Tag Archives: Muriel Bowser

Relay Graduate School Forced onto DC Black Community

30 Mar

By Thomas Ultican 3/30/2022

School leaders and teachers in Washington DC’s wards 7 and 8 are being compelled into training given by Relay Graduate School of Education (RSGE). West of the Anacostia River in the wealthier whiter communities public school leaders are not being forced. When ward 7 and 8 administrators spoke out against the policy, they were fired. Two of them Dr. Carolyn Jackson-King and Marlon Ray, formerly of Boone Elementary School are suing DC Public Schools (DCPS) for violating the Whistleblower Protection Act and the DC Human Rights Act.

Jackson-King and Ray are emblematic of the talented black educators with deep experience that are being driven out of the Washington DC public school system. They are respected leaders in their schools and the community. When it was learned Jackson-King was let go, the community protested loudly and created a web site publishing her accomplishments.

In 2014, Jackson-King arrived at the Lawrence E. Boone Elementary school when it was still named Orr Elementary. The school had been plagued by violence and gone through two principals the previous year. Teacher Diane Johnson recalled carrying a bleeding student who had been punched to the nurse’s office. She remembered students fighting being a daily occurrence before Jackson-King took over.

In 2018, Orr Elementary went through a $46 million dollar renovation. The community and school board agreed that the name should be changed before the building reopened. Orr was originally named in honor of Benjamin Grayson Orr, a D.C. mayor in the 19th century and slave owner. The new name honors Lawrence Boone a Black educator who was Orr Elementary’s principal from 1973 to 1996. 

Jackson-King successfully navigated the campus violence and new construction. By 2019, Boon Elementary was demonstrating solid education progress as monitored by the district’s star ratings. Boone Elementary which is in a poor minority neighborhood went from a 1-star out of 5 rating when Jackson-King arrived to a 3-star rating her last year there.

City Council member Trayon White petitioned Superintendent Lewis Ferebee to rescind the removal of Jackson-King as principal stating,

“I have received many letters, emails and texts from parents and former students regarding this action. I join them in getting answers. I have personally witnessed Dr. Jackson-King’s leadership. Over the past six years, she has transformed Boone into a 3-star school by incorporating new partners and programs. She is not just a pillar at Boone, she is a pillar in the community with much respect from those who know her. … In the words of many, ‘Dr. Jackson-King has led our School Family Community from total chaos to success.’”

Marlon Ray was Boone’s director of strategy and logistics. He worked there for 13-years including the last six under Principal Jackson-King. Despite his long history in the district, Ray was apparently targeted after filing a whistleblower complaint over Relay Graduate School. Ray questioned RGSE’s relationship with DCPS, the Executive Office of the Mayor and the Office of the State Superintendent of Education. He implicated Mary Ann Stinson, the DCPS Cluster II instructional superintendent who wrote Jackson-King’s district Impact review that paved the way for her termination.

In the lawsuit, Ray alleges that DCPS leadership responded by requiring him to work in person five days a week in the early months of the pandemic while most of his colleagues, including Jackson-King’s replacement Kimberly Douglas, worked remotely. This continued well into the spring of 2021.

In October of 2020, Ray joined with about 30 Washington Teacher’s Union members, parents and students to rally against opening schools before it was safe. Ray reported that he received a tongue lashing from a DCPS administrator for being there and then 2-hours later receive a telephoned death threat. He reports the caller saying, “This is Marcus from DCPS; you’re done, you’re through, you’re finished, you’re dead.”

Ray’s position was eliminated in June, 2021.

Dr. Jackson-King and Ray were not the only ones who experienced retaliation and were ultimately terminated due to opposing Relay. Johann Lee, formerly of Kimball Elementary School and Richard Trogisch, formerly of School Without Walls criticized Relay and DCPS’s COVID mitigation strategy, respectively. They are also both out. Ray says there are others who have not come forward.

Embracing a School Privatization Agenda

George Bernard Shaw noted that, “… the first rule of morals and manners in a Democratic country: namely, that you must not treat your political opponent as a moral delinquent” (Selected Non-Dramatic Writings of Bernard Shaw page 408). Keeping this in mind, I will try not to impugn Mayor Bowser’s integrity. I believe she is sincere in her belief that public schools are failing and that privatization is the cure. It is an illusion that started gaining adherents during the Reagan administration and the next five presidents have continued advancing it.

In Washington DC, the mayor has almost dictatorial power over public education. Therefore, when she becomes convinced of an illusion that falsely claims public schools are failing, there are few safeguards available to stop policy led destruction.

In the chart above, notice that all of the key employees she chose to lead DC K-12 education have a strong connection to organizations practicing what Cornell Professor Noliwe Rooks labels “segrenomics.” In her book Cutting School (Page 2), she describes it as the businesses of taking advantage of separate, segregated, and unequal forms of education to make a profit selling school. Bowser’s first Deputy Mayor for Education, Jennifer Niles, was a charter school founder. Her second Deputy Mayor, Paul Kihn, attended the infamous privatization centric Broad Academy. She inherited Kaya Henderson as DCPS Chancellor and kept her for five years. Kaya Henderson, a Teach For America alum, was the notorious Michelle Rhee’s heir apparent. The other two Chancellors that Bowser chose, Antwan Wilson and Lewis Ferebee, also attended the Broad Academy and both are members of Jeb Bush’s Chiefs for Change.

