Tag Archives: Tony Thurmond

Hired Guns, Scholars and the California School Policy Task Force

15 Jun

By T. Ultican 6/15/2019

California Governor Gavin Newsom created a task force and assigned the State Superintendent of Public Instruction (SSPI), Tony Thurmond, to lead a review of California charter school laws and policies.  The Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) produced three policy briefs and CRPE founder Paul Hill testified to the task force as an expert witness “sympathetic to charter schools.” The author of “Breaking Point,” Gordon Lafer also provided expert testimony.

Rutgers Professor Bruce Baker reviewed Hill’s claims which were published in three CRPE policy briefs created for the taskforce. Spoiler alert: He found them deceptive.

Thurmond released “The Charter School Policy Task Force” report to the Governor on June 6.

The claims by these scholars and political actions coming from the task force have the potential to influence the spending of hundreds of millions of dollars in public monies by California and billions in spending by the federal government.

The Charter School Policy Task Force (CTF)

The task force was made up of eleven members. Since 90% of the California’s students attend public schools and because the charter industry spent more than $50 million to defeat SSPI Thurmond in 2018, many people expected supporters of public schools to dominate the task force. But that was not the case. Jan Resseger observed,

“It is one of those groups carefully balanced to provide a forum for both sides of what has become a contentious debate about whether or not there ought to be a charter school sector.  Actually whoever recommended the appointments seem to have accepted the idea that the fight is between unions and charter schools—an assumption I believe is wrong, because the debate is not limited to the fact that fewer teachers in charter schools belong to teachers unions.”

Others like Diane Ravitch saw the committee in terms of the charter school industry versus public schools. She wrote, “By my count, six members of the 11-member panel are directly connected to the charter industry, including two from the lobbying organization CCSA.” A seventh member of the eleven member task force also appears to be biased toward privatization. The seven pro-privatization members were:

  1. Cristina de Jesus, president and chief executive officer, Green Dot Public Schools California. This was the same charter system failed SSPI candidate Marshall Tuck previously led.
  2. Margaret Fortune, California Charter Schools Association board chair; Fortune School of Education, president & CEO.
  3. Lester Garcia, political director, SEIU Local 99. Closely associated with Eli Broad. Most recently they took $100,000 from Broad to oppose Jackie Goldberg for LA Unified School District Board.
  4. Beth Hunkapiller, educator and administrator, Aspire Public Schools. A charter school chain.
  5. Ed Manansala, superintendent, El Dorado County and board president, California County Superintendents Educational Services Association. Diane Ravitch reported, “… Ed Manansala was principal and superintendent of Kevin Johnson’s St. Hope Academy Charter High School in Sacramento before he became County Superintendent in El Dorado.” His El Dorado County Office set up a Special Education Local Plan Area (SELPA) specifically to service students with disabilities in charter schools and wooed charter students away from their local districts.
  6. Gina Plate, vice president of special education, California Charter Schools Association.
  7. Edgar Zazueta, senior director, policy & governmental relations, Association of California School Administrators. During the last election cycle his organization endorsed former charter school executive Marshall Tuck for SSPI.

The other four members – which also included the only two members with classroom teaching experience – were:

  1. Dolores Duran, California School Employees Association.
  2. Alia Griffing, political director, American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) Council 57.
  3. Cindy Marten, superintendent, San Diego Unified School District. (A former teacher)
  4. Erika Jones, board of directors, California Teachers Association. (A current teacher serving on the union board)

The immediate response to this committee was anger directed at SSPI Thurmond for the task force makeup. Capital and Main reported, “No sooner did author-academic Diane Ravitch expose this month the charter leanings of Governor Gavin Newsom’s task force studying the fiscal impacts of charters than California schools superintendent and panel chair Tony Thurmond found a Twitter blowtorch pointed his way.” My tweet was part of that blowtorch.

My Taskforce Tweet

A few days later on March 14, Diane Ravitch posted,

“I received an email from a reader in California whose credentials are impeccable, who has a direct tie inside the Governor’s office. This person told me that the committee was selected by Governor Gavin Newsom, not by Tony Thurmond.”

