Tag Archives: Laurene Powell Jobs

Jobs’ Reading Scam

By Thomas Ultican 4/10/2024

Laurene Powell Jobs controls Amplify, a kids-at-screens education enterprise. In 2011, she became one of the wealthiest women in the world when her husband, Steve, died. This former Silicon Valley housewife displays the arrogance of wealth, infecting all billionaires. She is now a “philanthropist”, in pursuit of both her concerns and biases. Her care for the environment and climate change are admirable but her anti-public school thinking is a threat to America. Her company, Amplify, sells the antithesis of good education.

I am on Amplify’s mailing list. April third’s new message said,

“What if I told you there’s a way for 95% of your students to read at or near grade level? Maybe you’ve heard the term Science of Reading before, and have wondered what it is and why it matters.”

Spokesperson, Susan Lambert, goes on to disingenuously explain how the Science of Reading (SoR) “refers to the abundance of research illustrating the best way students learn to read.”

This whopper is followed by a bigger one, stating:

“A shift to a Science of Reading-based curriculum can help give every teacher and student what they need and guarantee literacy success in your school. Tennessee school districts did just that and they are seeing an abundant amount of success from their efforts.”

A shift to SoR-based curriculum is as likely to cause harm as it is to bring literacy success. This was just a used-car salesman style claim. On the other hand, the “abundance of success” in Tennessee is an unadulterated lie. National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) tracks testing over time and is respected for education testing integrity. Tennessee’s NAEP data shows no success “from their efforts.” Their reading scores since 2013 have been down, not a lot but do not demonstrate an “abundance of success”.

NAEP Data Plot 2005 to 2022

Amplify’s Genesis

Larry Berger and Greg Dunn founded Wireless Generation in 2000 to create the software for lessons presented on screens. Ten years later, they sold it to Rupert Murdoch and his News Corporation for $360 million. Berger pocketed $40 million and agreed to stay on as head of curriculum. Wireless Generation was rebranded Amplify and Joel Klein was hired to run it.

Murdoch proposed buying a million I-pads to deliver classroom instruction. However, the Apple operating system was not flexible enough to run the software. The android system developed at Google met their needs. They purchased the Taiwanese-made Asus Tablets, well regarded in the market place but not designed for the rigors of school use. Another issue was that Wireless Generation had not developed curriculum but Murdoch wanted to beat Pearson and Houghton Mifflin to the digital education market place … so they forged ahead.

In 2012, the corporate plan was rolling along until the wheels came off. In Guilford County, North Carolina, the school district won a Race to the Top grant of $30 million dollars which it used to experiment with digital learning. The district’s plan called for nearly 17,000 students in 20 middle schools to receive Amplify tablets. When a charger for one of the tablets overheated, the plan was halted. Only two months into the experiment, they found not only had a charger malfunctioned but another 175 chargers had issues and 1500 screens were kid-damaged.

This was the beginning of the end.

By August of 2015, News Corporation announced it was exiting the education business. The corporation took a $371 million dollar write-off. The next month, they announced selling Amplify to members of its staff. In the deal orchestrated by Joel Klein, who remained a board member, Larry Berger assumed leadership of the company.

Three months later, Reuters reported that the real buyer was Laurene Powell Jobs. She purchased Amplify through her LLC, the Emerson Collective. In typical Powell Jobs style, no information was available for how much of the company she would personally control.

Because Emerson Collective is an LLC, it can purchase private companies and is not required to make money details public. However, the Waverley Street Foundation, also known as the Emerson Collective Foundation, is a 501 C3 (EIN: 81-3242506) that must make money transactions public. Waverly Street received their tax exempt status November 9, 2016.

SoR A Sales Scam

The Amplify email gave me a link to two documents that were supposed to explain SoR: (Navigating the shift to evidence-based literacy instruction 6 takeaways from Amplify’s Science of Reading: The Symposium) and (Change Management Playbook Navigating and sustaining change when implementing a Science of Reading curriculum). Let’s call them Symposium and Navigating.

Navigating tells readers that it helps teachers move away from ineffective legacy practices and start making shifts to evidence-based practices. The claim that “legacy practices” are “ineffective” is not evidence-based. The other assertion that SoR is evidence-based has no peer-reviewed research backing it.

Sally Riordan is a Senior Research Fellow at the University College London. In Britain, they have many of the same issues with reading instruction. In her recent research, she noted:

“In 2023, however, researchers at the University of Warwick pointed out something that should have been obvious for some time but has been very much overlooked – that following the evidence is not resulting in the progress we might expect.

“A series of randomised controlled trials, including one looking at how to improve literacy through evidence, have suggested that schools that use methods based on research are not performing better than schools that do not.”

In Symposium, we see quotes from Kareem Weaver who co-founded Fulcrum in Oakland, California and is its executive director. Weaver also was managing director of the New School Venture Fund, where Powell Jobs served on the board. He works for mostly white billionaires to the detriment of his community. (Page 15)

Both Symposium and Navigating have the same quote, “Our friends at the Reading League say that instruction based on the Science of Reading ‘will elevate and transform every community, every nation, through the power of literacy.”’

Who is the Reading League and where did they come from?

Dr. Maria Murray is the founder and CEO of The Reading League. It seems to have been hatched at the University of Syracuse and State University of New York at Oswego by Murray and Professor Jorene Finn in 2017. That year, they took in $11,044 in contributions (EIN: 81-0820021) and in 2018, another $109,652. Then in 2019, their revenues jumped 20 times to $2,240,707!

Jorene Finn worked for Cambria Learning Group and was a LETRS facilitator at Lexia. That means the group had serious connections to the corporate SoR initiative before they began.

With Amplify’s multiple citations of The Reading League, I speculated that the source of that big money in 2019 might have been Powell Jobs. Her Waverly Street Foundation (AKA Emerson Collective Foundation) only shows one large donation of $95,000,000 in 2019. It went to the Silicon Valley Community Foundation (EIN: 20-5205488), a donor-directed dark money fund.

There is no way of following that $95 million.

The Reading League Brain Scan Proving What?

Professor Paul Thomas of Furman University noted the League’s over-reliance on brain scans and shared:

“Many researchers in neurobiology (e.g., Elliott et al., 2020; Hickok, 2014; Lyon, 2017) have voiced alarming concerns about the validity and preciseness of brain imaging techniques such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to detect reliable biomarkers in processes such as reading and in the diagnosis of other mental activity….

“And Mark Seidenberg, a key neuroscientist cited by the “science of reading” movement, offers a serious caution about the value of brain research: “Our concern is that although reading science is highly relevant to learning in the classroom setting, it does not yet speak to what to teach, when, how, and for whom at a level that is useful for teachers.”

“Beware The Reading League because it is an advocacy movement that is too often little more than cherry-picking, oversimplification, and a thin veneer for commercial interests in the teaching of reading.”

The push to implement SoR is a new way to sell what Amplify originally called “personalized learning.” This corporate movement conned legislators, many are co-conspirators, into passing laws forcing schools and teachers to use the SoR-related programs, equipment and testing.

SoR is about economic gain for its purveyors and not science based.

When politicians and corporations control education, children and America lose.

Tags: Emerson Collective, Joel Klien, Larry Berger, Laurene Powell Jobs, Paul Thomas, Rupert Murdoch, Sally Riordan, Science of Reading, SoR, The Reading League

Comments 3 Comments
Categories Corporate Education Reform, technology

Pitch AI Education?

9 Jan

By Thomas Ultican 1/9/2024

The Walton family (Tax Id: 13-3441466), Jonathon Sackler (Tax Id: 13-4119735), Lynn Schusterman (Tax Id: 73-1312965) and other billionaires fund The 74 Media, Inc. It has become a primary method for propagating their agenda. In December, The 74 published “7 Artificial Intelligence Trends That Could Reshape Education in 2024.” For serious educators, AI is a set of computer algorithms, making cheating easy. It is another tool for a dumbed-down, easier to control and more profitable education system.

Late Steve Jobs’ billionaire wife, Laurene Powell Jobs, founded the Emerson Collective. In 2015, Emerson Collective bought Amplify, a kids-at-screens education initiative that Rupert Murdoch gave up on. The same year, Jobs and Russlynn Ali founded XQ Institute and its XQ Super Schools project soon followed. In 2017, they put on a one-hour show, XQ Super Schools Live, simultaneously on four networks, ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox. Talent featured included Ringo Starr, Tom Hanks, Samuel L. Jackson, Justin Timberlake, and Jennifer Hudson.

Jobs set out to use wealth to impose her views on reforming public education.

Her plans did not resonate deeply with the public so today she seems to be using wealth to push education technology and Amplify. The AI article linked was written by Edward Montalvo, XQ institute’s senior education writer. He writes:

‘“The future of AI in education is not just about adopting new technologies; it’s about reshaping our approach to teaching and learning in a way that is as dynamic and diverse as the students we serve,’ XQ Institute Senior Advisor Laurence Holt said. … Through AI, we can also transcend the limitations of the Carnegie Unit — a century-old system in which a high school diploma is based on how much time students spend in specific subject classes.

“Changing that rigid system is our mission at XQ.”

The article, linked by Montalvo, appeared in the September 11, 2023 issue of The 74, co-written by XQ’s Russlynn Ali and Carnegie’s Timothy Knowles. Ending the Carnegie Unit is crucial for the scheme to put children in front of computers earning badges. It is the only way to implement competency-based education (CBE), at a low price.

The fact that CBE and its forerunners have a 50-year history of failure seems not to be an issue.

Montalvo’s article was a sales job for AI products. He noted that an XQ Super School, PSI High in Sanford Florida, was engaging with AI. PSI tells us, “The program’s mastery-based grading system also helps ensure that students are fully prepared for college, career, and beyond.” Abandoning traditional education, they have replaced it with rubrics. There is no information about student performance 6-months down the road. How can AP courses be offered without traditional education? Yet, PSI says they are excited about AI.

AI has value but for pedagogy, it is limited. Educator and blogger, Mercedes Schneider, shared, “As a teacher for many decades, I find increasingly more of my time consumed with devising means to ensure students complete my assignments without the easy-cheat, sustain-my-own-ignorance that AI enables in today’s students – and, it seems, an increasing number of (especially remote) professionals who may be using the corner-chopping ability AI offers to even hold multiple full-time positions.”

