Tag Archives: Public education

John Eaton, Hero of American Education

15 Jan

By Thomas Ultican 1/15/2024

John Eaton (1829 – 1906) was a clergyman, soldier, philanthropist, journalist, educator, and statesman. He was born to a farmer in Sutton, New Hampshire and attended Vermont’s Thetford Academy . After graduating from Dartmouth College in 1854, he studied at Andover Theological Seminary and in 1862 was ordained to the Presbyterian ministry. Eaton also earned a Master of Arts and Legum Doctor from Rutgers University.

After Dartmouth, as a school principal in Cleveland, Ohio his success led to an appointment as superintendent of the public schools of Toledo, Ohio … a position he held from 1856-59.

On August 15, 1861, he joined the 27th Ohio Volunteer Infantry as chaplain. In September 1862, Lincoln signed Proposition 95, soon known as the Emancipation Proclamation. The next month, Major General Ulysses S. Grant appointed Eaton superintendent of freedmen and made him supervisor of all military posts from Cairo, Georgia to Natchez, Mississippi and Fort Smith, Arkansas. On October 10, 1863, Grant made him colonel of the 63rd United States Colored Infantry.

 The following month, Eaton was tasked with Superintendent of Negro Affairs for the Department of the Tennessee (Grant’s Army). From 1863-64, he opened 74 schools, all black, in places like Memphis, Vicksburg, Natchez, Little Rock, Pine Bluff and others within the Union lines, with 13,320 pupils. (Page 296)

With this, the leading Christian denominations of the North commenced church schools, also supervised by General Eaton. As the Union army advanced, the few public schools for white children came under military control and were likewise put under his jurisdiction.

Professor Johann Neem shared, “Because of their political power and the way the tax burden fell largely upon them, slaveholding elites spread an antitax gospel to convince ordinary whites that taxes were a bad thing.” (Democracy’s Schools Page 92) Leading into the Civil War, there were no state-supported public schools in the south. Eaton’s efforts started the American common-school system in the South which, in succeeding years, led to revised constitutions in every reconstructed southern state, establishing publicly financed education.

Eaton was a force-of-nature endowed with a profound work ethic, natural ability at organizing and political acumen. He was confirmed brigadier general by the US Senate in 1866.

Post-Bellum National and International Education Leader

In 1867, he was selected superintendent of public instruction for the state of Tennessee and was instrumental in creating the state’s public education laws. This appointment allowed him to enforce them. The so-called “Eaton System” was not popular with the local population, yet for two years, he was able to establish a common-school system, servicing 185,000 Black and White students.

After he left Tennessee in 1869, the state legislature swept away the “Eaton System.” (Page 296) Eaton anticipated this outcome and in his final report to Tennessee’s Governor wrote:

“No state in the Union is now satisfied without an efficient system of free public schools. If this one, which has been inaugurated at such cost and with such care, is destroyed in Tennessee, it will necessarily be revived. It must be. Nothing can prevent it in any American state. ” (Page 297)

He was prescient. The system was temporarily checked but its essential features were soon re-adopted.

Author and clergyman A. D. Mayo (1823-1907) summed up the work of General Eaton:

“For more than twenty years, from 1862 to 1882, no man in the United States contributed more to the final establishment and increasing importance of the common-school system in the South than he. … Whatever may have come of his tremendous labors and those of his faithful assistants during these early years, working under a military supervision, it cannot be reasonably doubted that any competent reader of the educational literature thrown up in this period, with the commentary of subsequent events, will be forced to acknowledge that then and there was laid a permanent foundation for the new departure of a system of common schools in the South .” (Page 297)

General Eaton Goes to Washington

A new Department of education was created by Congress in 1867 with Dr. Henry Barnard as Commissioner. The public fear of dangerous centralization became so great that in 1870, the Senate changed it from a department to a bureau, attached to the Department of the Interior.

When U. S. Grant was inaugurated president (March 4, 1869), he discovered Commissioner Barnard wanted to leave. Grant decided to bring General Eaton to Washington and appointed him Commissioner of Education on March 16, 1870.

When Eaton arrived, appropriations for the National Bureau of Education had been reduced from $20,000 to $6,000 a year. He had a staff of two clerks, with the existence of a Bureau of Education threatened. (Page 298)

Employing phenomenal powers of organization, political acuity and work ethic, Eaton set out to build a National Bureau of Education, recognized favorably in the US and worldwide.

Dr. William T. Harris, who succeeded Eaton as Commissioner, stated:

“General Eaton was the true founder of this Bureau, in the sense that he established as the chief work of this Bureau, the annual collection of statistics by means of statistical schedules, which were sent to all institutions and all general officers to be filled out and returned to the Commissioner from year to year. In this way he trained educators to keep original records of their operations and made these records available for analysis and comparison.” (Page 299)

Eaton’s innovations in expanding public education included initiating kindergarten in the US, introducing domestic science, industrial and manual training, creating commercial, agricultural, art, and nurse-training schools, women in higher education, schools for the blind, for the learning-disabled, technical schools, free libraries, etc. (Page 300)

His influence went beyond the boundaries of the United States. He was tendered an honorary membership in the French “Ministry of Public Instruction,” which he declined because it was improper. The Department of Education of England also sought his advice. When the governments of Japan, South Africa, Egypt, Bulgaria, Brazil, Columbia, Peru, Chili, and Argentina awoke to the importance of educating the masses, General Eaton was solicited to map a suitable school system and expended great efforts to help these countries. (Page 301)

These labors undermined his health and in November 1886, against the wishes of the President, he felt compelled to resign his commission. In 1870, the Bureau had two clerks of low grade, 100 volumes in its library, $6,000 for maintenance and was considered a failure. By the time he left, the Bureau of Education had 38 paid clerks and 9,000 unpaid volunteer assistants in the United States and foreign lands collecting statistics. There were 18,000 volumes and 47,000 pamphlets in the library, the most extensive and complete pedagogic collection in existence at the time, with $102,284 for the maintenance of the Bureau. Its stellar global reputation was declared “the most influential educational office in the world.”

During the years from 1875 to 1886, General Eaton wielded a larger influence on educational affairs than any other person in America. (Page 301)

After Washington DC

From 1886 to 1891, Eaton was president of Marietta College. In 1895, he was appointed president of Sheldon Jackson College in Sitka, Alaska and in 1898, he became president of Westminster College in Salt Lake City. He also served as Councilor of the American Public Health Association, Vice-President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and president of the Association of Social Science.

In 1899, owing to his experience organizing educational systems of several South American republics, the US Government called on him to reform the education system in Puerto Rico. General Eaton successfully replaced the Spanish system which profited certain privileged classes and abolished the “substitute system,” in which a person could draw the full salary of a teacher and employ a cheap substitute to do the teaching. The school curriculum was also reformed and the “fee system” eliminated, enabling children of poorer classes to attend school. He required educating girls as well as boys, changing an ancient, effete school culture into a modern one, founding the American school system in Puerto Rico.

General Eaton passed at home in Washington DC on 2-9-1906, survived by his wife Shirley, daughter Elsie Newton and two sons, Joseph Shirley Eaton and John Quincy Eaton.

His obituary in The Evening Star noted,

“In the death of Gen. Eaton the cause of public education meets with a severe loss, it is pointed out and his death will be regretted, not only by a host of friends in this city and elsewhere, but by many educational Institutions throughout the country.” 

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School Board District Elections for Coronado, Carlsbad and Vista

19 Sep

By Thomas Ultican 9/19/2022

The November 8, 2022 general election will usher in large changes to school board districts in San Diego County and around the country. School boards are quite literally that foundation of American democracy. In this installment, three districts are highlighted and recommendations for the seats are made.

School board races are supposedly non-partisan; however the Democratic and Republican Parties have both weighed in. The Republicans do formal endorsements but the Democrats only highlight party members. In this piece both methods are treated as endorsements.

Coronado Unified School District (Coronado USD)

Public school students 2,747 – Charter school students 0 – Percent charter 0%

Coronado is an upscale city of 20,000 on sort of an island across the bay from San Diego. It is the home of Naval Air Station North Island with a narrow strip of land known as the Silver Strand extending south to Imperial Beach. Driving down the strand one sees the iconic Hotel Del Coronado, the Seal Team training facility and Silver Strand State Beach. It is a stunningly beautiful community filled with naval flag officers, doctors, lawyers and expensive real estate.

Lately the community has experienced divisive political turmoil centered on their school district. The new MAGA right organization, We the Parents Coronado (WTPC), has been loudly railing against CRT, state mask mandates and vaccine requirements. They strongly support “school choice.” Last year an article in the Coronado Times reported,

“Prior to going offline Wednesday afternoon, the We the Parents of Coronado Website featured a section called “Values” that linked to a post about the Declaration of Independence on the American Citadel blog written by Zack Strong. But when visitors clicked through to The American Citadel site and viewed other blog posts there, some were shocked to discover that other posts contained controversial content.”

“Posts found on The American Citadel site include anti-LGBTQ referring to the homosexual ‘agenda’ as “satanic” and “dangerous,” while others are blatantly misogynistic, including one post called “Stay Home, Amy” that chastises newly-appointed Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett for working outside of the home, and ends with the advice, “Ladies, the home is where you were designed to shine.” Many posts are suggestive of anti-Semitism, while others appear to make disparaging comments about Black Americans, Native Americans and Asian Americans. Other posts seem to call for a violent insurrection, and fantasize about the assassination of President Biden and Vice President Harris.”

The WTPC website has since been scrubbed of this content but it can still be viewed here. However, their cleaned website continues to direct people to the works of Christopher Rufo the paid mouthpiece of libertarian billionaires Charles Koch and the Walton family. Rufo became infamous for propagandizing critical race theory (CRT) saying it is used to groom k-12 students against the white race. The reality is that CRT is a legal theory discussing how race affects legal outcomes. It is only seriously studied in law school graduate seminars. CRT has never been taught in k-12 schools and until just over a years ago, very few k-12 teachers had ever heard of it.

The WTPC has all the earmarks of an authoritarian white supremacist group.

Coronado USD’s school board is made up of five members. This year four positions are on the ballot. Three are for regular four year terms and one is for the remaining two years of Stacy Keszei’s term. Widely viewed as a driving force in WTPC, Keszei resigned her seat this January.

The board seats are all voted on at large with seven people running for one of the three full term positions and three people running of the short term position.

– Full 4 Year Term

1. Stephanie Anderson is a local business women and native of Coronado. She is also a member of the Chamber of Commerce. Anderson lists no experience in education but she does seem to truly value the public schools and her answers to the Coronado Times questions for school board candidates are reasonable.

2. Helen Anderson-Cruz is the loan incumbent running in this election. She has a doctorate in education from the Rosier School of Education at USC. A Coronado Islander since 1989, Anderson-Cruz taught English language arts in the Sweetwater District for 20 years. She has a granddaughter attending Village Elementary.

3. Michael Iversen is Vice President of Commercial Strategy at Galaxy Medical. This recent Danish immigrant reports no background in education. He is very critical of the Coronado USD governing board and the actions of parents and students over the past few years.

4. Lisa Meglioli has the endorsement of the Republican Party. Her web page says she is an Italian immigrant with five children ages 11 to 21 who are or were Coronado USD students. She shows no background in education and seems to be the only candidate who did no answer the Coronado Times candidate survey.

5. Alexia Palacios-Peters says on her Facebook page, “I’m a mom, military spouse, and attorney running for CUSD Board Trustee in 2022.” Her website notes that before becoming an attorney she earned a degree from the University of Texas in early childhood education and taught in elementary school. In her answers for the Coronado Times she says that she has children in ¾ of the schools in the district.

6. Malachy Denis Sandy is a retired Navy Captain who attended the Naval Academy. His answers to the Coronado Times indicate that he is very disturbed by the culture war focused on Coronado USD. He says, “There appears to be a small but vocal group of people in the Coronado community who refuse to work within the structure of CUSD and California State guidelines and policies.” He is bothered by their not placing value on science, data, facts and history. He does not appear to have any background in k-12 education.

7. Scot Youngblood is an orthopedic surgeon and retired Navy Captain who is endorsed by the Republican Party. The policy positions on his website show an unquestioning belief in the validity of standardized testing. Scot does not have any experience with k-12 education.

Recommendations: Helen Anderson-Cruz; Alexia Palacios-Peters; Malachy Denis Sandy

Short Term

1. Nicole Boucher is a registered nurse. In her interview with the Coronado Times she noted her disappointment with state government and its “unconscionable bills (i.e., AB-2223 and SB866).” AB-2223 is a law that guarantees woman will not be investigated or charged for experiencing a miscarriage, stillbirth, abortion, or perinatal death due to causes that occurred in utero. It is on the governor’s desk but has yet to be signed into law. AB866 would have allowed students 12 years and older to receive COVID vaccinations without parental consent. It was pulled and never made it to a vote. Boucher has no experience with k-12 education.

2. Renee Cavanaugh’s Facebook page states, “Renee Cavanaugh, is a retired CUSD teacher, running for school board to keep our schools great.” While answering the Coronado Times questions, she noted, “CUSD was recently named the number one school district in the county based on graduation rates, student-teacher ratio, spending per student and attendance and suspension rates.” Her answers also demonstrated a deep knowledge of how the k-12 system functions.

3. Geri L. Machin is believed to be the executive director of We The Parents Coronado. In her answers for the Coronado Times she claimed 10 years of teaching experience in both private and public schools. She has a campaign website and the endorsement of the Republican Party. Last year she wrote an anti-masking opinion piece for the Coronado Eagle and Journal.

Recommendation: Renee Cavanaugh

Carlsbad Unified School District (CUSD)

Public school students 11,027 – Charter school students 0 – Percent charter 0%

Carlsbad is an upscale bedroom community of 115,000 on the edge of the Pacific Ocean. It is home to Legoland and Callaway Golf.

