Tag Archives: Public Schools

NPE Throws Cold Water on CREDO Paper

By Thomas Ultican 7/23/2023

The Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) just released another pro-charter school study, “CREDO also acknowledges the Walton Family Foundation and The City Fund for supporting this research.” It is not a study submitted for peer review and so opaque that real scholars find the methodology and data sets difficult to understand. Carol Burris and her public school defenders at the Network for Public Education (NPE) have provided an in-depth critical review.

With the new CREDO study, Education Week’s Libby Stanford said that “charters have drastically improved, producing better reading and math scores than traditional public schools.’’ Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal declared charter schools are now “blowing away their traditional school competition.” Burris retorted with “despite the headlines, the only thing ‘blown away’ is the truth.” (Page 3)

Putting a CREDO Thumb on the Scale

CREDO uses massive data sets, unavailable to other researchers, getting minuscule differences which are statistically significant. No one can check their work. They employ a unique and highly discredited statistical approach called “virtual twins” to compare public school with charter school testing outcomes. Instead of reporting the statistical results in standard deviations, CREDO uses their “crazy pants” days of learning scheme.

NPE discovered that the “blowing away” public school results amounted to 0.011 standard deviations in math and 0.028 standard deviations in reading. The minuscule difference is “significant statistically but is meaningless from a practical standpoint” according to CREDO. In a 2009 report showing public schools with a small advantage, CREDO declared, “Differences of the magnitude described here could arise simply from the measurement error in the state achievement tests that make up the growth score, so considerable caution is needed in the use of these results.”

To give these almost non-existent differences more relevance, CREDO reports them as “days of learning” instead of standard deviation. “Days of learning” is a method unique to CREDO and generally not accepted by scholars. They claim charter school math students get 6 more “days of learning” and English students, 16 days.

CREDO Days of Learning Conversions

The above chart comes from the Technical Appendix of a previous CREDO study, which reveals that Eric Hanushek and Macke Raymond used NAEP data from 2017 to create the table. No justifications for the conversions are given. It appears to be sloppy science and headlines generated by its use are unfounded propaganda.

Bad Methodology

The CREDO method does not compare charter school performance to actual public schools. It creates mathematical simulations. Professor Andrew Maul of UC Santa-Barbara stated, “The study’s ‘virtual twin’ technique is insufficiently documented, and it remains unclear and puzzling why the researchers use this approach rather than the more accepted approach of propensity score matching.”

CREDO’s stipulation that “virtual twins” comes from “feeder schools,” favors charter schools. Management expert, Andrea Gabor, explained that CREDO used less than five student transfers to a charter school as the cutoff for a particular public school’s data. She notes the “study excludes public schools that do NOT send students to charters, thus introducing a bias against the best urban public schools, especially small public schools that may send few, if any, students to charters.”

This study is singularly focused on test results as determinate of school quality. Many charter systems, like IDEA and Success Academy, spend an inordinate amount of time preparing for standardized tests. This biases results.

Professor Mark Weber of Rutgers University adds a few more observations:

“The matching variables that create the counterfactuals are far too crude to do the job properly.”
“The definition of the treatment — enrolling in a charter school — does not account for factors such as increased spending, peer effects, and other advantages which have nothing to do with ‘charteriness.’”
“The consistently small effect sizes have been pumped up by an unvalidated conversion into ‘days of learning’ which has never been properly justified by the authors.”

The NPE report highlights another source of bias for charter schools:

“In addition to their presence in a CREDO-identified feeder school, students are matched by gender, grade level, scores, race, and special education and English language learner status. Yet special education students are not a monolith. Research has consistently shown that charters take fewer special education students and enroll fewer students with more challenging disabilities than public schools.” (Page 9)

The combination of rejected methodologies, murky data studies and biases toward charter schools render the CREDO study useless. Minuscule advantages reported, favoring charter schools, indicate that in reality, public schools outperform charters.

The CREDO Story

In 1981, Massachusetts Institute of Technology trained economist, Eric Hanushek, wrote “Throwing Money at Schools.” Right-leaning philanthropies and institutions were drawn to his declaration:

“The conventional wisdom about public schools is that they face serious problems in terms of performance and that improving schools requires additional money. However, the available evidence suggests that there is no relationship between expenditures and the achievement of students and that such traditional remedies as reducing class sizes or hiring better trained teachers are unlikely to improve matters.”

In a 1981 Ed Week commentary referencing this paper, Hanushek points to SAT testing as the gold standard for judging school performance. He claims, “Advanced statistical techniques are employed to disentangle the influences on achievement of schools and teachers from those of other factors such as family backgrounds and student abilities.” This motivated him to push for teachers to be evaluated, using “value added measures”, that since have been thoroughly discredited.

At the time, he was teaching political science and economics at Rochester University and meeting his future wife, a significantly younger student, named Margret (Macke) Raymond. She completed her Rochester University political science PhD in 1985.

A 1999 announcement from the school said, “The Center for Research on Education Outcomes has been established at the University of Rochester’s Wallis Institute of Political Economy…” In the same posting, it revealed, “Two foundations have committed $1.25 million to fund a three-and one-half year initiative to address the current shortage of evaluation research in education policy matters.” CREDO never made the names of the two foundations public but a knowledgeable academic disclosed one of them was the Walton Family Foundation. It is documented that the Waltons give generously to CREDO.

The announcement listed Eric Hanushek first and Macke Raymond as founding Director.

CREDO moved to Stanford University’s Hoover Institute in July 2000 which made networking in conservative circles much easier. Their 2^nd year report stated that moving to the Hoover Institute brought many new contacts, including the New Schools Venture Fund, the District of Columbia Charter School Board, the Teacher Union Reform Network and others.

Public Schools are Superior to Charter Schools

Staffing in public schools is made up of mostly college graduates with certified state teaching credentials. Before the appearance of the billionaire-created Teach For America (TFA), nearly 100% of public school teachers had a year of teacher training and a bachelors degree or higher. A significant percentage of charter school teachers come from TFA with just five weeks of education training. Charters are typically not required to use certificated teachers.

The depth of experience in the public school teaching corps is larger than that of charter schools. A Fordham Institute article states:

“That being said, there is a bona fide but often unaddressed teacher shortage: experienced teachers in charter schools. In the United States, a third of charter teachers have fewer than three years of teaching experience, compared to only a fifth of public school teachers.”

“Comparative inexperience and youth in front of classrooms carries costs. More than any other school-related factor, a teacher’s efficacy matters most to student learning. And especially in the early years, nothing improves a teacher’s efficacy quite like experience.”

Stability is important for school-aged children and especially for those growing up in difficult home environments. In 2020, NPE conducted an in-depth look at charter schools since their inception. They discovered that charters were closing at extremely high rates; 18% by year 3, 25% by year 5, 40% by year 10 and 50% by year 15. In some cases, charters closed their doors mid-semester without warning; this never happens in public schools.

Management in public schools must meet state credentialing requirements. They focus on good pedagogy, safe schools and parent engagement. In charter schools, supervisors are often untrained in education and make return on investment, a key goal.

Safety in public schools is state-mandated but charter schools can ignore some rules. In California, all public schools must be earthquake-safe facilities. Charter schools may not heed this requirement.

In 2013, Christopher A. Lubienski and Sarah Theule Lubienski published The Public School Advantage – Why Public Schools Outperform Private Schools. Nothing has happened over the last ten years that invalidates this scholarly work. Charter schools are private schools with a state contract, similar to garbage collection companies, contracting with a city. They are private companies, paid with taxpayer funds.

Charters are substandard education organizations that only survive because of marketing.

Tags: Charter schools, CREDO, Eric Hanushek, Margret (Macke) Raymond, NPE, Public Schools, testing

Comments 3 Comments
Categories DPE, education

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 8^th, 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 17^th 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

Tags: Charter schools, Mike Allman, Public education, Public Schools, School Board Elections, testing

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Categories Justice

Enabling the Privatizers – The End Game is Finally Here

8 Feb

Guest post by an Oakland parent and teacher, Jane Nylund 2/8/2022

Lest we all forget, from six years ago, here was the plan: 50% of our kids into charter schools. https://capitalandmain.com/oaklands-charter-school-tipping-point-0531

And now, it looks like that plan is coming to fruition. You are following the privatization playbook to the letter.

When the well-paid accountants arrive and show a slide comparing Oakland Unified School District (OUSD) to other districts of similar enrollments/socio-economic status (SES), and make the simplistic assumption that OUSD has too many schools compared to the others and that we have to be just the same, here’s what you are really saying.

Lesson 1) High poverty children don’t deserve smaller schools and class sizes, anywhere in the state of California, unless it’s a charter.

Lesson 2) It isn’t acceptable for a high-needs district to appear to have it “better” than the others with smaller schools. Smaller schools are meant for wealthy people.