Dystopian Future is Possible

Jobs, XQ and Carnegie are far from the only forces out to blow up our current education system by pushing for a technology-based takeover. Many deep-pocketed fans promote education technology. The new push to eliminate the Carnegie unit is coming from a below-the-surface movement to digitize education. Global Silicon Valley (GSV) has taken leadership of an effort to program life with crypto-world tools.

GSV is a venture capital firm founded in 2010 by Michael Moe, a private company with a radical libertarian ideology. Moe and colleagues published “American Revolution 2.0; How Education Innovation is Going to Revitalize America and Transform the U.S. Economy.” This manifesto calls for turning kindergarten through university and beyond into a tokenized existence. Graduation from kindergarten gets a token, hospitalization gets a token, immunization gets a token, earn a C in reading gets a token and so on, will be forever saved in a blockchain.

This is a roadmap to “Big Brother.”

American Revolution 2.0 Page 292

At the April 2023 ASU+GSV conference in San Diego, Educational Testing Service (ETS) and Carnegie Foundation announced they are partnering to create assessments for CBE. Besides resting on a 50-year history of failure, the big obstacle for CBE is that testing has not proven reliable. This is the issue that Amit Savak of ETS and Tim Knowles of Carnegie are promising to solve. It is a key to the digitized education scheme becoming viable.

Much of the motivation for this thinking is a belief that the preeminent purpose of education is employment readiness. Philosophy, literature, art etc. are only meaningful for children of the wealthy. The new push for CBE and ending the Carnegie Unit is a move toward skill-based education, wasting no time on useless “frills.”

It is easy to cheat with digitally-enhanced systems. Derek Newton, writing for Forbes, observed, “But because of the credit hour system, which is designed to measure classroom instruction time, it’s still relatively hard to cheat your way to a full college degree.”

A good example of Newton’s point is high school credit recovery. America’s high school graduation rates peaked at about 77% in 1970 and then drifted down for almost four decades to 69% in 2007. Credit recovery at a computer screen was introduced in 2007. After that students were completing semester-long courses in as little as one day and cheating became rampant. In 2012, 81% of the freshman cohort in America graduated on time, an all-time record.

Roman Sterns, founder and executive director of Scaling Student Success, is all in for credentialing. He says the present high school transcript is a relic of the past, describes a new transcript type and excitedly reports:

“Fortunately, a version of this new kind of transcript has been developed and is being piloted now by schools affiliated with the Mastery Transcript Consortium (MTC). Launched in March 2017, membership has grown to over 300 schools. Most are independent schools, both in the U.S. and overseas, but increasingly public schools are opting in.”

EdSurge reports:

“In the area of lifelong learning, the Learning Economy Foundation (LEF) aims to create a decentralized, blockchain-based network where skills and credentials are stored within a digital identity that follows the learner. Recently, LEF partnered with LEGO Foundation to create a gamified learning experience, called SuperSkills!, where elementary school students can select adventures and collect gifts as a result of learning core skills.”

Crypto technology has created an environment where storing information about everyone in a blockchain is possible and the data can never be erased or corrected. This new edtech tool is described in Greg Nadeau’s slide presentation “Internet of Education 3.0.” He is a crypto enthusiast but some of his slides troublingly point to a new tyranny of information.

Opinion

Between the Civil War and Bill Clinton’s presidency, American public education made slow, consistent improvement. With President Clinton’s standards, the momentum dropped and stopped with the advent of No Child Left Behind. Reagan era’s “A Nation at Risk” was the model for education reform, directed by non-educators. With the movement for “school choice,” vultures started circling over public education, looking for opportunities. Clearly, public education can be improved but success requires professional educators to lead, not politicians, entrepreneurs and amateurs.

The direction charted by GSV, XQ and the Carnegie Foundation is more than foolish … it is dangerous. An institution responsible for the developing the world’s oldest functioning democracy is being turned into a tool for repression.

Greedy, Mindless fools must be stopped!

Tags: Amit Savak, Laurene Powell Jobs, Michael Moe, Russlynn Ali, Timothy Knowles

Comments Leave a Comment
Categories technology

Carnegie vs Carnegie Unit

9 Dec

By Thomas Ultican 12/9/2023

Current president of Carnegie Foundation, Tim Knowles, from the University of Chicago and founding director of Teach for America, is vigorously trying to upend the Carnegie Unit. Joining in this crusade are CEO of Education Testing Services (ETS), Amit Savak, and billionaire Laurene Powell Jobs’ XQ Institute.

What is it and Where Did it Come From?

Andrew Carnegie became the wealthiest man in the world when he sold Carnegie Steele to J. P. Morgan in 1901. With the sale, he surpassed John D. Rockefeller’s riches. Carnegie, the penniless Scotsman who came to America and became wealthy, is also known as the man who gave it all away. In 1905, he put up $10 million to create retirement benefits for college professors. In today’s dollars that grant would be worth about $350 million.

The problem became developing a standard for identifying legitimate professors.

A 2015 paper from the Carnegie Foundation reported that in 1906:

“The Carnegie trustees concluded that college entrance requirements should be ‘designated in terms of units, a unit being a course of five periods weekly throughout an academic year of the preparatory school.’ Fourteen such units constituted ‘the minimum amount of preparation’ for students heading for college. And colleges that required fourteen units for admission would, if they met the Foundation’s other requirements, qualify for the pension fund.” (Page 8)

The Carnegie Unit, which developed from this decision, measures student progress. For example, a student attending class meetings one hour a day 3 times a week, for 40 weeks, plus passing the course work and testing involved earns one “unit” of high school credit, for the 120 hours in class. The “unit” is a minimum requirement creating a nationwide agreed-upon structure. It does not control pedagogy nor assessments but insures a minimum amount of time on task.

The 2015 Carnegie paper also stated:

“It provides a common currency that makes possible innumerable exchanges and interconnections among institutions. And it continues to provide a valuable opportunity-to-learn standard for students in both higher education and K-12 education, where inequitable resources and variable quality are more the rule than the exception.” (Page 5)

The Carnegie Unit is a method for insuring a minimum amount of time is spent in class to earn a credit. Curriculum choices, assignments and testing are the province of classroom teachers and their schools. The number of credits required to graduate from a high school are set by state education departments and local school districts.

Changes Knowles and Others Want

Billionaire-financed propaganda rag, The 74, interviewed Tim Knowles in September. The sub-head stated, “From credits to seat time to school finance to student engagement, century-old unit of measurement is stifling real education reform and innovation.” Knowles’ first answer, explaining the Carnegie Unit is a lie:

“What it is, fundamentally, is the conflation of time and learning. It’s the suggestion that X number of minutes equals learning.”

It has never conflated time and learning.

Knowles, Savak and Jobs see the Carnegie Unit as a roadblock for their vision of a competency-based education (CBE) system, replacing units with proof of skills. Savak’s ETS promises to develop reliable mastery testing methods for providing a designation of competency, such as grades or badges. Jobs’ Amplify Education already has virtual courses that students can complete at their own speed. These fit nicely with Bill Gates’ old employee, Tom Vander Ark’s new Mastery Transcript Consortium.

In September, The 74 obligingly published “Credit Hours Are a Relic of the Past. How States Must Disrupt High School – Now.” The article is written by Russlynn Ali director of Laurene Powell Jobs’ XQ Institute and Timothy Knowles, blaming the Carnegie Unit for only half of high school graduates being ready for college, decline in economic mobility and NAEP scores falling after the pandemic. Ali and Knowles promise they “are intent on building a new educational architecture that shifts the sector to a truly competency-based system and away from time-bound conceptions of what knowledge is and how it is acquired.”

Not everyone is sanguine about their new “educational architecture.” Jal Mehta, professor of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, said in a published dialog:

“I’ve found myself increasingly wary each time another educational leader tells me how enthusiastic they are about this venture. For one thing, this year marked the 40^th anniversary of ‘A Nation at Risk,’ which famously urged states to boost the number of Carnegie Units required for graduation. Given that many of those excited about ditching Carnegie sit in the same offices as those who, a generation ago, led the push to act on that report’s recommendation, it’s worth asking why savvy leaders once deemed mandating more math, science, English, and world-language requirements a promising path forward. The answer, of course, is that they thought it a crude but workable way to put a floor beneath student learning. In a time of sky-high graduation rates, rampant grade inflation, and plummeting student achievement, this is something that we shouldn’t lightly dismiss.”

“The case against changing the Carnegie Unit is essentially twofold. First, that it was never intended as a way of measuring learning, which is properly left to individual teachers, professors, departments, and schools. It offers a very rough view of what is a “course” – defined by time – and then leaves all the assessment questions to local actors. Yes, there is tremendous variability in how these actors define ‘quality learning.’ But it preserves their autonomy to do so, while at the same time creating some basic measures that allow some equity and comparability across institutions. The second case against changing it is that anything replacing it would be worse. As the author of The Allure of Order, I can certainly make a case that efforts to build massive systems of measurement and impose them across different contexts of learning have often gone poorly!”

Education writer, Derek Newton’s article for Forbes, opposed ending the Carnegie unit for a host of reasons but the major one is cheating:

“Cheating, academic misconduct as the insiders know it, is so pervasive and so easy that it makes a complete mockery of any effort to build an entire education system around testing.”

“The sellers use software to take remote control of a test-taker’s computer and have a ringer take the exam for them.”

“But because of the credit hour system, which is designed to measure classroom instruction time, it’s still relatively hard to cheat your way to a full college degree.”

Doomed to Bad Pedagogy

ETS and Carnegie Foundation partnered to create assessments for CBE, making the Orwellian-named “personalized-learning” viable for issuing digitally-earned certifications. This is one required ingredient for their plan to shift American education to a “competency-based system,” with a 50-year history of failure.

The 1970’s “mastery learning” was very unpopular and renamed “outcome-based education” in the 1990s, now it’s called “competency-based education.” CBE is a move to use “mastery leaning” techniques to create individualized certification paths. However it is still the same mind-numbing approach that the 1970s teachers began calling “seats and sheets.” This behaviorist approach to education leaves almost no room for students to construct knowledge and ignores the social component of education.

