Tag Archives: KIPP

Stalled California Charter Schools

29 Feb

By Thomas Ultican 2/29/2024

In California, from 2021 to 2023, 31 new charter schools opened but 63 closed. Since inception in 1994, charter school enrollment grew ever year until 2021. For the first time, charter school enrollment fell. This December, KIPP SoCal announced they were closing three of their 23 Los Angeles County schools. Alliance for College-Ready Public Schools and Green Dot Public Schools have also closed LA area schools.

The charter industry is struggling…

California State Enrollment Data

Los Angeles Unified School District

Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) charter petitions used to arrive by the dozens but there were none this year. The 74 reported:

“Enrollment in the schools peaked in 2021, when the city’s charters enrolled nearly 168,000 students. Since then admissions have declined by nearly 11%, although not as fast as district schools.”

The “although not as fast as district schools” remark is disingenuous. In 2016, LAUSD enrollment was 639,337 and by 2023, had fallen to 538,295. This was a drop of almost 16% but over a much longer time period.

Since 2019, student enrollment in California declined by 5% and in Los Angeles County, the drop was 8.5% (California Data).

Howard Blum, reporting for the LA Times, stated:

“Twenty years ago, L.A. Unified had close to 740,000 students and was building schools as fast as it could. District-operated schools currently enroll about 420,000 students — a decline caused by reduced immigration, families moving out of L.A., lower birthrates — and, until recently, the growth of charter schools.”

Carol Burris and Network for Public Education (NPE) published Broken Promises in 2020. A stunning find was that almost 50% of charter schools had closed their doors within the first 15 years of operation (Broken Page 19).

About 50% of Charter Schools Closures by Year 15

Parents, sold a story about superior charter schools, often end up dismayed. A typical response to the closing of KIPP Poder comes from parent Gina Alonzo:

“I was very angry — very, very upset — disappointed, because we didn’t get a warning. We didn’t get a notification of what was going on — the issues that they were having.”

“We were grown as a community here. Everybody knows each other. This is all my son knows. So I’m upset and I’m thinking about the trauma that this is going to cause him.”

Besides new state policies and falling student populations, people in the choice community see the LAUSD board as hostile to charter schools. In 2022, Rocio Rivas won the district-2 seat in a tightly fought battle, not called until two weeks after the election. With a pro-public school board member, replacing termed-out Monica Garcia, the board shifted away from school choice.

In 2017, billionaires (Hastings, Broad, Rock, Fisher and, multiple Waltons) poured huge dollars into the LAUSD election, outspending their opponents 2 to 1 in America’s most expensive school board election ever. They spent more than $6 million in just the 2020 district-7 race to maintain control of the board. The 2022 results flipped the script and billionaires lost control.

John Angeli is executive director of the Los Angeles Coalition for Excellent Public Schools, a group that represents some of the city’s largest charter operators. He points out that in 2024, two incumbent school board members are running for reelection with two retiring board members, leaving open seats. Angeli believes the board could tip back to his favor in November.

School Choice – A Bad Choice

Some charter schools are abominations but most of them are reasonable. Like public schools, they are staffed with excellent or mostly decent teachers and a few who should not be in the profession. Their standardized testing results are similar to those of public schools with two deficiencies. They are likely to close their doors anytime while a public school never closes mid-school year, with no notice. Also public schools unify communities while charter schools divide them.

Birthed in the bowels of the 1950’s segregationist south, school choice has never been about improving education. It is founded on white supremacy, profiting off taxpayers, cutting taxes, selling market based solutions and financing religion. School choice ideology has a long dark history of dealing significant harm to public education.

Steve Suitts’ book, Overturning Brown, provides overwhelming evidence for the segregationist legacy of “school choice.” “Brown v Board” has been effectively gutted with “choice” as the white supremacists’ most potent strategy. In the 21st century, choice is being wielded to maintain segregation and destroy separation of church and state.

Southern segregationists often condemned “integration as the work of communists” (Suitts 32). Adopting the language of University of Chicago libertarian economist, Milton Friedman, they began denouncing the “monopoly of government schools”, calling it “socialism in its purest form” (Suitts 59). This is the basis of so-called school choice.

A Brookings Institute study of segregation in schools reported:

“Charter schools are more segregated than TPS [traditional public school] at national, state, and metro levels. Black students in charter schools are far more likely than their traditional public school counterparts to be educated in intensely segregated settings. At the national level, 70 percent of black charter school students attend intensely segregated minority charter schools (which enroll 90-100 percent of students from under-represented minority backgrounds), or twice as many as the share of intensely segregated black students in traditional public schools”.

This is a big problem concerning all races. Professors Linda R. Tropp and Suchi Saxena along with many other sociologists and educators have conducted research identifying the clear benefit of and need for school integration. They state, “New social science research demonstrates the importance of fostering sustained interracial contact between youth in order to prepare them to thrive in a multiracial society”.

UCLA Professor Gary Orfield coined the phrase “apartheid schools” for schools with a White student enrollment of 1% or less. A personal 2019 study of Washington DC charter schools revealed that 64 of the 116 charter schools could be classified as “apartheid schools”.

Yesterday, Peter Greene posted an insightful article about the coalition-promoting school choice and their splintering. One of the points he made was:

“But what the alliance didn’t produce was results. Choice did not provide a sudden lifting of all boats, despite some data-torturing attempts to show otherwise. Data-driven instruction didn’t improve the data generated by either students or teachers. Underserved communities that were supposed to be rescued from failing schools by charters and choice too often had education policies done to them rather than with them. And then there was the gross miscalculation that was Common Core, which drew attack from all across the political spectrum”.

For the Catholic Church and Evangelical Christians, like Betsy DeVos, publicly provided vouchers for private religious schools open a path to taxpayer support for their organizations. It is lamentable for their cause that every recent large scale study of vouchers showed students perform worse when transferred to voucher schools.

What is the main motive behind mega-rich spending to undermine public education? Professor Maurice Cunningham of the University of Massachusetts claimed they really want “lower state and local taxes.”

John Arnold is the billionaire Enron trader who did not go to prison when that company collapsed. He has joined forces with the billionaire CEO of Netflix, Reed Hastings, to sell the nation on the portfolio model of school management.  To achieve their goal, they created The City Fund. After its founding in 2018, billionaires Bill Gates, Michael Dell and Steve Ballmer all made significant contributions.

In brief, the portfolio model directs closing schools that score in the bottom 5% on standardized testing and reopening them as charter schools or Innovation schools. In either case, they will no longer come under the purview of an elected school board. It is a march to oblivion for public schools because there will always be a bottom 5%.

