Tag Archives: Julia Keleher

Moneyed People Attack Wilmington Schools

23 Sep

By Thomas Ultican 9/23/2024

July 10th the Christina school board voted, at 2:45 AM, to remove popular Superintendent Dan Shelton. The seven member board split 4 to 3. It seems that Shelton’s opposition to allowing charter schools to take over the district motivated the vote. The Christina school district serves the small Delaware cities of Wilmington, Newark and their outskirts. It is a modest sized district with about 14,000 students. The unseen force behind the ouster was the DuPont family.

The attack by billionaires on schools in Delaware is similar to harm visiting public education throughout the nation. The local rich guy sets up tax exempt “charities” and uses them to undermine local schools. The “charities” hire young ambitious and talented people to lead the effort. Looking behind the scenes in Delaware illuminates the undermining of public schools nationwide.

Board President Donald Patton was joined by Vice President Alethea Smith-Tucker, Y.F. Lou, and Dr. Naveed Baqir in voting to oust the Superintendent two months before the new school year begins. It is alleged that they are the compromised four. In a local pod cast, Highland Bunker, board member Doug Manley reported that Matt Clifford, who dropped out of the recent school board election, was offered support if he agreed to vote with Board President Patton. Manley also speculated that Y. F. Lou received the same offer.

Trustee Manley stated that in his view the only reason Shelton was removed from office was because of his opposition to letting charter schools parcel out the district. It is notable that in 2022, Shelton was named Delaware State Superintendent of the Year.

Longwood Foundation

The Longwood Foundation is not called the DuPont Foundation because it was originally established in 1937 by Pierre DuPont to support Longwood Gardens. A tax reform act in 1969 caused a change and, Longwood Gardens, Inc. was formed to finance the gardens. The Longwood Foundation remained in existence to “principally support charitable organizations” and push forward the DuPont agenda.

Over the last decade, the foundation has spent $1,812,200 to support Reading Assist Inc. whose web page says:

“Reading Assist provides high-dosage tutoring for students in grades K-3 in the lowest 25% for reading proficiency, with a focus on serving in schools where there is the highest need.

“We recruit, train, and embed AmeriCorps members – known as Reading Assist Fellows – willing to commit a school year of service to provide our accredited, one-on-one intervention program to struggling readers.”

Reading Assist is a science of reading (SoR) advocate whose founder has ties to the dyslexia community. AmeriCorps has helped provide Teach for America (TFA) training and recruits. In other words, these organizations come with privatization blemishes. Many researchers believe SoR is bad science promoted by wealthy people and publishing companies while TFA is their army.

Longwood is still a DuPont family run organization. According to the 2022 tax form 990PF (TIN: 51-0066734), John DuPont is the current president and Margaret DuPont is Vice President. The tax records also show that in the last decade they have provided the fake education graduate school, Relay Graduate School, $1,300,000.

The Foundation concentrates its spending into the Wilmington area and does very little spending nationally. So their spending of more than $15,000,000 on charter schools in the last decade has made a huge impact locally. Margaret and one other DuPont family member also sit on the board of the smaller Chelsea Foundation (TIN: 51-6015638) which also provides grants to charter schools. It is this drive to privatize the Christina School District that seems to have led to firing a respected and popular administrator.

In 2017, Indiana scholars Jim Scheurich, Gayle Cosby, and Nathanial Williams posted an article on Diane Ravitch’s blog that outlined the model used by billionaires to gain control of local schools.  Point five of their rich guy privatization model is, “Development of a network of local organizations or affiliates that all collaborate closely on the same local agenda.”

First State Educate, Inc.

First State Educate’s 2019 form 990 (TIN: 84-2554991) reports its founding officers as President: John DuPont, Treasure: James Kelly and Secretary: Jocelyn Stewart. Since then, the Longwood Foundation has gifted it $731,100. In other words, First State Educate is fueled by DuPont money.