In A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door, Jack Schneider and Jennifer Berkshire explain, “Because learning is deeply rooted in relationships, it can’t be farmed out to robots or time-saving devices.”

Final Observations

The American education system has become more and more centrally controlled since 1983’s “Nation at Risk.” This has made it more vulnerable to hare-brained schemes that would upend it, like Tim Knowles new “educational architecture.”

Billions of dollars have been spent to convince people that public schools are failing. This is not true. We have the premier education system in the world. If most people are satisfied with their schools, corporations will be denied easy access to the $100’s of billions from annual education budgets. They want Tim Knowles’ new “educational architecture,” not that it is better but it is more profitable.

Knowles, Savak and leaders at Jobs’ XQ Institute have been all over the country this year, at corporate-sponsored education events, trying to convince people to get rid of the Carnegie Unit. They want to replace it with CBE, a failed-education approach accompanied by an unproven testing system.

This approach to education has the potential to end American democracy because the public education system is its pillar. It also ignores the important social component of education.

Upending public schools this way is folly.

Tags: Amit Savak, Derek Newton, Jal Mehta, Laurene Powell Jobs, Russlynn Ali, Timothy Knowles

Comments 2 Comments
Categories Corporate Education Reform

Education Profiteering Accelerates in Texas

12 Apr

By Thomas Ultican 4/12/2023

In March, the Texas house of representative’s education committee introduced House Bill 1605. Chairman Brad Buckley from Killeen was lead sponsor and 25 other members are listed as co-sponsors including one Democrat. The actual author of the bill and who if anyone paid for it to be written is not known. The legislation creates two major changes. It transfers purchasing power from the state education board to State Commissioner of Education Mike Morath and it opens the door for Laurene Powell Jobs’ Amplify to control instructional materials for the Foundation School Program.

The Texas Education Agency (TEA) explains,

“The primary source of state funding for Texas school districts is the Foundation School Program (FSP). This program ensures that all school districts, regardless of property wealth, receive ‘substantially equal access to similar revenue per student at similar tax effort.’”

Foundation curriculum includes the list of the big four subjects mapped out by the TEA curriculum division.

English Language Arts and Reading
Mathematics
Science
Social Studies

The material is to be delivered using open education resources (OER). This means content deliverance via interactive electronic screens. Districts will have the right not to use the curriculum however the structure of HB 1605 bribes them to employ it.

Under this new legislation, the state of Texas is contracting with Amplify to write the curriculum according to TEA guidelines. Amplify will also provide daily lesson plans for all teachers. The idea is to educate all Texas children using digital devices and scripted lesson plans while teachers are tasked with monitoring student progress.

Senate bill 2565 is the companion legislation. The language of neither HB 1605 nor SB 2565 mention Amplify. However, during the senate education committee public comments period on SB 2565 it was revealed that TEA had already given Amplify a $50,000,000 pandemic contract. When witnesses referenced Amplify as the purported contractor, senators did not push back and the only company the Senators spoke about themselves was Amplify. So it is clear that it will be Amplify and some people in the know believe Commissioner Morath has already made a deal with the company.

Who Likes this Idea?

On March 2, 2023 just one week before Buckley introduced HB 1605, a new organization called the Coalition for Education Excellence (CEE) announced its presence. They stated,

“CEE, made up of state and local education and public policy advocacy organizations across Texas, has been created to take the under-education crisis head-on. Founding members of CEE include The Commit Partnership, the Greater Houston Partnership, Teach Plus Texas, Texas 2036, the Texas Association of Business, the Texas Business Leadership Council, the Texas District Charter Alliance and the Texas Public Policy Foundation, with more members to be announced in the coming weeks.”

Everyone of their supporting “advocacy organizations” are either far right opponents of public education or are groups who have a long history of working to privatize public education.

CEE states in their announcement that “a recent study found that Texas students are being taught below grade-level content in our public schools.” The so called study was conducted by the Teach For America spinoff TNTP. It is a billionaire created organization working to privatize public education. Papers coming from leading education institutions like the University of Texas or Rice University are peer reviewed scholarly efforts. Whereas TNTP produces non-peer reviewed polemics like this bogus study called “The Opportunity Myth.” When Michelle Rhee led TNTP they made headlines by unfairly trashing public education teachers.

CEE disingenuously pretended that their support of this legislation is written to help overburdened teachers. They stated in their announcement,

‘“Many teachers in Texas are currently working two jobs—designing lessons and teaching them—which is contributing to their exhaustion and teacher shortages. Access to high-quality instructional material can reduce teacher workloads and play a critical role in delivering quality education to our students,’ said Kevin Malonson, Texas Executive Director of Teach Plus.“

Anyone who has spent significant time in a classroom knows scripted lessons are a disaster. I have personally experienced teaching the same high school class in three separate periods and even though the students were all peers, the levels of ability in the classrooms varied significantly. The differences were so great that I often had to modify my lesson plans to effectively teach the material during the different periods. Trying to write one lesson plan for thousands of students living in significantly different neighborhoods is a daft approach that devalues teacher expertise, undermines educator professionalism and will fail students.

Found on the CEE Web Page

Texas 2036 listed above was formed by Tom Luce in 2016. It publishes cyber page links to CEE letters and publications and generally supports the privatization agenda.

Tom Luce is a lawyer not an educator but his fingerprints are all over some of the worst education policies in the history of our country. His bio at the George W. Bush Whitehouse archives says, “… Luce is perhaps best known for his role in 1984 as the chief of staff of the Texas Select Committee of Public Education, which produced one of the first major reform efforts among public schools.” The chairman of that committee was Ross Perot and they gave us the disaster known as standardized testing.

In 2019, Tom Luce became Chairman Emeritus of Texas 2036 and Margaret Spellings returned to Texas to assume the lead as President and CEO. At the same time, Spellings who led George W. Bush’s failed No Child Left Behind education reform law became a board member for Laurene Powell Jobs’s Amplify. Of course, Board Member Spellings is supporting turning over Texas school curriculum to Jobs’s company.

Laurene Powell Jobs and Amplify

Laurene Powell Jobs has no respect for public school educators and the schools in which they work. When Wiki Leaks released the Clinton campaign’s emails, Powell Jobs’ four recommendations to Hillary Clinton were revealed:

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

I disagree. Charter schools have been R&D for fraud, embezzlement, instability and abuse but not for innovations. Her slap at teachers unions and work place protections is consistent with other arrogant billionaires who support privatization. I came into education from working as a research scientist in Silicon Valley and found teachers every bit as intellectually equipped as my colleagues in the lab. Her support for Teach for America temp teachers demonstrates education ignorance.

The Amplify education model puts children at digital devices where they learn in isolation. It is an unhealthy approach. Dr. Nicholas Kardaras wrote “Screens In Schools Are a $60 Billion Hoax” for Time magazine. When discussing health risks associated with student screen time, he stated, “over two hundred peer-reviewed studies point to screen time correlating to increased ADHD, screen addiction, increased aggression, depression, anxiety and even psychosis.”

Educators like Nancy Bailey have addressed problems with Amplify’s Core Knowledge Language Arts (CKLA) program for teaching reading. Teacher evaluation committees from Rochester, New York and Tulsa, Oklahoma condemned the program. An NPR report highlighted criticism of Amplify science and math noting,

“Former school board member Peters said it’s difficult to compare results the first year of a new test: Pass rates dropped across the board in 2018 when it was introduced. But her analysis shows pass rates dropped the most at the Seattle schools using Amplify Science — despite the curriculum’s promise to help students meet the new standards.”

‘“The students that fared the worst were low-income students using Amplify Science,’ Peters wrote in an email to the board.”

The Leaders of the Amplify Takeover

Before 2012, Dallas school board elections were very low key affairs. When Mike Morath ran for the district two trusteeship, it was pretty much unheard of for a school board candidate to have raised as much as $10,000 for a campaign; however even though running unopposed, Morath’s campaign contributions totaled $28,890.00 and he spent $16,773.07.

Morath had almost no background in education but he was supported by Dallas’s wealthiest conservatives. A 2014 article published by In These Times, 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

“Since 2011, Educate Dallas, a PAC backed by the Dallas Regional Chamber (the local Chamber of Commerce), has raised $661,953 in cash on hand for its school board war chest, and the Dallas-based education reform PAC Kids First, led by millionaire tech CEO Ken Barth, has raised $661,616. The majority of their donations come from Dallas’ famous aristocrats, including Barth, Ross Perot, Ray Hunt—an oil heir with a net worth of $5.8 billion—and Harlan Crow, a real estate heir and buddy of Clarence Thomas.”

The big Dallas money aimed at privatizing public education has supported Morath all the way to the state’s highest education position. When Governor Abbott selected Morath to be commissioner, conservative writer Donna Garner declared, “I cannot think of very many people whom Gov. Greg Abbott could have appointed who would have been a worse choice than Mike Morath as Texas Commissioner of Education.”

In addition to contracting with Amplify to privatize curriculum, Morath has created a program called the System of Great Schools. It is a plan to implement the portfolio model of school governance throughout the state of Texas. It is identical to the plan that billionaires Reed Hasting, John Arnold, Bill Gates and Michael Dell are financing through The City Fund. The portfolio school system management model systematically removes public schools from governance by elected boards and puts them under private control.

Laurene Jobs Powell has hooked up with like minded billionaires in an effort to privatize the entire Texas public education system. Their guy Mike Morath is dutifully implementing the plans.

Tags: Coalition for Education Excellence, HB 1605, Laurene Powell Jobs, Margaret Spellings, Mike Morath, Open Education Resources, SB 2565, Texas 2036, TNTP, Tom Luce

Comments 12 Comments
Categories DPE

Schools Closings Creating Community Uproar in Oakland

1 Feb

By Thomas Ultican 2/1/2022

Alameda County has designated Oakland Unified School District (OUSD) with a “lack of going concern” label. Translation: They are going broke and must follow orders to save their district. However, many Oakland citizens are not ready to genuflect; leaving school board members in a trap. Twenty years of billionaires financing attacks on Oakland’s public school system has created a toxic political environment.

