Tag Archives: Michael Dell

Selling Edtech when Disguised as Philanthropy

27 Nov

By Thomas Ultican 11/27/2020

“Personalized learning” is being driven by foundations derived from companies that stand to profit by its implementation. Last year, George Mason’s Priscilla Regan and the University of Ottawa’s Valerie Steeves wrote the peer reviewed paper “Education, privacy, and big data algorithms: Taking the persons out of personalized learning” in which they state, “Other than the Carnegie Corporation, the private foundations who have been most supportive of personalized learning are those supported by the technology companies, including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, and the Google Foundation.”

In the case of the Carnegie Corporation, the authors note that the philanthropy has been supporting education causes since its founding in 1911. Recently, Carnegie has given monetary support to “personalized learning” but “typically in partnership with one of the tech foundations.”

Based on a listing of the fifteen largest education spending philanthropies in the first decade of the millennium,  the paper’s authors selected the technology linked Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (the largest donor); Michael and Susan Dell (fourth largest donor); and William and Flora Hewlett Foundation (#8 in 2010) for analysis. They added two newer giving organizations, the Google Foundation and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, to complete their list of five tech associated education grant making companies to analyze.

In their review of scholarly papers and the popular press, they identified five types of activities supported by tech foundations with their K-12 spending:

“The first activity … involves grants to public schools for adoption of edtech applications, including personalized learning initiatives, or to educational initiatives to organizations working in public schools (such as Teach for America) or to organizations providing alternatives to public schools (such as charter schools).

“The second entails grants or some form of funding support for edtech companies.”

“The third area of activity is tech foundation support for coverage of edtech, especially coverage in publications directed to education professionals.”

“A fourth area of activity is tech foundation funding for research into studies evaluating the results of edtech applications, including personalized learning.”

“The fifth area of activity is tech foundation funding for advocacy groups who work in K-12 education.”

Three important observations from Regan and Steeves paper:

“We argue that, although there has been no formal recognition, personalized learning as conceptualized by foundations marks a significant shift away from traditional notions of the role of education in a liberal democracy and raises serious privacy issues that must be addressed.”

“It presents yet another example of the transformation of the traditional role of public education as educating citizens to one of educating future workers and consumers, a contrast of liberal democracy with neoliberal democracy.”

“The edtech sector has been focused on the notion [of personalized learning] …. While companies have generated hundreds of products and a smattering of new school models are showing promise, there is little large-scale evidence that the approach can improve teaching and learning or narrow gaps in academic achievement.”

After investigating education journalism, the authors chose to focus on Education Week as representative. The 1981 non-profit bills itself as “American education’s newspaper of record.” It has a print circulation of 50,000 and an online subscribership of 750,000 made up predominately of educators. Education Week has gotten an infusion of grant money from philanthropic foundations including $10 million from the Gates Foundation since 2005.

The authors concluded, “It accordingly is a site where various actors involved in personalized learning, including, teachers, school administrators, developers, policy-makers and foundations, share their views.” They also note that Education Week intersects with all five of the activity types supported by the tech foundations. For the study, they reviewed articles from the five year period 2013 to 2017.

What is being Sold?

“Personalized learning”, “blended learning” and standardized testing are three of the bigger items being promoted. Huge lobbying by big tech has turned the United States Education Department (USED) into a de facto tech sales firm. Statements like this abound on the USED web site,

“Transitioning away from seat time, in favor of a structure that creates flexibility, allows students to progress as they demonstrate mastery of academic content, regardless of time, place, or pace of learning. Competency-based strategies provide flexibility in the way that credit can be earned or awarded, and provide students with personalized learning opportunities. These strategies include online and blended learning, dual enrollment and early college high schools, project-based and community-based learning, and credit recovery, among others. This type of learning leads to better student engagement because the content is relevant to each student and tailored to their unique needs. It also leads to better student outcomes because the pace of learning is customized to each student.”  

This grotesque distortion of reality is little more than propaganda backing technology based bad pedagogy. Tech provided schemes like “personalized learning” are founded on the behaviorist based mastery education theory. Besides promoting tech industry products, USED champions age inappropriate learning and publishes unfounded blather about better student outcomes.

The 1970’s “mastery learning” was so detested that it was renamed “outcome based education” in the 1990s and now is called “competency based education” (CBE). The name changes are due to the five-decade long record of failure. CBE is simply putting “mastery leaning” on a computer instead of using worksheets and paper assessments. In the 1970s teachers began calling it “seats and sheets.”

“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 based on mastery learning theory.

“Credit recovery” is the fraud that has engendered soaring graduation rates. It is another way of implementing “personalize learning.” Students are completing semester long classes and receiving full credit for them in as little as one day. America’s high school graduation rates peaked at about 77% in 1970 and then drifted down for almost four decades to 69% in 2007. Today, fueled by this technology based scam, graduation rates are approaching 90%.

The current version of the national education law, The Every Student Succeeds Act, defines “blended learning”:

‘‘The term ‘blended learning’ means a formal education program that leverages both technology-based and face-to-face instructional approaches—(A) that include an element of online or digital learning, combined with supervised learning time, and student- led learning, in which the elements are connected to provide an integrated learning experience; and (B) in which students are provided some control over time, path, or pace.”

This means that a student gets lessons delivered to their digital device from a provider like the Khan Academy. Later the student’s teacher takes on the roll of tutor and helps them with their assignments during class. It is another way to de-professionalize teaching and sell technology.

There are many dark sides to education technology including personal privacy being sundered.

Education psychologist and author of “Failure to Connect: How Computers Affect Our Children’s Minds”, Jane Healy, spent years doing research into computer use in schools and, while she expected to find that computers in the classroom would be beneficial, now feels that “time on the computer might interfere with development of everything from the young child’s motor skills to his or her ability to think logically and distinguish between reality and fantasy.”

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.”

Jean M. Twenge, professor of psychology at San Diego State University and the author of Generation Me and iGen recently wrote an article for Atlantic magazine about the damage screen time is doing. She shared about the current group of teenagers she labels iGen,

“Psychologically, however, they are more vulnerable than Millennials were: Rates of teen depression and suicide have skyrocketed since 2011. It’s not an exaggeration to describe iGen as being on the brink of the worst mental-health crisis in decades. Much of this deterioration can be traced to their phones.”

Not all edtech is bad. In fact some is necessary and some greatly enhances learning. In my personal experience, I found Jupiter Grades, the online grade book to be a very valuable tool for communicating with both students and their parents. Student management systems like those provided by Illuminate Education are essential for managing attendance, enrollment and other things schools legally must track.

In the classroom, high speed data acquisition equipment, word processing capabilities and high end calculators are a boon. Textbooks that take advantage of technology to create hints and provide tools for exploration are excellent learning tools.

The difference between technology that enhances pedagogy and bad edtech is the underlying purpose. Technology that is designed to fill a need and enhance learning is normally a good thing. Technology that is designed to improve system efficiency the way robotics has increased production outputs per worker is generally bad for learning.

In the new book 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. Technology, of course, is rapidly moving into classrooms. But just having more Chromebooks or online learning platforms hasn’t allowed for faster or larger batch-processing of students.”

Looking at the Scholarly Analysis

Regan and Steeves wrote,

“With respect to personalized learning, all five of the foundations emphasize that there are differences in the ways student learn and the importance of ‘flexible learning opportunities’ (Hewlett), ‘the right experiences to help students learn’ (Dell), ‘a truly transformative, personalized learning experience’ (CZ), and ‘the right learning materials’ (Google), which leads to the importance of ‘real-time assessments for gauging student learning’ (Gates) and ‘formative data … gathered as learning is happening … in-the-moment use of data in the classroom’ (Dell). None of the five foundations, however provide a definition of what they actually mean by personalized learning instead describing the importance of data and differences.

“Moreover, none of the five foundations offers actual evidence for the effectiveness of the innovations they are advancing although all discuss the importance of evidence.” (Emphasis Added)

 “Perhaps most interesting in our review of foundations’ Web sites was the almost universal absence of any mention of privacy or the implications of collecting all this data on students’ learning and personal characteristics that would be a necessary component to implement personalized learning, as well as an outcome of that implementation. … The absence of this topic from their overviews is startling given the attention companies like Google and Facebook have been forced to pay to both privacy and security.”

When looking at the EdWeek material the authors observed,

“The EdWeek data set … bifurcates into two, mostly separate, discourses. The first replicates the same themes we found in the foundation Web site materials. It consists of 14 articles written by eight authors, including senior EdWeek writers …; all eight authors are explicitly assigned to cover ed-tech from a business perspective …. For simplicity sake, we refer to this as the dominant discourse.”