Two central ideologies behind school choice are markets always make superior decisions and the cost of local control of schools is poor outcomes. Both ideas are demonstrably untrue but big money and power politics keep them alive.

It is good for America that charter schools are starting to struggle but it is heartbreaking for parents, hornswaggled by billionaires. Americans have always had school choice. If taxpayer funded public school are not wanted, there are always private schools, without the choice encumbering taxpayers.

Let’s join with the Network for Public Education and thoughtfully role back choice schools and put them under democratic control.

Stop fleecing taxpayers to finance privatized schools.

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DC Charter School Performance “Almost” Matches Public Schools

8 Sep

By T. Ultican 9/8/2019

Washington DC charter schools did not significantly outperform public schools or even match them on the last two years of PARCC testing. These disappointing results for the charter school industry come almost a quarter-century after Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich teamed up to bring neoliberal education reform to Washington DC. As their “reforms” accelerated, residents were assured that innovative privatized schools would bring better outcomes and performance gaps would close. None of that happened. Instead, public schools have been disappearing; democratic rights have been taken away; “segrenomics” has motivated change and corruption is rampant.

It is important to note that standardized testing data has only two legitimate outcomes. These tests are not capable of measuring school or teacher quality but they do provide a huge revenue stream for companies like the testing giant Pearson Corporation and they create propaganda for disrupting and privatizing public schools. No group has put more stock in standardized testing data than the charter school industry. Since many charter schools are known to center their curriculum on preparing for tests like PARCC, it is surprising that for the last few years, Washington DC’s public schools have outperformed charters.

The PARCC testing consortium claims that on their 5-point scale, “Students who performed at level 4 and above have demonstrated readiness for the next grade level/course and, eventually, college and career.” The Washington DC, Office of the State Superintendent of Education (OSSE) is in charge of PARCC testing. OSSE reports the data in terms of percentage of students scoring greater than or equal to 4.

ELA 3-8 PARCC Data

ELA Data from the OSSE Report

Math 3-6 PARCC Data

Math Data from the OSSE Report

In the data above, DCPS indicates the District of Columbia Public Schools; PCS indicates Public Charter Schools and State indicates the sum of the two. The inappropriately named Public Charter School Board which oversees charter schools in the city asserts, “Public charter schools serve a student body that is equally or at times more disadvantaged, while outperforming traditional public schools.” The data shown above highlights the board’s bias.

Sociologists point out that testing reliability is undermined when employed for accountability. Donald T. Campbell famously observed, “The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.” The National Assessment of Education Progress (NEAP) testing does not have any high stakes associated with it. The following NEAP data looks at education performance gaps between races.

Gap Data 2005-2017

Red Numbers Indicate the Performance Gaps in 2005 and 2017

The chart above shows that DC performance gaps have shrunk, however, they are still the largest in the nation and more the twice the National Average. An interesting side note; another portfolio district, Denver, also has very high student performance gaps.

The other school choice initiative forced onto DC by Congress is vouchers. In 2003 the Opportunity Scholarship Program was sneaked into an omnibus bill. It authorized $20 million yearly to be spent on vouchers in the district. That means all taxpayers are paying for DC students to attend religious schools.

A recent Center for American Progress report on vouchers observed:

“This analysis builds on a large body of voucher program evaluations in Louisiana, Indiana, Ohio, and Washington, D.C., all of which show that students attending participating private schools perform significantly worse than their peers in public schools! especially in math. A recent, rigorous evaluation of the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program from the U.S. Department of Education reaffirms these findings, reporting that D.C. students attending voucher schools performed significantly worse than they would have in their original public school.”

With public schools outperforming charter schools, academic performance gaps being the largest in the nation and voucher students falling behind their peers, Valerie Strauss of the Washington Post asks a pertinent question,

“When are school reformers nationwide who have had a love affair with the D.C. model going to give it up?”

Why Don’t Washington DC Residents Merit Democracy?

The US Census Bureau estimates that on July 1, 2018 Wyoming’s populations was 577,737; Alaska’s population was 737,438 and Washington DC’s population was 702,455. Alaska and Wyoming both have two senators and a congressman representing them. Washington DC only has one congressman with limited voting privileges.

In 1968, the US congress gave the residents of Washington DC the right to vote for an 11-member school board. In 1996, the President appointed DC Financial Responsibility and Management Board (the “Control Board”) reduced the school boards power and claimed the authority to appoint the superintendent. In 2000, a DC referendum reduced the school board to 9 members and gave the Mayor the right to appoint 4 members. Finally, in 2007, the DC District Council passed the Public Education Reform Amendment Act (PERAA). This act transferred almost all management authority to the mayor and created the present school system organization.

There are four main Components of the Washington DC school system:

  1. The State Board of Education (SBE) which has the city’s only publicly elected school board. It sets some standards but has little actual power.
  2. The Office of the State Superintendent of Education (OSSE) is in charge of testing, data reporting, transportation, and athletics.
  3. Public Charter School Board (PCSB) is a 7-member board appointed by the Mayor. It was created in 1996 and is the sole charter school authorizer in Washington DC. It also has the power to rescind a charter.
  4. District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS) is the public school system serving more than half of Washington DC’s students.

The Mayor has almost dictatorial control over the school system with very little input from teachers, students or parents. When Muriel Bowser was elected Mayor in 2014, she inherited DCPS Chancellor, Kaya Henderson. Bowser appointed Jennifer Niles as her chief education advisor with the title Deputy Mayor for Education. Niles was well known in charter school circles having founded the E. L. Haynes Charter School in 2004. Niles was forced to resign when it came to light that she had made it possible for DCPS Chancellor Antwan Wilson to secretly transfer his daughter to a preferred school against his own rules.

Bowser has an affinity for education leaders that have gone through Eli Broad’s unaccredited Superintendents Academy. She is a Democratic politician who appreciates Broad’s well documented history of spending lavishly to privatize public-schools. When Kaya Henderson resigned as chancellor in 2016, Antwan Wilson from the Broad Academy class of 2012-2014, was Bowser’s choice to replace her. Subsequent scandal forced the Mayor to replace both the Chancellor and the Deputy Mayor in 2018. For Chancellor, she chose Louis Ferebee who is not only a member of Jeb Bush’s Chiefs for Change, but is also a graduate with the Broad Academy class of 2017-2018. Her new Deputy Mayor choice was Paul Kihn Broad Academy Class of 2014-2015.

With the control Mayor Bowser has over public education, the DCPS webpage now looks more like a vote for Bowser publication than a school information sight.