In October 2021, the OUSD board voted to end its policy of permanently closing schools every year. On November 8^th – less than 2 weeks later – Alameda County Office of Education (ACOE) Superintendent L. Karen Monroe sent a memo approving the OUSD 2021-22 budget but included a “lack of going concern” designation. The memo also demanded school closures resume and $90 million dollars in budget cuts be made by January 31. Monroe also assigned the Fiscal Crisis and Management Assistance Team (FCMAT) to direct fiscal management, noting “the school district shall follow the recommendations of the team.”

The county claimed seven financial issues: (1) decline in enrollment not budgeted; (2) unrecorded health care liabilities; (3) structural deficits; (4) multiyear projection not reliable; (5) one time funding use not sustainable; (6) past board did not make necessary budget adjustments; and (7) forgoing $10 million in AB 1480 funding.

OUSD refuted all of these charges noting: (1) the district’s COVID enrollment declines were less than most districts; (2) health care liabilities were a onetime charge and not significant; (3) the structural deficits cited are quite small and the board agrees all one time funded positions will need to be ended; (4) acknowledges the need to address the positions funded by one-time sources; (5) November 3, 2021 the board explicitly voted that all positions funded with one-time funds will not carry over to the following fiscal year; (6) this is a new board confronted with a clear, manageable challenge it agrees to resolve and (7) the choice to forgo $10 million instead of closing schools was accounted for in the district’s budget.

The District leadership believes not one of these claims by the county can legitimately be considered a basis for the “lack of going concern” designation. OUSD district-5 Director Mike Hutchinson asserts, “Karen Monroe for five years has had oversight over every budget, and she approved the budgets.” Hutchinson also claims that the district has been working closely with the county and is in better fiscal shape than it has been in years. He asks, “What is new, besides the district’s decision not to close more schools?”

Twenty years ago, the state took over OUSD claiming a financial crisis which has led directly to OUSD becoming the most privatized public school system in California. Then like now, the Bakersfield non-profit FCMAT was brought in to supervise. The state went on to appoint a series of administrators to run the district. The new administrators welcomed charter schools and closed public schools. Concern that this could happen again might explain why three board members have changed their positions on closing schools and are placating Karen Monroe.

Schools proposed to be closed or merged between 2022 and 2024: Prescott, Brookfield, Carl Munck, Parker (K-5), Parker (6-8), Grass Valley, Horace Mann, Korematsu, RISE, Manzanita Community, Westlake, La Escuelita grades 6-8, Ralph J. Bunche, Dewey Academy, Community Day School, Manzanita Community School, Hillcrest grades 6-8.

The Billionaire Created Conundrum

The map of charter schools in Oakland and proposed school closings shows that both are all in the minority dominated flats (the low lying area between the bay and the hills). With all of these closings, residents in the flats may no longer have a traditional public school serving their community.

Much of this can be laid at the door step of the six billionaire “education reformers” living across the bay – Reed Hastings (Netflix), Arthur Rock (Intel), Carrie Walton Penner (Walmart), Laurene Powell Jobs (Apple), Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook) and Doris Fisher (The Gap).

Reed Hastings established America’s first charter management organization (CMO) in Oakland. There are now six Aspire charter schools serving Oakland families.

Arthur Rock, Doris Fisher and Carrie Walton Penner have been investing in Teach For America (TFA) and charter school growth in Oakland. Mark Zuckerberg and Laurene Powell Jobs have been pushing education technology as well as TFA and charter schools.

Along with these billionaires, New Yorker Michael Bloomberg and Tulsa billionaire Stacey Schusterman have joined in the spending to sway Oakland’s school board elections.

Oakland’s own T. Gary Rogers established a foundation before he died that continues to be central to the local school privatization agenda. It significantly supports and directs privatization efforts by GO public education and Education78. The City Fund created by Reed Hastings and John (Enron) Arnold recently gave GO and Education78 a total of $5 million (EIN 82-4938743).

This brief outline of the money being spent to privatize schools in Oakland would be woefully incomplete if Eli Broad was not mentioned. Although his direct spending to advance privatization in Oakland has been relatively modest, the four Superintendents and many administrative staff members that he trained and got placed in Oakland are central to OUSD being the most privatized district in California. A key training manual developed at the Broad Center was the “School Closure Guide.”

“Black Hole Mike” Hutchinson observed,

“A lot of these policies were first tried out in Oakland. If you go back and look at the Eli Broad handbook on school closures, a lot of the source information that they used for that report is from Oakland.”

The billionaire spending has resulted in 39 charter schools operating in Oakland today. Nine were authorized by the county, one by the state of California and 29 by OUSD. Using data from the California Department of Education, it can be shown that 31% of the publicly supported k-12 students in Oakland attend privatized charter schools.

It is disturbing that 22 of the 39 schools have a student body made up by more than 90% Hispanic and Black students. Overall 67% of Oakland’s charter school children are Hispanic or Black but only 50% of the residents of Oakland are Hispanic or Black. The privatization agenda has driven school segregation in Oakland to new heights.

The other divisive agenda is gentrification. Ken Epstein is a longtime observer of OUSD and a bay area pundit. He observed,

“Many school advocates view these school closures as a land grab of public property by privatizers. Others see this is a way to force Black and Latino families out of Oakland, making education inaccessible for them by closing the schools in the neighborhoods where they live.”

If a well financed developer could gain control of the flats, the profit possibilities are immense. These concerns are further fed when OUSD board President Gary Yee tells a Skyline High School parent that the school should be closed because the property is too valuable to be used for public education.

Is Closing Schools in the Flats the Only Possible Solution?

In an email to board members, Jane Nylund an OUSD alum, a teacher and high school student parent with a long family history in Oakland stated,

“For 2018, I counted 14 positions at $200K+, including benefits. In 2020, OUSD had 47 admin positions at $200K+ including benefits (Transparent California). And in 2019, many of them got 10% raises, all inclusive, around $20-30K each. While it’s true that other large districts have a lot of admin, OUSD has one of highest paid administrations compared to the rest of the state, at 526% of the state average. It still has its consultants at 325% of the state average. Collectively, those salaries went from around $3M to $10.7M in two years.”

Based on the claims in the OUSD administrations school closing presentation, the salary increases Jane highlights total to a million dollars greater than the projected cost savings from the closures and those are disputed.

VanCedric Williams is a school board Director representing OUSD district-3. In a private email former OUSD teacher Steven Miller reported on a community meeting attended by Williams,

“VanCedrick Williams repeatedly pointed out that OUSD has not looked at any other possible solution than closing more schools. He also notes that there is no real plan, just a stampede to close more schools.”

The OUSD board believed they could afford to keep all their schools open in October. Then L. Karen Monroe from the Alameda County Office of Education threatened them. She is in a position to cause havoc in Oakland. That seems to have intimidated some board members who are now ready to ignore equity for residents of the flats. The case for mass school closings is not well founded. Rather, the evidence suggests market based ideology and gentrification are trumping justice.

Tags: Arthur Rock, Carrie Walton Penner, Doris Fisher, L. Karen Monroe, Laurene Powell Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Bloomberg, Mike Hutchinson, OUSD, Reed Hastings, Stacy Schusterman, T. Gary Rogers, VanCedrick Williams

Comments 10 Comments
Categories Corporate Education Reform, Justice

Corporations Invade Delaware Public Schools

18 Oct

By Thomas Ultican 10/18/2021

A multifaceted corporate plan for control of Delaware public education is in progress. Billionaires are financing numerous edtech projects that isolate children at screens. To validate literacy curriculum the state has turned to the International Dyslexia Association and their nonsense “science of reading” standards. A key driver for the corporate takeover is the so called “High Quality Instructional Materials” (HQIM) certified as such by EdReports.

Whenever the words “high quality” are used to promote something in education, it is a good bet that swamp land is being sold.

A private email from a Delaware teacher stated the situation succinctly,

“Over the past several years, it has seemed like Delaware was going in the right direction after the nightmare of Gov. Jack Markell and the RTTT grant. There was suddenly more of a focus on the whole child, starting in October of 2018 when Gov. John Carney announced that our state would adopt trauma-informed practices. … Teachers were beginning to breathe a sigh of relief that maybe our state would begin to implement more reasonable education practices than the rigid, scripted, market-based programs we have seen. Then all of a sudden this summer, this stuff about HQIM started popping up from DDOE. Schools were written up in The 74. Videos were made with the Knowledge Matters group …. Professional development was announced with TNTP.”

Delaware has one of the oldest public education systems in America. The History of Public Education in Delaware dates back to the 1792 state constitution which called for the establishment of public education as soon as possible (History page 19). In 1796, a permanent fund for public education was established (History page 19). In the following graphic a plaque identifies the historic Clayton Stone School built in 1805 on land donated by John Dickinson the “Penman of the American Revolution.” This is the legacy being threatened by corporate raiders.

Corner Stones of the Corporatization Plan

There was concern that Delaware’s children were falling behind due to the COVID pandemic. Monica Gant, Ph.D. from the Delaware Department of Education (DDOE) presented their strategy to accelerate learning in March. (Accelerating learning is highly questionable learning strategy.) Grant pitched,

“DDOE is excited to use ESSER II funds to provide all Delaware public schools with five resources to support learning acceleration for students in literacy and mathematics for summer 2021:

Literacy Professional Learning and core HQIM Summer Booster content for raising 1-6 graders

Student access to online text repository (all students)

Access to Zearn Math Summer Intensive Series for all rising 1-8 graders

Zearn Professional Learning

High-dosage tutoring seats for multiple grades”

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.” And she announced that teachers will have the following professional materials available.

“Free OER – Core Knowledge Language Arts (CKLA) and Expeditionary Learning (EL)
Summer Booster provided by SchoolKit and TNTP
Districts already using American Reading Company (ARC) – Summer Booster provided by American Reading Company
Districts already using Bookworms – Bookworms Booster provided by UD (PDCE)”

Let’s unpack this a little. First, what is this ESSER II fund the DDOE is so excited about? ESSER II – Passed on Dec. 27, 2020 as part of the Coronavirus Response and Relief Supplemental Appropriations Act. Delaware received $182,885,104.