“The second discourse appears almost exclusively in 14 articles written by Benjamin Herold, a staff writer who came to EdWeek from public radio and who covers ‘ed-tech, newsroom analytics, digital storytelling and Philadelphia’.”

One of the main themes from the dominant discourse is diminishing the roll of teachers.

“From this perspective, teachers are not experts in the education process equipped to make decisions about how and when to use edtech; instead, they must embrace the fact that, because of technology, ‘they don’t need to know it all. They’re not the experts’ …. Expertise resides in the edtech itself.”

The authors note, “And ultimately, when faced with hard numbers that suggest personalized learning is not effective, the dominant discourse falls back on the need to believe in the technology.”

Benjamin Herold’s articles pushed back against the dominant discourse. His basic argument is captured in the following quote attributed to a parent activist,

“As parent Karen Effrem, ‘the president of … an advocacy organization that supports parents’ right to control their children’s education’ says, ‘We’re sacrificing our children’s privacy, and we’re allowing corporations to make potentially life-changing decisions about our kids, all for technology that doesn’t actually help them.’”

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School Choice is a Harmful Fraud

7 Sep

By Thomas Ultican 9/7/2020

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

Market Based Ideology

Milton Friedman first recommended school vouchers in a 1955 essay. In 2006, he was asked by a conservative group of legislators what he envisioned back then. PRWatch reports that he said, “It had nothing whatsoever to do with helping ‘indigent’ children; no, he explained to thunderous applause, vouchers were all about ‘abolishing the public school system.”’ [Emphasis added]

Market based ideologues are convinced that business is the superior model for school management. Starting with the infamous Regan era polemic, “A Nation at Risk,” the claim that “private business management is superior” has been a consistent theory of education reform promoted by corporate leaders like IBM’s Louis Gerstner, Microsoft’s Bill Gates, Wal-Mart’s Walton family, Bloomberg LP’s founder, Michael Bloomberg and SunAmerica’s Eli Broad. It is a central tenet of both neoliberal and libertarian philosophy.

Charles Koch and his late brother David have spent lavishly promoting their libertarian beliefs. Inspired by Friedman’s doyen, Austrian Economist Friedrich Hayek, the brothers agreed that public education must be abolished.

To this and other ends like defeating climate change legislation, the Kochs created the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). This lobbying organization has contributing members from throughout corporate America. ALEC writes model legislation and financially supports state politicians who promote their libertarian principles.

Like the Walton family and Betsy DeVos, Charles Koch promotes private school vouchers.

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

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

In brief, the portfolio model directs closing schools that score in the bottom 5% on standardized testing and reopening them as charter schools or Innovation schools. In either case, they will no longer come under the purview of an elected school board.

Because standardized testing only reliably correlates with family wealth, this system guarantees that schools in poor communities will all eventually be privatized.

In 2014, SFGATE reported, “Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, who suggests that democratically elected school boards are the problem with public education, says they should be replaced by privately held corporations.”

When it came to privatizing schools, vouchers were a tough sell. Jeffry Henig of Teachers College noted to writer Jeff Bryant, “The Walton foundation itself was one of the early organizations to transition from vouchers to charters.” In an AlterNet article Bryant explained,

“Henig believes many conservatives view charter schools as a way to “soften the ground” for potentially more private options, though he isn’t entirely sure “the Waltons view charters as a Trojan Horse for eventually providing vouchers universally.’”

John Walton read “A Nation at Risk” and that set off his hyper focus on reforming public education. Throughout the 1990s he campaigned endlessly for new voucher legislation and saw his efforts repeatedly rebuffed. Shortly before his death in 2005, John joined Don Fisher and Buzz Woolley in establishing the Charter School Growth fund. Around the same time the Walton Family Foundation began financing charter school startups in communities across America.

No matter how stinking the thinking, a billionaires beliefs have influence. The billionaire led push to privatize public education is based on at least four completely bogus ideas:

1 – “A Nation at Risk” was a misguided fraud but it is still the motivating prime point for corporate driven education “reform.” Former New York Times Education writer, Richard Rothstein states,

“A Nation at Risk based its analysis of declining student achievement entirely on average SAT scores which had dropped by about half a standard deviation from 1963 to 1980. But much of the decline had been due to the changing composition of SAT test takers — in the early 1960s, the preponderance of SAT test takers were high school students planning to apply to the most selective colleges. By 1983, the demographic composition of SAT test takers had mostly stabilized, and average SAT scores were again rising, not declining.”

2 – The growing belief among wealthy elites that elected school boards are the problem is ridiculous. Saying democracy is a discredited way to run publicly financed organizations and elected boards should be replaced by privately run businesses is UN-American.

3 – Market based ideologues religiously believe in Adam Smith’s invisible hand. They are sure comparative school performance will provide families with improving schools that are striving to win the market. These proponents trust that this system will efficiently remove low-performing schools. A 2015 paper notes,

“This idealized theory assumes that all consumers are equally desirable customers for which providers will compete …  just because parents can voice a choice in the system does not mean they will get the choice they want. In New Orleans, the most desirable schools choose their students to a substantial extent.”

4 – Our present Secretary of Education is emblematic of people who believe it is terrible that public schools have replaced churches as the center of community life. Betsy and Dick DeVos have been using their Amway generated wealth to tear down the separation between church and state. They believe the public should provide vouchers to private religious schools and they promote home schooling.

Choice Drives Segregation by Race and Class

It is well known that integrated schools are beneficial for all races and classes and for the social development of society. Professor Peter Piazza’s “School Diversity Notebook” provides a short summary of the research validating this statement.

Data does not inform the decisions to segregate schooling. As Professor Piazza states, “Decisions to segregate are made in the gut or maybe (sadly) in the heart, but not in the head.”

A Matt Barnum article about school integration discusses what happened:

‘“School integration didn’t fail,’ Berkeley economist Rucker Johnson, who has conducted some of the most far-reaching research on school integration, recently argued. ‘The only failure is that we stopped pursuing it and allowed the reign of segregation to return.”’

Adding more perspective, Sonya Ramsey wrote “The Troubled History of American Education after the Brown Decision” for the American Historian. It is made available by the Library of Congress. In that paper she reported,

“From 1954 to the late 1980s, the rate of black children attending white schools rose tremendously in the South, from 0 percent in 1954, to 43.5 percent by 1988, only declining after the dismantling of court ordered desegregation plans to 23.2 in 2011. The South remains the least segregated area of the nation. The current resegregation of the public school are due more to the declining support for desegregation by local districts, the federal government, and the Supreme Court. In 2007 Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. stated the following in his majority opinion in two court cases that used race in determining transfer policies and school plans to foster desegregation: “The way to stop race discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” [17] This decision turned a blind eye to decades of racial discrimination in public schools and struck a deathblow to Brown. The federal government’s focus on assessment testing in the 1980s also placed less emphasis on enforcing desegregation.” [Note 17: https://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/29/washington/29scotus.html]

Today’s school choice advocates precisely echo the language and schemes created by southern segregationists in the 1950s.

Last year three researchers – Julian Vasquez Heilig from the University of Kentucky, T. Jameson Brewer from the University of North Georgia and Yohuru Williams from the University of St. Thomas – collaborated on a study of the segregating effects of charter schools. Their paper clearly documents that charter schools are accelerating resegregation. 

In the literature search section of the study, they reported that the conservative oriented “American Enterprise Institute (AEI) conducted a study of the entire universe of charter schools in the United States concluding that parents were self-segregating along racial and class lines but that such segregation was simply a result of a ‘well-functioning education market.”’ [Emphasis added]

The researchers concluded that “Many of the nation’s charters can even be classified as “apartheid schools”—a term coined by UCLA Professor Gary Orfield for schools with a White student enrollment of 1 percent or less.” And “double segregation by race and class is higher in charter schools” than in public schools.

A personal 2019 study of Washington DC charter schools revealed that 64 of the 116 charter schools would be classified “apartheid schools” using Professor Orfield’s definition.

For their study, Heilig at al accessed the Common Core of Data (CCD) – the Department of Education’s primary database on public elementary and secondary education in the United States. This data was brought together with census and zip code data to reveal related school site and community demographic data.

A common defense of charter schools is that they purposely serve highly segregated communities. However, the researchers discovered “even when comparing schools that are located near each other—that charter schools are more segregated than nearby public schools.”