It is not likely that Newsom personally selected the committee members. It is highly probable that Newsom’s new Chief of Staff, Ann O’Leary, a former advisor to Hilary Clinton, selected them. A Fortune magazine biography of O’Leary noted,

“O’Leary is a diehard policy wonk, especially keen on anything that affects families or education. As Clinton’s Senate aide in 2001, she was at the center of No Child Left Behind—a once popular education initiative that has since soured in the public mind. ‘It was a really important moment,’ she says of the law, which Ted Kennedy crafted and George W. Bush signed. ‘When you look back at what happened, this was serious, bipartisan, constructive work. We were committed to high standards and helping states get there.”’

Ann OLeary

Ann O’Leary – Policy Runner Blog Mount Holyoake College 2016

O’Leary appears to be a heartfelt social liberal who had a key voice in promoting gay rights and paid maternity leave. However, besides her history with NCLB, she supports Common Core State Standards and says they were developed by state governors. She believes in standards based testing and supports privatizing public education with charter schools. She is a neoliberal from the Clinton wing of the Democratic Party. Her professional position and past actions provide strong evidence that she selected the members of the task force.

The CTF Work Product

To begin their work, the CTF received a series of reports on charter schools and their impacts from a variety of sources. Thurmond called this “an attempt to provide some level setting for members to establish a baseline of understanding and knowledge.” Once “level setting” was complete the CTF began brainstorming policy reform proposals. The task force was able to reach consensus on four proposals, reported majority voting support for seven proposals and two proposals did not receive majority support.

Proposals not receiving majority support reflect the impact of giving the charter industry a majority position on the task force.

A California law (Education Code 47605 [b]) states, “the governing board of the school district shall grant a charter for the operation of a school if it is satisfied that granting the charter is consistent with sound educational practice.” Because of the word “shall,” if the proposal is educationally sound few other considerations are relevant and the charter must be granted. The proposal was to replace the word “shall” with “may.” This change could add to the difficulty in obtaining a charter especially in districts already impacted by charters, therefore it failed. SSPI Thurmond wrote, “The proposal to change from ‘shall’ to ‘may’ failed by the narrowest of votes, with the majority position opposing the change.”

A managed growth plan that would control growth in highly impacted districts like Los Angeles, San Diego and Oakland did not make it to a vote. Thurmond reported, “CTF members were invited to provide an alternative set of caveats for a managed growth plan, however CTF members could not agree on the conditions for limiting growth.”

Current charter school law requires using Academic Performance Index (API) testing data to determine whether a charter school has met the academic testing criteria for renewal. A proposal to update the charter law to reflect that API is no longer used got majority support but not consensus. Why?

There was majority support for ending charter denial appeals to the state, limiting appeals to the county to errors by the district, prohibiting authorization of charters outside district boundaries, allowing fiscal impact to be considered in charter authorization and developing clearer authorization guidelines.

There was consensus agreement that the state department of education should not supervise charters and that school saturation, academic outcomes and statements of need should be part of the authorizing process. There was also consensus that districts losing students to charter schools should receive the same hold harmless provisions a district receives when a student moves out of the area. This $100,000,000 proposal would help mitigate some of the losses districts face when charters are expanding in their area.

The other two consensus proposals add thirty days to the time a district has to respond to a charter petition and create statewide authorizer standards and training.

Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) is a Propaganda Mill

Scholar, Bruce Baker reviewed the three policy briefs by CRPE for the National Education Policy Center at the University of Colorado. His paper “Costs, Benefits, and Impact on School Districts (Center on Reinventing Public Education, May 2019)” begins,

“The Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE), based at the University of Washington, Bothell, recently released a series of three policy briefs on the financial impact of charter schools on nearby school districts in California. The briefs arrive at a time when a Task Force convened by California Gov. Gavin Newsom is deliberating on these exact matters. CRPE’s founder, Paul Hill, was a key source of testimony to the task force, serving as an expert viewed as ‘sympathetic to charter schools.”’