Their documents reveal:

“First State Educate/Action Fund (FSE/AF) were founded in 2019 to catalyze radical change in education by activating the power of Delawareans. In the four years since its founding, FSE/AF has helped 16 game-changing leaders be elected to school boards throughout the state, including five school board members enrolling 45,000 students who now serve in leadership positions. FSE/AF also helped propel numerous initiatives to change the conditions of teaching and learning, including the Wilmington Learning Collaborative, RISE UP Delaware and FaCE coalitions.

The reason there are two organizations is that First State Educate is the tax exempt “charity” and Action Fund is a political organizations that is not tax exempt.

There was only one change in the board leadership shown on the 2023 tax report; Jocelyn Stewarts position became Interim Executive Director. The form says she put in 40 hours a week in this position with no pay. She is a busy person. When she was appointed to the board of trustees for Delaware State University, the school reported, “Ms. Stewart is the chair of the board chairperson (sic) for Teach for America Delaware, the vice chair of the East Side Charter School, a trustee for Christiana Care Health Services and has served on a number of State of Delaware committees.”

Stewart comes from the banking industry where she worked in the Events Marketing Department of First USA Bank. In 2000, when Barclaycard US was founded she developed their community strategies.

This picture from the NPR affiliate Delawarepublic.org shows Delaware Senator, Chris Coons, on the left and Jocelyn Stewart on the right holding Barclay’s gift to EastSide Charter School. It is unknown why the Democratic senator is supporting public education privatization but he clearly is.

Stewart was replaced as director of First State Educate in July 2023 by Julia Keleher.

While serving as Secretary of Education in Puerto Rico, Keleher who is not Puerto Rican, secured a new law allowing for charter schools and vouchers plus the closure of hundreds of schools.

On December 28, 2016, Keleher was appointed Puerto Rico Secretary of Education by Governor-elect Ricardo Rosselló who became so hated he was driven from office in 2019. The appointment was just a few months before hurricane Maria hit. Keleher also became disliked as was demonstrated by San Juan protesters loudly chanting, “Julia go home!”

Things went sideways for Keleher. December 17, 2021, a federal judge in Puerto Rico sentenced her with six months prison, 12 months house arrest and a $21,000 fine. She plead guilty in June to two felony counts involving conspiracies to commit fraud. Almost as soon as she finished her prison term, she was hired by First State Educate. Now she is the executive director.

Conclusion

Rich people in Delaware are working to privatize the public schools in Wilmington and environs. The school board voting 4-3 to fire Dan Shelton is a result these efforts. It appears the school board has been completely corrupted with a compromised four.

WHYY reported, “[Naveed] Baqir and the private school he co-founded are under scrutiny concerning invoices submitted to the school district.”

Delawarpublic.org noted that in June the Department of Justice (DOJ) stated “that the board has made repeated Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) violations …”

On top of the state (DOJ) ruling, it seems that Dan Shelton has firm grounds for a lawsuit. The former Christina School District Attorney, James McMakin, severed ties with the board and said his firm is working to finalize a lawsuit against the district on the superintendent’s behalf. Shelton’s attorneys claim that he was discharged without a pre-determination hearing and he has constitutional rights. When still representing the district, McMakin told them “they’re acting lawlessly.”

It appears that the board members who voted to oust the superintendent are not protected from the lawsuit.

There is a good chance some of this injustice will be righted but damage has been done to the Christina School District. The people of Wilmington and Newark are in jeopardy of having their schools stolen by wealth neighbors including the DuPont family.

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A National Warning

14 Aug

By Thomas Ultican 8/14/2023

An unholy alliance between neoliberal Democrats and education reform oligarchs is harming Delaware public education. This is a lesson for the rest of the nation.

A new charter school law introduced to reduce principal professionalism is the latest example. Data clearly shows for almost two decades, top-down education reform has been ineffective and seriously damaged a once, exemplary system.