There is no incumbent running in Area 1. Sharon Mckeeman who is endorsed by the Republican Party is running against Michele Tsutagawa Ward who is endorsed by the Democratic Party and the Carlsbad Teachers Association.

Mckeeman and two other candidates use Briana Baleskie from Brian Bilbray’s Imperial Beach campaign services organization as their treasurer. Mckeeman is the founder of Let Them Breath which sued the state to reopen schools during the height of the pandemic. She is also a homeschooler. On her web page she shares, “As a home educator in the past she nurtured her children to achievements such as her son winning the county and state science fair.”

Ward is a 20-year educator working mostly in Carlsbad elementary schools. She is presently the principal of Tierra Bonita Elementary in Poway. Her web page shares that she was voted Calavera Elementary Teacher of the Year in 2012. She is involved with local organizations supporting education like the Carlsbad Education Foundation and the California Association of Asian and Pacific Leaders in Education.

Recommendation: Michele Tsutagawa Ward

Area 4 also has no incumbent running. Candidate Jennifer Fornal is a non-profit project manager and has been involved with the Carlsbad PTA since 2013. She has managed several projects for youth development and after school programs. Fornal is endorsed by the Democratic Party and the Carlsbad Teachers Association.

Gretchen Vurbeff is running against Fornal. Her web page notes that she is an exercise physiologist working as a wellness educator for the past 30 years. She has been volunteering with the PTA for more than a decade. Verbeff also uses Briana Baleskie as her treasurer and is endorsed by the Republican Party. It is certainly not a deal buster to be endorsed by the Republican Party, but in today’s political climate to also use the same treasurer as the other endorsees is worrisome.

Recommendation: Jennifer Fornal

In Area 5, incumbent Kathleen Hope Rallings faces off against Scott Davison. Rallings was first elected Trustee in 2014. Her district biography notes, “She received a B.A. in Speech Communications from California State University, Long Beach, and an M.A. in Negotiations and Conflict Management from California State University, Dominguez Hills.” Rallings is endorsed by the Democratic Party and the Carlsbad Teachers Association.

Davidson’s web page opens with a call for transparency. This kind of goal has become associated with the anti-CRT and Anti-LGBTQ movement that is driving teachers out of the classroom. He may not support either agenda and he claims to believe in public schools. In 2020, Davidson setup a gofundme page to support the Trump inspired open schools movement. He also uses Briana Baleskie as treasurer for his campaign and is endorsed by the Republican Party.

Recommendation: Kathleen Hope Rallings

Escondido Union School District (EUSD)

Public school students 14,360 – Charter school students 2,864 – Percent charter 16.6%

Escondido is a community of 151,000 located north and east of San Diego. It is San Diego County’s second oldest city and is rumored to have been a hideout for Pancho Villa and his men.

EUSD is a k-8th grade district not to be confused with the Escondido Union High School District which serves grades 9-12.

In area 2, long serving Trustee Joan Gardner has been on the board since 1998. Gardner is endorsed by the Republican Party and has yet to mount much of a campaign. She was the target of a failed 2016 recall effort.

Elizabeth Shulok is attempting to unseat Gardner. She is a UC Berkley trained data scientist and mother engaged with education. She has organized preschool classes, volunteered in classrooms and chaperoned field trips. Shulok makes a very impressive presentation on her web page, on her Facebook page and at her LinkedIn site. She is endorsed by the Democratic Party.

Recommendation: Elizabeth Shulok

In Area 4, incumbent Georgine Tomasi is being challenged by former board member Zesty Harper. Tomasi has a 40 year career working in education starting with teaching high school history in New Jersey. She presently works for the California Teachers Association. Her web page lists some of the important accomplishments she contributed to as an EUSD Trustee. Tomasi is endorsed by the Democratic Party.

After winning the Area 4 seat in 2014, Zesty Harper became a controversial figure when she proclaimed, “No longer will it be OK for this disservice we have called your education to continue.” She stated that creationism should be taught in classrooms alongside evolution. She also sent her own children to Heritage Charter School instead of an EUSD school. On her web page it says, “Zesty strongly believes in school choice and has supported local charter schools to increase innovation, competition, and choice in Escondido public schools.” Harper is endorsed by the Republican Party.

Recommendation: Georgine Tomasi

Area 5 incumbent Frank Huston is running unopposed.

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San Diego County School Board Election 2022

12 Sep

By Thomas Ultican 9/12/2022

The bedrock of American Democracy is the school board. Many of America’s leading politicians began their career serving on a school board. This November 8th, half of the school board positions in San Diego County will be on the ballot. Here is a review of the candidates in our ten largest school districts and the County Office of Education. Recommendations are included.

School board seats are supposedly non-partisan contests; however the Republican and Democratic parties have made recommendations in many of the matches. The Republicans do a formal endorsement while the Democrats identify party members on the ballot. In this post both methods are treated as endorsements.

San Diego County Board of Education

Public school students 399,786 – Charter school students 81,316 – Percent charter 16.9%

In District-3 which includes most of the southern end of the county, incumbent Alicia Muñoz faces off against Marvin Attiq. The Democrats endorse Muñoz and the Republicans endorse Attiq.

Attiq appears to be a barber with no background in education. Muñoz has been on the board since 2014 and teaches English at Cuyamaca College. She has a master’s degree in English from San Francisco State University and a bachelor’s in comparative literature from UC Berkley.

Recommendation: Alicia Muñoz.

District-5 runs along the coast north from Del Mar to camp Pendleton. Incumbent Richard Shea has the endorsement of the Democrats and Emily Wichmann is endorsed by the Republicans. Shea worked as a special assistant to the county superintendent and was originally appointed to a vacant seat in 2015. In 2016, he was elected to the office. Shea previously served as head teacher for the Juvenile Court Schools.

Based on her posts on Facebook, it appears Wichmann tacitly supports the anti-LGBTQ attacks and her LinkedIn page indicates she supports standardized testing. She also joins the pro-choice agenda of many in the Republican Party. Although Wichmann does not have any formal training or experience in education, her 24 years on the Oceanside Unified school board vests her with on the job training.

Recommendation: Richard Shea

San Diego Unified School District (SDUSD)

Public school students 95,250 – Charter school students 19,217 – Percent charter 16.8%

Area B represents northeastern San Diego from Scripps Ranch to Normal Heights. SDUSD is one of the few districts to require a primary to earn a spot on the general election ballot.

Godwin Higa is perhaps San Diego’s foremost expert on trauma informed education. Documentary film maker Rita Grant made a 2017 short film about Higa and his work at Cherokee Point Elementary School. He has more than 30 years experience as an educator and administrator. Find Higa’s campaign web page here.

Shana Hazan is a young mother with two elementary school aged daughters attending SDUSD schools. Her campaign web site shares an impressive list of endorsements including the Democratic Party and the San Diego Union Tribune. According to her linked in page, after earning a master’s in education from Northwestern University, she taught elementary school for two years. One year was at a charter school and the other at a Chicago public school. Since returning to San Diego, she has spent the last 12 years working at Jewish Family Services.

The amount of money flowing into Hazan’s campaign is concerning. The $93,000 she has already reported dwarfs the sums raised by any other San Diego school board candidate. By comparison, Higa reported $5,685. It is not just the amount but who is contributing that is worrisome. Her campaign reports show $1,500 from Alan Bersin, $1,500 from Scott Peters, $1,500 from Irwin Jacobs, $1,500 from Joan Jacobs, $1,500 from Allison Price, $1,500 from Robert Price and $1,000 from David Wax. Clearly neoliberal money is pouring in.

Recommendation: Godwin Higa

In Area C, Rebecca Williams is the anti-mask and anti-vaccine mandates candidate endorsed by the Republican Party. She has teaching experience in charter schools. She and her husband founded Valor Education a charter management organization whose classic education is a conservative response to progressive values. Williams has reported the second most money of any county school board candidate, $65,839.

Cody Peterson is an anthropology lecturer at University of California San Diego and a well-known environmentalist. He grew up in La Jolla attending public schools there. The Voice of San Diego stated, “[His] history of involvement, his progressive politics and his support of, and membership in local unions led to a cascade of endorsements from Democratic officials and many of San Diego’s most robust unions, like the San Diego Education Association, which represents SDUSD’s teachers.”

Recommendation: Cody Peterson

Sweetwater Union High School District (SUHSD)

Public school students 36,557 – Charter school students 1,469 – Percent charter 3.9%

This election brings a big change for Sweetwater. For the first time since 2014, two incumbent board members are not running.

Area 1 covers National City and northwest Chula Vista. Trustee Arturo Solis is the incumbent running unopposed.

Area 3 includes Bonita and Eastlake. Marquetta Brown has a campaign facebook page and web page. Elva Lopez-Zapeda also has a web page and is a long time elementary school educator. Noem Abrego lists herself as a community volunteer. Rebekkah Naputi has no known education background but she is endorsed by the Republican Party. Michael Black is a personal injury attorney who shows no education experience or background. An insider believes that the Sweetwater Teachers Association will endorse Elva Lopez-Zapeda.

Recommendation: Elva Lopez-Zapeda

 Area 5 represents Imperial Beach and south San Diego. Dante Garcia Pamintuan is a real estate agent who has been described as a MAGA Republican. He was a member of the Imperial Beach Chamber of Commerce board of directors in 2020. Marti Emerald is a well known investigative journalist and former San Diego city council member. She is endorsed by the Democratic Party. Neither Pamintuan nor Emerald has experience working with education.

Recommendation: Marti Emerald

Poway Unified School District (PUSD)

Public school students 35,192 – Charter school students 0 – Percent charter 0%

In the Northeast corner of Poway a battle is brewing for the Area B seat. Incumbent Ginger Couvrette was first elected to the board in 2018. She has the endorsement of the Republican Party and reports on her web page the support of Carl DeMaio and Joel Anderson.

Frida Brunzell holds a masters degree in chemical engineer. She is engaged with many Poway civic groups and is endorsed by the Democratic Party. Her campaign web page highlights the work she has done as a President of the Palomar Council PTA which oversees all of the PTA organizations in the district.

On Dave Nelson’s campaign web page, he makes clear the disdain he holds for present school board. He may be the MAGA candidate. Nelson states, “We parents have been taken over by mandates, CRT and Cancel Culture, which has devastating effects on our Schools and the Students’ ability to learn.”

Recommendation: Frida Brunzell

Area C is in north central Poway. Patrick Batten a former Marine and San Diego City council candidate is endorsed by the Republican Party and his web page lists several known Republican Politicians including Darrell Issa as supporters. Heather Plotzke is endorsed by the Democratic Party and her web page has a list Democratic Party groups that are supporting her. Neither Batten nor Plotzke list any experience in education. The third candidate Jason Bennett lists himself as a restaurateur and father. No other information is known about him.

Recommendation: Heather Plotzke

Area D is in south central Poway. The incumbent, Michelle O’Connor Ratcliff, teaches business law at the University of San Diego. Ratcliff, who has served on the PUSD board since 2014 and is endorsed by the Democratic Party. Janet Bremseth lists herself as a community volunteer. She is endorsed by the Republican Party. Bremseth has made no other information about herself available.

Recommendation: Michelle O’Connor Ratcliff.

Chula Vista Elementary School District (CVESD)

Public school students 22,188 – Charter school students 6,690 – Percent charter 23.2%

For Seat 1, incumbent Francisco Tamayo faces off against Jesse Vigil. Vigil is the former youth pastor at Eastlake Church and is presently director the San Diego branch of the charity Big Table. He is endorsed by the Republican Party.

Tamayo has been on the CVESD board since 2014. He worked in the SUHSD before transitioning to a position at the county board of education. He is endorsed by the Democratic Party.

Recommendation: Francisco Tamayo

Incumbent Leslie Bunker faces three challengers for Seat 3. She is both a former student and a 26 year teacher in CVESD. Serving since 2014, Bunker has the endorsement of the Democratic Party.

Delia Dominguez Cervantes lists herself as an education non-profit director. She is endorsed by the Republican Party. The other two candidates are blank slates. Eric Douglas lists himself as a retail manager and Jaqueline Gonzales says she is a parent and student advocate.

Recommendation: Leslie Bunker

Area 5 incumbent Cesar Fernandez also faces three challengers. Fernandez was appointed to the board in 2021. This will be his first election. His career in education includes more than 20-years teaching mathematics in SDUSD and SUHSD. He has a masters in curriculum and instruction and is endorsed by the Democratic Party.

Armando Farias is a former school board member. He currently works as director of human resources in the Coronado school district. He has a campaign web page here. John Borja is a former school teacher who recently ran for the Chula Vista city council. Keren Dominguez says she is an advocate, mother and educator. Other than her endorsement by the Republican Party little else is known about her.

Recommendation: Cesar Fernandez

San Marcos Unified School District (SMUSD)

Public school students 19,622 – Charter school students 113 – Percent charter 0.6%

Area C has 21-year high school councilor, Andres Ramos Martin, against a consultant at the nonprofit College Bound. She has a campaign web page. He has the endorsement of the Democratic Party.

Recommendation: Andres Ramos Martin

In Area E, incumbent board president Stacy Carlson is opposed by Associate Marriage and Family Therapist Sharyl Cavellier. Cavellier’s reference to Project Tomorrow’s 2021 Speakup survey indicates that she has been taken in by the billionaire financed education “reform” movement. Stacy Carlson left the banking and finance industry to start volunteering at SMUSD schools when her daughter was born 10 years ago. She has been on the board since 2014 and is endorsed by the Democratic Party.

Recommendation: Stacy Carlson

Vista Unified School District (VUSD)

Public school students 19,527 – Charter school students 2,565 – Percent charter 11.6%

Debbie Morton is the incumbent trustee for Area 2 which is on the east side of the district. Before being elected to the board in 2018 she taught school for 24 years. Her campaign web page is here.