John Chubb’s and Terry Moe’s 1990 book, Politics, Markets, and America’s Schools, claimed that poor academic performance was “one of the prices Americans pay for choosing to exercise direct democratic control over their schools.”

Responding to Chubb and Moe, Rand Corporation researcher Paul Hill founded the Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) and began working out the mechanics of ending democratic control of public education. His solution 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.

In July of 2018, former Enron trader, John Arnold, joined forces with San Francisco billionaire Netflix CEO, Reed Hastings. They each pledged $100,000,000 to a new non-profit dedicated to selling the portfolio model of school governance. They call it City Fund. Gates and Dell have also contributed to City Fund.

Little-Sis-Map-of-Reorganization

Big Money Flowing to the Portfolio Model and Public School Privatization (Map here)

Hill’s presentation to the CTF had little to do with scholarly research and everything to do with promoting the privatization of public education. In his review, Professor Baker goes into a detailed refutation of the CRPE assertions. He concludes,

“The first brief is misleading in its assertion that charter enrollment growth is not to blame for district enrollment decline. It is, and has been for some time, whether in districts with declining, stable or growing overall student enrollments. The brief also attempts to minimize the import of the considerable role played by charters in districts’ enrollment loss, offering up the non sequitur that enrollment loss can arise from other sources as well. The second brief relies on overly simplistic comparisons of charter enrollments and county-assigned “fiscal distress” classifications to conclude that there is no association between charter enrollments and fiscal distress. The contention here is that there can’t be an illness if the patient isn’t dead. In order to rely on this problematic approach, the brief erroneously dismisses a significant, more rigorous, detailed, peer-reviewed and published body of research that illustrates the fiscal impact of charter schools on host districts, and how those fiscal impacts may lead to fiscal stress. The third brief, which presents itself as an analysis of costs and benefits, merely touts the benefits of charter schooling as tangible while being entirely dismissive of numerous known and often measurable costs. Taken together, the briefs are useful only in pointing to some important issues that policymakers should consider; their analyses of those issues are, however, generally superficial and misleading.” (emphasis added)

CRPE Graphic

CRPE Graph Showing Fiscal Distress Decreased as Charter Enrollment Increased

Baker’s amusing analysis of this proof that charter schools are not causing fiscals distress says,

“Of course, what Figure 2 actually shows is that the recessionary period from 2008 through about 2013 resulted in a dramatic increase in districts in fiscal distress, which has subsided during the recovery period, swamping any noticeable effects of charter growth and making it impossible to draw any conclusions regarding charter enrollment impact from this broad descriptive data.”

“It’s also true, however, that between 1960 and 2000, the rate of cigarette smoking among women declined by about 30%, while during the same time period, the rate of death from lung cancer increased more than 50%. Should we logically conclude that stopping smoking causes lung cancer? Or might there be other factors at play?”

It seems clear that CRPE is not producing scholarly information. They are simply creating propaganda to sell the billionaire financed positions.

Some Charter School Reform Proposals

After 25-years, it is obvious that the charter school experiment is a failure. Charter schools have been a net harm to public education in America. There has been almost no innovation coming from the charter school sector with the exception of regressive practices such as “no excuses” discipline policies. It is a sector that is rife with profiteering, fraud and abuse. The best charter schools merely match the better public schools and on average charters do worse on testing than public schools.

The charter system adds a layer of inefficiency to public education and creates division in communities. As Peter Greene wrote again yesterday in his blog Curmudgucation,

“The problem here, as with several other choice-related issues, is in a false premise of modern school choice movement. That false premise is the assertion that we can fund multiple school districts for the same money we used to use to fund one single public system.

“This is transparent baloney.”

Charter school reform proposal 1: A complete and permanent moratorium on new charter schools.

Charter school reform proposal 2: Role all existing charter schools that choose not to become private schools into the school district within which they reside.