The paper contained six tables revealing the magnitude of segregation comparing charter schools with public schools. The following is Table 4 from the study that details growing charter school segregation in major cities.

Overall, the intensity of charter school segregation in America’s major cities is shocking. However, the city with the most charter schools, Los Angeles, looks relatively OK. This is a bit of an illusion because many of the charter schools in that city serve racially isolated white students.

In February, Anji Williams published “How Charter Schools in Hollywood Uphold the Racist Tradition of Redlining Segregation.” In Hollywood, the public middle school, La Conte, is almost 100% free and reduced lunch while the co-located Citizens of the World Charter School is more than 60% middle class.

The School Choice Advantage

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

For the Walton family, John Arnold and Charles Koch, school choice grants a path to undermining public education and lowering taxes. However, “when considering the extant literature on school performance comparisons, the minority of charter schools, at best, provide minimal academic benefits whereas the majority underperform public schools.” Worse yet, charter schools are unstable with half of them going out of business within 15 years.  

For Bill Gates, Reed Hastings and Michael Dell, school choice prepares a path for creating an education technology industry that has the promise of huge future profits. Unfortunately for them, digital learning has proven to have serious limitations. The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) said in a 2015 report that heavy users of computers in the classroom “do a lot worse in most learning outcomes.”

For the white supremacist, school choice presents a path for not having their children attending school with “those people.” The data shows it clearly works for their purposes.

For the mission of public education and the future of America, school choice is an atrocious policy.

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Center for Reinventing Public Education the Billionaires’ Advocate

27 Aug

By Thomas Ultican 8/26/2020

In 1993, Political Science Professor Paul T. Hill established the Center for Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) at the Daniel J. Evans School of Public Affairs on the University of Washington campus. The research group Hill founded is steeped in public school failure ideology. On their web site Hill let it be known “The Center has a definite point of view.” Among the points listed are:

“The ineffectiveness of big city public schools clouds the futures of millions of children.”

“Incremental efforts to improve urban public education without disturbing the school boards, unions, and central office administrators have failed, largely because roles, missions, and interests of those organizations are incompatible with effective schooling.”

“There are now far too few good public schools in big cities, in part because the entire structure of city school systems, from regulation and funding to teacher selection and professional development, is hostile to school quality.”

“To create good schools in urban areas where academic failure is the norm, we need an entirely different way of creating and operating schools.”

The CRPE 1999 “about” statement says,

“The Center pursues a national program of research and development on such proposals as charter schools, school contracting, choice, and school system decentralization, via alliances with the Brookings Institution, The RAND Corporation, Vanderbilt University, and the University of Chicago.”

Professor Hill, a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institute, was a member of Brookings’ cadre of researchers convinced that American public education was failing. Furthermore, they shared a general agreement that market based business principles were central to the solution. They believed teacher’s unions and governance by locally elected school boards must overturned.

In 1990, Bookings had published John Chubb’s and Terry Moe’s book, Politics, Markets, and America’s Schools in which they asserted that poor academic performance was “one of the prices Americans pay for choosing to exercise direct democratic control over their schools.” A few years later, Brookings published Fixing Urban Schools co-written by Hill and Mary Beth Celio. It was a call for running schools by contracting with private operators like the Edison Project.

From its 1993 founding thru 1999, CRPE survived by doing research projects for the Brookings Institute, the Rand Corporation, the United States Department of education, the National Business Roundtable and a few others.

crpe-robinpaul

Hill hired researcher Robin Lake the year after founding CRPE. Lake conducted research on charter schools, contracting, and standards-based school decentralization. She led the evaluation of The National Business Roundtable’s national systemic reform initiative.

Big Money Started Arriving

CRPE was fortunate to be in Seattle, Washington where the world’s richest man decided to implement his opinions concerning education. The fact that he was so rich appeared to be his only qualification for what became an outsized influence over public education.

Bill Gates first big education “reform” initiative was his small schools agenda. He believed that smaller schools were more conducive to learning and retention than larger ones. To implement his small schools scheme, he contracted with CRPE to do evaluations and provide implementation advice.

The CRPE web site reported their involvement stating, “The project, supported by a generous gift from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, provides a range of services to new and emerging small schools that have an organizational structure and philosophical commitment compatible with the attributes of high achieving schools.”

Because all donations to CRPE go through the University of Washington Foundation, it is often difficult to identify the specific amounts of money granted to CRPE. In 1999, the Gates Foundation donated $2,000,000 to the Daniel J Evans School of Public Affairs to support Northwest Education. It is likely most of that money went to CRPE but not certain.

In 2000, Gates donated another $750,000. This time stating the donation is ‘to develop resources which will promote the creation of small high schools.” It is a reasonable assumption that all of this money was directed to CRPE.

In 2004, CRPE proudly reported,

“Over the past 10 years the Center has received support from many organizations and foundations. We would like to recognize and thank the

In 2009 CRPE Struck Gold

“School choice” has a long history of fermenting segregation. That history stems back to the negative reaction in the South to the Supreme Court’s 1954 ruling in Brown v Board of Education. In Brown, the court overturned the public school policy of “separate but equal” saying it was “inherently unequal” and that it deprived the plaintiffs of the “equal protection of the law” prescribed in the 14th amendment.

Modern “school choice” ideology promoted by many white billionaires is little different from the strategies of southern segregationist in the 1950s and 60s. It still increases segregation and creates an “inherently unequal” and racist education system.

Promoting “school choice” has become a specialty at CRPE.

“Doing School Choice Right” was a CRPE project funded by the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, Annie E. Casey Foundation, and Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. CPRE listed two salient goals for their study:

    • “Create models for how school districts can oversee public schools in multiple ways—including direct operation, chartering, contracting, and licensing private schools to admit voucher students. This study is conducted in partnership with the National Charter School Research Project.”
    • “Examine issues involved in moving toward pupil-based funding, particularly technical, legal, and regulatory barriers.”

Out of this study, the “portfolio school” management model was created. In October 2009, CRPE published “Portfolio School Districts for Big Cities: An Interim Report.” Lead author Paul Hill and associates stated,

“The report introduces the idea of a ‘portfolio school district,’ and shows how some leading school districts have put the idea into practice. A portfolio district is built for continuous improvement through expansion and imitation of the highest-performing schools, closure and replacement of the lowest-performing, and constant search for new ideas.”

In other words, it is an organized idea for managing the charter schools, innovation schools, public schools and voucher schools that make up the mix of schools in a district. Using standardized testing as a proxy for measuring quality, some percentage (5%) of the lowest performing schools will be closed every year. Invariably, the closed school will be replaced by a privatized structure outside of the purview of an elected school board.

Professors David Berliner and Gene Glass are leading experts in the education research community. In a recent article they convincingly demonstrated – again – that the only strongly correlated outcome associated with education standardized testing is family wealth.

That means that under the “portfolio school district” scheme public schools in poor neighborhoods will be closed and replace by privatized “choice” schools.

This novel idea brought CRPE a new mix of funders. Between 2012 and 2018, foundation tax records show that the Walton Family Foundation (EIN: 13-3441466) granted almost $4 million, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (EIN: 56-2618866) granted over $6 million, the Laura and John Arnold Foundation (EIN: 26-3241764) granted more than $4.5 million and the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation (EIN: 36-4336415) gifted more than $1.3 million.

Unlike the other contributors to the University of Washington Foundation, The Gates Foundation does not explicitly name CPRE in its tax records. The $6 million dollar figure is a conservative estimate made from tax record descriptions.

This year, a CRPE news release stated that the Walton family had granted another $650,000 in support of 2020 operations. The new portfolio model induced funding stream appears to be continuing.

For the fiscal year ending June 30 2018, The University of Washington Foundation (EIN 94-3079432) took in grants totaling $132,838,893. After distributing the money they had a balance of $9,300,536 which is consistent with its past practices. Interestingly, Bill Gates Sr. is a Director of the fund.

By 2019, CRPE quit sharing who it funders are. In 2018, their listed funders were:

    • The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
    • Carnegie Corporation of New York
    • Laura and John Arnold Foundation
    • Michael and Susan Dell Foundation
    • US Department of Education
    • Walton Family Foundation  

Changes at CRPE

CRPE went through big changes in 2012. Paul Hill stepped down as director (semi-retired) and was replaced by his longtime associate Robin Lake. The Center moved from the Daniel J. Evans School of Public Affairs to the Bothell campus also on the University of Washington campus.