HQIM stands for high quality instructional materials. Amplify is the edtech company controlled by billionaire Laurene Powell Jobs. On the Amplify website they explain the HQIM qualifier,

“States and districts across the country are focusing on materials that have been rigorously reviewed and deemed high-quality by EdReports.org, the leading third-party curriculum reviewer (or, in Louisiana, by a Tier 1 designation). EdReports defines high-quality instructional materials as materials that are closely aligned to rigorous standards and easy to use.”

Unfortunately, EdReports is a creation of edtech money plus libertarian focused foundations and other neoliberal supporters of privatizing public education. EdReports shares its major sources of finance:

“EdReports is funded by Broadcom Corporation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Carnegie Corporation of New York, Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies, the Helmsley Charitable Trust, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Overdeck Family Foundation, the Samueli Foundation, the Charles and Helen Schwab Foundation, the Stuart Foundation, the Walton Family Foundation, and the Oak Foundation.”

EdReports is not an unbiased or even a knowledgeable arbiter of best curriculum or pedagogy practices. It is part of a scheme to advance corporate control over education content.

Free OER is more of the same. It provides free digital resources which are delivered on a tablet or computer screen. OER reports that their top supporters are the Leona M. and Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, Draper Richards Kaplan Foundation, Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies and The Robin Hood Foundation. These are not legitimate philanthropies. Rather they are organizations with a political agenda who intend to profit from or privatize or end public education.

Both CKLA which is an Amplify product and Expeditionary Learning (EL) mentioned in the plan provide scripted lessons to a screen. Nancy Bailey wrote a scathing critique of CKLA that seems to fit EL as well. In it she quotes an Oklahoma teacher giving CKLA the only positive spin she could,

“I wouldn’t want my children taught this way. I don’t know the rationale behind adopting it. The curriculum doesn’t light up the eyes of kids. It removes the autonomy from the teacher. I guess if people have come through an alternate route and don’t have a teaching degree, you can teach it without much experience.”

The DDOE has adopted a rigidly scripted market-based program called “Bookworms” for K-5 literacy. It was developed locally by University of Delaware professor Sharon Walpole. However, this is another digital product that undermines teacher professionalism and is also part of OER’s national offerings.

The newer product being foisted on Delaware schools is Zearn. It is another digital learning platform similar to i-Ready and Amplify. Bill Gates (Foundation Tax Id: 56-2618866) and the New Schools Venture Fund (Foundation Tax Id: 94-3281780) are spending heavily to make this company founded in 2014 a success. Between 2016 and 2019 Gates gifted them more than $7,000,000.

Of the 16 leaders listed on Zearn’s first year (2014) web-site, five of them came from Mit Romney’s Bain & Company including Shalinee Sharma who still leads Zearn. Two of them were from Wireless Generation which eventually became Amplify which endured some spectacular failures.

It is difficult to find independent research that evaluates Zearn. Though it is designed to maximize test scores, the only academic study found (from Johns Hopkins University) showed that Zearn treatment students did not outperform other public school students on standardized testing. However, since those tests are basically useless, that result does not mean much.

Zearn claims to be engaging for students and that students like the product. However, on an independent review site, students are brutal in their condemnation of Zearn with comments like, “I am in fifth grade and the thing has me doing stuff, my baby brother could do!” Worst of all, it is not healthy to put children at screens for long periods of time.

Propaganda Versus Reason

The Delaware teacher quoted above mentioned articles produced by Knowledge Matters about local schools appearing in The 74. Funders for The 74 include the Walton Family, Bill & Melinda Gates, the Emerson Collective (Laurene Powell Jobs), the Joyce Foundation, and Michael Bloomberg. So it was an easy lift for Knowledge Matters to place their articles touting corporate created literacy materials. This is all part of a billionaire funded anti-public education publishing cabal.

Knowledge Matters is hardly a fair unbiased commentator. Their steering committee includes Chester E. Finn, Thomas B. Fordham Institute; Kaya Henderson former Chancellor of the District of Columbia Public Schools; Joel Klein former Chancellor of the New York City Department of Education and David Steiner former New York State Commissioner of Education. All of these people have done damage to public education.

To guide the Delaware public schools’ literacy program, the DDOE has turned to The International Dyslexia Association (IDA) – who advocates the “science of reading” – to validate Delaware’s programs. The National Education Policy Center warned against, “Misrepresenting the ‘science of reading’ as settled science that purportedly prescribes systematic intensive phonics for all students.” And they stated that policy makers, “Should support the professionalism of K-12 teachers and teacher educators, and should acknowledge the teacher as the reading expert in the care of unique populations of students.” IDA is more about selling testing and promoting corporate created scripted literacy lessons than it is about helping students learn.

No teacher should be condemned to professional development from TNTP. This spinoff from Teach for America (TFA) is unqualified because of weak education scholarship and limited experience. Almost every Delaware school district has a more experienced and professional team than TNTP can provide. Without the huge funding they received from billionaires, TNTP would have never survived into the 21^st century. TNTP is famous for writing papers that are not peer reviewed and often contravene evidence. Their papers do support the agenda of the billionaires funding them.

For more than 200 years, Delaware has been developing a world class education system. The districts and schools in the state are staffed by genuinely well trained and experienced staff. Instead of turning to TFA teachers who have little experience and less training for leadership in pedagogy, turn to your existing education professionals. Turn away from hubris and greed. Instead of buying scripted lessons that kill creativity in both teachers and students, let your high quality professional educators do their job.

Tags: Bill Gates, Delaware Department of Education, EdReports, ESSER II, HQIM, Knowledge Matters, Laurene Powell Jobs, TNTP, Zearn

Comments 2 Comments
Categories DPE, education, technology

Billionaire Sponsored Edtech Sales Pitch

29 Apr

By Thomas Ultican 4/29/2021

Laurene Powell Jobs and Amplify Education are hosting a “Virtual Summit” which is what they’re calling this May’s sales event. Jobs is very confident that her billions qualify her to shape education policy. In her drive to privatize public education, she has accumulated and created several pro-edtech and anti-teacher organizations. She also provides leadership and money to other billionaire driven organizations promoting education technology while simultaneously denigrating public schools.

When Laurene’s husband, Steve Jobs, died in 2011 she inherited the rest of the billions the couple had derived from the company Steve founded, Apple Inc. Since then, her fortune has grown to more than $30 billion. Fundamentally, Jobs only qualification for shaping national education policy derives from her marrying the right guy.

In 2016, Powell Jobs’ sent Hillary Clinton four uninformed education policy positions:

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

Some Laurene Powell Jobs Connections Mapped in LittleSis

The LittleSis map above has a hyperlink to the original in the caption. Shown here is a minimal display of Jobs’ connections within the movement to privatize and monetize public education. However, every line and name is hyperlinked on the original map to a large trove of information in the LittleSis data base.

The point of the map is that Jobs is the owner of Amplify through her non-profit organization, Emerson Collective.

The Amplify “Virtual Summit”

The May sales event was promoted in the Education Week Advertiser with the title “Reading Reimagined: Uncovering the Science Behind Personalized Learning.” All but one of the presenters at the daylong affair is an Amplify employee. They will emphasize three points:

“The Science of Reading in personalized learning.”
“What to look for in a personalized learning program.”
“How to leverage COVID-19 relief stimulus funding to combat instructional loss.”

Russ Walsh is a professional educator and blogger. Recently (4/26/2021), He began an article about the science of reading with,

“Call me crazy, but when I learned I had cancer a few years ago, I did not immediately consult a journalist. Instead I chose to see an oncologist. When COVID broke out, I threw in my lot with Dr. Fauci and other infectious disease scientists, instead of a former reality TV star who suggested I inject bleach. And so, when I want advice on reading instruction, I avoid the journalists, the parent lobbying groups, the reading program sales reps, and the agenda driven pseudo-education organizations, and I look to the experts.”

The professionals Russ pointed to were Peter Johnston and Deborah Scanlon of the University at Albany who have debunked the Science of Reading (SOR) in a new report. Russ quotes them as stating,

“There is no one right way to teach reading. Student’s difficulties are unique to the individual students. Better to assume that the instruction we are providing is not meeting the student’s needs and adjust accordingly, than to focus on one instructional approach.”

Professor Paul Thomas of Furman University has also been out spoken in his scorn for the science of reading ideology.

In a previous post, I defined the nebulous term personalized learning:

‘“Personalized Learning” is a euphemistic term that indicates lessons delivered on a digital device. These lessons are often organized with a playlist and come with a claim of using artificial intelligence to tailor the lessons to the recipient. The scheme is related to competency base education (CBE).”

For five decades, the CBE scheme, operating under several different names, has posited that drilling small skills for mastery is the best way to teach. It has not worked yet.

The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development said in a 2015 report that heavy users of computers in the classroom “do a lot worse in most learning outcomes.”

Wireless Generation to Amplify

Greg Gunn a former associate of the Carlyle Group who had earned a Masters of Electrical Engineering from MIT joined with Larry Berger to found Wireless Generation. Berger was a graduate of Yale University with a BA and had been a White House fellow working on Educational Technology at NASA during the Clinton administration.

In 2010, News Corporation paid $360 million dollars to acquire Wireless Generation and renamed it Amplify Education, Inc.

By August of 2015, after spectacular failures in North Carolina, News Corporation announced it was exiting the education business. The corporation took a $371 million dollar write off to get out of the digital curriculum business. The next month, News Corporation announced it had sold Amplify to members of its staff. In the deal orchestrated by Joel Klein, he would remain as a board member and Larry Berger would assume leadership of the company.

It was soon learned that the real buyer of Amplify was Laurene Powell Jobs. Larry Berger is still leading the company.

Tags: Amplify, Amplify Education, Larry Berger, Laurene Powell Jobs, Paul Thomas, Russ Walsh

Comments 4 Comments
Categories Corporate Education Reform, DPE, education

Organized to Disrupt

10 Jun

By Thomas Ultican 6/10/2020

The New Schools Venture Fund (NSVF) is the Swiss army knife of public school privatization. It promotes education technology development, bankrolls charter school creation, develops charter management organizations and sponsors school leadership training groups. Since its founding in 1998, a small group of people with extraordinary wealth have been munificent in their support. NSVF is a significant asset in the billionaire funded drive to end democratically run public schools and replace them with privatized corporate structures.