Lesson 3) Because we don’t have the political will to invest in the other comparison districts, we need to continue to dis-invest in Oakland instead, thus creating “equity” at the bottom. Nothing new, we’ve been doing that for years. See Lesson #1

Lesson 4) It’s okay to let Bill Gates experiment with small schools for our kids, until he becomes bored and pulls funding.

Here is the equivalent of that purported “savings” that really isn’t:

1) Recent HQ pay for two years. OUSD used to have 14 positions at $200K+; in 2020 they had 47.

2) Lease at 1000 Broadway.

3) Cost of a new school site kitchen.

So, by closing all these schools, OUSD can now have the cost equivalent of a kitchen. Maybe.

Turn this entire idea on its head. The continued austerity measures for high-poverty districts like Oakland are a clear message to these families that they don’t deserve a mix of schools, like, say, San Francisco.

Have you ever looked at the school mix in San Francisco, our neighbor across the bay? You should. I recently noted that they have a mix of 122 schools, give or take. They have 14% charter enrollment, and several comprehensive high schools. They also support a mix of much smaller schools from 100-500 kids each, of all types. They don’t use an “ideal” size. That doesn’t exist, and research bears that out, no matter how many presentations and how many consultants you pay to come up with an “ideal” number. So, if you are arguing that Oakland has too many schools, then you need to head over to SF and advise their board to also close schools. Oh, that’s right, they have wealthy families there. Don’t want to rock the boat. See Lesson #2

The accountants never look at San Francisco as a comparison district because of socio-economics, but SF still comes in at 57% free and reduced price lunch. Clearly, San Francisco does something we don’t, even as elite San Franciscans are trying to shut down their elected school board. The obvious answer is that San Francisco is not a top-heavy, privatized, portfolio district.

No one in OUSD, Financial Crises and Management Assist Team (FCMAT), or local and state government has ever answered the obvious question: find me a comparison district in California, the same as ours, that has all the community services/pay/benefits/supports/enrichment as a result of having 40-50 schools. This nonsensical premise is what you are trying to sell us. What is a model district that you can reference that has successfully achieved and implemented this accounting miracle? Stockton, Sacramento, Long Beach? Where?

Answer: none of the above. You can’t find any high-needs district that has all of this because it supports a magical number of 40-50 schools. So you are asking us to just go along to get along with Stockton, Sacramento, and Long Beach, and many others. All that “savings” simply evaporates, along with enrollment, and the status quo remains. It is truly mind-blowing that you are promising community schools to magically appear, when there is no other district model in the state that supports this idea that you can close dozens of schools, and expect tax dollars to rain down upon school sites. The consultants will be falling all over themselves to be first in line for the money grab. It would be laughable if it wasn’t such a tragedy.

Go back to my point #1 in case you forgot about the entire argument about why this exercise isn’t about children. It isn’t about savings. It isn’t about more money for school sites. It isn’t about teacher pay. It’s about not having the guts to stand up to bullies like FCMAT and their state overlords. It’s about taking the easy way out because of a “belief” system. It’s neat and tidy, and pencils out nicely. But once you put down those pencils, the disaster you have created for our communities will be irreparable and will change the fabric of the Oakland community forever. But John Fisher doesn’t care. The chaos will make it that much easier for the luxury A’s stadium to go in. But you already knew that.

Tags: Closing Schools, Education Reform, John Fisher, Oakland Unified School District, Public Schools

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Categories Corporate Education Reform, DPE, education

Infrastructure for Ending the Public School System

29 Sep

By Thomas Ultican 9/24/2021

Educating children is expensive. Wealthy people like Charles Koch do not mind paying to educate their own children but they detest the idea of being taxed to pay for educating other people’s children. In the dystopian market driven system libertarians such as Koch espouse, people should only receive what they pay for. They believe almost all government programs should be ended including Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, the FAA, the EPA, the Department of Energy, the FDA, The Consumer Product Safety Commission and more. Libertarians contend that mail, schools and roads should be privatized plus personal and corporate taxes should be abolished (Kochland Pages 113 and 114).

Toward achieving their ends, Koch, Gates, the Walton family and scores of wealthy elites have been building an infrastructure to take over and privatize the public school system. By twisting the laws concerning tax free philanthropic organizations, wealthy moguls are funneling huge sums of money into creating privatized schools; thus eliminating local control by elected school boards. All the while, they illegitimately write off most of their spending to promote public school privatization as charitable giving.

In addition to spending to privatize schools, a key strategy employed to advance their market based agenda is the creation of alternate teacher professional development and certification. It is another new privatized system under their control and not influenced by university based programs or education scholars.

The third leg of their attack on public education is political spending to take over elected school boards and influence legislatures.

The New Schools Venture Fund (NSVF) and Teach for America (TFA) support all three of the ending public schools privatization pillars.

The article “Organized to Disrupt” gives many details about the founding, purpose and lavish financing for NSVF. A former CEO of NSVF, Ted Mitchell, was also simultaneously President of the California State Board of Education. He left NSVF to become Under Secretary of the United States Department of Education. NSVF is generating more than $100,000,000 yearly income which it uses to invest in edtech start ups, charter schools and political organizing.

The TFA story is well known. The post “TFA is Bad for America” gives some details about how through huge financing, TFA is providing its billionaire funders with a privatization army of youthful college graduates looking for a career. These temp teachers – 80% of whom are gone in three years – have no business in a classroom. Real teachers go through a rigorous college teaching curriculum and a year of student-teaching under the supervision of a master teacher. TFA teachers get no teaching curriculum and five weeks of teacher training in the summer.

These unqualified TFA teachers have become the backbone of the teaching core for no-excuses charter schools. They embrace market based reform as a mechanism for reforming schools (Scripting Page 173) and within two to three years after they leave the classroom, their TFA connections put them in good position to became district, state or federal education leaders. TFA also offers political help for corps members to run for school board positions through its associated Leadership for Education Equity (LEE) non-profit. The LEE board of trustees consists of Emma Bloomberg (Michael Bloomberg’s daughter); Steuart Walton (billionaire); Arthur Rock (billionaire) and Elisa Villanueva Beard (TFA-CEO).

Training Educators

Teacher fellowships are used to influence teacher training and develop neoliberal attitudes. The late Eli Broad created the Broad Fellowships which trained school leaders how to close schools, in the benefit of enabling privatized schools and about the superiority of a market based approach. Before he died, Broad transferred the program and monetary support for it to Yale University.

In Oakland, California, the billionaire funded school privatization group GO Public Schools offers teacher fellowships of $3500 for their two year program. In Indianapolis, the $15 billion Lilly Endowment runs a 100 teacher yearly $12,000 fellowship program.

Two early problems slowing school privatization efforts were that teachers were both opposed to it and were respected by their communities. The fellowships described above are just three examples out of the many funded by extremely wealthy people to shape young teacher attitudes. It is not an accident that few of these fellowship programs are run by education professionals or scholars.

In 1997, the founder of TFA, Wendy Kopp, started The New Teachers Project (TNTP) to provide professional development services. She chose Michelle Rhee to be its founding director. This organization designed to train teachers was founded by a person that has never taught and was led by an untrained teacher that had two years experience as a TFA temp teacher. Even though a reasonable school administrator would never contract with an obviously incompetent group such as TNTP, it has flourished due to a continuous influx of billionaire dollars and powerful political connections.

Besides helping to shape teacher attitudes, founding director Rhee was one of the loudest voices in America claiming teachers were incompetent and low IQ.

Today, TNTP has a new initiative called PLUS to train principals. PLUS has clients in Camden, Kansas City, New York, Philadelphia and San Francisco. Billionaire spending is the reason school districts turn their back on established administrative programs at local universities for this unqualified group. In Kansas City, three billion-dollar foundations, Kaufman, Hall and Walton, are funding the PLUS program.

Relay Graduate School of Education is a private stand alone graduate school created and led by people with meager academic credentials. It was founded by officials from the no-excuses charter school industry and lavishly financed by billionaires. This completely bogus graduate school was certified after New York’s billionaire Chancellor of Education, Merryl H. Tisch, tapped David Steiner to be Commissioner of Education. Steiner, who is closely aligned with Jeb Bush’s Chiefs for Change, officially certified Relay. He was also a founding board member and still serves on the Relay board.

Control School Boards

School boards are being controlled in several ways. One obvious way, was covered in the article “School Board Elections 2020: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly.” It tells the story of a small group of super wealthy individuals spending to put their preferred candidates on school boards in Los Angeles, Oakland and Indianapolis. In California, this group also contributed to almost every senate and assembly race.

Billionaire Spending in the 2020 LA School Board Election

More than money is required to politically control local school boards. The Mind Trust in Indianapolis became an example of developing a local political group working on education issues along with spending by local plutocrats. This method has led to the public school system there being the second most privatized system in America; second only to New Orleans.