That same year, CRPE for the first time announced “policy partners.” They stated, “CRPE is one of five national education policy organizations that co-founded the Policy Innovators in Education (PIE) Network, whose mission is to build, support, and promote a network of education advocacy organizations working to improve K-12 education in their states so that every student graduates world-ready.”

Image Clipped From PIE Home Page

The other “policy partner” listed in 2012 was CEE-Trust. In 2010, Doug Harris and Ethan Gray of The Mind Trust founded CEE-Trust. Its mission was to become a catalyst for new Mind Trust style organizations nationwide promoting school choice. The CEE-Trust web site revealed,

“CEE-Trust is funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and The Joyce Foundation. CEE-Trust is also grateful for the past support of the Carnegie Corporation of New York.”  

After a debacle in Kansas City, CEE-Trust changed its name to Education Cities in 2014. By 2015, CRPE was listing three “policy partners:” Education Cities, Policy Innovators in Education and a new one the National Center for Special Education in Charter Schools (NCSECS). Today, CRPE Director Robin Lake is the board chair of NCSECS.

Education Cities was broken up into two new organizations in 2018. The founder, Ethan Gray, became a founding partner at John Arnold’s and Reed Hastings’ new organization The City Fund. Matt Barnum of Chalkbeat reported, “With big names and $200 million, a new group is forming to push for the ‘portfolio model.”’

It appears CRPE has found another deep pocketed “policy partner.”

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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 NSVF Map

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.

Contribution Graph

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.

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i-Ready Sells 50-Years-Old Education Failure

23 Nov

By Thomas Ultican 11/23/2019

i-Ready sells digital math and English lessons to school districts. It provides diagnostic testing which recommends interventions for struggling students that it then provides. i-Ready’s pedagogy embraces competency based education (CBE) a theory promoted by the US Department of Education and blended learning theory also financially supported by the federal government. CBE is the latest name for an education theory that failed in both the 1970’s and 1990’s. Blended learning theory is an experiment with almost no research supporting it but lots of research pointing to its health risks. Students dislike i-Ready.

June 2018, I wrote “i-Ready Magnificent Marketing Terrible Teaching.” It received decent traffic for the first four days, but strangely the traffic never slowed. This year, it is my most accessed article averaging over 700 hits per month.

Curriculum Associates and Bad Education Philosophy

The Massachusetts based company Curriculum Associates (CA) distributes i-Ready and its related testing services. When founded in 1969, it was providing worksheets in support of Mastery Learning curriculum which is similar to today’s CBE. They are the same failed theories delivered by different mediums. CBE and Mastery Learning theory also go by many other names including outcome based education; performance based education; standards based education; high performance learning; transformational education and break-the-mold schools, among others.

Benjamin Bloom and his collaborators developed what almost all teachers in America know as “Bloom’s Taxonomy.” The taxonomy was originally conceived as a method for identifying the learning objectives that test questions addressed. At the time, Bloom was the Director of the Board of Examinations of the University of Chicago and he enlisted measurement experts from across the country to aid in his question classification project. Their final product was published in 1956 under the title, Taxonomy of Educational Objectives (Bloom, Engelhart, Furst, Hill, & Krathwohl).

David R. Krathwohl, Professor of Education Emeritus at Syracuse University, explained that Bloom saw the Taxonomy as more than a measurement tool. He says Bloom believed it could serve as a:

  • “common language about learning goals to facilitate communication across persons, subject matter, and grade levels;
  • “basis for determining for a particular course or curriculum the specific meaning of broad educational goals, such as those found in the currently prevalent national, state, and local standards;
  • “means for determining the congruence of educational objectives, activities, and assessments in unit, course, or curriculum;” (Emphasis added.)

In the late 1960’s Bloom outlined “Learning for Mastery” which was based on both the Taxonomy and the theoretical work of John B. Carroll. Carroll had proposed that if each student was allowed the time needed to learn a subject to some criterion level, then she could attain that level. In other words, almost all students could master academic subjects.

In the 1970’s “Learning for Mastery” became “Mastery Learning” and was evolving. However, critics were questioning its methods and outcomes. Many teachers started referring to it as “seats and sheets.”

In 1976, James H. Block and Robert B. Burns, two education professors from the University of California Santa Barbra, published a lengthy defense of Mastery Learning. In their defense, they described the related Personalized System of Instruction (PSI) as an individually based, student-paced approach to mastery instruction wherein students typically learn independently of their classmates. They state:

“The theoretical basis for this strategy lay in B. F. Skinner’s pioneering work in operant conditioning and the application of that work in the programmed instruction movement of the 1960s. Some of the basic features of this movement have been summarized by Hartley (1974, p. 279).

  1. “The learner should be given some clear idea of where he is going, i.e., the terminal behavior.
  2. “The instruction leading to this behavior must be sequenced into small steps.
  3. “The learner should work on each step alone and at his own pace.
  4. “At each step, the learner should be encouraged to actively respond.
  5. “The learner should receive immediate knowledge of results concerning the correctness or appropriateness of these responses.” (Emphasis added.)

Mastery Learning outcomes were not encouraging. A 1982 paper in Learning by George N. Schmidt said, “A city-wide elementary school reading program that emphasizes mastery learning … is blamed for the declining reading test scores of high school students there.”

When Chicago finally abandoned Mastery Learning, teacher Kenneth S. Goodman wrote in an Education Week article, “Perhaps what, more than any other factor, brought down the program was that it was imposed on teachers: …” (Emphasis added.)

As Mastery Learning was careening toward the dustbin of failed education ideas, Bill Spady, self-proclaimed father of Outcome-Based Education (OBE), was organizing a group of Mastery Learning advocates to join him in promoting OBE. Spady explained,

“In January of 1980 we convened a meeting of 42 people to form the Network for Outcome-Based Schools. Most of the people who were there—Jim Block, John Champlin—had a strong background in mastery learning, since it was what OBE was called at the time. But I pleaded with the group not to use the name “mastery learning” in the network’s new name because the word “mastery” had already been destroyed through poor implementation.”

Peter Greene the author of the blog “Curmudgucation” and Senior Contributor for education at Forbes discussed the demise of OBE in a 2015 Post. He noted, “This was the dawn of TSWBAT (the student will be able to…) which meant that every single objective had to be paired with some observable student behavior.” It is likely that almost all teachers in America have been plagued at one time or another by administrators insisting that a TSWBAT statement be posted for each day’s lesson.

The Clinton administration embraced OBE and its development of education curricular standards. However, the standards associated with OBE were peppered with politically charged non-cognitive objectives like:

“All students understand and appreciate their worth as unique and capable individuals, and exhibit self-esteem.

“All students apply the fundamentals of consumer behavior to managing available resources to provide for personal and family needs.

“All students make environmentally sound decisions in their personal and civic lives.”

OBE was extremely unpopular with practicing educators. However, what really killed it was the reaction from the political right. As Greene noted, “Rush Limbaugh, Bill Bennett, Pat Robertson and most especially Phyllis Schafly were sure that OBE was here to socially engineer your child into some bleeding heart gay-loving liberal twinkie.” Another OBE vulnerability was absolutely no evidence or research indicated it actually worked.

Competency Based Education (CBE) and i-Ready

CBE is OBE on a screen. The objectives have been simplified into discrete sets of small competencies that can be assessed by digital algorithm. These objectives which align with common core state standards are derived from the ideas developed through Mastery Learning and OBE.

In 2008, i-Ready’s CEO, Rob Waldron, took the reins at Curriculum Associates (CA) and steered it into the digital education business. CA became an education technology company.

The timing was good. Jeb Bush soon established a well funded campaign to promoted digital learning (students at screens). Donald Cohen, chairperson of the nonprofit, In the Public Interest release a trove of emails that brought to light the forces financing Bush’s education technology initiative. Cohen said the emails “conclusively reveal that FEE [Foundation for Excellence in Education] staff acted to promote their corporate funders’ priorities, and demonstrate the dangerous role that corporate money plays in shaping our education policy.”

Lee Fan reporting for the Nation magazine said these funders included the American Legislative Exchange Council (Koch Industries), K12 Inc., Pearson, Apex Learning (launched by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen), Microsoft, McGraw-Hill Education, Bill and Melinda Gates, Michael and Susan Dell among others. With this kind of financial and political support, the fact that educating students by putting them at screens was an untested theory was not a hindrance.

Competency Based Education has not performed as theorized. This month, an article in Ed Week shared,

“The evidence base is very weak at this point,” said Pane, who led a Gates-funded study of about 40 personalized-learning schools, finding modest gains and big implementation challenges.”