1990’s Silicon Valley was a Happening Place

Mark Andreessen had just co-written the world’s first web-browser, Mosaic, before he came to town from the University of Illinois to co-found Netscape. John Doerr left Intel in 1980 to join the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins where his reputation for picking winners became legendary. His wins include Amazon, AOL, Compaq, Electronic Arts, Google, Netscape and Twitter. Internet search engines were in their infancy when in 1999 Doerr convinced his partners to put $12.5 million into Google. Five years later that investment turned into billions.

Like elsewhere in America, every little strip mall in San Jose, California had a Blockbuster video rental store. In 1997, Reed Hastings and Netflix co-founder Mark Reynolds came up with a disruptive idea that put Blockbuster out of business. For a monthly fee, they offered DVD’s by mail with no late charges. Blockbuster did not adapt fast enough and went bankrupt.

In the Valley, everyone was aware that their business could be just one new technology innovation away from being the next Blockbuster.

“DoWopDon” Shalvey was the superintendent of schools in San Carlos, California a bedroom community about a third of the way up the peninsula between San Jose and San Francisco. When California passed its 1992 charter school legislation, Shalvey’s application for a charter turned into California’s first charter school. It officially opened in August 1994.

Apparently, Don Shalvey was an amateur DJ and very into music. His twitter handle is @dooWopDon.

Shalvey joined with Reed Hastings in writing a statewide initiative for the 1998 ballot that lifted the cap on charter schools and eased restrictions on starting one. At that time, Hastings was made president of Technology Network, a bipartisan lobbying group formed by Silicon Valley CEOs. With their support, the initiative quickly amassed more than a million signatures. Opposition from the teachers union ended as they were also fighting against other education proposals coming from Governor Pete Wilson’s office.

A deal was struck making the initiative unnecessary. Legislative leaders passed a bill containing the initiative’s key ingredients and union leader withheld their objections. The new bill green-lighted an unlimited number of charter schools and just as importantly the bill authorized a single board to oversee multiple charter schools. It was the birth of charter management organizations and a massive acceleration in new charter school development.

When Pete Wilson signed the new bill into law in May 1998, Shalvey and Hastings had $403,000 left in their initiative campaign fund. They decided to shift the money into a non-profit and founded what became the Aspire charter school network.

Meanwhile on the other side of the continent, Ann Smith graduated with a degree in political science and psychology from Columbia University in 1989 and started working for Wendy Kopp and the Teach For America (TFA) founding team. In 1993, she moved to the Silicon Valley area and co-founded the Bay Area Youth Consortium – AmeriCorps. In 1996, she left AmeriCorps to pursue a Masters in Business Administration at Stanford University.

Smith was co-chair of the Stanford business school’s entrepreneur club and she wanted to get Amazon founder Jeff Bezos as a speaker for the club. She asked her friend John Doerr to help and he agreed on one condition. In an education session at Al Gore’s house, the name NewSchools had been created. Doerr wanted her to come up with a use for the name.

Bezos spoke at the club and Smith worked on her assignment. She wrote a two page paper outlining the NewSchools Venture Fund. She had been inspired by what Don Shalvey and Reed Hastings had accomplished and thought to herself, “Why couldn’t entrepreneurial philanthropists come together to create networks of entrepreneurial education organizations?” Smith labeled the paper “Creating CMOs — scaling up with quality — with the help of venture-capital-style philanthropic investing.”

The history at the NSVF web-site says,

“NewSchools Venture Fund was created in 1998 by social entrepreneur Kim Smith and venture capitalists John Doerr and Brook Byers.” (Byers is a colleague of Doerr’s from Kleiner Perkins)

“We were among the first and largest investors in public charter schools and the first to identify and support multisite charter management organizations, which launch and operate integrated networks of public charter schools.”

“NewSchools’ work to support digital learning tools began at our inception in 1998.”

Philanthropy Magazine notes that Reed Hastings helped, “to launch the NewSchools Venture Fund.”

Big Money and Political Connections

LittleSis Map of NSVF Massive Funding By Billionaires

While there is little doubt the Bill Gates and The Walton Family Foundation are the largest individual donors to NSVF, the $226,881,394 in grants documented in the map above are only a fraction of the total billionaire largess. Besides receiving help from Reed Hastings, over the last 20-years, billionaires John Doerr, Laurene Jobs Powell and John Sackler have served on the board, but there is no information about any of their monetary contributions.

Kim Smith was the founding CEO of NSVF. The second CEO was Ted Mitchell the former President of Occidental College and a founding board member of NSVF. Mitchell replaced Kim Smith as CEO in September 2005 and held the position until 2014. From 2008-2010, he was simultaneously President of the California State Board of Education.

Mitchell has also served on the boards of New Leaders, Khan Academy, California Education Partners, Teach Channel, ConnectED, Hameetman Foundation, the Alliance for College-Ready Public Schools, Silicon Schools, Children Now, Bellwether Partners, Pivot Learning Partners, EnCorps Teacher Training Program, the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, and the Green DOT Public Schools.

On May 8, 2014 EdSource reported, “Former State Board of Education president Ted Mitchell was confirmed Thursday as under secretary of education, the third-highest ranking official at the U.S. Department of Education.”

NSVF’s 2010 990-tax form had a note that claimed, “To date, the Organization has successfully received support from … the U.S. Department of Education.” From 2003-2007, NSVF reported $5,997,900 in grants from governmental sources. In 2008, the line requiring listing governmental grants separately disappeared from the 990-tax form. There is no longer an easily accessible method for gaining that information.

Enormous Grant Amounts Reported by NSVF and Selected Billionaires

In the graph above the billionaire giving in green is for yearly totals from the tax reports by the billionaires in the LittleSis Map above. The 2016 spike occurred because some unknown entity contributed $68,000,000 to NSVF through the donor directed foundation Silicon Valley Community Fund.

In 2016, Reed Hastings created a $100,000,000 fund within the Silicon Valley Community Fund. At the same time, Laurene Jobs Powell was serving on the board of NSVF when her XQ Institute was granted $24,750,000 in 2015 and $57,402,973 in 2016. Either one of them could have made the large contribution or maybe it was someone else.

Every year NSVF hosts a “Summit” in Oakland, California which they state brings together more than 1,200 educators, entrepreneurs, community leaders, funders, and policy makers to share ideas on how to “reimagine learning.” These “Summits” are a must attend for the disrupter community and they drive contributions.

To replace Mitchell as CEO when he left for the Department of Education in 2014, NSVF brought in Stacey Childress from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Childress earned an MBA from Harvard Business School in 2000. Afterwards, she spent a year co-founding an enterprise software sales company and then returned to Harvard where she was a Senior Lecturer and Executive Director. In 2010, Childress became Deputy Director of the Gates Foundation. She has been CEO of NSVF since arriving in 2014.

Both Mitchell and Childress have received NSVF salaries in excess of $500,000. The 2018 NSVF tax-form explanation of their compensation method reads,

“The organization obtained compensation studies from several independent sources to compile information used as a metric for salary increases … A subcommittee of the Board of Directors (BOD) conducts the review of the CEO and develops a recommendation for the full BOD.”

This is similar to the method that has ballooned executive pay in corporate America while line worker wages have stagnated. It is a method that justifies those at the top getting an ever greater share.

Investing in Privatization and Education Technology

NSVF claims they have invested in 117 Ed Tech companies, 187 charter schools and 55 diverse leaders programs.

Among their Ed Tech investments are Class Dojo, EdSurge, LearnZillion, Phet Interactive Simulations and Education Elements. When NSVF makes a major investment in an Ed Tech startup, they require a position on the companies governing board.

One of NSVF’s founding board members, Dave Whorton, is also the founder of Tugboat Ventures. When NSVF invested in Education Elements so did Tugboat Ventures. Dave Whorton was made a member of Education Elements Board of Directors where he efficiently keeps an eye on funds from both Tugboat and NSVF.

When first founded, NSVF invested heavily in Aspire Public Schools because of their plan to create a charter management organization. In 2001, they granted $1,095,000 of their total of $2,468,000 in giving to Aspire.

As their wealth grew the grants to charter schools became very similar to the grants their funders were making. They have funded DC Prep, Phalen Leadership Academy, Rocketship Education, Success Charter Network, Yu Ming Charter School and almost 200 more.

The Yu Ming Charter is essentially a private Mandarin immersion school that has just submitted a material revision to their expansion plan that was rejected in December. It has been alleged the Yu Ming does not want new students above the kindergarten level. A parent comment on the Berkeley Parent Network says, “The teachers seem reluctant to admit kids who aren’t quite up to par in Mandarin as it can be really overwhelming for students to be new and they don’t want to see them struggle and be under water from the get-go.” To which Oakland Educator Jane Nylund responded,

“Real, authentic public education is hard; we deal with struggling students every day as expected, standard educational practice. We don’t find a way to reject them because they are ‘struggling’. This honest assessment by an involved parent is just more evidence of a ‘public school’ in name only, and not in practice.”

NSVF’s diverse-leaders investing is aimed at replacing quality teacher education at universities with for profit organizations that have very limited expertise. It is also aimed at selling the privatization agenda. NSVF invested in Branch Alliance for Education Diversity, edfuel, MindWorks Collaborative, National Charter Collaborative, School Board Partners, TNTP and fifty more organizations.

School Board Partners came out of Education Cities when The City Fund was established. They appear to want influence over school board members by offering training; a function every state already provides. They are a part of selling the privatization agenda.

TNTP was rolled out of TFA by Wendy Kopp and Michelle Rhee. Before the billionaire driven push to privatize public education a “non-profit” company like TNTP would have gotten no consideration for training teachers because they are unqualified.

Final Comments

Kim Smith staid on the board at NSVF and in 2011 co-founded Bellwether Education Partners. The next year she founded the Pahara Institute where she is the CEO. Her 2016 pay reported on tax forms signed by her was $419,576. (Update: Smith recently stepped down as the Pahara CEO.)

DoWopDon (Don Shalvey) is now Deputy Director of the College Ready Team at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

NSVF along with scores of billionaire funded Foundations has been spending staggeringly large amounts of money to privatize public education and monetize it. This spending has been going on for decades now. So, why are about 90% of America’s students still attending public schools? The answer is simple.