DC Public Schools Welcome Page

Image of the DCPS Home Webpage Taken on 9/7/2019

Corruption and “Segrenomics” Infest DC Schools

Noliwe Rooks’ book, Cutting School: Privatization, Segregation and the End of Public Education, says uplifting all children requires racial and economic integration. It warns against separate but equal education. In the book, Professor Rooks defines Segrenomics:

“While not ensuring educational equality, such separate, segregated, and unequal forms of education have provided the opportunity for businesses to make a profit selling schooling. I am calling this specific form of economic profit segrenomics. Segrenomics, or the business of profiting specifically from high levels of racial and economic segregation, is on the rise.”

In the 2018-2019 school year Washington DC had 116 charter schools reporting attendance. Of that number 92 or 82% of the schools reported more than 90% Black and Hispanic students. Thirty charter schools or 26% reported over 98% Black students. These are startlingly high rates of segregation.

Of the 15 KIPP DC charter schools, all of them reported serving 96% or more Black students. According to their 2017 tax filings, seven KIPP DC administrators took home $1,546,494. The smallest salary was $184,310.

In addition to charter school profiteering, the seven people Mayor Bowser appointed to lead the Public Charter School Board seem more like charter industry insiders than protectors of the public trust.

The PCSB Board:

Rick Cruz (Chair) – Chief Executive Officer of DC Prep Public Charter School; formerly worked at the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship, Teach for America and America’s Promise Alliance. Currently, he is Executive Director of Strategic Partnerships at The College Board

Saba Bireda (Vice Chair) – Attorney at Sanford Hiesler, LLP, served under John King at the U.S. Department of Education.

Lea Crusey (Member): Has served at Teach for America, advisory board for KIPP Chicago, StudentsFirst, and Democrats for Education Reform.

Steve Bumbaugh (Treasurer) – Manager of Breakthrough Schools at CityBridge Foundation.

Ricarda Ganjam (Secretary) – More than 15 years as Management Consultant with Accenture; consulted on KIPP DC’s Future Focus Program.

Naomi Shelton (Member) – Director of Community Engagement at KIPP Foundation.

Jim Sandman (Member): President of the Legal Services Corporation.

It appears that charter schools in DC are starting to cannibalize each other. A relatively new company called TenSquare is using its connections at the PCSB to advance its charter school turnaround service. Last year Rachel M. Cohen wrote “Behind the Consulting Firm Raking In Millions From D.C. Charter Schools; Is TenSquare effective—or just connected?” Cohen’s lengthy article stated, “TenSquare is the brainchild of Josh Kern, who graduated from Georgetown Law School in 2001 and founded Thurgood Marshall Academy—a legal-themed charter high school—immediately afterward.” TenSquare started operating in 2011. Cohen reported:

One common criticism of TenSquare is that its business model is, in a sense, circular: It can effectively hire itself. When TenSquare is brought in to assess a charter’s alleged deficiencies, it is well positioned to recommend that the charter correct those deficiencies with TenSquare’s own turnaround services.

“It’s a racket,” says Jenny DuFresne, a former charter principal whose school contracted with TenSquare. “It’s a bunch of good old boys who are talking to each other and scratching each other’s backs. Like honestly, that’s all it is.”

A disturbing quote concludes Rachel Cohen’s article:

‘“If you talk to charter people off the record around the city, you’ll find most are afraid to speak honestly about TenSquare,’ says Donald Hense, the now-retired founder and CEO of Friendship Public Charter School. ‘But they’re also afraid if they don’t hire the company then their charters will be revoked.”’

End Notes

Well known national foundations that spend for school choice and market reform of education send multiple millions of dollars yearly to advance school privatization in Washington DC. These include the Edythe and Eli Broad Foundation, the Bill and Malinda Gates Foundation and the Walton Family Foundation. Locally, David and Katherine Bradley, owners of Atlantic media, have established the CityBridge Foundation. They are also spending seven figures to privatize the city’s public schools.

CityBridge

Spending to Privatize Public Schools in 2017

With all this spending, surprisingly, the expansion of charter schools in Washington DC has slowed or possibly stopped. The promised benefits from privatization have not materialized but community disruption has.

Twitter: @tultican

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TFA is Bad for America

18 Aug

By T. Ultican 8/19/2019

Teach For America (TFA) has become the billionaire financed army for privatizing public education. It is the number one source of charter school teachers and its alumni are carrying a neoliberal ideology into education leadership at all levels.

TFA undermines education professionalism and exacerbates teacher turnover. Its teachers are totally unqualified to run a classroom yet their political support caused the US Congress to label them as highly qualified teachers.

Big money and its political power have elevated TFA to being the nation’s most effective force driving the privatization of public education.

Defining  TFA Neoliberalism

This April, Angela M. Kraemer-Holland of DePaul University submitted her doctoral thesis in which she observed:

“TFA’s primary conception of itself is not as a teacher training organization, nor a non-university-based early entry recruitment program, but rather as a “movement” against a pressing and untenable social problem. Conclusions illuminate TFA’s efforts to shape participants’ understanding of teaching and learning—framing teaching as a temporary career—in order to create and sustain a broader movement in education and beyond that is reflective of neoliberal ideas.”

Kraemer-Holland’s conclusions echoes those of two TFA alumni working on their doctorates at Boston College, Randall Lahann and Emilie Mitescu Reagan. They co-wrote “Teach for America and the Politics of Progressive Neoliberalism” published by the Teacher Education Quarterly winter 2011. The classification of TFA as a progressive neoliberal organization is based on their definitions of these combined terms:

“Neoliberalism: Political ideology which calls for state policies that better enable entrepreneurs to compete in the free market. Policies which promote privatization, deregulation, individual choice, and the reduction of government expenditures are valued over those which increase, or promote the welfare state and government control of social and economic activity.”

“Progressivism: The idea that schooling and teacher education are crucial elements in the making of a more just society.”

Although neoliberalism is known to be a conservative ideology, within TFA there is the idea that the outcomes in education are more than just test scores and knowledge, but equity and justice as well. Lahann and Reagan write, “This space can be thought of as progressive neoliberalism.”

Whatever it is called, the faith is in the superiority of the market fundamentalism which Ruth Rosen defined as “the irrational belief that markets solve all problems.”

In the book Democracy in Chains, Nancy MacLean quoted former congressman and leader of the “Contract for America” Dick Armey. He summed up the neoliberal view succinctly, “The markets are rational, the government is dumb.”

Neoliberal ideology has been on the ascendancy since the 1970’s coinciding with the founding of the libertarian think tanks Heritage Foundation and Cato Institute. There is an inherent anti-democratic sentiment attached to the theory.

In Democracy, Maclean provides a detailed description of the lavish spending since the 1950s by the billionaire brothers David and Charles Koch promoting their neoliberal based libertarian ideology. Charles Koch founded the Cato Institute. Their stands include an ultra-conservative property rights view and an anti-public education agenda.