“Critics such as independent researcher Audrey Watters warn that personalized learning is a pretext for ‘massive data collection’ and surveillance of students.”

Ed Week CBE Graphic

Results of Education Weeks School Principals Technology Survey

Parents, Teachers and Students Dislike i-Ready

This Urban dictionary says, “Iready is commonly used as a form of child torture in the US education system.”

This definition aptly expresses the sentiments of many respondents to i-Ready blogs:

  1. Teacher: “I got no information on iReady about my students that I didn’t already know.”
  2. Parent: “I’ve only heard teachers say that iready gave them the same information they already have about students. IOW, it has no value.”
  3. Student: “I hate I-ready, when I do it I get the same lessons every time.”
  4. Student: “i hate doing iready”
  5. Teacher: “Most kids view computer programs as games. So it changes the mind set of many students from what am I learning to how can I beat this game.”
  6. Parent: “It is abusive to a student’s rights!”
  7. Teacher: “My eighth graders deliberately answer the diagnostic test questions incorrectly because they’ve discovered this results in easier (faster) lessons.”
  8. Parent: “My son hates it.”
  9. Student: “i am a kid in 4th grade who is supposed to be doing iready not writing this but i cant and wont because it is too stupid boring and downright horrible!”
  10. Student: “yeah I am not supposed to save this but what are we kids getting out of I ready I know nothing but a f’d up way to learn nothing but sh!t”
  11. Student: “i agree it sucks”
  12. Parent: “I wonder what you’d see for responses if you asked kids if they liked school in general? Using student quotes about a program is a poor metric when most young students would rather be doing something else on a computer (like Fortnite). Wrong metric.”
  13. Student 1 Response: “well here’s a kids response school sucks but i would rather jump off a cliff than do another iready lesson!”
  14. Student 2 Response: “That isn’t true for all students like me I’m an A student but I hate iready (even though I play games a lot)”
  15. Student: “I am a gifted student in an I-ready school who hates I-ready so much that I created a rebel alliance against it.”

A Florida parent named Deb Herbage wrote a scathing account about i-Ready “i-Ready?…………More Like i-SCAM and Other Deceptions.” In it she excoriates Jeb Bush saying,

“We have i-Ready, IRLA, Canvas, Nearpod, ReadyGen, MobyMax and a host of other ‘experimental’ programs and software that have been deceptively deployed in our schools that our kids are actively testing and helped ‘validate’ and refine. … With all these partnerships and alliances – it can become difficult to track these companies but they all seem to point in the same direction – Jeb Bush, the Foundation for Excellence in Education, Common Core, education reform, the US DOE, the NGA, the CCSSO and the state of Florida.”

Kassia Omohundro Wedekind is an elementary math teaching specialist and the author of Math Exchanges: Guiding Young Mathematicians in Small-Group Meetings. She recently published to her blog, “Why iReady is Dangerous.” Wedekind observed, “iReady, and assessments of this nature, overwhelming identify poor students and students of color as most in need of intervention.”

Conclusions

Programmed instruction, Mastery Learning, Outcome Based Education and Competency Based Education all were imposed on teachers and mostly imposed by non-educators. Instead of learning from practicing educators, theorists turned to behaviorist philosophy to create their ideologies. In the 21st century, education technology has also been imposed on educators, but not by misguided reformers. It is being sold by some of the largest corporations in the world who are looking for profits. Not all education technology is bad but lifeless lessons delivered on screens are harming both student health and their intellectual growth.

Twitter: @tultican

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Dallas Chamber of Commerce Accelerates Attack on Public Schools

24 Oct

By Thomas Ultican 10/24/2019

Elites living in upscale mostly white Dallas communities are spending heavily to privatize public schools. Dallas demographics are basically a three way split with Hispanics (41.7%), whites (29.1%) and blacks (24%). However, whites living in trendy neighborhoods like Highland Park where Teach For America (TFA) founder Wendy Kopp grew up dominate the business community. In 2012, 16-years after a group of wealthy outsiders failed in their effort to take over Dallas public schools a new privatization agenda was launched.

When reporting on the 2012 takeover effort, award winning columnist of the Texas Observer, Jim Schutze, described that first attempt,

“In 1996, when well-funded, mainly white reformers came in with big manila folders of statistics under their arms preaching about outcomes and incomes, there was open warfare. Board meetings dissolved into riots.

“The New Black Panthers threatened to show up at school headquarters armed with shotguns. Tangles between angry speakers and district security guards were beginning to make board meetings look like Total Nonstop Action Wrestling.

“The New Black Panthers painted the white school board members as bogus crackers. Then a neighbor of one white trustee proved them right by wiretapping the trustee using racial slurs. The superintendent resigned. The next superintendent got sent to the pen. A dismal series of financial scandals ensued. The school district wound up looking like bad fruit erupted in the merciless Texas sun. So here we go again?”

In 2011, the Dallas Chamber of Commerce paid for local political leaders to visit Denver, Los Angeles and Houston to learn more about charter schools. Superintendent Michael Hinojosa and trustee Bernadette Nutall were in the group.

Before 2012, Dallas school board elections were very low key affairs. Two of the three incumbent school board trustees up for reelection ran unopposed in 2011 and the third district trustee had resigned. Mike Morath stepped forward to take that 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.

Writing for In These Times, George Joseph explained the political change in a 2014 article:

“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.”

In 2012, incumbent Bernadette Nutall was provided a campaign war chest of $54,527.06 to fend off a challenge by an unknown youth. Nutall had supported closing eleven “underutilized” schools in her district which made her popular at the chamber but angered much of her district. In that same election, Dan Micciche received $56,479.57 to run against Trustee Bruce Parrot in district-3. With an almost 60 to 1 spending advantage, Micciche easily won.

Once the new board was seated it proceeded to fire Superintendent Michael Hinojosa and replace him with Mike Miles a graduate of billionaire Eli Broad’s Superintendents Academy. At the time, Miles was serving as superintendent of schools for Harrison School District-2 in Colorado Springs. The Dallas morning news stated that Miles had “been compared with Michelle Rhee, the go-get-em chancellor who has been villainized and lauded as she tries to repair the shattered Washington, D.C. school system.” The lone vote opposed to the Miles hire came from district-6 Trustee Carla Ranger. Ranger posted an informative quote from the Colorado Gazette on her blog:

“That tough and visionary approach to education is what impressed the Texans.  Blackburn [Board President Lew Blackburn] said that they liked the steps Miles took to improve Harrison, including pay for performance and the intense performance evaluations.”

The article “Dallas Chamber of Commerce Disrupts Dallas Schools” summarizes Miles three year tenure,

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

In 2015, Michael Hinojosa was rehired as Dallas Superintendent of schools.

The year before, Trustee Mike Morath had proposed a scheme based on an obscure Texas law that would eliminate the democratically elected school board and accelerate charter school growth. George Joseph reporting on Morath’s “home rule” plan wrote,

Three inside city sources told the Dallas Morning News that the mayor and school board trustee Mike Morath, a major force behind the home rule effort, view home rule as best chance to replace the elected school board with complete mayoral control or at least an appointed school board. One source claimed the mayor’s spokesperson told him that “the mayor would run DISD or oversee it. You wouldn’t have trustees. If you did, they wouldn’t be making decisions.”

Morath’s “home rule” plan was quickly embraced by the local chamber of commerce through a political action non-profit, Support Our Public Schools. Houston billionaire and former Enron trader John Arnold contributed $150,000 to the cause. Communities throughout Dallas rose up and to defeat the plan but Morath’s prominence grew.

In 2015, new Texas Governor Greg Abbott appointed Mike Morath Commissioner of Education. With no education training and a few months experience as a substitute teacher, Morath became Abbott’s best possible choice. 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.”

Chamber of Commerce and Billionaires Continue Buying School Board Elections

Stacy Schusterman

Tulsa Billionaire Stacy Schusterman a Dallas School Board Election Donor; Sampson-Energy

In 2017, Miguel Solis the incumbent from district-8 ran unopposed. In district-6, the incumbent Joyce Forman had token opposition and easily won with 87% of the vote. In district-2, the incumbent Dustin Marshall was in for a dog fight. In fact, his opponent Lori Kirkpatrick almost won outright during the general election with 49.8% of the vote to Marshall’s 47.0%. In the runoff, Marshall handily beat Kirkpatrick 66.3% to 33.7%. Money was the difference. Marshall could outspend Kirkpatrick by more than 6 times with his $338,302.63 funding advantage over her $52,913.76.