In 2018, billionaires Jon Arnold and Reed Hastings claimed to be investing $100 million each to establish a new anti-public school non-profit they called The City Fund. Since then several billionaires including Bill Gates and Michael Dell have started contributing to the fund. To advance their privatization agenda, The City Fund is spending significant amounts developing local political organizations. The following are examples.

Saint Louis – The Opportunity Trust: In 2018, a former TFA corps member and TFA employee for 14 years, Eric Scroggins, founded The Opportunity Trust. That same year The City Fund gifted it $5.5 million.

San Antonio – City Education Partners: Listed as being for community engagement efforts including the development and launch of San Antonio School Finder and correlated operations support. $4.98 million

Oakland – Educate78: Cited as a continuation of support previously provided by The Hastings Fund for work to improve public education including the expansion of high quality schools and support for the development of diverse teacher pipelines. $4.25 million

Memphis – Memphis Education Fund: Noted as support for operational budget and community engagement effort. $5 million

Newark – New Jersey Children’s Foundation: Stated as support for the launch of the new organization and ongoing operating budget support. $5.325 million

Baton Rouge – New Schools for Baton Rouge: Cited as support for expansion and launch of high quality nonprofit schools in Baton Rouge. $13,487,500

New Orleans – New Schools for New Orleans: Listed as support for the expansion of high quality schools and training for school leaders. $7,750,000

Oakland – Oakland Reach: Cited as operating budget support for ongoing parent and community engagement. $500,000

Atlanta – RedefinEd: Noted as operations support and support for work to empower communities, build teacher and leadership development pipelines, and expand high quality schools. $2,750,000

Denver – RootED (formerly Blue Schools): Listed as operating budget support and support for expansion of high quality schools. $21,000,000

Oakland and Stockton – Silicon Schools Fund: Cited as support for expansion of innovative public school models. $1,566,666

Indianapolis – The Mind Trust: Noted as operating support and support for expansion of high quality schools. $18,000,000

Privatizing Schools

Several billionaires have been spending large amounts of money for three decades to advance the growth of charter schools in America. Today, fortunately, they are seeing some resistance to the non-stop expansion. As Network for Public Education Director Carol Burris noted,

“Everything changed when DeVos was in charge. Progressives and moderates started to see that charter schools were really a ‘gateway drug’ for the libertarian right, a means to further the destruction of public education.”

However, with the Supreme Court destroying the separation between church and state, private schools have been growing rapidly in states with voucher programs. Almost all of these private schools are religious schools.

The economist Milton Friedman is one of the godfathers of the current movement to end public education. Duke University’s noted historian and the author of Democracy in Chains, Nancy MacLean, shared the following quotes from Friedman. They leave no doubt about the true purpose of the choice movement in the mind of one of its creators. The first comes from 2004 and the second is from a 2006 speech at a meeting of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).

“In my ideal world, government would not be responsible for providing education any more than it is for providing food and clothing.”

“The ideal way would be to abolish the public school system and eliminate all the taxes that pay for it.”

Tags: Charles Koch, Charter schools, Milton Friedman, New Schools Venture Fund, Public Schools, TFA, The City Fund

Comments 5 Comments
Categories DPE, education

Sketchy Epic Cyber Charter Has Gone National

4 May

By T. Ultican 5/4/2019

Epic is the business name for Oklahoma’s indigenous and fastest growing virtual charter school chain. In 2015, they moved beyond Oklahoma opening a business in Orange County, California and are currently in contract talks with Pulaski County, Arkansas to provide online education. EPIC’s fast growth has been accompanied by continuous legal problems, charges of political improprieties and claims of unethical aggressive marketing.

The Founders

Ben Harris and David Chaney, two long time friends from Oklahoma City, founded Epic.

Harris and Chaney

The Founders of EPIC Virtual Charter Schools

In 1999, One year after Harris was awarded a Master of Public Administration from Syracuse University, he and Chaney founded Advanced Academics Inc. Today Pearson Corporation the large British testing and publishing company owns Advanced Academics which sells credit recovery courses and software for virtual classes.

Both Harris and Chaney went to work for Jeb Bush in 2003 at the Florida Department of Children and Families. Harris was soon made the Deputy Secretary in charge of technology. He worked under Secretary Jerry Regier who had previously run health and human services in Oklahoma. It was here that Harris made a name for himself by privatizing the child welfare system. However, all was not well.

Megan Rolland of the Tulsa World reported,

“In July 2004, a whistle-blower investigation revealed that Harris had accepted trips, dinners and other favors from companies looking to contract with the social services agency.

“Harris resigned and a full criminal investigation conducted by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement began. No charges were filed.

“The investigation did find that both Harris and Chaney were involved in a number of questionable contracts awarded to vendors that appeared to circumvent the state’s bidding process.

“One of those questionable contracts was awarded to Florida State University’s Institute of Health and Human Services, where Elizabeth VanAcker worked.”

“VanAcker also sits on the board of a nonprofit in Florida that has submitted seven charter school applications for virtual schools that propose contracting exclusively with Advanced Academics.”

“VanAcker’s company — formerly named Edmetrics — created the Epic 1 on 1 Charter School website for Community Strategies Inc.”

Rolland’s Report also shared some founding details about the business originally called Epic 1 on 1 charter schools,

“Harris is listed as a registered agent for Community Strategies Inc., the nonprofit that is opening Epic 1 on 1 Charter School. He uses his home address on the corporate papers, and he worked behind the scenes to get the school approved by the University of Central Oklahoma.”

In 2009 – just prior to founding Epic – Harris was Chief Financial Officer of Velocity Sports Performance in Irvine, California. The CEO of Velocity Sports Performance when Harris arrived there was Troy Medley, who is now Chairman of the Board for Epic in California.

Epic Found a Way into Orange County, California

Epic is an acronym for excellence, performance, innovation and citizenship. In California the non-profit business name is Next Generation Education. In Oklahoma the non-profit business name is Community Strategies Inc. Neither Epic founder, David Chaney nor Ben Harris, sits on the board of either Next Generation Education in California or Community Strategies Inc. in Oklahoma.

Rather, David Chaney serves as both superintendent of the nonprofit Epic Charter Schools and CEO of Epic Youth Services, a for-profit company that manages the school for a fee. Chaney owns the for-profit corporation, which originally had Harris’s home address listed on the incorporating papers.

A report in the Oklahoma Watch described the Epic business structure:

“The nonprofit contracts with Epic Youth Services, a for-profit company that manages the school for a fee of 10 percent of Epic’s gross revenue. Epic Youth Services, in turn, contracts with Advanced Academics, a division of Connections Education, a Pearson company. Calvert Partners and Beasley Technology also have contracts with Epic Youth Services.”

It appears that the structure is the same in California. In the Next Generation Education board meeting notes, Ben Harris is referenced as providing updates from the charter management organization (CMO) which is Epic Youth Services.

This Byzantine structure hides the fact that Epic is a for profit business cloaked in a non-profit’s suit, thus skirting California’s prohibition against for profit charters. It also means that in their tax forms, the non-profit only reports costs and no salaries. For example, in the fiscal year ending June 30, 2017 Community Strategies Inc. the Oklahoma non-profit reported revenues of $41,487,230 and expenditures of $40,105,203. However, the non-profit reported no salaries because the for-profit does payroll. There is no way for taxpayers to see how many public dollars are going into private hands.

In 2015, EPIC petitioned the Anaheim City School District (an elementary school district) for its first charter outside of Oklahoma. The districts staff investigated the petition, came back with a long list of deficiencies and made a strong denial recommendation. After reviewing the report the district board voted 5 – 0 to deny.

The following three deficiencies are among the more than 20 deficiencies cited:

(1) California charter law requires new charter petitioners to gather signatures showing a demand for the school. When Anaheim City School District started checking the signatures, the majority response they heard was “I don’t know what you are talking about.” They checked 109 of the 526 signatures and these are some of the responses,

“I’ve never heard of EPIC.”

“No, but if you ever need someone to sign a petition to help you with your funding just let me know.”

“I don’t remember signing any petition.”

“I like the school my kids go to, I thought I was just signing a petition saying I am in favor of charter schools.”

“No, I don’t know what you’re talking about, I’m in China.”

(2) The plan for special education was almost non-existent.

(3) There was no workable plan for English language learners (EL’s).

A widely held belief says charter schools find ways not to enroll more expensive students to educate such as EL’s. The enrollment data for school year 2017-2018 indicates that Epic still has no viable support for EL’s. That appears to be a feature not a flaw.

EL Percentage

At Epic’s 2015 appeal to the Orange County School Board, Leslie Coghlan speaking for the Anaheim City School District explained their petition denial and concluded with,

“We would also like to note that at our public hearings in the Anaheim City School District there were not any members of our community that came out to support the charter school at the public hearings. And one of our final concerns is that the Epic’s Oklahoma program is involved in litigation with the Oklahoma Department of Education and currently the subject of a fraud investigation by the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation concerning falsification of records to fraudulently receive payments from the Department of Education.”