Undermining Professionalism in Education

In the paper “Teach For America’s Preferential Treatment: School District Contracts, Hiring Decisions, and Employment Practices”, authors T. Jameson Brewer et al address why school districts want to hire TFA teachers. Their research led to these four points:

“(1) Districts realize the long-term savings potential that comes from converting open teaching positions to positions held exclusively for TFA (or otherwise short-term, not fully credentialed teachers).”

“(2) Districts are willing to pay additional up-front costs not only for the long-term savings but in the quest for increased test scores that can result from pedagogical practices of teaching-to-the-test that characterize TFA pedagogy.”

“(3) School board leaders have bought into the rhetoric of the ‘bad’ teacher and TFA represents a political opportunity to address that perception.”

“(4) In the case of a genuine teacher shortage, cost impacts become less important than filling positions.”

“While each rationale – or a combination of them – may explain why districts continue to honor and expand MOUs[memorandums of understanding] with TFA, we suggest that it is the long-term savings potential that is the most plausible.”

In the same paper it was mentioned that TFA alumni “tend to understand educational change through managerial terms; believing that inequity is a result of resource mismanagement and a lack of accountability and that solutions lay in merit pay for teachers, increased autonomy for leadership, standardization of curriculum, and an end to collective bargaining.”

An article in Phi Delta Kappan had similar observations. In Rethinking Teach For America’s leadership models researchers, Tina Trujillo and Janelle Scott, noted that TFA alumni emphasized managerial goals. From their research they reported, “Over 80% of our participants depicted the causes of inequality in technical or managerial terms.”  The education reforms posited by the TFA alumni interviewed were:

  • “Scale back unions’ collective bargaining agreements in order to increase principals’ flexibility in personnel matters.”
  • “Increase teacher and principal effectiveness through tighter accountability.”
  • “Increase principal and teacher expectations.”
  • “Tie teacher compensation to student performance.”
  • “Hire better “talent.”’
  • “Standardize curricula and assessments.”
  • “Expand technology and data use.”

Clearly these former TFA corps members had completely assimilated the destroy public education message of failing schools, inept principals and bad teachers.

Prior to taking over a classroom, TFA teachers receive just five weeks of training. Their training is test centric and employs behaviorist principles. TFA corps members study Doug Lemov’s Teach Like a Champion.

Lemov never studied education nor taught. He became involved with the no-excuses charter movement in mid-1990s. As glowingly depicted by Elizabeth Green in Building A+ Better Teacher, Lemov observed classrooms to develop his teaching ideas.

Most trained professional educators find Lemov’s teaching theory regressive. Jennifer Berkshire published a post by Layla Treuhaft-Ali on her popular blog and podcast “Have You Heard.” Under the title “Teach Like its 1885” Layla wrote,

“As I was reading Teach Like A Champion, I observed something that shocked me. The pedagogical model espoused by Lemov is disturbingly similar to one that was established almost a century ago for the express purpose of maintaining racial hierarchy.”

Treuhaft-Ali added, “Placed in their proper racial context, the Teach Like A Champion techniques can read like a modern-day version of the *Hampton Idea,* where children of color are taught not to challenge authority under the supervision of a wealthy, white elite.”

Amber K. Kim, Ph.D. made the following observations about Teach Like A Champion:

“ TLAC strategies are not proven using empirical methodology and published in peer reviewed journals. If there are studies, what are the variables? n? p value?”

“ TLAC is for “Other people’s children” (L. Delpit). Of course some TLAC strategies are effective and even fun, but the strict adherence to TLAC as a bible for teaching is reserved for students of color and low SES [Social Economic Status].”

This year California Assemblywomen Cristina Garcia introduced a bill to end TFA hiring in the state. Garcia is a former classroom teacher and understands the importance of teaching staff stability. In an op-ed for the San Diego Union, She noted that 80% of TFA teachers are gone within three years. Coincidentally, that is the amount of classroom time researchers believe it takes for teachers to become proficient. Garcia stated,

“Third-party trainees lack crucial experience before entering a classroom, receiving only a few weeks of training and do not need to have a degree in education. For teacher-credentialing programs, hopeful educators take two years to complete their educational training and serve as a student teacher for another year before entering the classroom as its sole credentialed instructor.”

“Yes, California has struggled with a teacher shortage for decades. The answer to that shortage is not placing untrained educators in schools who leave after a two-year stint. When teachers leave after only a few years, it just exacerbates the issue. It’s a Band-Aid fix on a bullet-hole problem.”

Garcia ordered her bill to the inactive file in May.

TFA is the Billionaire Army

TFA Army

It seems like every major foundation gives to TFA. Besides Gates, Walton, Broad, Dell, Hastings, and Arnold, there is Bradley, Hall, Kaufman, DeVos, Skillman, Sackler and the list goes on. According to TFA’s 2016 tax form, the grants TFA received that year totaled more than $245 million. US taxpayer give TFA $40 million a year via the US Department of Education.

The Walton (Walmart) family has provided TFA more than $100,000,000. In 2013, their $20,000,000 grant gave $2,000 more per TFA teacher going to charter schools than for public school teachers. Annie Waldmen reporting for ProPublica observed,

“The incentives corresponded to a shift in Teach For America’s direction. Although only 7% of students go to charter schools, Teach For America sent almost 40% of its 6,736 teachers to them in 2018 — up from 34% in 2015 and 13% in 2008. In some large cities, charter schools employ the majority of TFA teachers: 54% in Houston, 58% in San Antonio and at least 70% in Los Angeles.”

To enhance the opportunities in leadership for TFA teachers, TFA created the non-profit Leadership for Education Equity (LEE). The LEE board includes Emma Bloomberg (Michael Bloomberg’s daughter); Steuart Walton (billionaire); Arthur Rock (billionaire) and Elisa Villanueva Beard (TFA-CEO).

LEE finances TFA members and alumni who run for political office and provides campaign training. All LEE members get at least $2,000 but members with the right attitude will also get individual donations from board members.

LEE, which received $29 million in contributions and grants in 2017, helped more than 150 alumni run in local and state races in 2018, according to an internal presentation obtained by ProPublica.

A LEE example: This May when Houston ISD voted to end their contract with TFA, board member Holly Vilaseca voted to renew it. Previously, Vilaseca had been a founding TFA teacher at a KIPP charter school. Walton family members and Arthur Rock gave a total of $20,000 to her 2017 school board campaign, in addition to $6,000 from LEE.