Carla Rivera-Cruz was just named Director of Alumni and Network engagement by Latinos for Education. This is an organization financed by the Walton Family Foundation, the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative and the NewSchools Venture Fund none of which are friends of public education.

Rena Marrocco is endorsed by the Democratic Party. She seems to be engaged in at least one local civic organization but not much is known about her background for the position.

Recommendation: Debbie Morton

In Area 3 on the west side of the district, incumbent Martha Alvarado is matched up against Jen Telles. Alvarado who is a military veteran and a bilingual educator was first elected to the board in 2018. She has the endorsement of the Democratic Party. Telles is endorsed by the Republican Party. This former accountant states on her campaign web page, “When my own children came along, I homeschooled for a period of time.”  

Recommendation: Martha Alvarado

Grossmont Union High School District (GUHSD)

Public school students 17,108 – Charter school students 4,966 – Percent charter 22.6%

Gary Woods, the incumbent in Area 3, taught online graduate courses at Liberty University and serves as executive director of the Equip Biblical Institute. He has been on the school board since 2008. Woods has the Republican Party’s endorsement.

Wood’s opponents Gabriel Lawson and Jo Hart Lloyd are both Community College educators. Lawson teaches psychology at Grossmont College and Lloyd is a councilor at San Diego City College. She is endorsed by the Democratic Party.

Recommendation: Jo Hart Lloyd

Jeanie Tyler is challenging Robert Shield the incumbent in Area 4. In a 2010 article about Shields campaign for re-election, East County Magazine reported, “Board trustee Shield, a middle school teacher, is endorsed by the San Diego Republican Party, California Pro-Life-Council, San Diego Union-Tribune ….” He still has the Republican Party endorsement.

Tyler is the Dean of Behavioral Science at San Diego City College. She is endorsed by the Democratic Party.

Recommendation: Jeanie Tyler

Area 5 incumbent, Jim Kelly, has been on the Grossmont board since at least 2006. Kelly is known to be a political brawler who has been accused of lying at times but his east county constituents keep putting him back on the board and the Republican Party keeps endorsing him.

Teacher Nancy Jennings has been endorsed by the Democratic Party for this seat. Terry Kohlenberg is also in the running in Area 5. He teaches communications and San Diego City College.

 Recommendation: Terry Kohlenberg

Oceanside Unified School District (OUSD)

Public school students 16,261 – Charter school students 2,410 – Percent charter 12.9%

Area 1 candidate Allison Mineau is endorsed by the Republican Party. Her campaign treasure is Briana Beleskie from Brian Billbray’s organization in Imperial Beach. On her Facebook page, she shares what an honor it was to be a speaker at a North County Patriots event. Her opponent is VUSD councilor Nancy Licona who is endorsed by the Oceanside Teachers Association and the Democratic Party.

Recommendation: Nancy Licona

In Area 3, Incumbent Stacy Begin is running unopposed.

In Area 4, Raquel (Rockie) Alvarez, the incumbent, works at Amador repair services and has been engaged in education studies at Grand Canyon University since 2019. Her opponent Tigran Ghukasyan is a bit of an enigma. The county lists him as on the ballot but none of his filing paperwork appears under a search by name or jurisdiction. He is listed as a being endorsed along with Alvarez by the Democratic Party.

Recommendation: Raquel Alvarez

Escondido Union High School District (EUHSD)

Public school students 7,166 – Charter school students 2,292 – Percent charter 24.2%

Bob Weller is facing Mickey E. Jackson for the vacated seat in Area 1. Retired industrial mechanic Mickey Jackson has the endorsement of the Democratic Party. However the Democrats incorrectly endorsed him for Area 2. Home mortgage strategist Bob Weller has the endorsement of all five sitting board members.

Recommendation: Bob Weller

Area 2 incumbent Bill Durney is running unopposed.

Area 5 has Katheryn McCarthy challenging incumbent Jon Petersen. Registered nurse McCarthy has a doctorate in nursing and teaches at USD. She is endorsed by the Democratic Party. Petersen is proud of his accomplishments in advancing career and technical education while on the board. He is endorsed by the Republican Party.

Recommendation: Jon Petersen

San Dieguito Union High School District (SDUHSD)

Public school students 12,704 – Charter school students 0 – Percent charter 0%

MAGA Mike Allman’s 2020 election to the SDUHSD board brought continuous turmoil and divisiveness. His outrageous agendas like creating a gerrymandered map to eliminate board members he didn’t like were passed because the other conservatives on the board felt obligated to support him. When Mo Muir withdrew her name as an Area 1 candidate on August 12, MAGA Mike desperately sprung into action recruiting like minded David Carattini to run for the open seat. The former Cost-Co manager who has no experience or training in education signed up for the position on August 17th the last possible day. He immediately got endorsed by the Republican Party.  

The other candidate for Area 1 is Rimga Viskanta. She is a former board member of the elementary school district in Encinitas and is endorsed by the Democratic Party.

Recommendation: Rimga Viskanta

In Area 3, this is the second go around for Jane Lea Smith the candidate supported by the Democratic Party. In 2020, Mike Allman defeated her by 326 votes for a seat on the board. Smith has a masters degree in special education and 16 years of experience as a teacher and school administrator. Property manager Sheila King has the support of the Republican Party. Daniel Hale lists himself as a software engineer. Neither is known to have an experience in education.

Recommendation: Jane Lea Smith

In Area 5 at the south end of the district, incumbent Julie Bronstein has 2 challengers, Georgia Ringler and Phan Anderson. Bronstein won the seat in a 2021 special election following Kristin Gibson’s resignation from the board. Her campaign page notes that professionally she is Managing Executive Director of Development in Health Sciences at UC San Diego. She is supported by the Democratic Party.

Georgia Ringler who list herself as parent seems to be the same person who sued her former employer, Scripp Research, for ignoring her religious objection to mandated COVID-19 vaccinations. Phan Anderson says she is a software engineer and parent. Anderson’s economic interest statement (form 700) indicates she is quite wealthy. Anderson has the endorsement of the Republican Party.

Recommendation: Julie Bronstein

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Why I Support Public Education

29 Mar

By Thomas Ultican 3/29/2021

The original cause for my supporting public education was that my rancher father married a school teacher. Growing up in southern Idaho, I learned many philosophical and theoretical reasons for supporting the establishment and maintenance of public schools from my mother. However, it was from watching mom and her dedicated colleagues in action that I learned to truly respect and appreciate public school.

I remember stories of my father being warned that he better not treat that woman wrong. For several years in a row she won the Elmore County sharp shooting contest. She didn’t like to chop a chicken’s head off so she would pull out her rifle and shoot it off.

Mom had some old school attitudes but maintained a mind of her own. There was a period in which she had to come home at lunch time and milk the cow. One Friday, after having to chase the cow across King Hill creek again, she had had enough; didn’t discuss it just loaded that cow into a trailer and took it to market.

In my home, there was no doubt about the value of education and also an abiding belief that the American public education system was unparalleled. My father was a high school basketball referee and an ardent supporter of music study.

As was common in the community, school events were family events. Helping the local school was one of the main missions of our civic organizations whether it was building viewing stands at the football field or sewing costumes for school plays.

My grandfather was an immigrant from Scotland who came to America on the Lusitania. Three years after his arrival that ship was sunk by a German U-boat killing 1,800 passengers and further pushing America into engaging with World War I.

It was through family in Scotland that my mother became familiar with the British Education system. She learned of its high stakes testing which was deciding a child’s education path; if that education would continue and whether it would be academic or vocational. To her, the great advantage for America’s schools was they did not have these kinds of tests determining a child’s future. American students were not immersed in testing hell.

Instead of being sorted out by testing, American students had multiple opportunities to reenter the education system in whatever capacity they desired. Immature 11-year olds, did not have their futures decided by dubious testing results.

Still today, Idaho has a greater than 90% white population making it one of the whitest places in the world. It used to be even whiter.

I did not meet a Black person until I was a 17 years-old high school student. That year the University of Idaho Vandaleers gave a concert at my high school. A local rancher’s wife threw an after party for the choir and that is where I met Ray McDonald. Not only was he a talented singer, he was also one of the top running backs in America who would soon be drafted in the second round by the Washington DC professional football team. All I really remember is I was star struck and he was a friendly guy who played piano.

Although there was very little racial diversity in the community there was significant religious diversity. We had Mormons, Mennonites, Catholics, Lutherans, Methodists, Assembly of God and other denominations attending our schools.

In a 2001 interview conducted at the Gathering, Richard DeVos lamented that it was awful that public schools had replaced churches as the center of communities. He did not identify whose church was going to be accepted as the community center.

The unifying factor in Glenn’s Ferry, Idaho was the public schools. Children from rich families and poor families grew up together in those schools. At school functions, parents from the disparate religious sects came together and formed common bonds. Political decisions concerning community governance were developed through these school based relationships.

Public schools became the foundation for democratic governance in the region plus it was literally where people voted. To me, it is unfeasible that a healthy American democracy does not include a healthy public school system.

America’s Founding Fathers Believed in Public Education

The second and third presidents of the United States advocated powerfully for public education. Thomas Jefferson saw education as the cause for developing out of common farmers the enlightened citizenry who would take the rational action a successful republican democracy requires. Jefferson contended,

“The qualifications for self government are not innate. They are the result of habit and long training.”

When Jefferson who was a former ambassador to France was queried about the French Revolution, he responded, “It has failed in its first effort, because the mobs of the cities, the instrument used for its accomplishment, debased by ignorance, poverty and vice, could not be restrained to rational action.” He called for the establishment of universal free public education claiming it as a requisite for the survival of a democratic republic.

Jefferson and his peer John Adams were integral to the founding of the United States. Jefferson is credited as the main author of the Declaration of Independence. Our system of government with its bi-cameral legislative branch, judicial branch and executive branch came about in great measure because of John Adams’ advocacy.

Like Jefferson, Adams also saw public education as crucial for the survival of our fledgling democracy. In a 1775 essay, he wrote:

“reformation must begin with the Body of the People which can be done only, to affect, in their Educations. the Whole People must take upon themselvs the Education of the Whole People and must be willing to bear the expences of it. there should not be a district of one Mile Square without a school in it, not founded by a Charitable individual but maintained at the expence of the People themselves”

Shortly before the American Revolution, Jean-Jacques Rousseau had published the controversial novel Emile, or On Education. He was widely condemned by the ruling elite for the religious views expressed in the book. However, the main portion of the book was about education. Rousseau’s character in the book was a tutor for children of the wealthy. That was the nature of education in the 18th century. Only children of the wealthy had the wherewithal to be educated by private tutors or in one of the few private schools.

Jefferson and Adams were calling for egalitarian progress giving common people the tools required to be self-governing. They were calling for a public school system.

Between 1820 and 1860, the Massachusetts education advocate Horace Mann – more than any other American political leader – was responsible for the nationwide spread of public schools. With the challenges of industrialization, immigration and urbanization, public schools became the tool of social integration. Horace Mann became the spokes-person for schools being that instrument.

It was Mann’s point of view that children in the common school were to receive a common moral education based on the general principles of the Bible and on common virtues. The moral values to be taught in public school were Protestant values and the political values were those of republican democracy.

Integrating the Protestant religious view into the common schools caused a split in communities. The burgeoning Catholic immigrant population did not want their children indoctrinated with an anti-Catholic ideology. Following the civil war, these influences irrupted into the “Bible Wars.” Author Katherine Stewart shared that it was in this atmosphere that “President Ulysses S. Grant declared that if a new civil war were to erupt, it would be fought not across the Mason-Dixon Line but at the door of the common schoolhouse.”

Stewart also noted an insightful admonition from Grant:

“Leave the matter of religion to the family altar, the church, and the private school, supported entirely by private contributions. Keep the church and state forever separate. With these safeguards I believe the battles which created the Army of Tennessee will not have been fought in vain.”

Early in the 20th century, public schools had been established serving every community from coast to coast. The results from this vast American public education experiment shine like a lighthouse beacon on the path of Democracy and social happiness. A nation that entered the century as a 2nd rate power ended the century as the undisputed world leader in literacy, economy, military power, industrial might, cultural influence and more.

Today, unbelievably, more and more forces are agitating to undo public education and even American Democracy itself.

As the 21st century dawned, the American public education system was facing a billionaire financed attack. Instead of financially enhancing public schools, libertarians called them “failures” and too expensive. They called public schools “monopolies” shutting out private business that would surely outperform “government schools.”

Hopefully the aphorism attributed Lincoln is true: “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time.”

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Democracy and Education

20 Dec

By Thomas Ultican 12/19/2020

Democracy and free universal public education are foundational American ideologies. They have engendered world renowned success for our experiment in government “by the people”. Two new books – Schoolhouse Burning by Derek Black and A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door by Jack Schneider and Jennifer Berkshire – demonstrate that these principles which were integral to the American experiment are shockingly under serious attack by wealthy elites.

After his father Fred died in 1967, Charles Koch took a disparate set of assets – a cattle ranch, a minority share in an oil refinery and a gas gathering business – and stitched them together. Today it is the second largest privately held corporation in the world. In the excellent 2019 book, Kochland, Christopher Leonard states, “Koch would eventually build one of the largest lobbying and political influence machines in US history.”

Both the introduction to A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door and the “Through History’s Eyes” chapter of Schoolhouse Burning mention the same quote from Charles Koch. In 2018, the Koch network held its annual three day gathering near Palm Springs, California. It was a 700-person confab of some of the richest people in America. Black wrote,

“Charles Koch told the audience that ‘we’ve made more progress in the last five years than I had in the last 50…. The capabilities we have now can take us to a whole new level…. We want to increase the effectiveness of the network … by an order of magnitude. If we do that, we can change the trajectory of the country.’ One of the donors at the summit explained that education is ‘the lowest hanging fruit for policy change in the United States today … I think this is the area that is most glaringly obvious.’