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Editorial Demands “DPE” Operative Leads California’s Schools

6 Oct

A recent editorial in the San Diego Union called for electing a former banker and charter school chief as Secretary of Public Instruction (SPI). Following a familiar destroy public education (DPE) script; the editor creates a false crisis as the predicate for an urgent need to elect charter school executive, Marshall Tuck, over California State Assemblyman, Tony Thurmond.

Another Phony Baloney Education Crisis

The piece opens by stating,

“The 21st century has been a transformative time in public education. While most educators were disappointed with the mixed results of the 2002 federal law that linked aid to improving test scores — the No Child Left Behind Act — some states have seen dramatic progress. In union strongholds like Massachusetts and New Jersey, and in nonunion states like Florida and Texas, reforms that emphasize accountability from students, parents, teachers and administrators alike — and that use evidence-based best practices to standardize and improve teaching tactics — have boosted student achievement. These four states’ 2017 scores in the massive National Assessment of Educational Progress confirm this success.”

Stunningly a group that cheered on the federal take-over of public education by the No Child Left Behind ACT (NCLB) admits the results were “mixed.”  “Mixed” is a soft way of characterizing the abject and destructive failure that was NCLB. The editor implies that NCLB theory actually worked when citing the use of “evidence-based best practices to standardize and improve teaching tactics” as the reason for improved scores by the good schools on National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) testing.

The writer informs us that California, instead of following the example of these four exemplary states instituted the mistaken Local Control Funding Formula and asserts,

“It came as no surprise when a thorough review by CALmatters last year found little evidence of improved academic performance after $31 billion in funding had been pumped into schools with high numbers of struggling students.”

“This history shows the urgency of electing Marshall Tuck as the next state superintendent of public instruction.”

Testing data has a long history of misuse. Thirty-five years ago the Regan administration published “A Nation at Risk” which was not an independently refereed paper. Rather it was a polemic that kicked off the “DPE” movement. If it had been refereed, the course of public education reform probably would have taken a different path. One of the key indicators used to prove that American schools were failing was the declining scores on SAT exams. This year Anya Kamenetz reporting for National Public Radio observed,

“In the early 1960s, college-going was still rare. It was mostly top students, largely well-off white males, who took standardized tests like the SAT and applied to college.”

Kamenetz agreed that the SAT scoring averages were indeed falling but speculated that it was the result of the robustly expanded test taking base. She also reported on the all but ignored review of American education testing data done by engineers at the Sandia National Laboratories. Their analysis refuted the “A Nation at Risk” claims. ‘”To our surprise, on nearly every measure, we found steady or slightly improving trends,’ one of the authors, Robert Huelskamp, later wrote.”

To test the San Diego Unions damning claims against California’s public schools, eighth grade math results from NAEP testing are compared.

NAEP Data 8th Math

NAEP 8th Grade Math Data with Percentage of English Language Learners

In 1998, an Australian, Noel Wilson, published his dissertation “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error.” His work that has never been refuted basically says that error in standardized testing is too large to reliably compare student outcomes. Another major strike against standardized testing is called Campbell’s Law. Psychologist Donald Campbell observed, “The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.”

Even with knowledge of the above, it is still interesting that between 2013 and 2017 only California did not see a decline in math results. That is the exact time period which the San Diego Union indicated that California’s schools were in decline because of the new funding formula. It is true that California’s scores are lower than the four states cited as exemplary, but it does not take much digging to find a compelling explanation.

It is well known that English language learners (ELL) score significantly lower on standardized testing. The federal data cited on the chart above shows how much larger the ELL population in California is than in any other state. Texas has the country’s 2nd largest ELL population at 16.8% but that is significantly less than California’s 21% ELL.

This year Education Week did a report on K-12 spending per student in the fifty states: California $9,417; Florida $9,737; Massachusetts $14,569; New Jersey $16,337 and Texas $8,485. In the Public Interest reports California is America’s 41st ranked state in per student spending.

The Brown administration pushed through a change in some of how schools are financed called the Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF). The state education bureaucracy used to dictate how moneys for programs like language learner support was spent. The LCFF gives local districts and counties control over how that money is spent and prescribes how their spending plan must be generated through an open process that includes parents, teachers and administrators. LCFF did not – as the editor said – pump $31 billion new dollars into schools; it changed how those dollars are administered.