The “disrupter” products are bad and Americans are not buying what their selling.

Tags: Bill Gates, Broad Foundation, Don Shalvey, John Doerr, John Sackler, Jon Arnold, Kim Smith, Laurene Powell Jobs, Michael Dell, NewSchools Venture Fund, Reed Hastings, Silicon Valley Community Foundation, Stacey Childress, Ted Mitchell, TFA, TNTP, Walton Family Foundation

Comments 18 Comments
Categories DPE, technology

Persistent Billionaire Financed Attack on Oakland Public Schools Continues

29 May

By Thomas Ultican 5/29/2020

This month, a survey was launched in Oakland, California with the claim “This survey is a primary partnership between OUSD and GO Public Schools Oakland.” Apparently some Oakland Unified School District (OUSD) board members were stunned by the news and were not happy about raising the stature of a billionaire financed organization dedicated to privatizing public schools. It seems the survey resulted from a secret negotiation between OUSD administrators, GO and possibly some OUSD board members.

On May 13, when OUSD Director Shanti Gonzalez learned about the Survey, she wrote to Superintendent Kyla Johnson-Trammell,

“Hi Kyla. Can you tell me more about the robocall that went out today that referred parents to GO’s website/survey and why it was decided to send this to parents? We don’t typically use our infrastructure to refer people to groups that engage in political activities, so I am curious.”

Two days later Gonzalez wrote again,

“I understand the desire to collaborate and avoid duplication of efforts, but please remember that GO plays two roles in the Oakland education arena. In this case, their intent was to support our efforts to understand families’ needs. Their other role is to shape the composition of the board of OUSD and ACOE [Alameda County Office of Education], and to support the growth of charter schools, at least historically.”

OUSD Director Roseann Torres was characterized as being hopping mad when she found out about the survey. In an interview Torres stated,

“The Superintendent will not respond to my emails about the survey. She doesn’t care that as a Director, I am her boss.”

On the other hand Director Jody London’s response to constituent questions about the survey indicates that she was informed. She writes,

“The OUSD Office of Equity and family engagement team are collaborating with GO and a number of other Office of Equity partners to reach as many families as possible with the survey that will provide very important information about our planning the reopening of school. The survey is standalone and initially only directed participants to GO if they wanted to provide information to receive the mailed school supplies thank you gift. That has now changed …”

“This more collaborative approach with a number of partners on the family survey will give us the best opportunity for a strong level of participation and useful feedback about reopening.”

Logos of the OUSD Survey Partners

Originally the above logos were depicted at the top of every page of the survey and a gift offering at the end of the survey required the takers to give their email addresses to GO Public Schools. After Oakland Education Association President Keith Brown became involved, the direction to GO Public Schools was replaced and logos at the top of each page were eliminated. People were directed to the OUSD web site to apply for the gift and the only logos shown were from OUSD and GO on the bottom of the intro page.

This survey is transparently GO’s and there is another survey by OUSD which is somewhat similar. The committee that created the second survey includes Teach For America (TFA), KIPP charter schools and others. It appears the content of both surveys are important to the charter industry. The GO survey seems to bias towards technology implementation and the other survey appears to be priming a unified enrollment system.

Privatization in Oakland Driven by Billionaire Dollars

Chris Stewart is a 2014 Bush Fellow, the CEO of Brightbeam and sits on the board of Great Schools. He feels the claims of billionaire dollars are unfair. He sees them as working to create “quality schools” or does his high six figure billionaire paid salary cause that opinion? Without billionaire dollars and a state take-over, Oakland public schools would be much healthier and the community would not be so divided.

The billionaire spending to privatize public schools in Oakland has been enormous.

Tax records document that just two foundations, The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (EIN: 56-2618866) and the Walton Family Foundation (EIN: 13-3441466) have spent more than $240,000,000 on privatization efforts in Oakland.

The Silicon Valley Community fund was formed in 2006. It has become an extremely large donor directed fund with reported assets of about $8 billion dollars. In 2018, it took in almost $6 billion dollars. Only three years of their 1,500 page long tax reports (EIN: 20-5205488) are searchable but just those three years show more than $15,000,000 spent on privatizing schools in Oakland including a 2017 gift to GO of $1,000,000.

This year, The City Fund – which was founded by two billionaires in 2018 – reported spending $7,591,666 on privatizing Oakland public schools. The City Fund supports the implementation of the “portfolio model” of school administration to drive privatization.

The portfolio model directs closing schools that score in the bottom 5% on standardized testing and reopening them as charter schools or Innovation schools. Oakland’s school board implemented this model in 2018 under the name “Citywide Plan.” The method makes it almost certain that schools in poorer and minority communities will be privatized.

In 2004, Don Fisher of the GAP and Buzz Wooley a San Diego investor put up $100,000 each to establish the Charter School Growth Fund. In 2005, Buzz Wooley resigned from the presidency and Jim Walton took his seat on the board. Since then the Walton Family Foundation has had significant influence over the fund. Between 2012 and 2017 the Charter School Growth Fund (EIN 05-0620063) spent $12,998,570 supporting privatized schools in Oakland.

The Ely and Edythe Broad Foundation (EIN 95-4686318) has spent a relatively modest $3,457,664 on privatized schools in Oakland. However, four different graduates of Broad’s strange education leaders training academy have served as superintendents of OUSD between 2003 and 2018. Diane Ravitch recently noted that “Broad Institute got accredited even though it has no faculty, no campus, no course catalogue ….” It was accredited by the Western States Schools and Colleges. There have been two common outcomes wherever “Broadies” serve; labor and community unrest accompanied by extreme budget issues.

The latest budget problems in Oakland trace directly to the tenure of Antwan Wilson the last Broad trained superintendent to run Oakland’s schools.

Are Billionaire Bought Board Members Now a Board Majority?

Roseann “Rosie” Torres is a lawyer who moved from her hometown of Stockton to Oakland in 2004. A civic organization she joined gave her a homework assignment to study the public school district budget. This opened her eyes to the tremendous inequities between the schools in the hills where she lived and those in the flats where much of Oakland’s minority population lived.

In 2012, school board member Noel Gallo convinced Rosie to run for the seat he was vacating so he could run for city council. Before his tenure on the school board SFGate reports, “In the mid-1990s, Gallo was a city employee during then-Mayor Jerry Brown’s two terms in office, working as a staff member for former City Manager Robert Bobb.” That is the same Robert Bobb who would take the Broad training course in 2005 and become the Detroit public school’s first emergency manager in 2009. Gallo introduced Rosie to GO Public Education.

In 2012, GO provided Torres with $37,847 in independent expenditures and helped her raise $36,635 in direct campaign contributions. These were historically large numbers but that same year GO was providing even larger campaign assistance to James Harris and Jumoke Hinton-Hodge. All three candidates were successful.

In addition, GO representatives introduced Torres to many Democratic politicians serving locally, at the state capital and in congress. Torres said she really did not know who GO was and it took her about six months after the election to figure it out.

After Torres turned against the GO privatization agenda, there assistance unsurprisingly ended. In 2016 when she ran for reelection, her total campaign money fell from the 2012 $74,000 to $17,725, however a group of local activists went to work for her and she won.

Torres will not be running for reelection this year. She needs a break from the pressure and drama.

In 2012, billionaires started actively engaging in local school board elections. All at once, school board elections in cities like Dallas became well funded and prohibitively expensive. That same year billionaires including Stacy Schusterman of Tulsa, Oklahoma, Michael Bloomberg of New York City, Laurene Jobs Powell of Palo Alto, California and others started making max donations to certain Oakland school board candidates.

The direct contribution limits of $700 made the independent expenditures with unlimited spending the place where most of their money went. In Oakland, that independent expenditure money was funneled though the GO Public School Advocates committee.

In 2018, $146,000 of Michael Bloomberg’s $250,000 contribution was put into the campaign to elect Gary Yee. Six years earlier, Yee was the focus of a recall campaign which was mainly about his push for closing schools. With Yee’s election, forces for privatization and school closing seem to have gained a solid majority on the OUSD board.

Some Closing Observations

The state government is also being corrupted by the prolific billionaire spending that is undermining democracy in America. In 2018, AB1840 which provided extra funding for financially strapped Oakland and Inglewood school districts was signed by Governor Brown. The root of their financial problems was the same; paying the extra unfunded costs associated with charter school openings and financial mismanagement by Broad trained superintendents.

One of the mandates for receiving financial help was the involvement of the Fiscal Crisis Management Assist Team (FCMAT) in stabilizing the budget. FCMAT was created and signed into law in 1991 by Governor Pete Wilson. The Kern County Superintendent of Schools office was selected as the administrative and fiscal agent for FCMAT. The purpose of FCMAT was to provide districts experiencing budget issues with professional leadership. However, this non-profit organization has developed a reputation for being more about helping political allies than struggling school districts.

FCMAT appears to have two strategies for solving district financial issues; laying-off personnel and closing schools.

On Memorial Day (May 25), the State Senate Fiscal Review Committee met to consider the May revise including AB1840 money for Oakland and Inglewood. Jane Nylund an Oakland resident and educator submitted a comment that reads in part,

“I strongly oppose the amendments of the Trailer Bill to AB 1840 regarding disbursements to Oakland Unified School District for 2020-21.”

“These amendments strip our local discretion to draw from the variety of strategies for fiscal solvency, listed as (c)(1)-(5). The language is clear: the District “MAY” use the strategies. It is not mandated to use any particular one of them.

“Given the current situation with Covid-19, and all the unknowns that come with it regarding schools, it is completely inappropriate that OUSD is held hostage to sell property that it may find necessary to keep open in order to mitigate health risks of Covid-19.”

Community based schools run under the authority of an elected school board have served as the foundation for American democracy for two centuries. Feckless billionaires operating from hubris or theological commitment or a desire to avoid taxes or a pursuit of more wealth are sundering those foundations.

Will activists of good will be able to throw off the yoke of billionaire financed tyranny and defend their public schools in Oakland?

