SARAH AHMAD7,09658.98%My Recommendation
BRITTANY BOWER4,93541.02% 

Trustee Area D

LENA LAUER MEUM5,94958.77% 
JAIME CHAMBERLIN4,17441.23%My Recommendation

NOTE: This new board could have problems.

Grossmont Union High School District (GUHSD)

Area 1

CHRIS FITE13,92343.30%My Recommendation
RANDALL DEAR10,48532.61% 
DEBRA HARRINGTON4,61414.35% 
AZURE CHRISAWN3,1329.74% 

Area 2

SCOTT ECKERT14,76836.64% 
JAY STEIGER13,64533.85%My Recommendation
JIM STIERINGER7,98019.80% 
MARSHA J. CHRISTMAN3,9149.71% 

NOTE: This looks like a decent outcome for GUHSD. Far right candidate, Randall Dear, was rejected even with his large cash advantage. Scott Eckert was not my first choice but he is a solid choice who cares about the district.

San Dieguito Union High School District (SDUHSD)

Trustee Area 2

JODIE WILLIAMS10,12651.22%My Recommendation
KELLY FRIIS9,64348.78% 

Trustee Area 4

MICHAEL ALLMAN8,99051.12% 
KEVIN SABELLICO8,59548.88%My Recommendation

NOTE: I was really sad to see MAGA man, Michael Allman, reelected. He has been a polarizing character since first being elected in 2020.

Escondido Union High School District (EUHSD)

Trustee Area 3

CHRISTI KNIGHT7,53865.36% 
CLAY BROWN3,99534.64%My Recommendation

Trustee Area 4

RYAN S. WILLIAMS7,84864.66% 
DARA CZERWONKA4,28935.34%My Recommendation

NOTE: In Area 3, Clay Brown dropped out of the race. Both incumbents, Christi Knight and Ryan S. Williams, were reelected. I felt there needed to be some people with education experience on the board.

Oceanside Unified School District (OUSD)

Trustee Area 2

ELEANOR EVANS6,17851.51%My Recommendation
EMILY ORTIZ WICHMANN5,81548.49% 

Trustee Area 5

MIKE BLESSING6,35453.44%My Recommendation
ROSIE HIGUERA5,53646.56% 

NOTE: The wins by incumbents, Eleanor Evans and Mike Blessing, were good news for Oceanside.

Twelve races were won by candidates I endorsed and ten went against my recommendations. Overall, there was only one of the ten districts I reviewed that I felt was hurt by this election. In San Marcos, they got rid of an incumbent with deep education experience, Carlos Ulloa, leaving SMUSD with little education knowledge. More troubling was they just elected a pro-school-choice trustee to its board.

Tags: , , ,

← Older Entries