The history of the World is replete with examples of Youth movements being used by ruthless individuals for their own purposes. Four years ago, I wrote “Is TFA a Cult.” At the time, I thought that was somewhat farcical.

Today, I believe it is true. Idealistic youths are recruited, taught a neoliberal view of good governance and those that take the bait are shaped for leadership and lucrative careers.

TFA corps members and alumni are the ground forces for privatizing public education the pillar of American Democracy. TFA is bad for America.

Twitter: @tultican

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Texas Hangs Sword of Damocles Over Houston Schools

3 Feb

When the Houston Independent School District (HISD) Board refused to privatize four schools, state takeover of the district became likely. States taking over school districts have an awful track record. Takeovers in Philadelphia, Newark, Detroit and Tennessee have been long running disasters for students, parents, schools and communities. So the idea that Texas will likely seize HISD – a district the Texas Education Agency (TEA) assigned a grade of B on its new A – F grading system – is bizarre.

HISD is the largest school district in the state of Texas and the 7th largest in the United States. The nine HISD Board members are an impressive group whose children attend district schools. Seven of them are products of HISD. They all are college graduates and most earned advanced degrees. Seven of them have both teaching and administrative experience in public schools. Anne Jung was a high school science teacher who earned a master’s in physics at Harvard. Jolanda Jones is a Rhodes Scholar and an NCAA heptathlon champion with a Juris Doctorate from the University of Houston. Wanda Adams was a scholarship winning athlete who attended Kashmere High School which is one of the four schools TEA might shutter. She is an Emmy winning college graduate who has been named to multiple top 50 lists in Houston area plus has served two terms on the Houston city council.

Richard Carranza became HISD superintendent in August of 2016. In March of 2018, he resigned to take a similar position in New York City Schools. With the HISD board’s impressive resumes and the fact that their last top hire was considered the best administrator in America to lead the nation’s largest school district, it was startling to read Governor Greg Abbott’s January 3rd tweet,

“What a joke. HISD leadership is a disaster. Their self-centered ineptitude has failed the children they are supposed to educate. If ever there was a school board that needs to be taken over and reformed it’s HISD. Their students & parents deserve change.”

A counter observation based on biographies is that every elected board member in HISD is more qualified to be an education leader than Mike Morath, the guy Abbott appointed Texas Commissioner of Education. They all are more educated with advanced degrees in clinical psychology, physics, law, education leadership etceteras compared to Morath’s bachelors degree in business. The board members have decades of experience working in public schools compared to Morath’s six months as an untrained long term sub teaching a computer science; a class outside of his field of study.

Morath tried to privatize the Dallas Independent School District while a board Trustee. It appears that Abbott might have a similar agenda for the entire state and that is why he selected this unqualified person to lead the state’s schools.

Terrible Education Policy Driven by Benighted Legislation

Takeover Authors

In 2015 Governor Abbott signed HB 1842 into law. It mandates “intervention in and sanction of a public school that has received an academically unsuccessful performance rating for at least two consecutive school years ….”

The law mandates that if a district does not implement an approved plan to turn the school around “the commissioner shall [may] order:

  • appointment of a board of managers to govern the district as provided by Section 39.112(b) [repurposing of the campus under this section];
  • alternative management of the campus under this section; or
  • closure of the campus.”

The bill allows districts to present a turnaround plan in which the district could be designated an “innovation district.” If after five consecutive years of bad tests scores at any district campus an “innovation district” would lose its designation and be subject to the above sanctions.

HB 1842 passed by large margins; 26-5 in the senate and 125-18 in the house. It is doubtful that many of the legislators fully understood that they were putting their constituent’s democratic rights in jeopardy when they voted for this bill.

In 2017, Senate Bill 1882 incentivized privatizing schools in minority neighborhoods. Sarah Becker an HISD parent and school psychologist explains,

“In the spring of 2017, just months before the sanctions of HB1842 were slated to go into effect; the legislature passed Texas Senate Bill 1882, which gave school boards another option for these so-called failing schools. SB1882 encouraged school districts to hand over control of these neighborhood schools to charter operators (referred to as “partnerships”) the year before schools would get ratings for the fifth year. In exchange, the school and its board would get a reprieve from Representative Dutton’s death penalty for two years and, as a bonus, would receive extra funding for every student enrolled in one of these charter-controlled schools.

“With one law the death penalty (1842) and the other law the price of clemency (1882), these two laws now work together to coerce local school boards to be the hand of privatizing their own neighborhood schools. One by one, schools are turned over to private, appointed organizations by local politicians that want to save their fledgling political careers, and in turn, these “partnerships” provide cover for conservative leaders that would have a hard time explaining to Texans how their state undermined local control of schools with state-mandated takeovers and closures.”

This combination of laws is based on the faulty premise that school quality can be measured by standardized testing. The famed education scholar Linda Hammond-Darling mentioned last week in an Ohio presentation,

“There’s about a 0.9 correlation between the level of poverty and test scores. So, if the only thing you measure is the absolute test score, then you’re always going to have the high poverty communities at the bottom and then they can be taken over.” (Emphasis added)

A correlation of 1 means it is a certainty and – 1 means it cannot happen. A correlation of 0.5 means there is a mild positive relationship. The 0.9 correlation with family wealth is the only correlation above 0.5 for any of the researched variables such as schools, teachers, sex or race.

In 1998, Noel Wilson wrote a major peer reviewed scholarly paper, “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error”. Wilson’s paper basically says that the level of error associated with standardized testing is so high it makes these tests unreliable as evaluative tools.

A year later, James Popham of the UCLA graduate school of education also wrote a peer reviewed paper on testing. In his Education Leadership article based on the paper he concluded,

“Educators should definitely be held accountable. The teaching of a nation’s children is too important to be left unmonitored. But to evaluate educational quality by using the wrong assessment instruments is a subversion of good sense. Although educators need to produce valid evidence regarding their effectiveness, standardized achievement tests are the wrong tools for the task.” (Emphasis added)

The science has not changed. Standardized test results will not evaluate a school’s quality but will identify poverty. The new approach in Texas guarantees that parents in minority mostly poor communities will have their democratic rights and public schools taken away. It may not be a racist intent but it certainly brings about a racist outcome. If this were not true at least one school in a majority white affluent neighborhood would be identified as “failing”.

TexasIR4_Correlated_w_RacePoverty2

HISD Parent Advocate Demographic Map of Houston Schools

Failure Demgraphics

Demographic Data from HISD

Houston’s Long Relationship with Destroy Public Education Ideology

Teach For America (TFA) or as my friend Ciedie Aech calls them the “teach-for-a-minute girls” came to Houston in 1991. A TFA teacher is a temporary employee with a bachelor’s degree and five-weeks of summer training from TFA. A new career teacher has a bachelor’s degree, a year of student teaching in conjunction with a year of teacher education classes. The TFA temp will normally leave after 2 years if not before. It would not be unusual for a career teacher to still be at a school 30-years later.