Tags: Charter School Growth Fund, Ely Broad, Gates Foundation, GO Public Schools, Laurene Powell Jobs, Michael Bloomberg, OUSD, Silicon Valley Community Fund, Stacy Schusterman, The City Fund, Walton Family Foundation

Comments 6 Comments
Categories DPE, Justice

Faulty Billionaire Financed Education “Study”

9 Apr

By Thomas Ultican 4/9/2020

This January, the new organization Brightbeam and its CEO Chris Stewart published “The Secret Shame: How America’s Most Progressive Cities Betray Their Commitment to Educational Opportunity for All.” The name clearly indicates the paper’s political leanings and the underlying data is suspicious. The paper is a polemic rather than a study. Like many “reports” coming from what Diane Ravitch labels the “disrupter” community, this 33-page document has not been submitted for peer-review. Never-the-less, it has been widely disseminated as legitimate research to the Brightbeam network including Education Post. It has also gone to hard right media like The Blaze and found its way into mainstream media like NBC and the Boston Herald.

About Brightbeam

Last year, Brightbeam was created to be the umbrella organization for the Education Post and other digital media sites. Brightbeam is the new operating name for the Results in Education Foundation (RIEF) which is the legal moniker for the obscure billionaire financed organization providing the operating funds for this new digital publishing group. Brightbeam also controls the cyber platforms, Citizen Education and Project Forever Free and it has influence over at least fourteen local internet publications in various American cities.

The billionaires financing Brightbeam include Michael Bloomberg, Alice Walton, Jim Walton, Laurene Jobs Powell and Mark Zuckerberg.

Chris Stewart who was named CEO of Brightbeam has been on the payroll at RIEF since its founding in 2014. The last available tax record puts his 2017 salary at $226,417.

The new “report” says, “Brightbeam is a nonprofit network of education activists demanding a better education and a brighter future for every child.” A more apt description would be “a billionaire created organization dedicated to privatizing public schools and undermining teacher professionalism.”

Evaluating the “Study”

In his introduction to the paper, Stewart claims, “Students in America’s most progressive cities face greater racial inequity in achievement and graduation rates than students living in the nation’s most conservative cities.” Concerning the purportedly extra-large racial achievement gaps in “progressive cities” the paper states, “Of all the factors we looked at, progressivism is the greatest predictor.”

The authors’ explanation of their approach is skimpy. They write,

“To determine a rationale for what is a progressive city and what is a conservative city we relied on criteria developed independently by political scientists Chris Tausanovitch and Christopher Warshaw, who pooled data from seven large surveys of U.S. public opinion to rank the nation’s biggest cities in terms of conservatism. We then selected the 12 most conservative cities and the 12 least conservative cities from that list to establish the conservative and progressive cities that make up the base of this report.”

With those cities in mind, we pulled the publicly available school achievement and graduation data from public school districts in each of those cities. When we analyzed the achievement gaps between black and white students and the gaps between Latino and white students we found larger gaps than readers might expect from cities where progressive residents presumably hold the most political, administrative and cultural power.

Tausanovitch’s and Warshaw’s paper seems like a reasonable way to identify conservative and progressive leanings in cities. It is a five year old study and presumably attitudes have not gone through a sea change in that amount of time. However, the premise that the political ideology between those cities would have a dramatic effect on the achievement of minority students seems unlikely.

More troubling than the premise is the contention that standardized testing conducted using different testing regimes in 24 locations makes a valid comparison. Standardized testing provides data of questionable value even when everyone is taking the same test, but trying to align data from multiple testing types is fraught with error. The study provides almost no information about the data and methodology used.

On page nine, the study claims that the Black-White mathematics proficiency gap is 41.3% in progressive cities and 26.2% in conservative cities. This claim was checked by using the 2019 Nation Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) 8^th grade math data for the 18 cities on the Tausnovich/Warshaw list that also had 2019 NAEP data. The average scale scores were subtracted and the difference was divided by the white student average scale score. The largest gap found was 21% in Washington DC. Even the 26.2% gap Brightbeam reported in conservative cities is a puzzle and the 41.3% number for progressive cities appears to be ludicrous.

$Grade 8 Math Gap$

Education Achievement Gaps Based on NAEP Data

San Francisco and Washington DC were rated respectively as number 1 and number 2 most progressive cities in the United States. The Brightbeam report states that in mathematics the Black-White achievement gap is 58% in San Francisco and 62% in Washington DC. Washington DC had the highest gap measured with NAEP data at 21%, however, that is almost 3 times less that the Brightbeam reported 62% claim.

San Francisco does not have easily attainable NAEP testing data, so the California Assessment of Student Performance and Progress (CAASPP) data for 2019 was used to check the gap claim. To calculate achievement gap measurements, percentages of all tested students who met or exceeded standards were summed for each ethnicity. Then a simple subtraction between the results of the various ethnic groups provided an achievement percentage difference. Using this method the Black-White achievement gap for mathematics was 32.7%. Outrageously high, but hardly the 58% gap that Brightbeam asserted.

While researching the achievement gaps in San Francisco, a fascinating correlation was discovered. The more an ethnic group utilized charter schools the worse their group’s education achievement.

Negative Correlation for Academic Achievement in Charter Schools

The Brightbeam report states, “…three of the 12 conservative cities — Virginia Beach, Anaheim, and Fort Worth — have effectively closed the gap in at least one of the academic categories we looked at, literally achieving a gap of zero or one.” To test this claim, the same methodology used for San Francisco was applied to Anaheim using 2019 CAASPP data for both Black-White and Hispanic-White achievement gaps in math and English language arts. The results are in the Table 1.

Table 1: Anaheim Education Achievement Gaps

Compared	ELA Gap	Math Gap
Black – White	14.6%	10.5%
Hispanic-White	22.2%	16.0%

Clearly, the Education Achievement Gaps are much more significant than the zero or one point gaps which Brightbeam declares.

A 2018 Brookings Institute study of education achievement gaps in America said that gaps were still too large between demographic groups but that they have been steadily improving. On the other hand, they noted, “In contrast to the improvement in racial and ethnic achievement gaps, however, achievement gaps based on students’ eligibility for free or reduced-price lunch—our best proxy for poverty in the NAEP data—do not show much progress.”

Another Brightbeam contention involves graduation rates. It praises the rates in Oklahoma City noting, “The Oklahoma City public school district only graduates 73% of its high school students in four years but the graduation rate is 10 percentage points higher for black students than for white students and 5 percentage points higher for Latino students than for whites.”

While this statement is true, it implies that the cause for the relative higher success rate for Black and Hispanic students in Oklahoma City is the conservative nature of the city. Brightbeam ignores the huge five-year demographic change among the graduates and the 18.5% drop in the white graduation rate. That is not a success to be celebrated.

Table 2: Graduation Rates in Oklahoma City

Ethnicity	2014		2018
Ethnicity	Graduation Rate	Demographic Mix	Graduation Rate	Demographic Mix
Black	75.8%	9.7%	77.8%	25.9%
Hispanic	77.6%	11.8%	75.9%	52.7%
White	84.7%	55.1%	66.3%	12.5%

Fraudulent digital credit recovery has rendered high school graduation rates a meaningless parameter for measuring school merit. America’s high school graduation rates peaked at about 77% in 1970 and then drifted down for almost four decades to 69% in 2007. By 2012 – after the education technology industry became involved with providing high school credits – 81% of the freshman cohort in America graduated on time. Bizarrely, students have been allowed to finish semester long classes in less than a week and obvious cheating is being ignored.

Selling Out the Black Community

The Brightbeam report is targeting the black community with its anti-public schools and anti-progressive message. Their report concludes, “All of us have an outstanding debt to our children. But, to return to the words of Martin Luther King, Jr., America, and most especially these progressive cities, has given our black and brown children a bad check, a check which has come back marked “insufficient funds.”

Keith Benson, Ed. D, is an amazing educator, thinker and leader in Camden, New Jersey. Keith is currently head of the Camden Education Association and has spent 14 years in the Camden classrooms. He is also active in and been a leader of the Camden branch of the NAACP. Last year Keith published “Seeing No Evil, “For the Children”:Identifying the Black education reform establishment’s purposeful blind spots in advocating for expansion of corporate education reforms.” This insightful paper addresses the kind of destructive leadership provided by billionaire funded Black led organizations like Brightbeam. Benson wrote:

“…in decades before where education reform, namely school choice was largely a fringe issue championed by anti-union, ideological white conservatives, today’s education reform movement gained momentum as pro-reform white benefactors expanded their public relations campaign to include Black and Latino ‘leaders’ to accomplish the same goal of collapsing urban public schools and teacher unions.”

“Michael Reagan, in ‘Think of the Children’ takes the ‘for the children’ argument to task calling it ‘pure BS…obvious political BS that has been used by politicians of both major parties’ and by people who lack ‘a legitimate or a reasonable argument.’ It is my contention here that the billionaire funded education reform movement and the Black Education Reform Establishment acting against urban public education for ‘the children,’ follows a similar rhetorical pattern.”

“In sum, through the education reform movement’s desire to close ‘failing schools’ and weaken teachers unions, it was experienced black teachers who bore the brunt of their contradictory advocacy which has only gained in strength and in allies that now includes the socially liberal, and persons of color. And while some critiques of urban public schools are accurate and warrant decisive systemic corrective action, it is simultaneously accurate that the single demographic most impacted by the policies advocated by today’s reformers are black educators, specifically, black women. Thus, while the Black Education Reform Establishment, as well as their wealthy white funders continuously champion dismantling urban teacher unions and closing “failing” schools in the name of benefiting the best hopes for urban black children, the Black Education Reform Establishment is targeting the same teachers most likely to help students of color achieve academically and usher them into post-secondary education.” (Emphasis added)

The billionaire sponsored paper from Chris Stewart and Brightbeam is not a study; not even close. It is propaganda. Mark Twain attributed Benjamin Disraeli with saying “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies and statistics.” The Brightbeam paper grossly violates all three of these categories of lies.

Tags: Alice Walton, Black-White Gaps, Brightbeam, Chris Stewart, Education Achievement Gaps, Hispanic-White Gaps, Jim Walton, Laurene Powell Jobs, Marc Zuckerberg, Michael Bloomberg

Comments 10 Comments
Categories DPE, education

← Older Entries