At that same 2015 hearing, Ben Harris defended Epic against the fraud investigation charge. He said, “This is based off a single news article several years ago that is proven to be false as no findings or issues have been raised.”

In a 2016 article, KOSU radio of Tulsa and Oklahoma City reported on Epic’s California problems:

“In 2014, Oklahoma Governor Mary Fallin requested an investigation in to allegations of fraud at the school. … No charges have been filed, and no information has been released.”

“More recently, controversy over EPIC’s business practices came to light last month in an audit prepared by the Fiscal Crisis & Management Assistance Team (FCMAT), which provides California school districts with financial and management support.

“The FCMAT audit alleges that Sue Roche, the founder of Oxford Preparatory Academy, which has two charter campuses in Orange County, formed an education management company called Edlighten Learning Solutions to launder school funds for personal profit.

“The audit lays out substantial financial ties between Edlighten and Ben Harris and David Chaney’s company, EPIC Youth Services. The audit says EPIC Youth Services received $5,000 a month from Edlighten for consulting services. The report contains emails between Roche and Harris, EPIC’s co-founder, in which they discuss moving personnel between Oxford Preparatory and their management companies to skirt legal issues.”

This February, the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation announced that Epic is once again the target of both state and federal investigators. No additional information was released.

At Epic, a yearly $1500 payment is made into each student’s personal “learning fund” to buy school supplies or use for academically compatible activities. The Orange County Register noted, “Though money doesn’t wind up in the hands of parents or students, the learning fund can, for example, pay for horseback riding, music or dance lessons.” Anaheim Union High School District Superintendent Mike Matsuda called the practice, “predatory marketing.”

Virtual schools like Epic have a history of poor student outcomes. Even the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools released a report sharply critical of virtual charter schools. And the Stanford study of online schools in 17 states and the District of Columbia found that during a 180-day school year, virtual students lost an average of 72 days of learning in reading and 180 days, or an entire school year, of learning in math.

“Why Would Anyone Support These Horrible Schools?”

A friend asked this question about Epic.

To get their foot in the door, Epic’s Ben Harris was able to use his personal connection with his former boss Troy Medley. Medley is currently President of Prima Health Credit of New Port Beach and he serves as Chairman of the Board for the charity Mortgage Miracles for the Kids. The President of Miracles, Autumn Strier – who previously worked for the Giuliani administration – joined Medley on the Next Generation Education (Epic) board as did another associated from Miracles, Chris Relth – a corporate head hunter.

Completing the five member Next Generation Education (Epic) board are Kenny Dodd, senior pastor at Claremont Emanuel Baptist Church in San Diego, and Alex Arcila of the Orange County Hispanic community. Medley is the board President.

Once Epic established an apparently reputable presence in Orange County, they were aided by the fact that this county is the most pro-business and privatization friendly place in California. For example, in the 2018 election for Superintendent of Public Instruction, Tony Thurmond defeated former Charter School executive Marshall Tuck, but he didn’t come close to matching Tuck’s support in Orange County.

OC 2018 SPI Outcome

Orange County 2018 Election Tallies

During the appeal hearing at the Orange County School Board, the board staff concurred with the Anaheim City School District and recommended the appeal be denied. After the staff submitted their recommendations, representatives of the district made a presentation and Epic co-founder Ben Harris made a presentation. Public comment followed the presentations. There were just seven speakers all from Epic; Epic co-founder David Chaney, Epic’s attorney Michelle Lopez and the five Epic board members.

When the board voted on the Epic appeal, Orange County School Board Trustees Robert Hammond, David Boyd, Linda Lindholm and Ken Williams voted to grant Epic a charter.

This vote also reflected the power of billionaire spending on school privatization.

Buying the Election

Billionaire Money is Distorting Democratic Processes in Local Elections

All but one board member who voted to give Epic a charter received large campaign support from billionaires through three independent expenditure committees; California Charter Schools Association Advocates (CCSAA), Orange County Charter Advocates for Great Schools (which is sponsored by CCSAA) and the Lincoln Club of Orange County. David Boyd, Chancellor of The Taft University System, did not receive documented largess from the billionaires but his campaign did have odd financial support. He loaned his own campaign $72,000, got a $50,000 loan from Taft University and a $25,000 loan from Elizabeth Dorn’s campaign. More than $30,000 in loan debt was later forgiven.

In 2016, the Beverly Hills Billionaire, Howard Ahmanson Jr. (state major donor ID 479163) gave the OC Charter PAC $10,000 and the Local Liberty PAC (State ID 1291528) that Ahmanson finances provided them another $18,171.83.

Howard Ahmanson’s name sake father established the Ahmanson Family Foundation in 1952. Today, that foundation has slightly more than a billion dollars in assets. They give extensively to the arts and LA basin charter schools. In 2016, they gave $500,000 to the billionaire funded pro-school privatization youth group Teach For America. Howard runs the Fieldstad and Company arm of the Ahmanson foundation.

Roberta Ahmanson, Howard’s wife, is a serious Christian thinker and writer. She gave a speech titled “What Fundamentalism Gave Me” at the 2018 commencement for Cornerstone University in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Like Betsy DeVos, she is part of The Gathering. Roberta and her husband see Epic as a tool that benefits the Christian home schooling movement.

Some Observations

The Epic contract with Epic Youth Services calls for an annual $125,000 fee for “development services” plus 10% of net revenue be paid to the for profit managers of the CMO, Harris and Chaney. This means that in 2016 Epic Oklahoma paid Epic Youth Services more than $540,000 for their services; this doesn’t include the California revenue. Ben Harris and David Chaney are becoming wealthy men. Because of aggressive marketing which even led to taking over an entire rural school district in Oklahoma and expansion in California, the 2016 $42 million in revenue probably isn’t a forth of the 2019 projected revenue.

In December, Oklahoma Watch reported, “Epic’s two leaders also outspent the political action committee for the largest teachers union, the Oklahoma Education Association, which has 35,000 members across the state.” This looks very much like a replay of Bill Lager’s Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow and his large political contributions leading to the continued fleecing of taxpayers in Ohio.

It is not in society’s interest to have children educated in isolation. Socialization is an important part of education. As Americans, we should have freedom of choice but we should not expect taxpayers to pay for those choices. If people want to home-school or put their children in private schools, that is their choice. It is more than sufficient for taxpayers to provide a world class professionally run public education system. Public money should not be transferred into private profiteering pockets.

Twitter: @tultican

Tags: Charter schools, Christianity, Comunity Strategies Inc., cyber charters, Epic Charter Schools, Epic Youth Survices, Next Generation Education, Politics, Public Schools

Comments 2 Comments
Categories DPE, education

Destroying Public Education in St. Louis

18 Apr

By T. Ultican 4/18/2019

On April 2^nd, 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

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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Barbara Anderson is a graduate of St. Louis Public Schools who taught on the elementary, middle and university levels throughout her career.
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 7^th 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.”

Tags: Charter schools, Ed-Tech, Privitization, Public education, Public School Allies, Public Schools, Rex Sinquefield, Segregation, segrenomics, Sinquefield, St. Louis, St. Louis Public Schools, Teachers, tenure, The City Fund

Comments 9 Comments
Categories DPE, education, Justice

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 8^th 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

Tags: apartheid schools, Noliwe Rooks, Public education, Public Schools, Segregation, segrenomics, vouchers

Comments 5 Comments
Categories DPE, Justice, Law

Atlanta’s Public School Board Voted for Privatization

23 Mar

3/22/2019 by T. Ultican

On March 4, the Atlanta Public School (APS) board voted 5 to 3 to begin adopting the “System of Excellent Schools.” That is Atlanta’s euphemistic name for the portfolio district model which systematically ends democratic governance of public schools. The portfolio model was a response to John Chubb’s and Terry Moe’s 1990 book, Politics, Markets, and America’s Schools, which claimed that poor academic performance was “one of the prices Americans pay for choosing to exercise direct democratic control over their schools.”

A Rand Corporation researcher named Paul Hill who founded the Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) began working out the mechanics of ending democratic control of public education. His solution to ending demon democracy – which is extremely unpopular with many billionaires – was the portfolio model of school governance.

The portfolio model directs closing schools that score in the bottom 5% on standardized testing and reopening them as charter schools or Innovation schools. In either case, the local community loses their right to hold elected leaders accountable, because the schools are removed from the school board’s portfolio. It is a plan that guarantees school churn in poor neighborhoods, venerates disruption and dismisses the value of stability and community history.

Atlanta’s Comprador Regime

Atlanta resident Ed Johnson compared what is happening in Atlanta to a “comprador regime” serving today’s neocolonialists. In the 19^th century, a comprador was a native servant doing the bidding of his European masters; the new compradors are doing the bidding of billionaires privatizing public education.