The new career teacher will likely not be confident or competent their first year. Most new teachers find an informal mentor on staff that guides them. The TFA temp normally does not have a clue about how unprepared they are. Because career teachers were so denigrated during their training, TFA teachers are reluctant to ask the advice of a veteran.

To label TFA teachers highly qualified or even qualified is to dissemble.

TFA is another of the destroy-public-education (DPE) organizations that only exists because of billionaire dollars. In her book Chronicle of Echoes, Mercedes Schneider documented that in 1995 TFA was $1.2 million in debt despite receiving a $2 million dollar federal grant.  Founder Wendy Kopp was able to scrape by with four $10 million gifts from the Broad foundation, the Dell foundation, Dan and Doris Fisher (Gap founders), and The Rainwater Charitable Funds. In 2011, the Walton Family gave TFA $49.5 million and since then money from billionaires has continuously poured in; even Houston’s own John Arnold has sent them more than $7 million.

In 1994, two teachers from TFA Houston with no training and three years teaching experience, Michael Feinberg and Dave Levin, founded KIPP charter school in Houston and New York. Schneider noted in Chronicle, “By 2000 Feinberg and Levin were receiving funding from Donald and Doris Fisher.” The Fisher’s co-founded the KIPP foundation where they were joined on the board by Carrie Walton Penner (Walmart heir), Mark Nunnely (Bain Capital) and Reed Hasting (Netflix) among others.

Chris Barbic another Houston TFA teacher with limited experience followed in Feinberg and Levin’s footsteps to founded YES Prep the next year. This charter was seen as miraculous. Gary Rubinstein was a fellow TFA teacher and personal friend of Barbic’s in Houston. He often shoots down miracle claims by charter schools. Gary wrote of Yes Prep,

“In 2010, YES was awarded a million dollars by Oprah Winfrey, in part because of their incredible record of getting 100% of their 12th graders to be accepted into college.  This was before people knew to ask, ‘But what percent of your 9th graders remained in the school to become 12th graders?’”

KIPP which uses a 19th century “no excuses” pedagogy has 25 schools in Houston and YES Prep has grown to 18 schools. Rubinstein concluded the article cited above with:

“So is YES Prep failing its Black students and then abandoning them when it serves YES for them to do so?  I can’t be certain, but the data makes me pretty confident that the answer is YES.”

YES Prep and KIPP are two more DPE organizations that only exist because a group of billionaires dedicated to privatizing public education gave them millions of dollars. It is not because they are superior schools but because they are not public.

The fraudulent “Texas miracle” that led to the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act and the federal takeover of public education came from Houston. Roderick Paige was the HISD Superintendent that rode that “miracle” all the way to the office of United States Secretary of Education.

Paige’s strategy was to give bonuses to school leaders that hit bench marks and fire those that didn’t. Drop out rates plunged and test scores soared. Later in was learned that the “Texas miracle” like all school miracle claims was a fraud. They cooked the books on dropout data and principals raised 10th grade testing scores by holding low scoring 9th graders back and then promoting them to 11th grade the next time they were due to test.

It is close to a consensus conclusion that NCLB was a colossal and damaging failure. Its strategy of test and punish became test and privatize. Alfie Kohn published a 2004 article, “Test Today, Privatize Tomorrow; Using Accountability to ‘Reform’ Public Schools to Death.” In a 2008 addendum, he wrote of the suspicion that schools were purposely setup for failure:

“We now have corroboration that these fears were entirely justified. Susan Neuman, an assistant secretary of education during the roll-out of NCLB, admitted that others in Bush’s Department of Education ‘saw NCLB as a Trojan horse for the choice agenda – a way to expose the failure of public education and ‘“blow it up a bit’’’ (Claudia Wallis, ‘No Child Left Behind: Doomed to Fail?’, Time, June 8, 2008).”

Some Observations

With the HB 1842 and SB 1882, the Texas legislature has created an education code that eerily mirrors NCLB. It has reinstituted the test and punish theory using the same faulty methodology for evaluating schools – standardized testing. Is this the result of ignorance or something far more sinister?

Local Houston billionaire and former Enron trader John Arnold has joined forces with San Francisco billionaire Reed Hastings to privatize America’s schools. They have each pledged $100,000,000 to their new City Fund dedicated to selling the portfolio model of school governance. TEA Commissioner Mike Morath recently started the System of Great Schools which is a strategy roadmap and toolkit for implementing the portfolio model for school governance, a model that posits disruption and school privatization as good for Texas.

Fewer and fewer schools in a portfolio district are controlled by a vote of the community. I believe in democracy and local control. How do Texas politicians justify undermining democracy and local control? What a strange group of conservatives.

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Big Spending on Privatizing Public Schools in San Antonio

19 Oct

By Thomas Ultican 10/19/2018

Federal dollars are supplementing deep pocketed Destroy Public Education (DPE) forces in an effort to privatize schools in San Antonio, Texas. The total monetary support for the preferred charter school systems exceeds $200,000,000. One “DPE” publication, The 74, published a lengthy piece glorifying the attack on San Antonio’s democratically run schools and praised local elites including the school superintendent trained by Arne Duncan and Eli Broad for leading the decimation of public schools in San Antonio’s poorest neighborhoods.

The article cited above ends with this disclosure:

“The George W. Brackenridge Foundation provided financial support for this project to The 74 [local San Antonio money]. The Walton Family Foundation [Walmart money with long history for working to privatize schools] , Bloomberg Philanthropies [Former NY Mayor spends heavily on charter school promotion], Carnegie Corporation of New York [Supports charter schools like Summit], the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation [Paid for Common Core and lavishes money on charter schools], The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation [Literally wrote a guide to closing public schools], the Doris and Donald Fisher Fund [Biggest and earliest funder of KIPP], the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation [Tulsa Foundation that supports privatization friendly school board candidates across the nation], the Karsh Family Foundation [Oaktree Capital Management money from LA – supporters of KIPP], and Jon Sackler [Purdue Pharmaceutical money from oxycontin – supports school privatization school board candidates]  provide financial support to both KIPP and The 74.”

In other words, this article was a paid advertisement selling the privatization agenda. The George W. Brackenridge Foundation from San Antonio made a first time “contribution” to The 74 for this article to be published. An example of the author, Beth Hawkins, shading the facts reads,

“In 2009, a woman named Victoria Rico visited one of what were then KIPP San Antonio’s two public charter schools. A lawyer and the product of a family with a legacy in the city’s philanthropic community, Rico had been appointed to the board of the George W. Brackenridge Foundation, whose sole area of giving was K-12 education.”