“Let that sink in for a moment; change the trajectory of the country and do it through education. In other words, the agenda is not to improve education. The agenda is to change America.”

In Kochland, Leonard gave some context to the effects of the progress for the 160,000 households in the wealthiest 0.1% that Charles Koch was addressing,

“In 1963, the top 0.1 percent of households possessed 10 percent of all American wealth. By 2012, they possessed 22 percent. This gain came as the vast majority of Americans’ lost ground. The bottom 90 percent of Americans possessed about 35 percent of the nation’s wealth in the mid-1980s. By about 2015, their share had fallen to 23 percent.”

Clearly, the great transfer of wealth in America has been from the working class to billionaires and privatizing public education is seen as key to continuing and accelerating that trend.

Schoolhouse Burning Documents the Legal Evolution of Public Education

In the introduction Derek Black states,

“From it first days, the nation’s theory of government depended on educated citizens. The founders feared that democracy without education would devolve into mob rule, open doors to unscrupulous politicians, and encourage hucksters to take advantage of citizens even as they stood in line to vote.”

The Massachusetts Constitution of 1780 is the oldest working constitution in the world and had great influence in the writing of the US Constitution. It divided the powers of government into three branches – the executive, the legislature and the judiciary. Its education clause states that, “wisdom and knowledge … diffused generally among the body of the people [are] necessary for the preservation of their rights and liberties…. [Thus,] it shall be the duty of the legislatures and magistrates, in all future periods of the commonwealth, to cherish the … public schools.”

Before the US Constitution was adopted, public education was written into the national legal framework. Black notes that every bound volume of the current United States Legal Code begins with a section called Front Matter which includes the four “organic laws” in chronological order. It is made up of the 1776 Declaration of Independence, the 1777 Articles of Confederation, the 1787 Northwest Ordinance and the 1789 US Constitution.

Black outlined how the Northwest Ordinance fits,

“…, the Northwest Ordinance’s substance is a constitutional charter of sorts. Practically speaking, it established the foundational structure for the nation to grow and organize itself for the next two centuries. Precise rules for dividing up land, developing the nation’s vast territories, and detailing the path that these territories would follow to become states are not the work of everyday legislation. They are the work of a national charter. Those rules and their effects remain in place to this day.

“From this perspective, the Northwest Ordinance’s education agenda cannot be separated from our constitutional structure and vision. And it was under this constitutional structure and vision that George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison took office and served as presidents of the United States. To no surprise, all would assert education’s utmost importance and call for its expansion.”

In the north, the ideals of public education were fully embraced and the only debate was over the details. It was different in the antebellum south where poorer whites paid almost no taxes and the wealthiest southerners paid two-thirds of all taxes. Johann Neem explains in Democracy’s Schools, “Because of their political power and the way the tax burden fell largely upon them, slaveholding elites spread an antitax gospel to convince ordinary whites that taxes were a bad thing”

During the period of reconstruction following the civil war, the US congress made provisions for freed slave education and political rights to be enforced by federal troops.  The thirteenth amendment to the constitution which passed December 6, 1865 abolished slavery. In 1866, the fourteenth amendment which prohibited discrimination in various aspects of life and extended citizenship to African Americans was adopted.

Requirements for states being readmitted to the union included ratification of the 14th amendment and adopting a constitution that conforms to the “Constitution of the United States in all respects.”  This last provision was a demand to establish a republican form of government which in turn meant enshrining public education in their state constitution. Because of growing signs of recalcitrance, Congress imposed an education commitment as an explicit condition for the last three states to reenter the Union – Virginia, Texas and Mississippi.

The compromise of 1877 undermined legal protections for black people in the south and financial support for public education. A closely divided corrupt election pitted a Republican abolitionist from Ohio, Rutherford Hayes, against the Democrat Samuel Tilden of New York. Tilden gained the most votes but 20 electors were disputed. A committee of 8 Republicans and 7 Democrats decided Hayes would become President provided he agree that

  • “Troops will be recalled from the statehouse property in the three states. [South Carolina, Florida and Louisiana]
  • “Funds will be provided to build the Texas and Pacific Railroad.
  • “A southerner will be appointed as Postmaster General.
  • “Funds will be appropriated to rebuild the economy in the South.
  • “The solution to the race problem will be left to the state governments.”

All decisions were made on party line votes of 8 Republicans for and 7 Democrats opposed.

Throughout the south, segregated schools were soon mandated, spending on educating the newly minted citizens was reduced to lower taxes and voting rights were restricted. Black writes,

“Planters saw the value of competent workers but no value in ‘inflat[ing] the economic and political expectations of workers.’ The only thing education would accomplish would be to ‘spoil good field hands.’ Even worse, education would lead blacks to push for even more social and political equality.”

Thurgood Marshall and other lawyers from the NAACP won many court victories including the famous Brown vs. the Board of Education case that declared education “must be made available to all on equal terms.” Black says the one phrase the court omitted in its 1954 opinion was a clear declaration that education is a fundamental right.

After that case, the Supreme Court expanded desegregation efforts. In the early 1970s a backlash came with the election of Richard Nixon. Nixon campaigned against the Supreme Court and especially against forced desegregation. Between 1969 and 1974, he appointed four justices – Burger, Rehnquist, Powell and Blackmun. Rehnquist held the view that Plessy v. Ferguson which Brown overturned had been correctly settled. Even more troubling, Justice Powell while on the Richmond, Virginia school board and later the Virginia state school board supported school segregation and the massive resistance movement against Brown.

In the 1974 case of Millikan v. Bradley, the court dealt a death blow to desegregation efforts. Black shared,

“By a vote of 5-4, the Court insisted that plaintiffs needed to show intentional school segregation, not just in Detroit’s city schools, but in its suburban districts, too. Absent that, lower courts could not order metropolitan-wide school desegregation.”

By the 1990s, no new Federal Court orders to end school segregation were in the works and those underway were being ended. Since then schools have been re-segregating.

“Are You Trying to Scare People?”

A senior scholar asked this question after reviewing an early draft of A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door. The authors’ response was, “In a word, yes.”

Schneider and Berkshire declare that ideas which for multiple decades have been considered fringe thinking are now central. The radical right and especially leaders in the religious right like Trump’s Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, denounce the whole concept of public education.

So, what do these ever more potent deep pocketed funders and conservative politicians want? The authors lay out the four main principles of the radical right.

“1. Education is a personal good, not a collective one.”

“2. Schools belong in the domain of the free market, not the government.”

“3. To the extent that they are able, ‘consumers’ of education should pay for it themselves.”

“4. Unions and other forms of collective power are economically inefficient and politically problematic.”

The conservative enemies of public education today sound like Fred Koch and his John Birch Society did in the 50s and 60s. From A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door,

‘“Elementary and secondary education in the U.S. is the country’s last remaining socialist enterprise,’ declared Joseph Bast, CEO of the libertarian Heartland Institute, in a 2002 blog post. Bast was explaining his distaste for public education while making the case for so-called universal private school vouchers, which conservatives view as a way station en route to whole-sale privatization.”

The socialist charge has also been directed at teachers. Writing about the 2018 teacher uprisings Schneider and Berkshire explain,

“They demanded that the wealthy pay higher taxes to fund public education, employing a hashtag slogan – #RedforEd.… While the slogan, and the cause it represented, attracted widespread public support, conservative critics saw #RedforEd as something more nefarious. Leaders of Arizona’s teacher protest movement, warned one Republican state representative were using ‘teachers and our children to carry out their socialist movement.’”

The push to privatize public education had foundered until charter schools appeared and a newly formed Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) was created to push the Democratic Party more to the center. A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door reports, “When the DLC unveiled its official agenda at a 1991 gathering in Cleveland, its head, a rising young Southern governor named Bill Clinton, gave school choice a full-throated endorsement.”

Not only has the push to privatize public education been a bipartisan effort of political elites from both major political parties but even more strangely they have also joined together in attacking labor. From the book:

“The irony is that weakening the influence of organized labor – teachers’ unions in particular – has been largely a bipartisan cause. Bill Clinton made his attack on Arkansas teachers a centerpiece of his 1983 gubernatorial campaign, burnishing his image as a new breed of Democrat who wasn’t afraid to take on the party’s own ‘special interests.’ And during Barack Obama’s eight years in the White House, tough talk against teachers’ unions as protectors of the status quo emerged as party orthodoxy. ‘It’s time to start rewarding good teachers, stop making excuses for bad ones,’ Obama proclaimed in a 2009 speech in which he praised the idea of merit pay for teachers, long a favorite policy tool of Republicans.”

In A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door, Schneider and Berkshire explain the pursuit of profits in education and the push to implement virtual learning. They ruminate on the history of government regulation (child labor – meat industry – healthcare products and practices) and the push to end regulation. Here like in school privatization there is a religious like belief in markets to be self-regulating and superior to any “big government” organization.

They delve into the marketing that comes along with market driven privatized education. Especially interesting is the potential for micro-targeting student families using companies like Facebook. It enables schools to target only certain demographics.

They also address teachers being pushed into the gig-economy and its ramifications.

The push for “personalized learning” at computers employing AI algorithms to guide students through lessons instead of teachers has the twin goals of reducing teacher costs and creating an edtech market. With cyber-schools, costs are reduced in two ways, facilities requirements are significantly cheaper and with their large class sizes teacher costs are reduced. Even more promising for cost reduction at cyber-schools is the prospect that all classes can be conducted by hourly paid gig workers. Schneider and Berkshire note:

“Of course, the replacement of flesh-and-blood teachers by personalized learning programs will not be universal. Students from privileged families will continue to be educated much as they always have been, with students and teachers coming together as communities of learners.”

Concluding Remark

There is a lot to these books. They highlight the multiple dangerous paths our nation is on which is indeed scary. Together Schoolhouse Burning and A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door paint – a maybe not probable – but a very possible grim picture for the future of public education in America. Even grimmer is that this attack on universal free public school is also an attack of America’s 250-year experiment with government “of the people, by the people and for the people.” It is a credible attack on democracy.

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Destroying Public Education in St. Louis

18 Apr

By T. Ultican 4/18/2019

On April 2nd, St. Louis city voters picked Adam Layne and Tracee Miller to serve on their seven-member Public School Board. They appear to be the two least likely candidates out of the seven to protect public schools. With the state ending twelve years of control over the city’s schools on April 16, this election result is not a happy one for public education advocates.

The Seven Board Candidates

  1. Adam Layne is a former Teach for America (TFA) corps member assigned to a St. Louis charter school and is currently a board member of the Kairos Academy charter school.
  2. Tracee Miller was a TFA corps member and is currently running a math tutoring program in St. Louis for the Gates Foundation supported Khan Academy.
  3. Louis Cross boasts a long career with St. Louis Public Schools. He served as principal and interim superintendent of the now defunct Ethel Hedgemen charter school.
  4. Bill Haas served on the school board from 1997 to 2005, and again from 2010 to 2018. He was one of two board members that stood in opposition to contracting with Alvarez and Marsal to run St. Louis schools in 2003.
  5. David Merideth served on a special committee in 2017 that studied the school board’s role in future governance of the district when state control is relinquished.
  6. Barbara Anderson is a graduate of St. Louis Public Schools who taught on the elementary, middle and university levels throughout her career.
  7. Dan McCready is from Cincinnati, where he taught third and fifth grade math at a Cincinnati public school. He currently works at KIPP Victory Academy, a St. Louis charter school.

Dark Money Sways Election Results

Layne and Miller

Adam Layne and Tracee Miller

New board member Adam Layne appears to be a talented and idealistic young man. In 2011, he graduated with a bachelor’s degree in finance from George Washington University. Unfortunately, that youthful idealism was corrupted when he was enticed into the segrenomics business by TFA. [Professor Noliwe Rooks defines segrenomics as profiting off segregated poor communities by selling them education services.]

Layne’s report to the Missouri Ethics Commission (ID: A190713) shows him receiving only $155 in campaign contributions.  The first time I searched the Ethics Commission, I got a clue as to how with such meager experience and direct campaign support; Layne won a seat on the board. There was some sort of data base error and instead of displaying Adam Layne in the name field it put Public School Allies. The error will not repeat but the downloaded excel file displays it.

Public School Allies

An Error Showing Public School Allies in the Name Field Instead of Adam Layne

Chalkbeat reported that St. Louis is one of seven US cities The City Fund has targeted for implementation of the portfolio district governance model; which assures the privatization of schools. Public School Allies is a political action committee created by The City Fund staff. It supplies campaign financing under IRS Code 501 C4 rules making it a dark money fund.

City Fund lists The Opportunity Trust as their partner in St. Louis. Opportunity is a TFA related business. Founder and CEO, Eric Scroggins, worked in various leadership positions at TFA for 14 years starting as a TFA corps member in 2001-3.

Marie Ceselski of the St. Louis 7th Ward reported,

“Last week, St. Louis City-based Civil PAC sent out a targeted, glossy, multi-color mailing supporting Adam Layne. …

“At the time of the mailing, Civil PAC had $37.21 in its bank account per MEC records. On Wednesday, March 24th, Civil PAC reported to MEC that it had received a $20,000 donation on March 19th. The donation was from Public School Allies ….”

The other new board member Tracee Miller also appears to be dedicated and idealistic. However, like her fellow new board member, she too had her youthful idealism corrupted by TFA. Through TFA she was introduced to a group of “education reform” companies profiting off segregated poor communities.