Chris Tackett put Dustin Marshall’s contributors into a pie chart.

Dustin Marshall Contributors Chris Tackett

Chris Tackett Pie Chart of 2017 Support for Marshall

The May 4, 2019 school board elections for districts 4, 5 and 7 had similar results. The chamber of commerce slate won a clean sweep, while candidates supported by community groups, the PTA and teachers’ associations were swamped under the massive spending.

Karla Garcia was forced into a runoff by her district-4 opponent Camile White. The three big corporate PACs Ascend, Kids First and Educate Dallas all generously supported Garcia enabling her to outspend White by a ratio of 18 to 1. Garcia’s $90,132.69 campaign fund allowed her to spend more than $78 for each vote received.

In District-5, Maxie Johnson outspent his opponent David King by more than 10 to 1. Educate Dallas, Kids First and the Texas Organizing Project all made large contributions to his total campaign fund of $74,992.93.

There was a bit of a contest in district-7. The chamber candidate Ben Mackey was opposed by Brent McDougal who had considerable community support. Mackey’s total campaign contributions of $138,416.27 was by far the largest in the May election and it dwarfed McDougal’s surprisingly large trove of $35,910.76. In addition to contributions from Educate Dallas and Kids First, Mackey got a $10,000 contribution from Tulsa billionaire Stacey Schusterman.

Dallas Chamber Joins State Republican Leaders and Billionaires in School Privatization Project   

Texas blogger Lynn Davenport recently wrote about a school board plan to turn over Martin Luther King, Jr. Arts Academy to a private operator. This plan is based on the 2017 state law, Senate Bill 1882, that pays districts $1800 for each student put in privately operated schools. In this case, a highly regarded non-profit CitySquare which has no experience running schools would operate Martin Luther King, Jr. Arts Academy as a charter school. In her discussion of the district policy change that would make this possible, Kirkpatrick wrote,

“MLK, Jr. Learning Center is a neighborhood school that was selected last year as a choice school, an arts academy being referred to as a ‘Baby Booker T.’ Trustee Joyce Foreman is the lone dissenter against the privatization agenda in Dallas ISD. She is up against a supermajority of trustees winning the race to hand the neighborhood and open-enrollment schools to non-educators and non-profits under the controversial SB 1882. Trustee Foreman asked, ‘Why would we want someone else to run our best schools?”’

A school board election commentary in the Dallas Morning News by metro columnist Sharon Grigsby had the title, “Good riddance to naysayers — Dallas ISD kids finally get the trustees they deserve.” In other words, anyone who speaks out against the privatization agenda is a “naysayer.”

Dallas’s largest and most influential newspaper also ran an editorial decrying “so much resistance to this school district exploring partnerships with outside organizations.” Partnerships are a way of privatizing public schools by turning them over to charter schools or other nonprofits. The Dallas Morning News is clearly an integral part of the chamber of commerce push to privatize public schools in Dallas.

As insightful education writer Nancy Bailey notes, “The partners, not the public, will own Dallas’s public schools.”

Since Greg Abbott has been governor he has signed two laws that accelerate public school privatization and end local control. House Bill 1842 mandates “intervention in and sanction of a public school that has received an academically unsuccessful performance rating for at least two consecutive school years ….” Senate Bill 1882 incentivizes school districts to hand over control of failing neighborhood schools to charter operators (referred to as “partnerships”). In Dallas local leaders are proposing using this provision to hand over control of open enrollment schools whether they are failing or not.

There have been twelve Texas schools that have been taken over by private operators under the provisions of SB 1882 and have a set of new grades. Some schools saw testing score improvement but most did not.

Texas Tribune Partnership Chart

Texas Tribune Chart of First SB1882 Privatized Schools with Grades

These privatization decisions are all being made based on standardized testing which is completely incapable of assessing school quality. The only thing they are good at is assessing a student’s family financial condition and providing propaganda for privatization.

Republican Governor Greg Abbott’s Commissioner of Education, Mike 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.

Dallas has a good public education system with a long history of success. That system is being hijacked by wealthy elites and their political henchmen. An awakened citizenry can stop this travesty.

Twitter: @tultican

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Relay Graduate School: a Slick “MarketWorld” Education Fraud

18 Sep

By T. Ultican 9/18/2019

Relay Graduate School of Education is a private stand alone graduate school created and led by people with meager academic credentials. Founded by officials from the charter school industry, it is lavishly financed by billionaires.

Contending that traditional university based teacher education has failed; Relay prescribes deregulation and market competition. Relay does not offer “coursework in areas typical of teacher education programs—courses such as school and society, philosophy of education, and teaching in democracy ….” Rather, Relay trains students almost exclusively in strict classroom management techniques.

Ken Zeichner is one of America’s leading academics studying teacher education. In a paper on alternative teacher preparation programs he noted that Match Teacher Residency and Relay “contribute to the inequitable distribution of professionally prepared teachers and to the stratification of schools according to the social class and racial composition of the student body.” Zeichner clarified,

“These two programs prepare teachers to use highly controlling pedagogical and classroom management techniques that are primarily used in schools serving students of color whose communities are severely impacted by poverty. Meanwhile, students in more economically advantaged areas have greater access to professionally trained teachers, less punitive and controlling management practices and broader and richer curricula and teaching practices. The teaching and management practices learned by the teachers in these two independent programs are based on a restricted definition of teaching and learning and would not be acceptable in more economically advantaged communities.”

Relay is another component of the destroy-public-education infrastructure that mirrors Professor Noliwe Rooks’ definition of segrenomics; “the business of profiting specifically from high levels of racial and economic segregation.”

Founding Relay Graduate School of Education

Relay’s foundation was laid when the Dean of City University of New York’s Hunter College school of education, David Steiner, was approached by Norman Atkins of Uncommon Schools, David Levin of KIPP charter schools, and Dacia Toll of Achievement First charter schools. Dean Steiner agreed to establish the kind of Teacher Preparation program at Hunter College that these three charter industry leaders wanted. The new program which began in 2008 and was called Teacher U.

Kate Peterson studied Relay for a Philadelphia group. She noted,

“Receiving $10 million from Larry Robbins, founder of the hedge fund Glenview Capital Management and current board member of Relay, and $20 million from the non-profit The Robin Hood Foundation, the three charter school leaders partnered with Hunter College in New York to implement their program ….”

The following year the newly elected and extremely wealthy Chancellor of the New York State Board of Regents, Merryl H. Tisch, tapped David Steiner to be Commissioner of Education.

Steiner and Tisch believed that there was an unhealthy university based monopoly of teacher education. Steiner moved to weaken that monopoly in 2010 by granting “a provisional charter to authorize clinically-rich teacher programs to address shortages such as in STEM areas as well as ‘students with disabilities and English language learners.’”

The following year Steiner authorized and the state board approved non-institutions of higher education to grant master’s degrees in education accredited by New York State.

Almost immediately, Teacher U became Relay Graduate School of Education and received accreditation from the state of New York. Steiner’s roll in the establishment of Relay was so prominent that he is still a member of Relay’s board of directors along with co-founders Atkins, Levin and Toll.

Relay Key Founders

Tisch and Steiner embodied a form of neoliberal ideology that the author Anand Giridharadas defined as “MarketWorld”. In Winners Take All Giridharadas explains,

“MarketWorld is an ascendant power elite that is defined by the concurrent drives to do well and do good, to change the world while also profiting from the status quo. It consists of enlightened businesspeople and their collaborators in the worlds of charity, academia, media, government and think tanks.”

Tisch and Steiner both embraced standardized testing as a legitimate measure of school and teacher quality. The former US Assistant Secretary of Education, Diane Ravitch, described Tisch as the “Doyenne of High-Stakes Testing.”

Tisch and Steiner also looked to private business as a solution to perceived problems in education and they enthusiastically promoted Bill Gates’ Common Core State Standards.

When Steiner resigned as Commissioner in 2011, Tisch replaced him with John King who had a similar education philosophy.

The idea that university based teacher education programs are a monopoly that must be broken is a farce. It is advocating that professionally run education programs guided by people who have spent their lives researching and practicing education must be replaced by a privatized alternative.

Here in my hometown of San Diego, California we have four major teacher education programs. University of California San Diego and San Diego State University run the two publicly sponsored programs. The University of San Diego and National University run the two private school education programs. Those four competing programs are hardly monopolies plus they meet a high standard of professionalism, something Relay does not do.