“Rico was blown away by what she saw at the school and began visiting other charter schools that were successfully replicating — opening new campuses where students were enjoying high academic growth.”

The message conveyed is a San Antonio elite with no agenda happened to visit a KIPP charter school and what she saw was so wonderful it called her to action. No mention of her having held board seats at three charter management organizations (CMO) Great Hearts Texas, Basis and IDEA. She is still on the IDEA board which seems like a conflict of interest considering she is in charge of grants from the Brackenridge foundation which gives to IDEA.

Victoria Rico’s Anti-Public School Crusade

Rico Graphic

Rico Picture from IDEA Board Web-Page

Victoria grew up with a family of three sisters in San Antonio. Her father James Lavoy Branton attended the US Air Force Academy and in 1961 earned a Juris Doctorate (JD) from the University of Texas. He and her mother Molly settled in San Antonio where they were very successful both locally and regionally.

Victoria followed in her father’s footsteps. She also achieved a JD from the University of Texas at Austin after earning a bachelor’s degree from Harvard University. Upon completing her education, she returned to San Antonio, married and went to work in the local philanthropic community. Her new husband made a success of his cyber security and online corporate training companies which he founded.

In 2011, Rico published a proposed strategy for San Antonio to replicate charter schools which she believed to be “high-performing.” Victoria also invited leaders of the charitable network Philanthropy Roundtable and representatives of charter school networks to two meetings in San Antonio. Her message was that the city’s private and family foundations could make a greater collective impact if they joined forces to help underwrite new charter schools.

Out of these meetings, Rico founded a new organization, Choose to Succeed, to lead the collective effort to expand charter networks in San Antonio. Her goal was to add four more charter CMO’s to the exiting two currently operating in the city, KIPP and IDEA. The four new CMO’s she planned to court were BASIS Schools, Carpe Diem Schools, Great Hearts Academies, and Rocketship Education.

The 74 article reported on the strategy,

“Cultivating their growth in San Antonio would require more than $50 million in local donations, about $24 million of which has already been raised thanks to hefty pledges from Harvey Najim and his foundation, the Ewing Halsell Foundation, Graham Weston’s 80/20 Foundation and others. Cheering them on are former mayors Henry Cisneros and Phil Hardberger.

“The room oozed money, a point Rico’s husband Martin made when he announced that the software company he owns had pledged $50,000 and challenged others to pledge, too, noting that some there could raise him by a factor of 100.

“Notably absent was H-E-B Chairman Charles Butt, a billionaire well-known for his education philanthropy….

“His office said he was unavailable to comment on the Choose to Succeed initiative.

“H-E-B’s primary area of focus remains on improving and investing in our teachers and our Texas Public Schools,” company spokeswoman Dya Campos said in an e-mail.”

Rico is clearly a talented advocate for her cause. In January of 2013 My San Antonio reported,

‘”We have a real chance here,’ said Victoria Rico, chairwoman and trustee at San Antonio’s George W. Brackenridge Foundation, one of several organizations involved in the effort, called Texans Deserve Great Schools.

“Dan Patrick, the Senate education chairman, joined Rico at the group’s news conference, where he and others pointed to test scores that lag behind other states and nations as evidence that education in Texas needs reform.”

“Patrick said he was excited about the ‘comprehensive, multi-approach (school) choice plan’ put forward by the consortium.”

“Several of the group’s proposed changes favor charter schools, such as lifting the current cap on charters, providing facilities funding for charter schools and strengthening the state’s “parent trigger” law to make it easier for parents to intervene in struggling schools, including turning them into charters.

“’Our purpose as Texans Deserve Great Schools is to be a resource to the leadership of Texas,’ said Caprice Young, vice president of education for Houston’s Laura and John Arnold Foundation.

“Others involved in the effort include the Austin-based Texas Institute for Education Reform and Parent Revolution, a California-based organization that promotes parent trigger laws.”

The leaders at the meeting are some of America’s most well known advocates for the “DPE” agenda. Dan Patrick is the ex-bomb-throwing-conservative talk show host from Houston who is now the Lieutenant Governor of the state. He tries every year to push through a school voucher law that would allow taxpayer money to go to religious schools.

Before working for John Arnold, Caprice Young was the first President of the California Charter Schools Association. She is now the head of the mysterious Tukish Imam, Fethullah Gülen’s charter schools in California.

Rico’s campaign has been very successful in raising money. The 74 article claims they have raised $50,000,000 from local philanthropists. That number seems plausible. Between 2012 and 2016, three relatively obscure foundations contributed almost $20,000,000 to the six preferred CMO’s and Rico’s Choose to Succeed.

local money

Data from Tax Form 990 for Halsell, Najim and Brackenridge

The national spending by billionaire controlled funds for expanding charter schools is stunning. One example is The Charter School Growth Fund, which is under the influence of the Walmart heirs. That fund gifted IDEA Charter Schools $7,515,000 between 2013 and 2016. However, private funds cannot match the US Department of Education’s largesse. Between 2010 and 2018, the Department of Education granted IDEA $108,490,824 and over the same period gave KIPP $238,953,951.

Pedro Martinez Brought in to Sheppard the “DPE” Plan

Martinez Graphic

Martinez Photo from San Antonio District

Martinez is not an educator. He has never run a classroom or studied pedagogy. However, he does have a Masters in Business Administration from DePaul University and got his start in education working for Arne Duncan at the Chicago Public Schools (CPS). Before leaving Chicago, he became the Chief Financial Officer at CPS.

Pedro attended Eli Broad’s faux school administrator academy in 2009. Broad’s theory is that school system leaders do not need an education background because they can hire consultants for that. It also appears that the Broad academy teaches a harsh top down style of leadership.

In 2011, George N. Schmidt reporting for Substance News in Las Vegas wrote, “Pedro Martinez resurrected as ‘instructional’ guru… Broad Foundation places former Chicago finance chief in Las Vegas administration.” In 2012, Martinez was on a short list of two people to become the Superintendent of Schools in Philadelphia. He lost out to fellow Broad trainee, William Hite. That same year he took the Superintendent position in Reno, Nevada.

Martinez was fired after just two years on the job in Reno for reasons that are shrouded in mystery. It seems to have had something to do with his firing the district’s police chief, Mike Mieras. The Reno News Review alluded to a common problem plaguing Broad trained leaders; authoritarianism leading to a disgruntled staff. The report said,

“District sources by the dozen have been leaking information, reluctant to go public—suggesting that Martinez has created an unhealthy climate of fear. Many of those sources have the same view, that Martinez wants only department heads who agree with him, and Mieras did not fill the bill. They also say the talk of departmental “restructuring” is a blind behind which the firing took place.”