Miller’s present employer the Khan Academy’s main purpose is promoting kids learning at computers – euphemistically known as “personalized learning.” She also lists Blueprint Education as a current employer. Blueprint is another TFA related business working in the segrenomics sector. Miller shares her responsibilities for Blueprint in Massachusetts,

“Supervise elementary math intervention program; hire, train, observe, coach, and evaluate high-quality full-time math intervention specialists; write lesson plans and provide instructional support for elementary teachers in math; serve as a liaison between school teams and Blueprint Fellows/Blueprint Program; track student data and use data to drive instruction via lesson planning and coaching; maintain a positive and professional atmosphere with clear and high expectations.”

At Dever Elementary school in Boston, the Blueprint experience was such a disaster that 45 of the original 47 teachers quit. Jennifer Berkshire of the Have You Heard blog started getting messages from upset teachers that did not know where else to turn. They told her, “We’ve lost faith because there’s absolutely no accountability here.” and “Blueprint has no idea how to run a school, and it’s maddening that there isn’t more oversight from the state.”

The amount of dark money that went into supporting Miller through independent expenditures is unclear, however, it is known that a dark money fund created by the newly established Joseph Wingate Folk Society put $143,000 dollars into the political action committee Voters Organized Through Education StL (aka Vote-StL PAC). Complaints have been filed with Missouri’s Attorney General over the way this secretive new fund operates. Besides this fund and Public School Allies there were other dark money funds operating around this election.

Miller received a modest direct contribution total of $8330 (ID: A190747). A $1,000 contribution from Leadership for Educational Equity (LEE) is particularly note worthy. LEE was established in 2007 to elect TFA corps members into education leadership positions. Miller sent a $1000 back to LEE to purchase their campaign consulting services. Leadership for Educational Equity’s three member board is comprised of Emma Bloomberg (former NY mayor Michael Bloomberg’s daughter), Michael Park (a Partner in McKinsey & Company’s New York office) and Arthur Rock (Silicon Valley billionaire who contributes heavily to promote charter schools and TFA).

TFA is an industry leader in the business of segrenomics. It has been remarkably successful everywhere except in the classroom. These temporary teachers with virtually no training nor experience are not ready to run a class. Letting TFA corps members teach is akin to letting a college graduate with five-week training fly commercial airliners or perform medical diagnosis. They have no business being granted a teaching license and students in their classrooms are being cheated. It is money from Billionaires that is making the TFA outrage possible.

St. Louis Elites Have Led a Century of Public Education Malfeasance

In 1904, St. Louis held an exposition on the centennial of the Louisiana Purchase. At the time, the city was wealthy and boasted an amazing public education system. Particularly noteworthy were the schools designed and built by architect William Ittner. In an in-depth piece, Journalist Jeff Bryant observed, “More than a century ago, St. Louis embarked on a revolution in education that made the city’s schools the jewel of the Midwest and a model for urban school districts around the nation.”

Unfortunately, segregation dominates the St. Louis story. Bryant cites the work of Richard Rothstein a Senior Fellow, emeritus, the Haas Institute at the University of California (Berkeley). “In an interview with a St. Louis reporter, Rothstein points to integrated neighborhoods in the city, such as Desoto-Carr, that were transformed into single race communities through federal housing programs.” This doomed many of the city’s schools to poor academic performance and anemic financial support plus the city itself stopped growing. The latest census shows that St. Louis has not grown in population since that 1904 exposition.

The schools in St. Louis receive 9% less revenue than the state of Missouri on average and next door in Ferguson they receive 13% less revenue. Rutgers University’s school finance wizard, Bruce Baker, put St. Louis schools into his “most screwed” category. The Normandy school system in Ferguson is where Michael Brown graduated just two months before being shot to death by Officer Darren Wilson. Brown was unarmed. In her book Cutting School, Cornell’s Professor Noliwe Rooks commented,

“Racial and economic segregation, racially specific forms of educational instruction and testing, subpar facilities, undertrained teachers, and white parents determined to keep Blacks out of their more stable and functional school systems were all as much a part of Michael Brown’s life as they were for the students involved in the cases that formed the plaintiff group in Brown v. Board.”

In 2001, four of the seven seats on the school board were up for election. Mayor Francis Slay a Democrat did not want to run the schools directly but he put together a slate of candidates to dominate board. He made sure they could significantly outspend their opponents. A 2003 report in the River Front Times states,

“Slay loaned $50,000 from his campaign fund to support the slate. Major area corporations kicked in with Anheuser-Busch, Ameren and Emerson Electric each giving $20,000. Energizer Eveready Battery Company gave $15,000. The coalition raised more than $235,000.”

This led to a sixteen year crisis in St. Louis schools. The first action by Slay’s team was to hire Alvarez & Marsal (A&M), the corporate turnaround consultants. St. Louis paid A&M $4.8 million to run the district. A&M had never worked in a school system before. The River Front Times reported the team’s goal was to “make the district more efficient, save money and hopefully redirect those savings to boost academic performance somewhere down the road.”

A&M selected Former Brookes Brothers CEO William V. Roberti to be superintendent of schools. His official title was changed to “Chief Restructuring Officer.” The clothing store leader had never worked in a school before.

Roberti commuted from his home in Connecticut using a $110,000 travel expense perk. His education advisor was former New York Superintendent, Rudy Crew, who was living on the West Coast and would not move to or spend much time in St. Louis.

Roberti closed more than 20 schools and “balanced” the school budgets by borrowing $49 million dollars from an existing desegregation program. The money had to be repaid. By the time it was recognized that the system’s $73 million dollar deficit had ballooned to $87.7 million, Roberti and A&M were long gone. The were consulting in the Detroit School System for the soon to be failed emergency manager Robert Bobb. In 2007, the state of Missouri took over St. Louis Public Schools citing its financial issues.

Democrat Slay responded by becoming a “cheerleader for charter schools” hoping that would turn the tide of people moving out of St. Louis. Slay’s effort to privatize public schools drew support from 110 miles away in Osage County where the billionaires Rex and Jeanne Sinquefield had made their new home. They also have a modest little 8300 square foot home in St. Louis but are registered to vote in Osage.

Libertarian Gospel Propagated in Missouri

Rex and Jeanne Sinqufield

Rex and Jeanne Sinquefield

Rex Sinquefield grew up in a St. Louis Catholic orphanage. Unlike other extremely wealthy libertarians such as David and Charles Koch or the entire Walton family, Rex did not inherit his wealth. Three years after graduating from high school, he left a Catholic seminary to pursue a more secular path. He eventually earned a Master of Business Administration (MBA) from Milton Friedman’s University of Chicago. At the school, he met and married his wife and business partner Jeanne Cairns. Jeanne also earned an MBA, plus she was awarded a PhD in demography.

In 1977, Rex co-Authored Stocks, Bonds, Bills and Inflation: The Past and the Future with Roger Ibbotson. The book is still considered a standard reference for those who seek valuable information on capital market returns. Ibbotson gained his PhD in finance from the University of Chicago.

In 1981, David Booth a fellow MBA student at the University of Chicago and Sinquefield formed the California based financial firm Dimensional Fund Advisor (DFA). Today the company oversees more than $350 billion in global assets. His wife Jeanne supervised the DFA Trading Department and served as executive vice president until her retirement in 2005. DFA pioneered index fund investing.

The Sinquefield’s lived in Santa Monica, California – which he called “Soviet Monica” – while running DFA. In 2005, Rex and Jeanne returned to Missouri ending his absence of more than 40 years.

The Center for Media and Democracy produced “A Reporter’s Guide to Rex Sinquefield and the Show-me Institute.” They demonstrated his attitude about public education by quoting Rex:

‘“There was a published column by a man named Ralph Voss who was a former judge in Missouri,’ Sinquefield continued, in response to a question about ending teacher tenure. [Voss] said, ‘A long time ago, decades ago, the Ku Klux Klan got together and said how can we really hurt the African-American children permanently? How can we ruin their lives? And what they designed was the public school system.’”

Rex Sinquefield’s primary policy interests are education, income tax reform and local control. He funds efforts for school vouchers, the elimination of teacher tenure and income tax reform. Ballotpedia stated, “Through the financial support of political committees and organizations, including Let Voters Decide, Teach Great and the Safer Missouri Citizen’s Coalition, Sinquefield has donated millions of dollars to support his policy priorities on the Missouri ballot.”

Sinquefield Ballot Measures

Ballotpedia.org Image

Sinquefield wants Missouri to eliminate personal and corporate income taxes altogether, partially replacing the lost revenue with a broader sales tax that would be capped at 7 percent. He believes Sam Brownback was on the right path in Kansas and wants Missouri to follow.

Sinquefield is currently trying to privatize the St. Louis’s Lambert Airport as a way of eliminating the 1% earnings tax in the city. Rex started learning his anti-tax beliefs at his mother’s knee. When he was seven years old, she had to give him and his brother up to an orphanage after his father’s death. Alan Greenblatt reported,

“In strained circumstances, his mother resented having to pay the 1 percent tax imposed on earnings of people who work or live in St. Louis. ‘I can’t afford this damned tax,’ he recalls her saying.”

Two Observations

The great concentration of wealth in the hands of a very few individuals is destroying democracy. Rex’s anti-tax, anti-union and free market ideology might be a winning philosophy, but his ability to spend so liberally to sell his ideas makes anyone else’s opinion mute. Billionaires are warping the democratic process and driving us toward oligarchy. We need a significant wealth tax to end this kind of financial tyranny.

Privatizing public education is another attack on the foundations of democracy. Charter schools, vouchers and education technology are not solutions to poverty and under resourced schools. Today, there are some good things happening in Saint Louis Public Schools. Protect it from billionaires and their TFA staffed armies of “deformers.”

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Apartheid Education and Segrenomics

7 Apr

By T. Ultican 4/7/2019

Noliwe Rooks new book Cutting School: Privatization, Segregation and the End of Public Education, her fourth, is a commanding account of the century’s long trend toward under-educating America’s Black and Brown children. Rooks is Director of American Studies at Cornell University where she is a Professor in Africana Studies and Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. The book is an illuminating peek inside the heart-breaking education experience of black and brown families.

Noliwe Rooks

Professor Noliwe Rooks

Well meaning white liberals are often blind to the true nature of the injustices they are inclined to fight. Here, a Black scholar elucidates the history of Black and Brown education in ways that edify. I grew up in rural Idaho and never met an African-American until I was 17 years-old. I saw public education through the lens of my almost all white school. Big cultural events in my home were school performances, high school sports and rodeos.  The few Mexican kids in our school were popular so I thought that was solid evidence that we were not racists. It was beyond my scope of understanding how different the American experience was for children being brutalized by racism. This book helps create that needed understanding.

Martin Luther King and his non-violent fight against racism absolutely moved my soul. However, I did not have a clue about how deep, vicious and sustained racist ideology was. I saw Bo Connor as an ignorant aberration not a representative of a widely held view. Most of all, it was not believable to me that people would purposely work to ensure that Black children were not educated even if they did not want them in the same school with their own children. More unbelievable is that today Black and Brown children are as segregated as they were in the 1970’s and their schools are monetized.

This book also answers the question, “Why are Black and Brown communities so vulnerable to the billionaire funded destroy public education (DPE) movement?”

Segrenomics

Rooks introduction begins by quoting John F. Kennedy,

“Simple justice requires that public funds, to which all taxpayers of all races contribute, not be spent in any fashion which encourages, entrenches, subsidizes, or results in … discrimination.”

She tells us that to lift all children up requires racial and economic integration and encourages us to educate poor students with wealthy students; not falling for the separate but equal fallacy. Unfortunately, today, poor children experience a recurrent push towards vocational education. Their schools often employ “cost effective” forms of funding and delivery such as cyber schools, students at screens and blended learning.  Rooks says,

“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.”

Segregation pays! Rooks cites Frederick Hess’s description of the focus on “90/90/90 schools.” That is 90% of the students are low income, 90% are of color and 90% fail to meet set academic standards. Philanthropic foundations, school reformers, and charter operators are in the business of educating poor Black and Hispanic kids attending these schools. As an example, the Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP) claims to serve nearly 80,000 students, 96% of who are Black or Latino and almost 90% are from families identified as poor. These segregated poor communities are the engines of growth for charter schools and other education businesses.

Wendy Kopp started Teach for America (TFA) based on her 1989 Princeton undergraduate thesis. Kopp spent the spring of her senior year contacting the CEO’s of several corporations and philanthropies. Rooks notes that it is significant to notice the people she did not meet with.  Based on Kopp’s memoir One Day, All Children, Rooks states,

“As she began to flesh out the specifics of her new venture to educate children in rural and urban areas who were at the bottom of the economic and educational ladder, she does not say that she met with parents, guardians, educators, teachers, or any number of stakeholders in the communities most likely to be impacted. Instead, she chronicles her meetings with representatives in business and finance whom she asks to help her get TFA off the ground.”

One business leaders Kopp met with was Chris Whittle founder of the Edison Schools. He tried to recruit her but she declined. However, she did marry one of his employees, Richard Barth. Following his time at Edison Schools, Barth became the CEO of KIPP, the charter schools founded by two early TFA corps members, Mike Feinberg and David Levin, both graduates of Yale.

One of Kopp’s first recruits to TFA was her brother’s Harvard roommate Whitney Tilson. He worked alongside Kopp as TFA co-founder for two years before leaving for a Wall Street Job. A decade after leaving TFA, Whitney Tilson – who was now running a hedge fund – became reengaged with education. Kopp invited him to one of the two original South Bronx KIPP schools where “he was immediately convinced that such schools were going to be the future of education.” Tilson started bringing his hedge fund friends and other investors to the South Bronx. He says, “KIPP was used as a converter for hedge fund guys … it went viral.” Justin Miller writing for the American Prospect noted, “You’d be hard-pressed to find a hedge fund guy who doesn’t sit on a charter-school board.”