As soon as Relay became New York’s first ever non-university associated and accredited education graduate school, billionaire money started rolling in. New Schools Venture Fund in Oakland, California sent them $500,000 in the founding year of 2011 and followed that with $1,500,000 in 2012.

Between Relay’s founding in 2011 and 2017, John Arnold, Bill Gates, Michael Dell, the Walton family plus the New School Venture Fund granted Relay $21,625,322. During its first year of operation, Relay received $10,403,909 in grants and contributions.

Relay’s Organization

Norman Atkins who was and still is the CEO of Uncommon Knowledge has assumed the leadership of Relay. Uncommon Knowledge, Inc. and Relay shared the same address until 2017 when Uncommon Knowledge became Together, Inc, which established a new address but kept their books at Atkins’ office.

Uncommon Knowledge has been very generous to Relay graduate school; granting them more than $5,000,000 between 2013 and 2017. While Atkins remains CEO of Uncommon his pay all comes from Relay.

Salaries

Top Salaries since Founding Reported on Relay’s Tax Forms

Mercedes Schneider looked at Relay in March (2018) and began her piece, “Relay Graduate School of Education (RGSE) is a corporate reform entity whose ‘deans’ need not possess the qualifications that deans of legitimate graduate schools possess (i.e., Ph.D.s; established professional careers in education, including publication in blind-review journals).”

Most Relay Deans were the founders of the Relay campus in their location. There are now seventeen Relay campuses which are in reality little more than a store front or an office. In the last year, Relay has gone from zero education doctorates to four.

Among the Deans, it appears that not one of them is qualified for tenure track at a legitimate college of education. Simply stated, Relay’s school leaders are not qualified education professionals.

When Relay tried for to go into California and Pennsylvania, both states refused them.  In an interview, Professor Zeichner remarked, “Their mumbo jumbo and smoke and mirrors game did not work however, in either CA or PA where the states ruled that Relay’s programs did not meet their state standards for teacher education programs.”

Recently, there has been deterioration in the leadership at some Relay campuses. While in 2017, they all had deans, three no longer do.

In Memphis, founding Dean Michelle Armstrong left Relay to be coordinator of instructional support at the Pyramid Peak Foundation. In Nashville, founding Dean Linda Lenz has departed and so has founding Dean Jennifer Francis of New Orleans. It appears that none of the “deans” have been replaced at their respective campuses.

Teach like it is 1885

Seton Hall’s Danial Katz described the program of studies, “Relay’s ‘curriculum’ mostly consists of taking the non-certified faculty of the charter schools, giving them computer-delivered modules on classroom management (and distributing copies of Teach Like a Champion), and placing them under the auspices of the ‘no excuses’ brand of charter school operation and teachers who already have experience with it.”

A good reference for understanding where the Relay theory of education spawned is Elizabeth Green’s Building A+ Better Teacher. Green is definitely a member of “MarketWorld” and she venerates the no-excuses charter founders, but her closeness to them provided her with deep information about these schools and the thinking of their founders.

Green notes that Doug Lamov, the author of Teach Like a Champion(TLC), was part of a new class of educators “from the world of educational entrepreneurs.” Green observed,

“Instead of epistemology, child psychology, and philosophy, their obsessions were data-based decision making, start-ups, and ‘disruption.’ They were more likely to know the name of Eric Hanushek, the economist who invented the value-added teacher evaluation model, than Judy Lanier.”

Doug Lamov decided to create a common taxonomy that Green described as “an organized breakdown of all the little details that helped great teachers excel.”  His list of techniques expanded to 49 and that became TLC. It was a behaviorist approach to classroom management and teaching. Some of the techniques are fine but the relentless application in a no-excuses environment stunts student creativity and need to know.

Most trained professional educators find Lemov’s teaching theory regressive. Jennifer Berkshire published a post by Layla Treuhaft-Ali. Under the title “Teach Like its 1885.” Layla wrote, “Placed in their proper racial context, the Teach Like A Champion techniques can read like a modern-day version of the *Hampton Idea,* where children of color are taught not to challenge authority under the supervision of a wealthy, white elite.”

Relay’s curriculum focuses on studying TLC through videos like this one. There is no lecture hall and no academic study of education. It is a 100% technical approach to building teachers who follow a script and teach their students to respond to cues.

Some Last Words

More from Professor Zeichner,

“Relay teachers work exclusively with ‘other people’s children’ and provide the kind of education that Relay staff would never accept for their own children. The reason that I use Lisa Delpit’s term ‘other people’s children’ here is to underline the point that few if any Relay staff and advocates for the program in the policy community would accept a Relay teacher for their own children. Most parents want more than a focus on standardized test scores for their children and this measure becomes the only definition of success in schools attended by students living in poverty.”

Relay practices the pedagogy of poverty and as Martin Haberman says,

“In reality, the pedagogy of poverty is not a professional methodology at all. It is not supported by research, by theory, or by the best practice of superior urban teachers. It is actually certain ritualistic acts that, much like the ceremonies performed by religious functionaries, have come to be conducted for their intrinsic value rather than to foster learning.”

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Destroy Public Education Forces Retooling for 2019

26 Dec

By T. Ultican 12/26/2018

The destroy public education (DPE) national coordinating organization, Education Cities, has been closed, with its assets and personnel distributed to three new organizations; The City Fund, School Board Partners and Community Engagement Partners. And there is more. In an interview with The 74, City Fund’s Managing Partner, Neerav Kingsland, revealed the establishment a new political action committee under IRS code 501 C4 called Public School Allies.

In October, the California Charter Schools Association (CCSA) announced that its leader for the past 10 years, Jed Wallace, would step down in January, 2019. The new President of CCSA will be Myrna Castrejón who is currently Director of Great Public Schools Now (GPSN). The announcement says of Wallace’s future, “He will move onto a new role advising charter school organizations across the United States.” Under Wallace’s leadership the CCSA replaced the California Teachers Association as the state’s largest lobbying effort on education issues.

The LittleSis map below shows the money coming into The City Fund and the new postings for the former Education Cities’ staff. During the interview cited above, Kirkland said, “Along with the Hastings Fund and the Arnold Foundation, we’ve also received funds from the Dell Foundation, the Gates Foundation, the Walton Family Foundation, and the Ballmer Group.” The amount of money given by the Walton family and Ballmer is unknown.

Little Sis Map of Reorganization

Reorganizing DPE Forces (see Interactive Map here)

Matt Barnum of Chalkbeat reported that City Fund has started spending to promote the “portfolio model” of education reform. Barnum stated,

“Kingsland said The City Fund has given to The Mind Trust, which focuses on Indianapolis Public Schools; RootED in Denver; City Education Partners in San Antonio; the Newark Charter School Fund and the New Jersey Children’s Foundation; The Opportunity Trust in St. Louis; and RedefinED Atlanta. In Nashville, The City Fund gave directly to certain charter schools.”

The City Fund’s central agenda is promoting the portfolio model of school reform. The portfolio model posits treating schools like stock holdings and trimming the failures by privatizing them or closing them. The instrument for measuring failure is the wholly inappropriate standardized test which reflects student family wealth but does not identify education quality. Testing and the portfolio model inevitably lead to an ever more privatized system – especially in poor communities – that strips parents and taxpayers of their democratic rights. Objections to the portfolio model include:

  1. It creates constant churn and disruption. Students in struggling neighborhoods need stable environments they can trust.
  2. Democratically operated schools are the foundation of American democracy. The portfolio model ignores the value of these democratic incubators.
  3. Parents and taxpayer lose the ability to hold elected officials accountable for school operations.

Even voucher enthusiast Jay P. Greene of the University of Arkansas wrote an open letter to John Arnold warning against the portfolio model. He noted, “The Arnold Foundation invests heavily in another initiative that promotes rigorous science for medical and policy decision-making, yet they do not seem to apply that same standard of proof to their own education strategy.”

Myrna Castrejón and Great Public Schools Now (GPSN)

Myrna Castrejón attended college at the flagship Seventh-day Adventist school Andrews University. From there she matriculated to the University of Wisconsin where she took graduate work in Anthropology and Border Studies. She has spent time at various non-profits focused on education reform in both El Paso, Texas and Los Angeles, California. In 2003, she went to work for the CCSA.

By 2015, Castrejón was the Senior Vice President, Government Affairs, at CCSA where she led their Advocates group. At the end of the year, she left her $231,000 position to establish GPSN where her  pay raised to $255,133 for the first year.