Chalkbeat reported that Atlanta is one of seven US cities The City Fund has targeted for implementation of the portfolio district governance model. The city fund was founded in 2018 by two billionaires, John Arnold the former Enron executive who did not go to prison and Reed Hastings the founder and CEO of Netflix. Neerav Kingsland, Executive Director of The City Fund, stated, “Along with the Hastings Fund and the Arnold Foundation, we’ve also received funds from the Dell Foundation, the Gates Foundation, the Walton Family Foundation, and the Ballmer Group.”

City Fund has designated RedefinED as their representative in Atlanta. Ed Chang, the Executive Director of RedefinED, is an example of the billionaire created education “reform” leader recruited initially by Teach for America (TFA).

TFA is the billionaire financed destroy-public-education (DPE) army. TFA teachers are not qualified to be in a classroom. They are new college graduates with no legitimate teacher training nor any academic study of education theory. Originally, TFA was proposed as an emergency corps of teachers for states like West Virginia who were having trouble attracting qualified professional educators. Then billionaires started financing TFA. They pushed through laws defining TFA teachers as “highly qualified” and purchased spurious research claiming TFA teachers were effective. If your child is in a TFA teacher’s classroom, they are being cheated out of a professionally delivered education. However, TFA provides the DPE billionaires a group of young ambitious people who suffer from group think bordering on cult like indoctrination.

Chang is originally from Chicago where he trained to be a physical therapist. He came south as a TFA seventh grade science teacher. Chang helped found an Atlanta charter school and through that experience received a Building Excellent Schools (BES) fellowship. BES claims to train “high-capacity individuals to take on the demanding and urgent work of leading high-achieving, college preparatory urban charter schools.”

After his subsequent charter school proposal was rejected, Chang started doing strategy work for the Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP). This led him to a yearlong Fisher Fellowship training to start and run a KIPP charter school. In 2009, he opened KIPP STRIVE Academy in Atlanta.

While complicit in stealing neighborhood public schools from Atlanta’s poorest communities, Chang says with a straight face, “Education is the civil rights movement of today.”

Ed Chang on BES

Ed Chang’s Picture from his BES Board Member Biography

Chang now has more than a decade working in billionaire financed DPE organizations. He started in TFA, had two billionaire supported “fellowships” and now has millions of dollars to use as the Executive Director of RedefinED. It is quite common for TFA alums like Chang to end up on the boards of multiple education “reform” organizations.

Under Chang’s direction, RedefinED has provided monetary support for both the fake teacher program, TFA, and the fake graduate school, Relay. In addition, they have given funds to the Georgia Charter School Association, Purpose Built Schools, Kindezi School, KIPP and Resurgence Hall.

The other obvious “Comprador” in Atlanta is APS Superintendent Meria Castarphen. A product of the prestigious Harvard Graduate School of Education where she was shaped to lead the billionaire financed privatization agenda. Unlike TFA, Harvard’s graduates are highly qualified. However, large contributions from billionaires with an agenda have corrupted the school’s intellectual honesty. The most notorious three “fauxlanthropies” working to destroy-public-education (DPE) have given generously to Harvard.

Harvard Grants

Using Philanthropy to Control Harvard – Gates – Walton – Broad

The Post “A Rotten Peach Poisoning Atlanta Public Schools” documents Castarphen’s journey from Selma, Alabama to Harvard and finally to Atlanta. At Harvard, she became an expert in using high stakes testing to hold schools and teachers accountable. Unfortunately, as is widely known, standardized testing is completely useless for evaluating schools or teachers. The only thing measured with confidence is how nice the student’s homes are.

During her first stint as a school superintendent, the people in St. Paul, Minnesota saw her as a tyrant. Half the existing administrative staff quit during her three year tenure. Executive Director of Facilities, Patrick Quinn, stated, “Meria’s confrontational style has rendered the administrative work environment toxic.”

She left St. Paul for the superintendent’s job in Austin, Texas. After five years, the Austin board did not offer her a contract renewal. She had alienated both the staff and the Hispanic community to such an extent several board members lost their seats and blamed her. In an article about Meria’s coming to Atlanta, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (AJC) quoted Austin resident Vincent Tovar, “Her corporate-reform-backed agenda didn’t fly here because we fought it, and that’s why she’s leaving.”

Castarphen’s first agenda in Atlanta was to rid the school system of its older more experienced educators and replace them with younger less expensive and more malleable teachers. She also introduced a turnaround strategy which turned APS into a charter district. It gave her more control and eliminated many teacher protections. A similar plan was rejected in Austin.

Two years ago, an announcement reminiscent of when the fox guarded the hen house appeared on the APS web-site. It reported,

“Today the Walton Family Foundation announced it will invest $2.1 million to support and evaluate the success of Atlanta Public Schools’ Turnaround Strategy. The grants will also help the district launch APS Insights, a first-of-its-kind data dashboard available this summer to share information about school options and quality with Atlanta parents.”

It is not clear that APS was in any real need of a turnaround strategy, but new data indicates the strategy has caused harm not improvement.

NEAP Data

National Assessment of Education Progress 8^th Grade Math, Reading and Change in Scale Scores

By March of 2016, the APS board approved Castarphen’s turnaround strategy and several neighborhood schools were identified for potential takeover. APS closed and merged several schools and turned five schools over to charter-related operators. Now, APS is examining all schools, not just struggling ones.

AJC reported on the new scheme,

“The result could bring autonomous ways of operating schools and possibly more closures or mergers. It could change the district’s mix of charter, partner-operated, and traditional, district-run neighborhood schools. Sixty-one of 89 APS schools now are neighborhood schools.”

“Helping APS with the planning work is Denver-based Foxhall Consulting Services, whose fees are being paid by RedefinED Atlanta, a local, charter-friendly nonprofit, according to records obtained by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution through a public records request. RedefinED agreed to give $235,000 to Atlanta Partners for Education, a nonprofit that supports the work of the school district, to pay for Foxhall’s consulting services and travel costs on behalf of the district.”

When AJC says “autonomous ways of operating” it means that local taxpayers will no longer have a vote on operating those schools. They will still get the tax bill but private companies will get the vote. The privatization scheme was compared to managing a stock portfolio by CRPE leading many people call it the “portfolio model.” In Texas, they call it the “System of Great Schools Network” and in Atlanta it is called the “System of Excellent Schools.” Whatever Orwellian name it is given; the purpose is to move public assets into private profit-making-hands.

Destroy Public Education Movement Atlanta Style

Professor Jim Scheurich and his urban studies team at Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) observed a pattern in the destruction of public education. Based on their observations, the team developed a DPE model which is described in “A Layman’s Guide to the Destroy Public Education Movement.” The destruction of Atlanta’s public education system fits that model like a print to a wood block. A few examples from the DPE model follow.

“Institute a local-national collaboration between wealthy neoliberals and other conservatives to promote school privatization and the portfolio model of school management.”

In Atlanta besides the relationship between the City Fund and RedefinED there is the relationship between the Walton Family Foundation and Atlanta Public Schools. In 2016, the billion dollar “Community Foundation of Greater Atlanta” contributed more than $14,000,000 toward school privatization including $271,000 to TFA. Falcon’s owner and Home Depot founder, Arthur M. Blank also kicked in more than a half million dollars to the privatization cause including $69,000 to TFA.

Two other big national privatization “fauxlanthropies” spent big on privatization in the Atlanta area. From 2014 to 2018, Bill Gates sent more than $52,000,000 “reform” dollars. Between 2015 and 2016, the Walton family chipped in more than $5,000,000 and that was before they partnered with APS in 2017.

“Direct large sums of money through advocacy organizations to recruit, train and finance pro-privatization school board candidates.”

Every year the Buckhead Coalition, a chamber-like, invitation-only organization of 100 CEOs, recommends and provides support for local school board candidates. At the beginning of the year, 8 of the 9 school board members had been promoted by the Coalition. In 2017, campaign contributions for school board races totaled to greater than $700,000 which is a staggering amount for a relatively modest district with just under 55,000 students.

The Community Foundation of Greater Atlanta sent $220,000 to Michelle Rhee’s Students First Institute known for putting money into local school board elections. Jason Esteves, the former TFA corps member and current President of the APS board, had a war chest of $167,000 for his reelection run in 2017. One of his maximum contributions came from Steuart Walton of Bentonville, Arkansas.

“Institute a portfolio system of school district management that includes public schools, charter schools and Innovation Schools.”

That is the whole point of the “System of Excellent Schools.”

“Hire minimally trained teachers from Teach for America (TFA) or other instant-teacher-certification programs.”

TFA claims, “After 18 years in Metro Atlanta, we have a network of more than 1,500 corps members and alumni who are making an impact across the education ecosystem.”

“Use groups like Teach Plus and TNTP to provide teacher professional development.”