In March, Delaware Professional Standards Board recommended charter school certification requirements match public school rules. Kendall Massett, executive director of the Delaware Charter Schools Network, immediately responded, “All Delaware charter schools are led by highly qualified administrators.” She said charter school principals have a different role than public school leaders and need to be excellent marketeers to raise funds and drive enrollment.

Did she mean charter school principals don’t need to be professional educators?

For the Standards Board recommendation to take effect, adoption by the State Board of Education is required. Before they acted, Senate President Pro Tem David P. Sokola introduced senate bill 163 to relax certification rules for charter school principals.

The heart of Democrat Sokola’s legislation says:

“The bill creates new subsections in Section 507(c) of Title 14 of the Delaware Code to define the licensure and certification requirements more clearly within Chapter 5 of Title 14. Finally, the bill requires the Secretary of Education to work with the Delaware Charter Schools Network to create a qualified alternative licensure and certification pathway for charter school administrators engaged in the instruction of students (Instructional Administrators).”

Teachers’ union leader, Mike Matthews, wrote to the Senate Executive Committee:

“I was disheartened to see that SB 163 — a bill that will actually deprofessionalize the education profession — was introduced by Senator Sokola. I was even more disappointed — and concerned — to see it filed in the Senate Executive Committee instead of the Senate Education Committee where it belongs. Why was that?”

Bill was passed by the State Senate and is currently awaiting action in the House Administration Committee. The House Education Committee, like its counterpart in the Senate, is not involved.

Neoliberal Education Reform

A Delaware Live headline howls, “School test scores dismal again despite new math, reading plans.” Two decades of 4th and 8th grade reading and math data on the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) support the headline. NAEP is often referred to as the nation’s education report card. The above graphs beg the question, “what happened in 2010?”

Long-term NAEP data showed from 1971 until 2002, there was steady growth in math and reading. The steady growth ended concurrent with the adoption of the bipartisan Kennedy-Bush education reform, No Child Left Behind. The graphs illustrate this phenomenon.

Why did Delaware’s scores start falling?

In 2010 educator and blogger, Susan Ohanian, reported,

“Delaware and Tennessee came out on top in round one of RTTT: Delaware got $100 million (about $800 per student), and Tennessee $500 million (about $500 per student). Since these states radically changed their education strategies to receive what amounts to 7 percent of their total expenditures on elementary and secondary education, the feds are getting a lot of bang for the buck.”

The $4.5 billion dollar Obama era Race To The Top (RTTT) program was administered by Education Secretary Arne Duncan. Grants were given to states that complied with three key elements: (1) Evaluate teachers based on student test scores (2) Close and turn into charter schools public schools that continue to get low test scores (3) In low-test score schools, the principal and half of the staff are to be fired and replaced. In addition, states were encouraged to create more privately-managed charter schools. 

Education historian and former Assistant US Secretary of Education Diane Ravitch predicted the program’s utter failure when it was announced:

“All of these elements are problematic. Evaluating teachers in relation to student test scores will have many adverse consequences. It will make the current standardized tests of basic skills more important than ever, and even more time and resources will be devoted to raising scores on these tests. The curriculum will be narrowed even more than under George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind, because of the link between wages and scores. There will be even less time available for the arts, science, history, civics, foreign language, even physical education. Teachers will teach to the test. There will be more cheating, more gaming the system.”

For more than a century, brilliant educators have been skeptical of top-down coerced education reform like those from Duncan, Obama, Bush and Kennedy. Alfred North Whitehead published his essay, “The Aims of Education,” in 1917, stating:

“I suggest that no system of external tests which aims primarily at examining individual scholars can result in anything but educational waste.” (Page 13)

“But the first requisite for educational reform is the school as a unit, with its approved curriculum based on its own needs, and evolved by its own staff. If we fail to secure that, we simply fall from one formalism into another, from one dung-hill of inert ideas into another.” (Page 13)

Former McKinsey Consultant and Democrat with neoliberal inclinations, Jack Markell, was elected Delaware Governor in 2009. His first major victory was winning the RTTT grant. He said:

“What’s really important today is where we go from here; whether we have the will to put our children first and move forward with reforms to improve our schools so that Delaware children can successfully compete for the best jobs in an increasingly competitive global economy. That won’t be easy, but we have proven in these past few months that it can be done.  I would like to thank all those who worked with us in support of our application and look forward to moving ahead to improve our schools.”