The editorial calls for the more authoritarian top down approach to administration than the democratically designed LCFF scheme. The CALmatters report referred to is from a new non-partisan newsgroup out of Sacramento. There report actually said,

“Two years after the state adopted the new funding formula, it created new tests for measuring student performance. Experts say it’s too early to draw sweeping conclusions from the new test scores in 2015 and 2016, but they are still troubled that the early results show little improvement for the neediest students and, in many cases, a widening achievement gap.”

Billionaires Spending Big on Tuck

Tuck Direct Contributions

A Few of Tuck’s 327 Maximum Direct Contributors ID#1395234

The Waltons control Walmart and have been spending heavily to privatize public schools for more than three decades.

Bill Bloomfield is a rich guy from LA who has also poured $7,000,000 into independent expenditures for Tuck.

The Rogers family is the main local force behind the privatization of Oakland’s school system.   

Doris Fisher founded The Gap with her husband Don. They have spent extensively promoting charter schools and were the first significant benefactors for the KIPP franchise.

Eli Broad is the only person to found two fortune 500 companies. He announced plans to charterize half of Los Angeles’s schools and published a guide for closing public schools.

John Scully was the former CEO of Apple and consistently supports school privatization.

David Horowitz is a Republican activist who gained notoriety for his anti-affirmative action campaign.

Author Rock is Silicon Valley royalty who spends lavishly to support school privatization.

Peter Chernin was COO of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. He is also a movie producer of some note.

Reed Hastings is possibly the most dedicated destroy public education billionaire. He sat on the board of the California Charter Schools Association for many years.

Richard Riordan is the billionaire former Mayor of Los Angeles who spends millions on public school privatization.

John Arnold is the ex-Enron executive who did not go to jail. He and Reed Hastings have each invested $100 million in a new national school privatizing organization called The City Fund.

Jonathan Sackler is the heir to the billionaire inventors of Oxycontin. Besides selling addictive drugs, Jonathan invests in the privatization of America’s schools.

Les Biller is a former CEO of Wells Fargo bank. He and his wife have a foundation in Seattle, Washington where they give heavily to charter schools.

Julian Roberson Jr. is a hedge fund manager in Chicago who thinks California really needs Marshal Tuck.

Stacy Schusterman is an energy industry heir from Tulsa, Oklahoma. She has been particularly active in California school board elections.

Michael Bloomberg is the billionaire former New York mayor who spawned Joel Klein, Eva Moskowitz and Michelle Rhee. He spends heavily on California school board elections.

The big money is not in direct contributions like those listed above. It is in the money for independent expenditure committees that do not have contribution limits. For example, the Ed Voice for the Kids Pac has already reported spending over $13,000,000 in support of Tuck (Id 1243091). There are many more of these PACs spending money to elect Tuck such as Education Reform Now Advocacy for Tuck and Charter Public Schools Political Action Committee.

PAC Money and Other Contributions Effecting Legislation

The teaching profession has historically always been vulnerable to political attack and intrigue. During my first year teaching, I experienced the effect of not having job protection. The daughter of a locally influential family lost her teaching position at another school. My principal took my position away and gave it to her. It was not because I was doing a poor job. In fact, he offered me a contract the next fall. Removing teacher job protections will make the profession even less desirable than it is now; it will undermine professionalism among educators and harm schools.

The union editorial criticized Thurman writing, “And his actions in July 2017 — when he openly sabotaged an effort by Assemblywoman Shirley Weber, D-San Diego, to improve teacher tenure laws — showed that his loyalties, as with Torlakson, are more with the adult employees of schools than with students.”

Weber receives significant campaign money from the DPE movement. Ed Voice for the Kids Pac has given her $6,700. Doris Fisher has contributed $4,400. John Scully has given $6,000. Reed Hastings has given her $2,000. The California Charter Schools Association has contributed $6,000. The Charter Public Schools Pac kicked in $1,000. The Charter Schools Pac gave $3,300. “DPE” forces have contributed a total of $29,400 to Weber’s 2018 campaign (Id 1393376).