The charter industry created a fake education graduate school with no professors of education. The so called Relay Graduate School of Education reported last year, “Relay will offer the Relay Teaching Residency in Atlanta, which caters to college graduates and career changers who are seeking a path into the teaching profession.”

In densely populated areas, the DPE agenda invariably is coherent with an urban renewal effort often derisively labeled “gentrification.” That is certainly the case in Atlanta. For example, Purpose Built Schools advertise, “We are a philanthropically funded organization that grew out of the holistic neighborhood transformation efforts of the East Lake Foundation, Purpose Built Communities and Charles R. Drew Charter School.” Another example is the self-declared history of the Grove Park Foundation stating they “forged a series of new partnerships with Atlanta Public Schools, KIPP, the YMCA and several arts organizations to bring an A+ school, a new YMCA facility and new housing options for all income levels to the Grove Park neighborhood.”

Final Observations

Shani Robinson’s book co-written with journalist Anna Simonton is called None of the Above: The Untold Story of the Atlanta Public Schools Cheating Scandal, Corporate Greed, and the Criminalization of Educators. Shani was a first-grade TFA teacher when she became ensnared in this grossly unjust episode. It is not that some teachers did not deserve to lose their job, but none of them deserved a prison stay for making a bad choice when confronted with horrible education policy. Some Atlanta teachers got 20-year sentences.

In a Democracy Now interview, Shani shared that 35 educators either pleaded guilty or were convicted at trial after being charged with racketeering under the RICO statutes created to bring down mobsters. Of the 35 charged, 34 were African-American and one was Filipino. At the time, the state estimated that 20% of the exams in the state of Georgia were fraudulent. There were other districts at least as guilty as APS. Furthermore, at the time, cheating was suspected in 40 US states while 15 of them were viewed as having pervasive cheating. The only teachers in America ever criminally charged and put in prison were in Atlanta.

Even more shocking, the state of Georgia knowingly used the fraudulent statewide testing results in its application for a Race To The Top grant. Georgia dishonorably won a $400,000,000 grant.

The Atlanta cheating event was used by black and white elites in Atlanta to fuel the current DPE movement and gentrification. When Robinson was asked where were Atlanta’s progressive black politicians at the time, she replied,

“Atlanta has always been known as “the city too busy to hate,” so it’s all about image. And historically, black and white elites have worked together to decrease any racial tension.”

Professionally run public education is being dismantled in Atlanta. The legacy of 200 years passed down by all our forefathers is being destroyed. Hate is not the correct response but neither is passivity. Democratically run public education is a pillar of Democracy and it is worth fighting for.

Tags: education, Gates, John Arnold, philanthropy, Politics, Public Schools, Reed Hastings, Teachers, testing, Walton Foundation

Comments 1 Comment
Categories DPE, Justice

Review and Preview Thurmond v Tuck

1 Dec

This year’s biggest election win in California was for the down-ballot office, Superintendent of Public Instruction (SPI). Tony Thurmond defeated Marshall Tuck in a proxy battle between billionaires supporting public school privatization and teachers’ unions fighting for democratically run neighborhood schools. More than $61,000,000 was spent on the SPI office doubling the previous $30,000,000 spending record set in 2014 when Tuck lost to Tom Torlakson.

Director of research at California Target Book, Rob Pyers, reported this year’s total election spending in California realized a new level. Target Book publisher Darry Sragow commented, “If blowing through the billion-dollar campaign spending ceiling in California doesn’t give pause to everyone in politics, I don’t know what will.”

Of the eight state-wide constitutional offices on the ballot, the governor’s race topped spending at $108,221,028 and the SPI race came in second totaling $61,170,451. Spending in the governor’s race was also heavily impacted by billionaires supporting the charter school industry. California has an open primary in which the top two vote getters reach the general election ballot regardless of party. Before June’s voting, billionaires lavished Anthony Villaraigosa’s campaign unprecedented independent expenditure money trying to get him to the November ballot.

Billionaires for Villaraigosa

Spending By Eight Billionaires for Villaraigosa over Newsom in 2018 Primary Election

When Villaraigosa lost badly in the June 6 primary, many of the same billionaires listed above turned their full attention toward electing Marshall Tuck SPI.

Following a brief career in investment banking, Tuck took a job at the politically connected Green Dot charter schools. Steve Barr a former chair of the Democratic Party who had served on national campaigns for Bill Clinton, Gary Hart and Michael Dukakis founded Green Dot charter schools in 1999. He hired Truck in 2002 to be Chief Operating Officer (COO) and eventually promoted him to President and COO.

When Los Angeles Mayor Anthony Villaraigosa was rebuffed in his efforts to take control of Los Angeles Unified School District, he convinced a few donors to underwrite the takeover of ten schools in areas which had suffered years of poor standardized testing results. They created a non-profit called Partnership for LA. Villaraigosa tapped Marshall Tuck to lead the Partnership.

Tuck was extremely unpopular at the Partnership. The Sacramento Bee reported, “Teachers passed a vote of no confidence at nine of the schools at the end of the first year, leading to independent mediation.”

During this education reform era in which connections are more important than skill, experience and training, Tuck remained in good standing with the Destroy Public Education (DPE) financiers. Subsequent to loosing the formerly most expensive SPI race in California’s history; Tuck’s benefactors took care of him. Despite no training as an educator, he was given a job as Educator-in-Residence at the New Teacher Center. Bill Gates provides much of the centers funding including grants totaling $26,305,252 since 2009.

Reviewing the Campaign Contributions

Direct contributions to a candidate are no longer of primary importance. The money given to “independent expenditure” committees has no contribution limits. Legally, these committees are supposed to be separate from the candidate and are not to coordinate with the candidate’s campaign; however, the committees are often doing the bidding of the same people who created the candidate.

In Tuck versus Thurmond, the direct giving only accounted for 12% of total money spent. Although the direct money spent was comparatively small, it was revealing. In this race the contribution limit was $7,300 and it could be given twice (once for the primary and once for the general). Tuck received 377 maximum contributions for a total of $2,748,500. Thurmond received 170 maximum contributions for a total of $1,234,854.

The race is generally viewed as a battle between billionaires and teachers unions, but that obscures some realities. Tuck’s maximum contributions came from 259 sources of which 257 were individuals. Thurmond’s Maximum contributions came from 129 sources of which 16 were individuals. Tuck received max contributions from 76 non-employed people, 65 financial industry employees, 39 corporate executives and 29 billionaires. Thurmond received a maximum contribution from one billionaire, Tom Steyer and two corporate executives, Stewart Resnick and Linda Ray Resnick, who also were maximum contributors for Tuck.

The groups who gave maximum contributions to Thurmond were almost all organized by labor unions. Surprisingly, much of the money came from voluntary contributions and not union dues. For example, the California State Retirees PAC, made a maximum contribution to Thurmond. The largest amount contributed to the PAC by the 1404 contributors was $15.50. Another example is The California Federation of Teachers COPE which made two max donation to Thurmond. The money came from 1326 member organizations like the San Jose Federation of Teacher Local 957 whose members made voluntary contributions totaling to $73,391.

It was the PACs who drove the election financially.

Independent Expenditures Map

Independent Expenditure Example Map of EdVoice for the Kids PAC

The LittleSis map above shows eight billionaires contributing $9,769,200 to EdVoice for the Kids PAC. Plus four of them send $2,664,600 to Charter Public Schools PAC sponsored by the California Charter Schools Association. That PAC contributes another $2,900,000 to the Ed Voice PAC. EdVoice then sends $17,953,882 to Students, Parents and Teachers Supporting Marshall Tuck which spends $22,013,408 on things like TV ads, radio spots and mailers.

The spending by the three PACs and the billionaires were verified using records provided by the Cal-access data base for major donors. The total of independent expenditures for Tuck is a conservative estimate based on multiple news reports. The independent expenditures on behalf of Tuck were more than the record setting $30,000,000 total for this contest in 2014.

Students, Parents and Teachers Supporting Marshal Tuck was a project of EdVoice. No students, teachers or parents are listed among the contributors to this PAC unless George Hume, Chairman of Basic American or investor Michael Stoppelman have children. This PAC name looked and sounded good when providing a deceptive and legally required source for political advertisements.

The opening page of EdVoice’s internet site says, “EdVoice is a nonprofit organization advocating for policies to increase measurable student achievement for all students in California and eliminate inequality of educational opportunity in public schools.” In other words, they promote using testing to label public schools failures and promote Betsy DeVos’s school choice ideology.

Bill Lucia, a connected Republican operative, is President and COO of Ed Voice. His Ed Voice biography states, “Prior to joining EdVoice, Lucia served as Senior Vice President for Advocacy and Policy, leading the advocacy and legal defense team at the California Charter Schools Association(CCSA). Before joining CCSA, Lucia worked as Senior Assessment Policy Liaison for Educational Testing Service, and prior to that, spent five years in Washington D.C. working as a senior official in the U.S. Department of Education and in the U.S. Senate.”