Markell praised then Senate Education Committee Chair, David Sokola, for his work on the RTTT grant proposal, the same Senator who just introduced legislation to soften certification requirements for charter school principals.

Since the RTTT announcement, Delaware has gone from consistently scoring above the national average on all NAEP testing to dropping well below.

Science of Reading is NOT the Answer

Delaware Live reported that because of the relative drop in reading scores, the state is implementing the “science of reading.” The article stated, “Today, after a decade of emphasizing training teachers in the science, Mississippi students handily outperform Delaware’s, which has dropped below the national average.”

While the scoring drop in Delaware looked real, the success in Mississippi was a mirage. The graphs to the left plot 2002, 2011 and 2022 NAEP scoring data for 4th and 8th grade reading. Delaware is graphed in red, Mississippi in green and National Public in blue. The 4th grade Mississippi data looked amazing but in 8th grade, they returned to being significantly below national average.

The anomaly is explained, in part, by Mississippi retaining all third graders who did not pass the state reading test. It made the 4th grade NAEP data look good but the 8th grade data indicated no earth-shaking advancement to emulate.

In 2021, Delaware’s Department of Education doubled down on oligarch-driven education reform. Monica Gant, Ph.D. from the Delaware Department of Education (DDOE), presented their strategy to accelerate learning in March 2021.

Under the heading “Literacy Professional Learning,” Professor Grant noted, “Participants will have a chance to apply their learning of the Science of Reading either through their district HQIM or utilize free OER (Open Education Resources) HQIM for this work.”

HQIM and OER are both programs financed by Bill Gates, Laurene Powell Jobs and other billionaires.

To guide Delaware public schools’ literacy program, DDOE has turned to the International Dyslexia Association (IDA) who advocates the “science of reading”, to validate Delaware’s programs. IDA is leading the effort to monetize dyslexia and establish state-mandated science of reading curriculum, purchased from specified vendors.

 While jurisdictions throughout the US saw a tick down in 2022 NAEP reading scores, Delaware’s scores, after a year of “science of reading”, were one the largest drops in America.

Final Observations

The reform movement in Delaware is still being pushed in a destructive direction. Senator Brian Pettyjohn, a Republican from Georgetown and member of the Senate Education Committee, commented on recent testing results:

“Our state must do more to hold school districts responsible for students’ academic success. The current mechanism in place for holding schools accountable is ineffective, and it is time for the state to establish a new system that recognizes school districts for their accomplishments and holds them responsible when they fall short of their objectives.”

The concern is understandable but his solution is wrong-headed. More mandates from politicians who do not understand education are not likely to be helpful.

There appears to be a privatization-promoting organization in Delaware called First State Educate. They just hired Julia Keleher as Executive Director. Serving as Secretary of Education in Puerto Rico, Keleher, who is not Puerto Rican, secured a new law allowing for charter schools and vouchers, as well as, the closure of hundreds of schools.

At a San Juan rally, protesters chanted, “Julia go home!”

Things went sideways for Keleher. December 17 2021, a federal judge in Puerto Rico sentenced her with six months prison, 12 months house arrest and a $21,000 fine. She pled guilty in June to two felony counts involving conspiracies to commit fraud.

Today she is another voice in Delaware, pushing for top-down reform and privatization of public education.

Delaware schools were most successful when local educators and school leaders took charge. Since then, after standards were imposed and teacher accountability mandated, school performance suffered. Alfred North Whitehead was right in 1917.

Give autonomy back to schools and professional educators. Politicians at state capitals have little understanding of local school needs or good pedagogy.

Empower teachers and Delaware education will shine again.

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