Weber introduced a bill to extend the probationary period for teachers from two to three years and strip them of due process rights. Taking away teacher protections has been a constant theme of the school privatization advocates. Thurmond countered Weber’s bill by introducing a similar bill that extended the probationary period but did not strip teachers of due process. The editor’s claim that professional educators only care about adults comes from upside-down world. The San Diego Union does not want teachers to have job protections equal to permanent employees at National Steel and Ship Building Company.

Dog-Whistles and Triumph Versus a Record of Failure

Candidates

Tony Thurmond was born in Monterey, California. His father was stationed at the Fort Ord Army base. Tony’s father abandoned his family of four children. Thurmond’s Panamanian immigrant mother became a school teacher and moved the family to San Jose.

Tragedy struck six-years-old Tony when his mother died of cancer. Tony and a brother moved to Philadelphia where they were raised by a cousin.

After graduating from high school in Philadelphia, Tony matriculated to Temple University where he was elected student body president and received a BA in psychology. He attended graduate school at Bryn Mawr earning a dual masters in Law and Social Policy and Social work.

The most disgusting statement in the 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.

After rising above his traumatic childhood and becoming educated, Tony married and returned to California in 1998. For the 20 years preceding his election to the California State Assembly, Thurmond served in various positions at non-profit social service agencies. Tony says it was his public school education that helped him become at 20-year social worker and serve on a school board, a city council and now the California State Assembly.

Tony has two daughters in public school.

Marshall Tuck received an MBA from Harvard University in 2000 and a BA in Political Science from University of California Los Angeles in 1995. He grew up in the San Francisco Bay area and has a wife and son.

He spent some time as a consultant at Mitt Romney’s Bain & Co. He was an investment analyst at the Upper Manhattan Empowerment Zone. He moved to Los Angeles to work at Salomon Brothers as an investment banker focused on both mergers and acquisitions. After a brief stint in sales for a Software company, in 2002, Tuck was hired by Green Dot Charter Schools as Chief Operating Officer.

In 2007, Los Angeles Mayor Anthony Villaraigosa had been rebuffed in his efforts to take control of Los Angeles Unified School District. He did convince a few donors to underwrite the takeover of a small number of schools in areas which had suffered years of poor standardized test results. They created a non-profit called Partnership for LA and Villaraigosa tapped Marshall Tuck to lead the Partnership.

Tuck had by then become the CEO of Green Dot. The year he left for the Partnership, Green Dot schools posted nine of the fifty lowest SAT scores among Los Angeles schools.

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.” An online education news paper in Los Angeles, School Matters, reported,  “Many of us hoped that when right-wing business banker Marshall Tuck was ignominiously forced to step down as the ‘CEO’ of the Partnership for Los Angeles Schools (PLAS), that we might have heard the last of Tuck altogether.”

Tuck’s authoritarianism and lack of education background has led to serial failures, however, those forces trying to privatize California’s public schools find his style to their liking.

In 2014, when Tuck lost the most expensive SPI race in California’s history, his allies were there to take care of him. Even though he has no training as an educator, he was made Educator-in-Residence at the New Teacher Center (NTC). Bill Gates has granted NTC $26,305,252 since 2009.

This Contest is Very Important If You Value American Democracy

Marshall Tuck is the representative of the Destroy Public Education billionaires who are spending massive amounts of money to get him elected. It is widely understood that elected school boards are the soil from which American democratic government rejuvenates itself. Dark “DPE” forces are undermining democracy in this country by destroying the people’s 200-years-old public education system. They must be stopped.

 

 

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The Association of California School Administrators (ACSA) Back-Stabs Public Education

26 Jan

ACSA endorsed a candidate for California State Superintendent of Public Instruction who actively works to privatize public schools. As a participant in the Destroy Public Education (DPE) movement, he supports initiatives undermining the teaching profession and good pedagogy.