To counter political resistance for the privatization of public schools, Tilson and friends created a political pressure group called Democrats for Education Reform (DFER). Tilson claimed its mission was “to break the teacher unions’ stranglehold over the Democratic Party.” DFER identified then-Senator Barak Obama and then-Mayor of Newark Corey Booker as promising politicians willing the break the teachers union and promote charter schools.

Rooks informs us that TFA, KIPP, and other large players in the “reform movement” enjoyed burgeoning success by;

“… [P]romising to help poor children improve educationally and to narrow the achievement gap for students in areas that were highly racially segregated without addressing the poverty of segregation with which those students were surrounded. In some ways, it was the twenty-first-century updated version of the separate but equal doctrine the Supreme Court had struck down in the mid-twentieth century.”

The AP reported in 2017 that charter schools were among the nation’s most segregated schools. There analysis found, “As of school year 2014-2015, more than 1,000 of the nation’s 6,747 charter schools had minority enrollment of at least 99 percent, and the number has been rising steadily.”

This is segrenomics in action.

Apartheid Schools and the Saga of Polly Williams

During the reconstruction era (1868 – 1877), federal troops were stationed in the south to ensure Blacks freedom from slavery, the right of citizenship and the right to vote. Federal funds also made possible schools, teachers and school buildings for both white and Black students. In the Compromise of 1877 Democrats agreed to let Republican Rutherford B. Hayes become president in exchange for a complete withdrawal of federal troops from the South. Republicans agreed, and the new president, ordered the remaining federal troops out.

Southern legislators moved aggressively to end the political and education progress Blacks had made. Former slave holders in state and county governments removed Black elected officials and passed laws against integrated education. They also instituted laws forbidding the use of “white tax dollars” to educate Black students.

At the beginning of the twentieth-century Northern white philanthropists like the oil barren John D. Rockefeller Sr. and the President of Sears and Roebuck Julius Rosenwald recognized a financial need to educate southern Blacks. Rockefeller founded the General Education Board which was chartered by congress to shape the public education system in the United States. Rosenwald provided matching grants for black communities to build schools. By 1930, the Rosenwald fund had provided seed money for 5,000 rural schools. One-third of American Blacks in school were in a Rosenwald seeded school.

In 1901, John D. Rockefeller Jr. led a party through the south for a tour of the institutions that were educating “the Negro.” Rooks explains, “They were in accord with the popular thinking of the time that linked Black education to certain forms of work and Black people to narratives of racial inferiority.” Among the Rockefeller party was Charles Dabney, the president of the University of Tennessee. He cautioned, “We must recognize in all its relations that momentous fact that the negro is a child race, at least two thousand years behind the Anglo-Saxon in its development.”

The members of the General Education Board decided that Blacks should only be exposed to vocational education. As northern philanthropist and General Education Board member William H. Baldwin declared, “This will permit the southern white laborer to perform the more expert labor, and to leave the fields, the mines and the simpler trades for the Negro.”

Black families were desperate for their children to be educated and made amazing sacrifices for schools. They had to build schools and finance their operations by themselves. In some southern states, not only could no tax money be used at schools for Black children, Blacks were still forced to pay taxes for the schools white children attended.

Beginning this century, much of the culture that created what Rooks aptly labels “apartheid schools” was still in play. Schools were still highly segregated and spending on schools attended by Black and brown children was purposely short changed. At the 2016 Network for Public Education conference, I heard a woman from New Orleans tell about being in an 8th grade class with 55 students and no air-conditioning. She said the classroom had one fan and it could only be run for 10-minutes out of each hour. These kinds of conditions made someone saying – they are going to start a charter school in the neighborhood and fund it well – sound good.

There are many examples of Black children excelling in school. In the 1930’s, Black children in company schools matched their white peers. There were astounding results from Black created privately operated community schools like the amazing Marva Collins’ Westside Preparatory School in Chicago, or Liller and William Green’s Ivy Leaf School in Philadelphia.

Annette Polly Williams was the key legislator that opened the way for America’s first large scale school voucher program. Williams served in the Wisconsin state senate for thirty years representing a Black section of Milwaukee. She was a passionate advocate for public education but like many members of her community was disillusioned by the lack of resources in their schools. She stated,

“We wanted the children to stay in their own community and have the resources there. We had been fighting for years to improve the public schools, but it was falling on unresponsive ears.”

Williams had served on the board of the Urban Day School, a nondenominational Black independent school run by Racine Dominican sisters and led by Sister Sarah Freiburger. Rooks explains,

“Sister Sarah believed that schools could be a positive force for inner-city children, and during the time when Williams was on the board, the school achieved high-flying results similar to those attained by Marva Collins’s Westside Prep, the Oakland Community School, and the Greens’ Ivy Leaf School. Over 80% of the children the school educated were Black and poor. Having already lost faith in the racially and economically segregated and funded public school system in Milwaukee, Williams was convinced that taxpayer support for schools like Urban Day were the best chance poor Black children had to finally receive a quality education.”

In 1989, Polly Williams joined with socially and fiscally conservative Republican Governor Tommy Thompson in his push for vouchers. With Williams on board, America’s first school voucher program was enacted.

By 1997, Williams began voicing concerns about the rapid expansion of the voucher program. Wisconsin was doing more to benefit white children attending Catholic schools and further impairing desegregation efforts. Up until then, she had received money for speaking honorariums and other support from the pro-choice crowd. After she voiced her concerns, Howard Fuller replaced her as the Black spokesperson for choice. In 1998, Williams observed, “Howard … is the person that the white people have selected to lead the choice movement now because I don’t cooperate.”

Rooks describes a 2011 interview with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s Howard Kane,

 “Williams went on to tell Kane that she had of course heard the concerns when she helped shape the legislation that would become ‘school choice’ – the cries from the opposition that it might eventually be expanded by politicians who wanted to damage the public school systems and teachers’ unions and were not primarily concerned with helping poor urban children learn. She explained that at the time she just didn’t want to believe it.”  

By the time Williams died in 2013, 75% of Wisconsin’s students receiving vouchers were already attending the school where they would spend the voucher. As Rooks notes, “they were able to use their taxpayer-funded vouchers to continue attending a segregated private school.”

A Few Last Words

Noliwe Rooks’ new book is an outstanding look at the development of apartheid education and the deftly described modern era of segrenomics. I have not even scratched the surface of what is in this scholarly effort. I highly recommend that you read Cutting School: Privatization, Segregation and the End of Public Education.

Twitter: @tultican

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Denver’s Portfolio Model School District Is a Failure!

19 Jan

By T. Ultican 1/19/2019

Here is a predictable outcome from the portfolio district. On Jan. 18, 2019, a press release from the Denver Classroom Teachers Association (DCTA) says,

“After ten hours of negotiations today, the Denver Classroom Teachers Association and Denver Public Schools were unable to reach an agreement on a fair compensation system for 5,700 teachers and special service providers. DCTA members will vote Saturday and Tuesday on whether or not to strike.”

The portfolio model which promotes disruption as a virtue is anti-union. It is not conducive to stable harmonious relations with either labor or communities and it is anti-democratic. Denver is held up as an exemplar of school reform; however the outcomes look more like a warning. Increasing achievement gaps; a bloating administration; significantly increasing segregation; ending stable community schools; and stripping citizens of their democratic rights are among the many jarring results.

Former Denver School Board Director, Jeanne Kaplan, wrote extensively about an article in EducationNext championing school reforms in Denver. It was based on a podcast by the guru of school reform and privatization in the Clinton administration, David Osborne. Kaplan noted,

“2009 was … the first time outside money appeared in [School] Board Election campaigns. Stand for Children came with the goal of making the board “more reform oriented”… In spite of their $30,000 expenditure per candidate – which at the time was unheard of – our side, as Osborne notes, won the election. Each following election more and more reform money … appeared …. In addition to Stand, Democrats for Education Reform, Students First, and wealthy local businessmen, both Democrats and Republicans, … put enormous amounts of money and human capital to be sure … a unanimous board was achieved. Much of the money while identified by independent expenditure committee remains hidden as to who is making the individual contributions. In 2011 the people were able to hold on to a “mighty minority” of three: 4-3. In 2013 the minority dwindled to one: 6-1. In 2015 the Board was unanimously “reform”: 7-0.

This has become a central thesis of the portfolio model strategy. A Chalkbeat article quotes Ethan Gray of Education Cities on the strategy. Gray who recently went to work at the new City Fund which was established specifically to sell the portfolio model said, “We’re skeptical that systems themselves will actually go through some sort of self-driven transformation.” Chalkbeat reported that the new plan for growth had three strategies.

  • Strategy #1: Apply outside pressure. (Increase pressure on school districts by bringing in outside competition and supporting local competing initiatives.)
  • Strategy #2: Push for one-stop school enrollment. (This forces public school districts to help the privatized schools and gives them an equivalency in the eyes of the public.)
  • Strategy #3: Create a very different power structure. (Use financial resources to change the makeup of existing governing boards or establish mayoral appointed boards.)

In the 2017 Denver Public School Board election, four of the seven seats were on the ballot. The results:

  • At large seat: Former Lieutenant Governor Barbra O’Brian defeated a field of three candidates 40% to 35% to 24%. O’Brian spent $8.94 per vote, Robert Speth spent $0.77 per vote and Julie Banuelos spent $0.33 per vote.
  • Distict 2: Angela Corbian a former Teach For America (TFA) corps member beat Xochitl “Sochi” Gaytan who had union support. Unfortunately, Gaytan had to spend time cleaning up after union blunders. The winner Corbian is currently an organizer for Leadership for Educational Equity (LEE) the TFA offshoot that trains former corps members “to engage civically.” Cobian’s support included $67,000 from DFER’s Raising Colorado and tens of thousands of dollars from local and national “reformers.”
  • District 3: Dr. Carrie Olson, a 33-year DPS teacher won this seat with very little financial or people support from the teachers union. She astonishingly defeated Mike Johnson the incumbent who raised over $100,000 on his own and received almost another $100,000 from DFER and Stand for Children. Olson’s victory reduces the “reform” majority back to 6-1.
  • District 4: Jennifer Bacon another former TFA corps member won. She raised $70,000 on her own and shockingly received $139,000 from the teachers union. Bacon also received reformer money from TFA national board member Arthur Rock. The incumbent Rachael Espiritu had a large war chest of $97,000 from DFER and $93,000 that she raised but Espiritu was running in a district that had had its fill of reform. A third candidate in this district was 19-year-old Tay Anderson.

When analyzing this election, Jeanne Kaplan said the biggest losers were “Denver’s teachers, who are paying dues to an organization that turned its back on a 33 year teacher and endorsed a heavily funded alum of TFA…”

Dismal Results from Denver’s Portfolio District

school segragation chart

Chart of Racial Isolation Based on October Count for School Year 2017-18

Of Denver’s 204 schools, One-hundred have a population that is greater than or equal to 70% Hispanic. When the Hispanic and black students are summed 68 schools have 90% or more students from these minority groups. The AP reported in 2017 that charter schools were among the nation’s most segregated schools. There analysis found, “As of school year 2014-2015, more than 1,000 of the nation’s 6,747 charter schools had minority enrollment of at least 99 percent, and the number has been rising steadily.”

Racial isolation is a characteristic of districts employing the portfolio model. This kind of profound segregation runs afoul of federal law, good education and decency. It does not comply with the 1954 Supreme Court decision known as Brown versus the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas.

The big selling point for modern school reform was closing the achievement gap. The achievement gap is measured by finding the average score differences between ethnicity groups on standards based tests. A 2011 report in Education Week stated, “With the passage of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, closing achievement gaps among these various student groups became a focus of federal education accountability…”

achievment gap 2017

Table of Reading and Math Achievement Gaps Derived from NAEP Testing Data

In the tables above – based on average scale scores – it shows national results have a smaller gap than the large city results. Predictably, Denver has among the nation’s largest achievement gaps after two-decades of “billionaire” led reform.

In the fall of 2015, the Center on Reinventing Public Education  (CRPE) which is the central think tank promoting portfolio models ranked Denver Public Schools 45th out of 50 urban districts for improving graduation rates.

Denver’s pro-privatization citizen oversight group, A+ Colorado (formerly A+ Denver) in a recently released report, showed concern over the district’s progress stating,

“Let’s be clear: There has been progress in DPS, particularly in comparison to other Colorado districts. But some student learning outcomes are stalled or improving far too slowly for the district to be successful.”

DPS received another black-eye this January when a Chalkbeat headline revealed, “Denver has 1 administrator for every 7.5 instructional staff — far above state average.” The article presented the following chart for administrators in Denver compared to the rest of the state over the past ten years.

administrator growth chart

Chart of Administration Growth during the “Reform Era”

In 2017 the New York Times ran an interactive article about a new way to compare schools. The article said,

“It’s true that children in prosperous districts tend to test well, while children in poorer districts on average score lower. But in this analysis, which measures how scores grow as student cohorts move through school, the Stanford researcher Sean Reardon argues that it’s possible to separate some of the advantages of socioeconomics from what’s actually happening in schools.”

The New York Times picked the comparison schools while the reader picks the district of interest. This simulator attempts to correlate by years of learning. The average between 3rd  and 8th grade should be five years. After 13 years of disruption and “reform,” Denver remains a little below average with lackluster growth.

student growth models

After Five Years Denver’s Eighth Graders Still below Average

All the closing schools and disrupting neighborhoods brought little or no significant change. Denver’s students are still measured as being about the same amount behind in 8th grade as when they started 3rd grade.

A 2015 hiring analysis revealed that DPS paid TFA $5000 to $7000 per recruit? TFA teachers are two year temps with a college degree and five-weeks of training. From 2012-2015, Denver taxpayers paid TFA $520,600 for 232 recruits at traditional schools and over $800,000 for 267 recruits at charter schools. DCTA President Henry Roman stated that teacher turnover is a crisis in DPS. He claims the average teacher tenure has dropped to two years.