After Reno, Martinez got a political appointment to be Superintendent-in-Residence for Nevada’s Department of Education where he was an advisor to the Governor’s office. In less than a year, leaders in San Antonio decided he was the most qualified person in America to be their Superintendent.

Pedro is a favorite of “DPE” groups. On the San Antonio Independent School District (SAISD) internet site, Martinez’s biography says, “He is a member of Chiefs for Change, a nonprofit, bipartisan network of diverse state and district education chiefs.” That is Jeb Bush’s organization dedicated to privatizing schools and selling technology into classrooms.

The 74, article praised Martinez embrace of the phony Relay Graduate School of education created by the charter school industry with no professor’s of education. The report said,

“Martinez’s decision to invite Relay to run schools — and train new district teachers — is something other districts are watching, says Magee. ‘The partnership with Relay is groundbreaking for a variety of reasons,’ he says. ‘One is that Pedro told Relay, ‘“You are going to be training teachers for our system, and we want to embed your training in our district.’”

The Magee quoted above is Mike Magee, a leader for Bush’s Chiefs for Change organization.

Martinez brought in Democracy Prep to take over Stewart Elementary and he has opened two schools to be run by Relay Graduate School.

District enrollment in SAISD is declining and ripping a hole in budgets. Martinez admits that the influx of charter schools is the cause but he embraces them anyway. To compensate for the falling enrollment, he laid off 31 administrators and 132 teachers. Now there are calls for Martinez to be fired; not because of the layoffs but because teachers were laid off on the basis of performance evaluations instead of by the contract rules.

Running Multiple School Districts Costs More

Peter Greene is an education commentator at Forbes. He explains why multiple schools systems drive up costs for education. This is one of his examples:

“Let’s assume that … six districts employ the same number of teachers that the old single district did. They probably don’t, because students don’t leave in neat class-sized numbers, so if five out of twenty-five fifth graders leave the public school, it can’t cut a fifth grade teaching position, but the charter will still have to hire one for those five new students. But let’s assume that the numbers work perfectly, and the exact same number of teachers is employed. Each of the six systems will still need its own superintendent (or CEOs or whatever you want to call your highest muckity-muck), building principals, psychologist, business manager, cafeteria manager– the list can be as long as you like, down to dean of student activities and administrative assistants all around. The six districts will employ more personnel than one did– and many of the “extra” hires will be the priciest personnel.”

Each charter management organization is a school district and the San Antonio plan is to grow six new districts concentrated in the Hispanic neighborhoods of zip code 78207. The residents are told that the public schools are failing and are shown misrepresented testing data as proof. They are promised “high quality schools” from the private sector. It is a lie from upside down world; the public schools which are being stolen are the “high quality schools.”

I will end with the words of a local San Antonio hero of public education, Luke Amphlett. He wrote,

“While school privatization ‘reformers’ are backed by big money donors and corporations, opponents include San Antonio’s Our Schools Coalition of community members, teachers, and parents, the Movement for Black Lives, the Network for Public Education, and the NAACP – the nation’s oldest and largest civil rights organization.

“It’s big corporate money versus civil rights organizations, community groups, and teachers. The choice could hardly be starker. That’s why charter advocates pretend this argument is about teachers’ contracts and unions that are scared of change: if they were to tell the public the truth, they’d lose the argument before it started.”

Twitter: @tultican

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Review of A Chronicle of Echoes

23 Jun

Chronicle’s author Mercedes K. Schneider will not be confused with Margret Mitchell or Leon Uris but she just might receive mention alongside Upton Sinclair and Izzy Stone. The book is plagued by poor editing and several passages are difficult or impossible to decode. However, Chronicle is a masterpiece of research that illuminates the unbelievable world of power, money and incestuous relations that are perverting public education in America.

In the introduction Schneider tells us “In writing this book, my purpose is to dismantle the dismantlers. As such, my words are not kind. My words expose, and that exposure is harsh. The individuals and organizations profiled in this book have declared war on my profession, and I take that personally.” As if proving these words, she calls chapter one “Joel Klein: The Man from Whom Nothing Good Comes.”

The subject is vast and this book is almost 500 pages of narrative and documentation of claims. In these pages Schneider demonstrates her extraordinary skill as a researcher. Even the most informed person about the politics and power behind what passes as education reform in America, will learn many things from this trove of information. I learned that ALEC (The American Legislative Exchange Council) was opposed to the Common Core until Jeb Bush intervened in 2012.

I was amazed to learn that two TFA (Teach For America) alums with no academic background in education, 6-weeks of TFA institute training and three years teaching experience were able to not only start the KIPP schools but immediately received huge donations for their enterprise. We are talking millions of dollars given by foundations to untrained, inexperienced youths to start a charter school chain. I was absolutely stunned to find that Obama and Duncan gave a $50,000,000 “Investing in Innovation” grant to KIPP.

$50,000,000 appears to be the amount of money given to the top preferred “reform” organizations. The Fisher Foundation (GAP) was the first supporter of KIPP and has given them fifty million dollars. Today, Wendy Kopp (the founder of TFA who amongst her many grants got fifty million dollars from the Walton foundation) is married to KIPP CEO, Richard Barth. With Wendy’s cheap untrained teacher force and all the philanthropic gifts, KIPP is awash in money. They have nearly twice the dollars to spend per student than the local public schools with whom they are “competing.”

Most of all what I learned from this book is that the big money being used to privatize public education in America is Republican money. It is true that there are groups like Democrats for Education Reform and even our current Democrat President who are facilitating the demise of public education and the teaching profession. But these self-proclaimed Democrat groups must create sub-groups with names like “Education Reform Now” that do not have Democrat in their name in order to get the big donations.

Schneider makes a good case that the biggest enemy of public education in America is Jeb Bush. She devotes three chapters to the shenanigans Jeb and his organizations have done. Jeb Bush comes off as a cynical elite using education as his ticket to political power. And like cynical elites everywhere, he does not appear to give a damn about the students of the poor and middle-class.

This tale of eleven million dollars here and fifty million dollars there to support the untested and inexperienced is mind boggling. What is the purpose of people like Netflix CEO, Reed Hastings, spending time and money on KIPP, TFA, Rocket Ship, etc. while undermining public schools in communities of poverty and degradation? It must be to destroy the current public education system in America and replace it with a privatized system.

Mercedes Schneider has created a community asset of great value with this book. It is a must read for anyone concerned about public education and the forces arrayed to steal public school funding.

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