Established in 1971 to advance the cause of public education, the ACSA has joined ranks with groups working to end taxpayer supported universal public education. The endorsement of Marshall Tuck over Tony Thurmond for Superintendent makes this clear.

Tuck and Thurmond are both Democrats. Thurmond is a progressive and Tuck is a neoliberal. The California Teachers Association (CTA) endorses Thurmond as do a long list of elected officials and organizations including Senator Kamala Harris.

Jenifer Berkshire’s article “How Education Reform Ate the Democratic Party,” describes neoliberals:

“‘The solutions of the thirties will not solve the problems of the eighties,’ wrote Randall Rothenberg in his breathless 1984 paean to this new breed [of Democrats], whom he called simply ‘The Neoliberals.’ His list of luminaries included the likes of Paul Tsongas, Bill Bradley, Gary Hart and Al Gore …. …, the ascendancy of the neoliberals represented an economic repositioning of the Democratic Party…. The era of big, affirmative government demanding action—desegregate those schools, clean up those polluted rivers, enforce those civil rights and labor laws—was over.”

Candidates Photo Fixed

Pictures snipped from campaign cyber sites and reformatted by Ultican.

Tony Thurmond spoke at the CTA delegates meeting in October 2017. He won their endorsement. The CTA news release said:

“We won’t stand for vouchers and we will not allow the privatization of public schools in the great state of California,” Thurmond told cheering delegates. He declared that resolving the teacher shortage is key to closing student achievement gaps. “I don’t know how we close the achievement gaps without closing the teacher shortage in the state.”

When Marshall Tuck answered the ACSA’s questions about “school choice,” he wrote:

“I believe it is important to preserve and strategically expand high-quality public school options for parents, …. These public options can take many forms: some are magnet programs that focus on a particular academic discipline, some are charter schools that have flexibility to innovate with new practices, and some are specialty programs, like those that focus on the arts or sciences.”

Billionaires Support Marshall Tuck

Besides the ACSA, many mega-wealthy people support Marshall Tuck. During his close loss for the same office in 2014, Tuck raised unprecedented amounts of money. Near the conclusion of that race, Tim Murphy of Mother Jones reported:

“The most expensive race in California this year isn’t the governor’s race, … it’s the race for state education superintendent, where incumbent Tom Torlakson and challenger Marshall Tuck have combined to spend nearly $30 million. Tuck, who has received big bucks from Walmart heir Alice Walton and former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg, is pledging to rein in the powerful California Teachers Association, ….”

Under California campaign rules, a candidate seeking state office can accept no more than $7300 a year from a single entity. Because we’ve entered a new year, it is possible for individuals to have given as much as $14,600. The following table is from data reported to California Secretary of State as of 1/22/2018. Billionaires love Tuck!

Contributor Names Amount
Michael Bloomberg $14,600
Carrie (Walton) & Gregory Penner $14,600
Alice Walton $7,300
Jim Walton $7,300
Edith and Eli Broad $29,200
Richard Riordan $7,300
Laurene Powell Jobs $7,300
Reed Hastings $7,300
Doris Fisher $14,600
John Fisher $14,600
Laura Fisher $14,600
Elizabeth Stroud Fisher $7,300
Robert Fisher $7,300
William Fisher $7,300
John and Regina Scully $29,200
Brad Gerstner $7,300
Jonathan Sackler $7,300
Andrew Horowitz $7,300
David Horowitz $7,300

A Biographical Sketch of Marshall Tuck

Tuck was raised on the peninsula just south of San Francisco in the upper-middle class community of Burlingame, California. It is a mixed race community with about a 68% white, 20% Asian, 13% Hispanic and 1% black population. The median home price is more than $1,000,000.

There is no data on siblings or his parents. Tuck’s campaign cyber presence does say he is “The son of a teacher … and [he] attended parochial elementary school and public middle and high schools.”

After high school he attended UCLA, where he was a 1995 graduate with a BA in political science. In 2000, he gained an MBA from Harvard Business.

During Tuck’s 2014 race the Sacramento Bee reported, “After graduating from UCLA, he worked for two years in mergers and acquisitions at Salomon Brothers in Los Angeles.”