EdVoice is not a big money organization. In 2016, its total income was $400,136. However at least two billionaires associated with privatizing public education are board members, Eli Broad and Carrie Walton Penner. Susan Bloomfield is also on the board.

The Campaign

In March 2017, Marshall Tuck announced his candidacy for SPI. In April, Tony Thurmond announced. By the end of 2017, four candidates had joined the race with the addition of Lily Ploski and Steven Ireland.

Marshall Tuck had name recognition and solid campaign funding. By August 2017, Thurmond announced $1,000,000 in campaign contributions and early endorsements from Senator Kamala D. Harris, SPI Tom Torlakson, the California Federation of Teachers, and the State Building and Construction Trades Council of California. From that point on, the race was mainly between Tuck and Thurmond but Ploski’s and Ireland’s entry made it difficult for either Tuck or Thurmond to win 50% of the votes during the primary which would have ended the race.

When the year began, many supporters of public education were concerned because the candidate apposing Marshall Tuck was a one-term Assemblyman from Richmond, California with no name recognition. Not only that, he was a black man vulnerable to the race card. Then the Judases at the Association of California School Administrators endorsed Marshall Tuck for SPI.

That might have been the point at which Thurmond demonstrated he was a special guy. On the weekend of January 20^th he spoke at the CTA delegates meeting. He already had their endorsement since October, but in this speech the delegates met a charismatic candidate who brought them to their feet cheering. He declared “no privatization of public schools in California. Not in this state. Not on my watch.”

At the California Democratic Party convention in February, the delegates overwhelmingly endorsed Thurmond over Tuck. Much of the sentiment at that San Diego convention was that Tuck was not a real Democrat. He was seen as being awash in Republican money while espousing their policies.

When Tuck tried to speak to the convention delegates, he was booed off the stage. Amusingly, Lee Ohanian of the Hoover Institute at Stanford University wrote an article titled “David Versus Goliath: A School Reformer Takes on the Democratic Party and Unions.” Amazingly in this article Tuck is David and Thurmond is Goliath. Ohanian wrote,

“A few months ago Marshall Tuck, a Democratic candidate who is running for the state office of California Superintendent of School (sic) Instruction, went to the California Democratic Party Convention to speak to his party about how to create better K–12 education in California. He went to the podium, but didn’t get a word out. Well, he may have said “I,” but that would have been about it. He was shouted down with a chorus of boos that drowned out his voice. The boos continued until his allotted time expired. No state Democratic party (sic) official quieted the crowd. The message was clear: this particular Democratic candidate, who wishes to change the status quo, is not welcome in his party. And you thought that the Democratic party embraced diversity?”

And you thought Stanford University was a credible research institution?

Thurmond turned out to be a consistent and gifted politician who won support at almost all debates, editorial interviews and campaign events.

A San Diego Union editorial read, “In his interview with us, Assemblyman Tony Thurmond, D-Richmond, who finished second to Tuck in the June primary, seemed just as affable but not nearly as ambitious as Tuck.” In case that was too subtle; Tony is a black man.

On November 6, Thurmond became the first African American elected to statewide office in four decades.

The Preview is Looking Good

Calmatters interviewed Thurmond during the campaign.

‘“We talked to voters across the state and told them what this election means for each of us: it means giving every kid the opportunity to succeed in the 21st century, not just the ones that show the most potential,’ Thurmond said.

‘“It means funding our public schools at the level they deserve, not pouring money into our jails in prisons. It means providing mental health treatment for kids, not arming them with guns.”’

Calmatters also stated,

“Thurmond had said he favored a ‘pause’ on the growth of charters in California while the state examines the long-term impact they’ve had so far on its public education system. The assemblyman also said he supported more charter-school oversight and sympathized with school districts that had taken financial hits after losing students to charter schools.”

Politico reported on Thurmond’s first public statements since Tuck conceded.

“He called for a temporary ban on any new K-12 charter schools in the state, addressing reporters at the Sacramento union hall of the State Building & Construction Trades Council of California. He said the state has reached a ‘tipping point’ with too many charters that have financially harmed public school districts, POLITICO’s Angela Hart reports.”

‘“I believe that we shouldn’t open new schools without providing the resources for those schools,’ said Thurmond, a Democratic assemblyman. ‘It is time to have perhaps a pause on the opening of new schools until we get clear about how we will fund any new schools.”’

“While charter school advocates believe their programs can force positive changes in traditional campuses, Thurmond took issue with the notion of ‘competition,’ which he framed in a negative light.”

‘“The truth of the matter is you cannot open new schools — charter or otherwise — and serve all the students in this state,” he said. “So if the model is built on saying let’s have competition in education, then you’re certainly leaving certain students to suffer and to not have the resources they need.”’

Tags: Alice Walton, California Charter Schools Association, Campaign Spending, Carrie Walton Penner, CTA, EdVoice, Eli Broad, James Walton, Politics, Public Schools, Reed Hastings, teachers unions

Comments 3 Comments
Categories DPE, education

NPE Indianapolis: “We Are Winning!”

29 Oct

By Thomas Ultican 10/29/2018

Diane Ravitch opened the fifth Network for Public Education (NPE) conference stating, “We are the resistance and we are winning!” She noted that “reformers” were envious of our domination of social media. When they hired mercenaries to staff their own multimillion dollar web-publications to counter us; they failed. We still dominate social media.

Ravitch listed a long string of victories including:

Leonie Haimson and her Class Sizes Matters organization successfully fought Bill Gates’ $100,000,000 Inbloom data base project that would have abrogated the privacy rights of countless children and their parents.

Jitu Brown led a thirty-two day hunger strike that saved the Walter Dyett high school, the only open enrollment high school in the Bronzeville community of Chicago.

Charter school growth has slowed significantly. Without the literally billions of dollars from “fauxlanthropists” and the federal government these often corrupt private businesses would have gone the way of the Edsel.

Diane concluded, “We’re winning. David is beating Goliath.”

Ravitch then introduced the famed Finish educator, Pasi Sahlberg, who coined the apt acronym for the worldwide school privatization phenomena by calling it the Global Education Reform Movement (GERM). Sahlberg began with stressing that what happens in the United States is extremely important because what we do here affects the rest of the world. He said, “You are making progress. The global situation is getting better.”

Pasi Sahlberg has served at the World Bank in Washington, DC , the European Commission in Italy and acted as an external expert to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) advising governments in more than 50 countries. He is a former Director General at Finland’s Ministry of Education and a Visiting professor of Practice at Harvard Graduate School of Education. He also chairs the Open Society Foundation’s Education Board and is a member of the Governing board of the University of Oulu, the Centre on International Education Benchmarking and the International Council of Education Advisors (ICEA) for the Scottish Government . He is currently working in Australia as a Professor of Education Policy at the University of New South Wales in Sidney.

Pasi slide

Pasi’s Slide Demarking Bad Education Policy and Good Education Policy

Professor Sahlberg’s presentation dealt with the negative effects being observed throughout the planet due to implementation of “GERM” policies. He shared several data sets including one implicating “GERM” initiatives in the degradation of student mental health. The following slide shows a correlation between screen time pushed by captains of technology industries such as Mark Zuckerberg and student mental health.

Pasi Screen Time Slide

Slide Shows Correlation Between Screen-time and Mental Health

He also shared some surprising conclusions from education researchers at the World Band and the (OECD).

“School choice advocates often argue that the introduction of market mechanisms in education allows equal access to high quality schooling for all…However evidence does not support these perceptions, as choice and associated market mechanisms can enhance segregation.” –OECD, 2012

“There is no consistent evidence that private schools deliver better learning outcomes than public schools. Numerous risks, such as the exclusion of disadvantaged or less able or desirable students, social segregation, exploitation of families for profit and the undermining of public education [exist].” –World Bank, 2017

Pasi ended his presentation on a similar note to Diane’s. He listed off places around the world where “GERM” is being reversed:

Sweden is in the process of reversing the unexpectedly sad results of their 1990’s decision to embrace school privatization.

Chile (the first victim of “GERM”) is “abolishing school selection, banning for-profit schools and investing in the teaching profession.”

Scotland is embracing a whole-child curriculum that focuses on equity and strengthening the role of play in the lower grades.

Liberia is now resisting privatization by for-profit foreign operators and the de-professionalizing of education.

Australia is reviewing the value of NAPLAN their standardized testing program. They are focusing on equity, well-being and early childhood education.

Singapore is mandating less testing, less student rankings, and more whole-child education.

New Zealand is removing national education standards, adopting less testing, abolishing charter schools, and encouraging more teacher and student voices. The new government won office by campaigning on a public education platform opposed to standards, testing and privatization.

Professor Sahlberg concluded by saying, “The problem is not completely solved but we are moving in the right direction.”