The DCPS web page is quite unusual in that it is close to being a Muriel Bowser campaign organ. A 2018 message concerning the end of Education Week ironically stated,

“Today, Mayor Bowser also announced that the Office of the State Superintendent of Education (OSSE) awarded $1.5 million in grants to five nonprofit organizations to recruit and train more than 250 high-quality new charter school teachers. The Scholarships for Opportunities and Results (SOAR) Act Teacher Pipeline Grant awardees are: Relay Graduate School of Education, the Urban Teacher Center, AppleTree Institute, KIPP DC, and the National Center for Montessori in the Public Sector.”

There are four main governing Components in the Washington DC school system: (1) The State Board of Education (SBE); (2) The Office of the State Superintendent of Education; (3) The Public Charter School Board and (4) The District of Columbia Public Schools. The SBE is an elected board with little power to effect policy. The other three entities are all controlled by Mayor Bowser.

The State Superintendent of Education who awarded $7.5 million in public education dollars to five private companies was Hanseul Kang. Before Bowser appointed her to the position, Kang was a member of the Broad Residency class of 2012-2014. At that time, she was serving as Chief of Staff for the Tennessee Department of Education while her fellow Broadie, Chris Barbic, was setting up the doomed to fail Tennessee Achievement School District. In 2021, Bowser had to replace Kang because she became the inaugural Executive Director of the new Broad Center at Yale. Bowser chose Christina Grant yet another Broad trained education privatization enthusiast to replace Kang.

(For a background information on the Broad Academy see Broad’s Academy and Residencies Fuel the Destroy Public Education Agenda.)

Bowser and her team are in many ways impressive, high achieving and admirable people. However, their deluded view of public education and its value is dangerous; dangerous for K-12 education, dangerous for democracy.

“Teach like it’s 1885“

The root of the push back against Relay training by ward 7 and 8 educators is found in the authoritarian approach being propagated. NPR listed feedback from dismayed teachers bothered by schemes such as:

  • “Students must pick up their pens within three seconds of starting a writing assignment.
  • “Students must walk silently, in a straight line, hands behind their backs, when they are outside the classroom.
  • “Teachers must stand still, speak in a ‘formal register’ and square their shoulders toward students when they give directions.”

Dr. Jackson-King noted, “Kids have to sit a certain way, they have to look a certain way. They cannot be who they are. Those are all the ways they teach you in prison — you have to walk in a straight line, hands behind your back, eyes forward.”

RSGE does not focus on education philosophy or guidance from the world’s foremost educators. Rather its fundamental text is Teach Like a Champion which is a guidebook for no-excuses charter schools.

Three no-excuses charter school leaders established RGSE. In the post “Teach Like it’s 1885”, published by Jenifer Berkshire, Layla Treuhaft-Ali 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.”

The Hampton Idea comment is a reference to W.E.B. Du Bois’s 1906 speech at Hampton University in which he called on the Black students to seek academic skills not just technical education.  

In her book Scripting the Moves, Professor Joanne Golann wrote:

‘“Ultimately no-excuses charters schools are a failed solution to a much larger social problem,’ education scholar Maury Nation has argued. ‘How does a society address systemic marginalization and related economic inequalities? How do schools mitigate the effects of a system of White supremacy within which schools themselves are embedded?’ Without attending to these problems, we will not solve the problems of educational inequality. ‘As with so many school reforms,’ Nation argues, ‘no-excuses discipline is an attempt to address the complexities of these problems, with a cheap, simplistic, mass-producible, ‘market-based’ solution.’” (Page 174)

Legitimate education professionals routinely heap scorn on RSGE. 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.”

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).”

Ken Zeichner is one of America’s leading academics studying teacher education. In a paper on alternative teacher preparation programs focused on Match Teacher Residency and RGSE, he asserted,

“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.”

This is the training program that these courageous educators were fired for opposing.

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DC Charter School Performance “Almost” Matches Public Schools

8 Sep

By T. Ultican 9/8/2019

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

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

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

ELA 3-8 PARCC Data

ELA Data from the OSSE Report

Math 3-6 PARCC Data

Math Data from the OSSE Report

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

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

Gap Data 2005-2017

Red Numbers Indicate the Performance Gaps in 2005 and 2017

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

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

A recent Center for American Progress report on vouchers observed:

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

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

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

Why Don’t Washington DC Residents Merit Democracy?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DC Public Schools Welcome Page

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

Corruption and “Segrenomics” Infest DC Schools

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

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

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

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

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

The PCSB Board:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A disturbing quote concludes Rachel Cohen’s article:

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

End Notes

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

CityBridge

Spending to Privatize Public Schools in 2017

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

Twitter: @tultican

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