Traditional teacher new hires have a college degree, one-year of post graduate pedagogy study and a year of supervised student teaching. They arrive at schools with the expectation of making teaching a career.

The reliance on untrained teachers along with recognizing and using a fake graduate school created by the charter industry explains why all of the spending on reform has not resulted in better performance. The fake graduate school is Relay Graduate School. It’s Denver Dean, Therese Zosel-Harper, is working on her PhD. Relay is an obviously fake graduate school because it has no credentialed education scholars on staff.

Where did the Portfolio District Model Originate?

A Rand Corporation researcher named Paul Hill founded the Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) on the campus at the University of Washington three years after John Chubb and Terry Moe wrote a popular book, Politics, Markets, and America’s Schools which was published in 1990 by The Brookings Institution. That book which was a sensation among neo-liberals called for the end of elected school boards. Hill began thinking about the mechanics for making that happen.

In 2002, Hill wrote a paper sponsored by the Annie E. Casey Foundation calling for changes in school governance,

“… [T]he last few decades of education reform have shown us that simply tinkering at the edges is not enough to ensure that changes will take place. Reforms need to be comprehensive and needs to affect every level of the education system.”

Hill’s statement and the book by Chubb and Moe were both motivated by the conviction that public schools in America were failing. It was not true then nor was it true in 1889, 1942, 1955, 1959, 1963 nor is it true now.

Jim Arnold and Peter Smagorinsky wrote,

“Admiral Rickover published “American Education, a National Failure” in 1963, and in 1959 LIFE magazine published “Crisis in Education” that noted the Russians beat us into space with Sputnik because “the standards of education are shockingly low.” In 1955 Why Johnny Can’t Read became a best seller, and in 1942 the NY Times noted only 6% of college freshmen could name the 13 original colonies and 75% did not know who was President during the Civil War. The US Navy in 1940 tested new pilots on their mastery of 4th grade math and found that 60% of the HS graduates failed. In 1889 the top 3% of US high school students went to college, and 84% of all American colleges reported remedial courses in core subjects were required for incoming freshmen.”

The paragraph above recalls more than a century of national failure to properly educate our citizenry yet in that same century America became the world’s leader economically, scientifically, militarily and culturally. Does this mean that education quality does not matter or is it more likely that the perception of American education failing – is and was an illusion? Based on this illusion of failure are we being driven toward failure with unproven market theories? That is what the portfolio theory is. It is an unproven market theory of education governance.

William J. Mathis and Kevin G. Welner, University of Colorado Boulder wrote a short paper “The ‘Portfolio’ Approach to School District Governance.” Their basic definition explains,

“Generally  speaking,  four  reform  strategies  are  combined,  in  varying  degrees,  in  portfolio  districts:  (1)  performance-based  (generally  test-based)  accountability,  (2)  school-level  de-centralization of management, (3) the reconstitution or closing of “failing” schools, and (4) the expansion of choice, primarily through charter schools.”

In Denver there are 204 schools; 106 public schools, 42 charter schools and 56 innovation schools. In accordance with portfolio district theory, Denver residents no longer have the right to vote on the governance of 108 of their publicly financed schools. In addition, both charter schools and innovation schools are generally non-union.

The innovation school concept is promoted nationally by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). According to ALEC model legislation these schools “are provided a greater degree of autonomy and can waive some statutory requirements.” In Denver, innovation schools are given a three year contract during which they are run by a non-profit. The results (testing data) at the end of the contract will dictate whether the experiment on the school children continues.

Innovation schools have only existed in Colorado since 2009. When the DPS board approved them in 2016, Board President Anne Rowe claimed, “I’m trying to think of a time I’ve been more excited, more proud, more optimistic about what we can achieve for kids.”

Conclusions

While Interviewing DCTA President Henry Roman, Jeff Fard said when he moves into a neighborhood he expects to register his kids in the local community school. “If I don’t like the school, I expect to roll up my sleeves and work to make it better.” If he still doesn’t like the school, he will pay for them to go to a private school. This is how it is supposed to be in America; people work for the betterment of their own community and pay for their own choices. However, if you live in portfolio districts like Denver, unseen and unelected forces control the neighborhood.

As Jitu Brown and the Journey for Justice have declared,

“We are not fooled by the ‘illusion of school choice.’ The policies of the last twenty years, driven more by private interests than by concern for our children’s education, are devastating our neighborhoods and our democratic rights.”

It is past time for the citizens of Denver to take back their democratic rights and their public schools.

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A Layman’s Guide to the Destroy Public Education Movement

9 Sep

By T. Ultican 9/9/2018

The destroy-public-education (DPE) movement is the fruit of a relatively small group of billionaires. The movement is financed by several large non-profit organizations. Nearly all of the money spent is free of taxation. Without this spending, there would be no wide-spread public school privatization.

It is generally recognized that the big three foundations driving DPE activities are The Bill and Melinda Gate Foundation (Assets in 2016 = $41 billion), The Walton Family Foundation (Assets in 2016 = $3.8 billion), and The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation (Assets in 2016 = $1.8 billion).

Yesterday, the Network for Public Education published “Hijacked by Billionaires: How the Super Rich Buy Elections to Undermine Public Schools.” This interactive report lists the top ten billionaires spending to drive their DPE agenda with links to case studies for their spending.

Top 10 Billioaires

These Images Come from the New NPE Report

Short Explanation of the Label DPE

The modern education reform apostate, Diane Ravitch, was Assistant Secretary of Education under Lamar Alexander from1991-93. She was an academic who held many research positions including the Brown Chair in Education Studies at the Brookings Institution and served in multiple capacities in different federal education administrations. Like all of her closest allies, she believed in the power of accountability, incentives and markets for reforming schools.

In 2010, Diane shocked her friends by publishing, The Death and Life of the Great American School System; How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education.  In chapter 1 she wrote,

“Where once I had been hopeful, even enthusiastic about the potential benefits of testing, accountability, choice, and markets, I now found myself experiencing profound doubts about these same ideas. I was trying to sort through the evidence about what was working and what was not. I was trying to understand why I was increasingly skeptical about these reforms, reforms that I had supported enthusiastically.”

“The short answer is that my views changed as I saw how these ideas were working out in reality. The long answer is what will follow in the rest of this book.” (Ravitch 2)

In the book, Ravitch wrote, “I call it the corporate reform movement not because everyone who supports it is interested in profit but because its ideas derive from business concepts about competition and targets, rewards and punishments, and ‘return on investment.’  (Ravitch 251)

Ravitch labled modern education reform “corporate education reform” and the label stuck.

Last year, researchers from the Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) led by professor Jim Scheurich, who coordinates the urban studies program there, perceived a pattern in the destruction of the public schools. That pattern became the “destroy public education” model. As Ravitch’s “corporate education reform” became more organized and ruthless, the Scheurich team’s DPE model became a better descriptor.

Ravitch posted the Indiana team’s DPE model on her blog. The model is outline here with explanations.

  1. Business is the best model for schools. Starting with the infamous Regan era report, “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 RJR Nabisco’s Louis Gerstner, Microsoft’s Bill Gates, Wal-Mart’s Walton family and Sun America’s Eli Broad. It is a central tenet of both neoliberal and libertarian philosophy.
  2. Institute local-national collaboration between wealthy neoliberals and other conservatives to promote school privatization and the portfolio model of school management. One example among many comes from Kansas City, Missouri. School Smart Kansas City does the local retail political activity, the $2.1 billion Kaufman foundation provides the local money and various national organizations like The Charter School Growth Fund that is controlled by the Wal-Mart heirs provides the outside money.
  3. Direct large sums of money through advocacy organizations to recruit, train and finance pro-privatization school board candidates. One such organization is Jonah Edelman’s Oregon based Stand for Children which functions as a conduit for outsiders to funnel money into local school board elections.
  4. Undermine and eliminate locally elected school boards. The 1990 book by John E. Chubb and Terry M. Moe, Politics, Markets, and America’s Schools, claimed that poor performance was “one of the prices Americans pay for choosing to exercise direct democratic control over their schools.” The book was hugely influential and its anti-democratic theory is a central ideology of DPE led reform.
  5. Institute a portfolio system of school district management that includes public schools, charter schools and Innovation Schools. School boards lose their oversight powers with both charter schools and Innovations schools. Portfolio theory posits closing the bottom 5% of schools based on standardized testing and reopening them as either charter schools or innovation schools. Standardized testing does not identify teaching or school quality but it does identify student poverty levels. This scheme guarantees that public schools in poor and minority communities will be privatized. While there is no evidence supporting this theory, there is evidence that it causes harm.
  6. Implement a unified enrollment system. Over the past 200 years, public schools in America have become a widely respected governmental institution. By forcing them to include charter schools in their enrollment system, the charter schools are provided an unearned equivalency. Charters are not publicly governed nor must they accept any student who applies in their area.
  7. Hire minimally trained teachers from Teach for America (TFA) or other instant-teacher-certification programs. By undermining the teaching profession, costs can be reduced; however general teacher quality will also be reduced. In 2007, Los Angeles Mayor, Anthony Villaraigosa, selected the Green Dot Charter Schools’ CEO, Marshall Tuck, to lead 18 schools in an experiment called the Partnership for LA. With millions of dollars to supplement the schools, Tuck failed to produce any real improvements. His error was hiring a significant numbers of untrained TFA teachers which more than offset his funding advantages.
  8. Use groups like Teach Plus and TNTP to provide teacher professional development. The most effective opponents of the destruction of public education have been teachers. By controlling teacher training, new pro-privatization attitudes can be fostered.
  9. Create teacher fellowships that develop teacher support for the privatization agenda. In Indiana, on a yearly basis, the $11 billion Lily Foundation gives out many $12,000 Teacher Creativity Fellowships. In Oakland California the DPE organization GO Oakland gives nearly 20 Fellowships a year.
  10. Institute networks of local organizations or affiliates that collaborate on the agenda. The newest national organization designed to develop these networks launched in July. It is called The City Fund. John Arnold, ex-Enron executive, and Reed Hasting, CEO of Netflix, each invested $100 million to start this donor directed fund. Bill Gates has already sent them $10 million to spend toward privatizing Oakland, California’s schools.

In densely populated areas, the DPE agenda invariably is coherent with an urban renewal effort often derisively labeled “gentrification.” Too often urban renewal has been accomplished by pushing the poorest citizens out without making any provisions for them. When renewal is only about economic advantage, it further harms already traumatized citizens.

Five Disparate Groups are United in Destroying Public Education

Group A) People who oppose public education on religious grounds and seek taxpayers supported religious schools. In 2001, when Dick and Betsy DeVos answered questions for the Gathering, Dick opined that church has retreated from its central role in communities and has been replaced by the public school.

At the same time that Dick and Betsy were speaking to the Gathering, Jay Sekulow, who is now a lawyer in the Trump administration, was in the process of successfully undermining the separation of church and state before the Supreme Court.

When the evangelical Christian movement gained prominence with Jerry Falwell’s moral majority and Pat Robertson’s 700-Club, they generated huge sums of money. A significant portion of that money was spent on legal activism.

In 1990, Pat Robertson brought Sekulow together with a few other lawyers to form the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ).  The even more radical Alliance Defense Fund (ADF) which declares it is out to defeat “the homosexual agenda” joined the ACLJ in the attack on the separation of church and state. In her important book, The Good News Club, The Christian Right’s Stealth Assault on America’s Children, Katherine Stewart described their ultimate triumph,

“An alien visitor to planet First Amendment could be forgiven for summarizing the entire story thus: Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia, together with a few fellow travelers on the Supreme Court and their friends in the ADF and ACLJ, got together and ordered that the United States should establish a nationwide network of evangelical churches housed in taxpayer-financed school facilities.” (Stewart 123/4)

Today, for the first time, taxpayers in America are paying for students to attend private religious schools.

B) People who want segregated schools where their children will not have to attend school with “those people.” A typical example from San Diego is The Old Town Academy (OTA). It is like a private school financed with public school dollars. A Voice of San Diego report noted, “Chris Celentino, OTA’s current board chair and one of the school’s founding members, said when the school opened with a class of 180 students, half came from families that would otherwise send their kids to private schools.” 

In 1955, Milton Friedman published “The Role Of Government in Education” which called for privatizing public schools. Mercedes Schneider writes of the reality of this theory in her book School Choice; The End of Public Education?,

“Even as Friedman published his 1955 essay, school choice was being exploited in the South, and state and local governments were complicit is the act. It took the federal government and district courts decades to successfully curb the southern, white-supremacist intention to offer choice to preserve racial segregation.” (Schneider 28)

The AP reported in 2017,

“National enrollment data shows that charters are vastly over-represented among schools where minorities study in the most extreme racial isolation. As of school year 2014-2015, more than 1,000 of the nation’s 6,747 charter schools had minority enrollment of at least 99 percent, and the number has been rising steadily.”

C) Entrepreneurs profiting from school management and school real estate deals.

This spring, In The Public Interest (ITPI) published “Fraud and Waste in California’s Charter Schools.” The report documents $149,000,000 fraudulently purloined by factions of the California charter-school industry. The total stealing stated is a summation of cases cited in media reports. The actual amount stolen is much larger.

The ITPI report also reveals how in California fortunes are created by gaining control of publicly financed assets. The report discloses,

“…, schools constructed with tax-exempt conduit bonds become the private property of the charter operator. Even if the charter is revoked, neither the state nor a local school district can take control of this property.”

This week Steven Singer a well known teacher activist from Pennsylvania wrote, “Thanks to some Clinton-era tax breaks, an investor in a charter school can double the original investment in just seven years!”