SOS Arizona the First Recipients of the Phyllis Bush Award

This year, NPE established a new award for community activism and named it after founding board member Phyllis Bush. The new to be annual award went to Save Our Schools Arizona. Two passionate women from Arizona, Beth Lewis and Sharon Kirsch received the award for SOS Arizona which stopped David and Charles Koch’s plan to massively expand vouchers in Arizona.

SOS Arizona Grass Roots Award

Sharon Kirsch and Beth Lewis Receive the Phyllis Bush Award for SOS Arizona from Phyllis Bush – Photo by Anthony Cody

After being ignored by state legislators who passed the Koch brother’s voucher law, they were demoralized. When Governor Doug Ducey dutifully signed the law, Beth and SOS Arizona decided to fight. They ignored all advice and precedence by staging an unlikely referendum signature drive. SOS Arizona surprised the professionals by running a successful campaign forcing the voucher law to the ballot which under Arizona law put it on hold.

Immediately, the Koch brothers set up a legal challenge and the SOS Arizona team had to fund raise to hire legal representation. After fighting and winning all the way to the state supreme court, SOS Arizona prevailed and the fate of the voucher law will be decided by the state’s voters on November 6.

Machine Learning and Data Mining Two Trojan Horses from the Technology Industry

Machine Learning

This Expert Panel Delivered a Powerful Message on Tech Inspired Student Harm

Leonie Haimson, who has a long successful history of working to protect student privacy, said a key understanding is that nothing is free. When a technology company provides software, computers, tablets or any other tech product for free, they expect something back – data. And even if you trust company “Z” to respect your privacy, it is likely that the data collected at schools will be stolen if not sold.

Audrey Watters apprised about the history of education technology, teaching machines and the failure of tech companies to come anywhere close to meeting their predictions. She shared, “Thomas Edison famously predicted in 1922, for example, ‘I believe that the motion picture is destined to revolutionize our educational system and that in a few years it will supplant largely, if not entirely, the use of textbooks.”’

Audrey defined artificial intelligence (AI) as little more than predictive algorithms based on statistics. She gave two reasons parent and teachers should resist “personalized learning” and the oversold AI. First, the software is proprietary which means we only see the inputs and outputs but not the decision making process. Second she asserted,

“Algorithms are biased, in part, because they’re built with data that’s biased, data taken from existing institutions and practices that are biased. They’re built by people who are biased. (Bless your hearts, white men, who think you are the rational objective ones and the rest of us just play ‘identity politics.’)”

Peter Greene reinforced Audrey’s claims about AI being yet one more over-hyped product from the technology industry which comes with peril for students. He said it is as if somebody walked into your classroom and said these three students belong in the advanced class and those three should be moved to the remedial class but will not tell you how they know. You would not listen to them and you certainly should not be run by a black box with a secret algorithm.

Little Sis the Antidote for Big Brother

Grading the States

NPE in cooperation with the Schott Foundation recently published Grading the States. The breakout session on that topic became more of an advanced seminar in researching tax documents and coalitions of groups working to privatize public education.

Schneider described how non-profit organization must file tax forms that detail their giving called a form 990. Mercedes also explained that there is also a form 990 PF and if that is the form filed, the filer must also list contributions to the private foundation. Gates and Walton file form 990 PF.

Gabor explained how to find these forms. She said she prefers the Foundation Center for her personal searches. Andrea noted that finding some foundations can be difficult and that it is often better to use less information in a search when the common foundation name yields no results.

Andrea Gabor’s latest book is called After the Education Wars: How Smart Schools Upend the Business of Reform.

Darcie Cimarusti did a lot of the research for the new report, Hijacked by Billionaires: How the Super Rich Buy Elections to Undermine Public Schools. She shared her use of LittleSis in doing that research. It is a free database detailing the connections between powerful people and organizations. Who do the wealthiest Americans donate their money to? Where did White House officials work before they were appointed? Which lobbyists are married to politicians, and who do they lobby for?

One form of data presentation from LittleSis is mapped connections. The screen grab below is of a map created by Darcie showing the moneyed connection around the 2017 LA school board election. On LittleSis, all of the shown paths are rollovers or links to data. For example, the link from Reed Hastings to the California Charter Schools Association (CCSA) reveals $8,520,500 going to their independent expenditures committee.

LittleSis Map by Darci

Darcie’s Map of Billionaire Donations to the CCSA Independent Expenditure Committee

NPE’s Diverse Environment is Manifesting Youthful Leaders

Jitu Brown is National Director of the Journey for Justice (J4J), an alliance of grassroots groups fighting against privatization and for sustainable community schools in over 28 cities including Atlanta, Baltimore, Birmingham, Boston, Chicago, Dayton, Denver, Detroit, Eupora and Kilmichael Mississippi, Los Angeles, Newark, Patterson, Camden, Jersey City, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, New Orleans, New York City, Brooklyn, Oakland, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Wichita and Johannesburg, South Africa!

This year Jitu and J4J came with a message:

“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. Only by organizing locally and coming together nationally will we build the power we need to change local, state, and federal policy and win back our public schools.”

J4J introduced their #WeChoose campaign which has seven pillars:

A moratorium on school privatization.
The creation of 10,000 community schools.
End zero tolerance policies in public schools now. (Supports restorative justice)
Conduct a national equity assessment.
Stop the attack on black teachers. (In 9 major cities impacted by school privatization there has been a rapid decline in the number of black teachers.)
End state takeovers, appointed school boards and mayoral control.
Eliminate the over-reliance on standardized tests in public schools.

For a real treat check out this video of Jitu Brown leading the NPE conference in a chant he learned from a high school student in Chicago.

Jitu Brown introduced Sunday morning’s keynote speaker, Jesse Hagopian, a youthful teacher leader from Seattle, Washington. Jitu declared, “Jesse is a freedom fighter who happens to be a teacher.”

Jesse’s address was called “Black Lives Matter at School.” He reported that Black Lives Matter at School Week was observed by 20 cities in 2017 and that he hoped to further expand the movement. Hagopian listed three demands: (1) End zero tolerance discipline and replace it with restorative justice; (2) Hire more black teachers (he noted there are 26,000 less black teachers since 2010) and (3) Teach ethnic studies including black history.

Saturday evening’s keynote speaker was Helen Gym, a city council member from Philadelphia whose political career was launched by fighting the horrible attack on public education in her city. Helen is a small person of Korean decent but she has giant courage and is an impassioned orator. Her address to the conference was titled “Victories for Public Ed in Philly.” Thanks to Helen and her friends, the seventeen-year long state takeover of Philadelphia’s public schools has ended. They now have a school board. Helen’s basic message was “we only get what we are organized to take.”

New Leaders

Sampling of a Youthful Wave of Education Champions at #NPE18Indy

The NAACP was in the House

The conference ended with an address by Derrick Johnson, President of the NAACP. Derrick grew up in pre-DeVosian Detroit, which meant he attended authentic high quality public schools. He now lives in Jackson, Mississippi with his wife and children.

Derrick Johnson, President of NAACP, Speaking at #NPE18Indy – Photo by Anthony Cody

Derrick said the NAACP was not opposed to charter schools, but is calling for a moratorium until there is transparency in their operations and uniformity in terms of requirements. He said NAACP conducted an in depth national study of charter schools and found a wide range of problems that needed to be fixed before the experiment is continued.

Johnson has been quoted saying “For the NAACP, we have been far more aggressive toward bad public schools then we’ve ever been against charter schools.” He said “We believe the same [accountability] for public schools should apply to charter schools.”

When Jesse Hagopian asked Mr. Johnson about how best to promote Black Lives Matter at School. He responded positively to Hagopian but did add a note of caution saying it was extremely important that the movement be inclusionary.

A Personal Perspective

Almost four years ago, I attended my first NPE conference in Chicago. I was very motivated by what I saw and heard, however, I did have a concern. It seemed like the movement was dominated by older white teachers like me, who were approaching retirement age. I thought that did not bode well for the future of our movement to save quality public education.

This year the conference was even more motivational with a big positive difference. A large wave of diverse youthful professionals have taken leadership. The future looks very bright with so many brilliant young people who are growing their expertise in research and organizing. These youthful leaders are determined to save our public schools. They are standing up for a social good that is not related to Mammonism or self promotion. They are the resistance that is winning.

For me personally, I had the opportunity to cultivate deeper friendships with the many wonderfully individuals who I first met at NPE Chicago. That included once again speaking with my personal heroine and friend, Diane Ravitch. Diane and I were even able to take our fourth annual picture.

Diane and I B

Diane Ravitch and Tom Ultican at #NPE18Indy – photo from Diane’s phone

Tags: #NPE18Indy, Bill Gates, education, NPE, Philadelphia, philanthropy, Politics, Public Schools, Standards, testing

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Categories education, Justice

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