GPSN was a start-up non-profit in 2016, however, it was extremely well financed. The Walton family gave $400,000 and Eli Broad sent $4,927,500 but the big money came from Bill Gates a whopping $24,985,965. With this money, Castrejón was able to finance a public relations campaign that gave her amazing access to the Los Angeles Unified School District’s board, especially Ref Rodriguez and Monica Garcia at the start and later with Nick Malvoin, Garcia and Superintendent Austin Buetner.

That first year, she was able to grant Teach for America $4,200,000 in order “to increase the pipeline of high quality teachers in LA schools.” She also sent $500,000 to Boston’s Building Excellent Schools to recruit two fellows for founding, opening and leading “high achieving charter schools” in LA.

This past October she organized a “town-hall meeting” with “250 parents” to promote the charter industries dream of a common application for all schools. LAUSD Board President, Monica Garcia, Board member, Nick Malvoin and Superintendent Austin Buetner were all there to support her agenda.

Buetner at Great Schools Now Event June 29_2018

GPSN One Application Event with Austin Buetner (picture from #onecityallkids)

Myrna Castrejón has been a very effective leader in the DPE effort to privatize schools in Los Angeles and throughout California. That is why she will be the next leader of CCSA, the big dog among California’s DPE forces.

School Board Partners

Matt Barnum a reporter for Chalkbeat obtained a trove of emails between Myrna Castrejón and officials at LAUSD through a public information request. He made the 315 pages of emails accessible in his article, “New group will try to connect school board members pushing for ‘dramatic change’ in these 10 cities.”

The emails show that Ref Rodriguez, Monica Garcia and Nick Malvoin were more like partners with Castrejón than public representatives. This August, Castrejón messaged Garcia and Malvoin about the Launch of School Board Partners. She wrote,

“I am forwarding a networking and support opportunity that one of our partners is launching to advance the work of quality and equity in urban districts. School Board Partners is a new, spin off organization of the former Education Cities network, of which GPSN is a member. As you can see from Carrie’s description, their aim is create a Board level community of practice and make available resources and support for participating members on site and remote.

“This is at NO cost to participating Board members. If this is of interest to you, the initial cohort will launch October 1-3 in Denver. Let me know if I can connect you more directly. See the general description below, and the link to the live page that explains their work in more detail. I hope you find this helpful!

“Myrna”

The email that Castrejón forwarded was from Carrie McPherson Douglass, the CEO, of School Board Partners, which was in its first month or two of operation. The key portion of Douglas’s message reads,

“For year 1, our list of priority cities is: Atlanta, Baton Rouge, Denver, Detroit, Indianapolis, Los Angeles, Memphis, New Orleans, Oakland, San Antonio and Stockton.

“In each of these cities, we plan to support 1-3 school board members by providing these three sets of supports:

“1.  A national community of diverse school board members who are working to lead bold change in their respective communities. The network will meet annually in person and communicate virtually throughout the year as needed. Members of the network will learn together and support each other, as well as benefit from the support and resources of the team at School Board Partners.

“2.  A personal coach/mentor to support each individual school board member as they develop as an elected official and leader of change in your city.

“3.  Pro-bono consulting services to help school board members research, plan and execute thoughtful change initiatives specific to your board and city. Our first national convening of school board members will be held in Denver Oct 1st-3rd.”

Both Garcia and Malvoin indicate great interest in the group but cited a conflict with the October date. Garcia said her Pahara group was meeting then and Nick said a looming strike and some board business would make those dates difficult. Castrejón agreed to put them both in direct contact with Carrie Douglass.

Carrie McPherson Douglass from EC bio

Carrie Douglass’s Profile Picture on the Education Cities Cyber sight

Carrie Douglass was the Managing Partner at Education Cities. She signed their tax forms and made really good money. The tax form’s list her 2014 salary at $154,343, her 2015 salary at $168,942 and her 2016 salary at $182,595.

Before Education Cities, Carrie served as the Senior Director of Strategy and Innovation at the Rogers Family Foundation in Oakland, an Education Cities member, where she developed a blended learning pilot. Prior to joining Rogers, Carrie was the Director of Human Resources at Aspire Public Schools.

Carry earned a B.A. from the University of Portland, Oregon, in Education and Music. She was awarded an M.B.A. at Boston University specializing in Finance, Strategy and Non-profit Management.

Douglass lives and works from the beautiful little city of Bend, Oregon on the eastern side of the Cascade Mountains. Last year she was elected to the local school board.

This founding leader of School Board Partners is a “Broadie.” She completed the two year Broad Residency program (2007-2009) while working at Aspire. Her quote on the Broad Alumni page reads,

“I am amazed that Americans have accepted mediocrity from our public school system for so long. The status quo must end. The Broad Residency provides an opportunity for professionals with a wide variety of experiences to bring innovative solutions to the table, while simultaneously developing a deep understanding of the historical context to ensure appropriate solutions for urban education.”

In other words this very white woman from an extraordinarily white area of the United States believes Broad gave her the kind of “deep understanding” required for saving the black and brown children in Atlanta, Baton Rouge, Denver, Detroit, Indianapolis, Los Angeles, Memphis, New Orleans, Oakland, San Antonio and Stockton. What could go wrong?

In a private email, Peter Greene responded to the establishment of School Board Partners with, “I call BS.” The point being that every state requires school board members to go through training and existing reputable private organizations like the California School Board Association also make many training and research resources available to board members. California’s Department of Consumer Affairs provides a plethora of training opportunities and informs all new Board members, “California … requires every appointed board member to complete a training and orientation program offered by the Department of Consumer Affairs (DCA) within one year of assuming office.”

School Board Partners is not a good Samaritan group filling a void. It is a DPE organization looking to co-opt elected board members into furthering the portfolio model of education reform.

Community Engagement Partners

This new organization is not well defined and their web presence is not much more informative than the non-existent web presence of The City Fund. Three former employees of Education Cities are developing this new DPE organization.

Kevin Leslie “provides finance and operations support to Education Cities and its two new initiatives: Community Engagement Partners and School Board Partners.”

Rebecca Weinberg Jones is the Deputy Director of Community Engagement Partners (CPE). She attended Vassar College and earned a Masters in Urban Education Policy from Brown University. Her LinkedIn page says of CEP,

“Community Engagement Partners, an initiative of Education Cities, supports education organizations and leaders as they partner with and learn from their local communities with the goal of creating and sustaining great schools. We believe that the change necessary to ensure that every child has access to a high-quality school is only possible and sustainable when those most impacted by educational inequity are partners in the work and decision making.”

Charles McDonald is the Executive Director for CEP. In the past, he served as Senior Managing Director, External Affairs for Teach For America – South Carolina. He also served as Program Manager for Education Pioneers Greater Boston Analyst and Graduate School Fellowship programs for two years.

A paper McDonald wrote while at Education Cities is the only document linked on the CEP web page. It purportedly points to their purpose. In it he obseved,

“After nearly a decade of catalyzing and implementing nationally-recognized education reforms, The Mind Trust made an intentional shift from solely focusing on grasstops-driven reform efforts to recognizing the need to partner with key grassroots stakeholders and civic leaders with deep ties to the communities most impacted by educational inequity. In 2013, the organization hired Indianapolis native Kameelah Shaheed-Diallo [now at The City Fund] to help lead efforts to better align The Mind Trust’s strategy to the needs and values of the community and build a base of community support for educational equity.”

It seems like the CEP purpose will be to continue Education City’s efforts to organize and support on the ground DPE forces in America’s cities.

Some Final Comments

This October, Diane Ravitch addressed #NPE2018Indy asserting, “We are the resistance and we are winning!” 2018 certainly was a hopeful year for the friends of public education and professional educators. Charter school growth has stagnated and “choice” has been shown to be a racist attack rather than an expanded right. In Arizona, an ALEC driven voucher scheme was soundly defeated and in California, Tony Thurmond turned back the nearly $50 million dollar effort to make a charter school executive Superintendent of Public Instruction.

The DPE response is a new more opaque and better funded effort narrowly focused on its theory of quality schools through the portfolio model. It is yet another effort to transform education with no input from educators. Without billionaire money tipping the scales of democracy; vouchers and charter schools would disappear because they are bad policy. Educators ache to focus on improving public education but must use their energy fighting for the survival of America’s public education system, the world’s greatest and most successful education institution.

America’s teachers are educators who will continue sharing lessons on how to recognize highly paid political agents and profitable propaganda centers masquerading as “think tanks.” I predict, even with the greater spending and reorganization, 2019 will be an awful year for the DPE forces.

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