Singer also addressed the profiteering by administrators: “New York City Schools Chancellor, Richard Carranza is paid $345,000 to oversee 135,000 employees and 1.1 million students. CEO of Success Academy charter school chain, Eva Moskowitz handles a mere 9,000 students, for which she is paid $782,175.”

It is the same story in California. Charter school administrators are lining their non-profit pockets with huge salaries. In 2015, San Diego’s Mary Bixby, CEO of the Altus schools (34 mostly mall store learning centers) paid herself $340,810 and her daughter Tiffany Yandell $135,947. Up in Los Angeles in 2016, CEO of the 22 school Green Dot organization, Cristina de Jesus, was paid $326,242 while the CEO of the five schools Camino Nuevo Charter Academy was compensated $193,585. That same year in Oakland the CEO of the three schools Envision Education took in $229,127.

Huge wealth is being generated from taxpayers with little oversight.

D) The technology industry is using wealth and lobbying power to place products into public schools and heaping praise on technology driven charter schools. “The Silicon Valley assault must be turned away, not because they’re bad people but because they are peddling snake oil,” wrote veteran education writer, John Merrow. In the last 10 years, titans of the tech industry have dominated K-street. Hi-tech is now spending twice as much as the banking industry on lobbying lawmakers.

They fund think tanks to promote their agendas like coding in every public school in America or one to one initiatives (a digital device for every student) or digital learning. Researchers working in think tanks like the New America Foundation will be disciplined if they upset a corporate leader like Google’s Eric Schmidt. Barry Lynn was sent packing for being honest.

Writing for the Guardian Ben Tarnoff reports, “Tech’s push to teach coding isn’t about kids’ success – it’s about cutting wages.” The premise is that coding is “a skill so widely demanded that anyone who acquires it can command a livable, even lucrative, wage.”

The flaw here is that there is no need for a flood of new programmers. It will only drive down wages, which have already stagnated, and that is the point. A 2013 Economic Policy Institute research paper stated, “For every two students that U.S. colleges graduate with STEM degrees, only one is hired into a STEM job.”

E) Ideologues who fervently believe that market-based solutions are always superior. Some representatives of this group are Charles and David Koch, inheritors of Koch Industries. They are fervent libertarians who have established and support many organizations that work to privatize public education. The world’s richest family is also in this group. They are the heirs of Wal-Mart founder, Sam Walton. Like the Koch brothers, they too are determined to privatize public education.

Jane Mayer writing in the New Yorker about a legal struggle to control the Cato Institute stated, “Cato was co-founded by Edward Crane and Charles Koch, in the nineteen-seventies, with Koch’s money; the lawsuit notes that the original corporate name was the Charles Koch Foundation, Inc.” For many years, one of the stars supported by the Cato institute was Milton Friedman, the father of vouchers. The Walton Family Foundation contributes regularly to the Cato Institute and spent significant money promoting voucher legislation in many US states.

The Koch brothers are a major force behind the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). ALEC writes model legislation which in some conservative states is written into law with little debate and no changes. The innovation schools that remove elected school board control are a product of ALEC model legislation.

The DPE Movement is Real, Well Financed and Determined

While growing up in America, I had a great belief in democracy instilled in me. Almost all of the education reform initiatives coming from the DPE forces are bunkum, but their hostility to public education convinces me they prefer a plutocracy or even an oligarchy to democracy. The idea that America’s education system was ever a failure is and always has been an illusion. It is by far the best education system in the world plus it is the foundation of American democracy. If you believe in American ideals, protect our public schools.

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History of Institutional Racism in U.S. Public Schools

20 Jun

By T. Ultican 6/20/2018

Susan DuFresne a pre-school and special education specialist from Seattle, Washington just published the book History of Institutional Racism in U.S. Public Schools. Dufresne is also a self-taught artist with a heart that screams for justice. She began her project with three fifteen feet long four feet high pieces of canvas and painted images of racial injustice and its effect on schools from the 16th century until today. These illustrations are supported by the notes Susan developed about each issue depicted and hand wrote in the margins.

I met Susan in 2014 at Seattle’s iconic Westgate Park, home of political expression and protest for five decades. For me, it brought back childhood memories of a 1962 trip with my parents and a sister to the Seattle World’s Fair. At Westgate Park, my family boarded the mono-rail for the fairgrounds now called the Seattle Center, still home of the Space Needle and today, home to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. That 2014 teacher’s march was the first public event organized by the Washington State Bats. We were protesting the Gates Foundation. Two motorcycle police went ahead of us closing streets to cross traffic and we happily marched toward the Seattle Center to enthusiastic cheers from locals along the route.

Marching in Seattle 2014

  1. a) Making Signs in Westgate Park Before the March b) Anthony Cody and Susan DuFresne Lead 250 Bats Toward the Gates Foundation – Photo by Ultican

Last year, I met Susan again at the National Public Education (NPE) annual conference in Oakland, California. She displayed her amazing art work in the main conference room. The room was large enough to accommodate more than 1,000 people seated at round tables. Her illustrations covered most of the north wall.

I would be very surprised if Susan could pick me out of a lineup, but she certainly made a positive impression on me.

School teachers in general abhor injustice and activists like Susan are particularly sensitive to the least protected among us. Garn Press, who is publishing Susan’s book says of her,

“Susan DuFresne is an artist and educator who advocates across all intersectional groups, organizing for social justice. She works alongside colleagues and friends who are leaders in the Black Lives Matter Movement and the Badass Teachers Association. She is a vocal supporter of Indigenous peoples, the Women’s Movement, and LGBTQIA activists, and cares deeply about environmental issues.”

“One of the important battles she fights is for democratically run schools, as well as a child’s right to play. She pushes against the use of high stakes testing, agreeing with many students, parents, and educators who denounce these tests as racially biased, advocating for their right to opt out.”

Both Susan and her publisher have pledged to donate a part of net profits to Black Lives Matter and to the Lakota People’s Law Project.

Yohuru R. Williams is Professor of History, Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of St. Thomas, Minnesota. In a foreword to Susan’s book he wrote,

“As a historian of the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements I am keenly aware of the power of art, in all of its forms, to rouse interest, stir the conscience, and encourage resistance to inequality. Inspired by the need to communicate a deeper truth, the poet’s words, the dancer’s feet, and the artist’s palette explode with an unharnessed creativity driven by a desire to educate, instigate and re-imagine.”

“United States Congressman and Civil Rights icon John Lewis is fond of sharing that one of the primary inspirations for him to write to the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King and join the Civil Rights Movement was a 1958 comic book Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story, which in vivid illustration told the story of Dr. King, Rosa Parks and the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott. Beyond a mere recounting of those events the comic was also an education tool, identifying various ways that young people could get involved with the movement following what it termed the “Montgomery Method,” Nonviolent Direct-Action protest strategies derived for, and aimed at toppling segregation without losing sight of the shared humanity of the oppressor and the oppressed.”

The Dark History of Ignorance and Bigotry

Panel 1

NPE Oakland 2017 Photo of Susan’s Original Panels (1) – Photo by Ultican

The foundations of America have some very unsavory aspects. Susan illustrates these realities of racism dehumanizing people with different features and languages. She makes the point that this history is not being appropriately studied. This opportunity to remove the talons of evil that led to injustice is not being exercised. Those dark tendencies are still plaguing modern society and children are growing up ignorant of this hidden heritage.

In two of the panels DuFresne addresses the atrocities foisted upon the indigenous peoples of America.

In 1830, President Andrew Jackson, just a year after taking office, narrowly pushed through a new piece of legislation called the “Indian Removal Act”. In an infamous 1838 episode depicted on one of Susan’s panels, the US government sent in 7,000 troops to remove the Cherokee nation from the Carolinas. They forced the Cherokees into stockades at bayonet point. They were not allowed time to gather their belongings, and as they left, whites looted their homes. Then began the march known as the Trail of Tears, in which 4,000 Cherokee people died of cold, hunger, and disease on their way to the western lands.

By 1837, the Jackson administration had removed 46,000 Native American people from their land east of the Mississippi and had secured treaties which led to the removal of a slightly larger number. Most members of the five southeastern nations had been relocated west, opening 25 million acres of land to white settlement and to slavery.

Supreme Court Rules Segregation Legal

The Plessy versus Ferguson court case of 1896 ended in a 7 to 1 decision by the US supreme court ratifying segregation. In this case, a shoemaker named Homer Plessy who happened to have one black great-grand-parent purposely broke Louisiana’s Jim Crow law that require black people to use separate facilities from whites. In the key passage of the opinion, the Court stated that segregation was legal and constitutional as long as “facilities were equal.” Thus the “separate but equal doctrine” that would keep America divided along racial lines for over half a century longer came into being.

DuFresne put Plessy on the same panel of art as the “science” of eugenics that “proved” white people superior. The 1905 IQ tests developed by Alfred Binet were also used to justify forced sterilization. One of Susan’s notes says that the last forced sterilization in America occurred in Oregon (1981). Clinical psychologist Natalie Frank states,

“The eugenics movement began with the advent of testing for individual characteristics in children. Although intelligence testing was created to determine school readiness, it became one of the unintended foundations of eugenics. This occurred when three of the influential psychometricians, Lewis Terman, Henry Goddard and Robert Yerkes, began advocating testing as a method of differentiating who should be permitted to reproduce based on intelligence. These scientists built momentum for the idea of selective breeding and the call for using the process to strengthen the gene pool was taken up by some of the upper echelon of American and European society.”

Panel 14

NPE Oakland 2017 Photo of Susan’s Original Panels (2) – photo by Ultican

Dictionary Dot Com defines eugenics: “the study of or belief in the possibility of improving the qualities of the human species or a human population, especially by such means as discouraging reproduction by persons having genetic defects or presumed to have inheritable undesirable traits (negative eugenics) or encouraging reproduction by persons presumed to have inheritable desirable traits (positive eugenics).”

Binet died in 1911 after having warned against the test’s potential for misuse, calling the notion that intelligence could not be improved a “brutal pessimism.” By 1916, Stanford’s Lewis Terman had come to quite a different conclusion. He wrote,

“The fact that one meets this type [feebleminded individuals] with such extraordinary frequency among Indians, Mexicans, and negroes suggests quite forcibly that the whole question of racial differences in mental traits will have to be taken up anew and by experimental methods. 

“Children of this group should be segregated in special classes and be given instruction which is concrete and practical. They cannot master abstractions, but they can often be made efficient workers, able to look out for themselves. There is no possibility at present of convincing society that they should not be allowed to reproduce, although from a eugenic point of view they constitute a grave problem because of their unusually prolific breeding.”

Terman’s reasoning has been updated and today it is used to justify privatizing public schools. The drill and skill pedagogy and discipline practices of the no excuses charter school movement flourishes in politically weak minority communities. It is child abuse justified by bigotry.

It is the same irrational ideology that has led to today’s high profit standardized testing industry. In fact, Carl C. Brigham, the father of the SAT, became interested in mental testing while a student a Princeton. He later became a psychology professor at the university, where he was an enthusiastic member of the eugenics movement. During the 1920s he developed his own objective admissions test for students applying to Princeton.

A Frontline story on PBS reported,

“Brigham later worked on the Army Alpha Test, an intelligence test given to millions of recruits during World War I. In 1923, he wrote A Study of American Intelligence, which analyzed the findings of the Alpha Test by race. Its conclusion, which Brigham insisted was without prejudice, was that American education was declining and ‘will proceed with an accelerating rate as the racial mixture becomes more and more extensive.’”

The Authors Motivation

About creating this massive work of art and latter turning it into a book, Susan shares,

“I thought too of the African men, women and children who were brought to America and enslaved. The Southern Poverty Law Center has raised the concern that even today public school students still do not study slavery or consider how racism and discrimination impact the lives of children and their families. With a marker I wrote the following notes in the margins of the first panel.

  • Enslavement of Indigenous people, Native Americans, murder and disease enabled the colonizers to seize land.
  • Enslavement of Africans enabled profit as well.
  • Oppressive schooling became possible via acts of terror.”

“Notes for panel 5:

  • 1899 – Supreme Court allows a state to levy taxes on Black and white citizens alike while providing a public school for white children only. (Cumming v. Richmond, (GA) County Board of Education).
  • 1893 – Mandatory education for Indian children in Boarding Schools – Native language forbidden. If parents refused, annuities or rations could be withheld or send them to jail. Educators had quotas to fill. Many died at school.
  • 1913 – U.S. v. Sandoval, Supreme Court, American Indians ‘simple, uninformed & inferior people’ – incapable of citizenship.”

Destroy Public Education Movement

Dufresne concludes her history by addressing the modern forces that are destroying public schools in poor non-white neighborhoods.

Panel 11

NPE Oakland 2017 Photo of Susan’s Original Panels (3) – Photo by Ultican

The 2002 No Child Left Behind Act used the tools developed by the eugenicists to label the schools of black and brown children failures. The standardized testing used to destroy their schools had “roots deeply embedded in racism.”

Susan highlights Secretary of Education in the Obama administration, Arne Duncan’s infamous statement, “I think the best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans was hurricane Katrina.” This statement is disgusting and makes it clear that the attack on schools in minority communities is bipartisan. It is not conservatives or liberals attacking public education. It is wealthy elites who lead both the conservative and liberal movements in America destroying the foundations of democracy because they fear it.

Conclusion

I have touched briefly on a small portion of the historical abuse of “those people’s children” that Susan is teaching about. As I was writing this, I looked closely at each panel of art and their associated notes. The more I looked the more I saw. This work exemplifies the creative use of art to teach. It shines a light on injustice motivated by racism and the damage reeked.

Every school library at every level should contain this book and have it prominently displayed. Every parent should get this book and study it with their children. This book is a masterpiece of art and history.

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