Tuck’s 2005 bio for the Green Dot charter schools says, “He also spent time as a consultant at Bain & Co., an investment analyst at the Upper Manhattan Empowerment Zone….” The bio also stated:

“Marshall Tuck joined Green Dot Public Schools in July 2002 as Chief Operating Officer in charge of both operations and finance. Prior to joining Green Dot, Marshall was the General Manager of the Strategic Accounts group at Model N (an enterprise software company), where he led a division focused on opening new markets for the company.”

Steve Barr a politically connected operative from the neoliberal wing of the Democratic party founded Green Dot Public Schools in 1999. He called the schools, public schools, but that is marketing. Green Dot is a private company which has a charter to run a school.

Barr has been active in politics throughout his professional career serving on the national campaigns of President Clinton, Senator Gary Hart and Governor Michael Dukakis and as a finance chair for the Democratic Party.

In 2007, a frustrated Antonio Villaraigosa, LA’s lusty mayor, had just failed to gain control over the Los Angeles Unified School District. He joined with some wealthy supporters to form a non-profit in collaboration with the district, targeting struggling schools in low-income communities for intervention. If school staff voted to opt in, the Partnership offered an alternative approach to improving student achievement, promising a collaborative role in shaping curriculum and running their schools.

The Sacramento Bee reported, “Tuck’s four years at Green Dot caught the attention of Villaraigosa, who selected him to lead the Partnership for Los Angeles Schools.”

There is not much detail available about why Tuck and the Partnership for Los Angeles Schools separated. In 2014 the blog School Matters stated, “Many of us hoped that when right-wing business banker Marshall Tuck was ignominiously forced to step down as the ‘CEO’ of the Partnership for Los Angeles Schools (PLAS), that we might have heard the last of Tuck altogether.”

Most recently, Tuck worked as an Educator-in-Residence at the New Teacher Center (NTC), a nonprofit organization working with school districts. It is notable that the Gates foundation has granted this Santa Cruz based organization a total of $18,305,252 since 2009.

Tuck’s Claims of Proven Leadership Success Are Baseless

At Green Dot he worked in finance and operations. It is unlikely that he had much impact on pedagogy. It is unreasonable to either credit or blame him for testing results. In addition, it is a well-known fact that standardized testing results do not measure teaching or school quality.

However, if one uses testing outcomes at Green Dot to bolster claims of proven leadership, then that data becomes relevant. When an LA Times report about charter schools says, “The lowest-performing, based on test scores, is the large Green Dot chain …,” bragging seems more like lying.

The Partnership for Los Angeles Schools suffered many failures during Tuck’s leadership. Teachers and parents revolted against what they called a top-down autocratic leadership after originally voting to join the Partnership.

The Sacramento Bee reported,

“… the Partnership also was marked at times by conflict with the local teachers’ union over recession-driven layoffs and tensions with teachers at the schools who felt their input was not being considered. Teachers passed a vote of no confidence at nine of the schools at the end of the first year, leading to independent mediation.”

The Bee gave voice to several teachers in the report.

‘“As teachers and parents and students, we just wanted to have an agency for what we thought would benefit our school community and benefit learning,’ Baranwal said. ‘And time and time again, they would come in and make the decision.’

‘“It all just came back down to test scores,’ Baranwal said. ‘It’s not allowing space for people to be looked at holistically. Teachers are not just a test score, students are not just a test score.’

“Gillian Russom, a high school history and geography teacher whose campus ultimately spun off from the Partnership, echoed those concerns: ‘Again and again, we felt that he decided what he wanted to do and pushed it through in a very managerial style,’ she said.”

The Bee article also noted that test scores were not so good:

“While Partnership campuses have improved by an average of almost 72 points on the state’s 1,000-point Academic Performance Index, …, the district as a whole rose almost as much during the same period.”

“That same year, the majority of Partnership campuses performed below average compared with California schools with a similar student demographic.”

Why – with all the extra resources the Partnership was given and their focus on testing – did schools test so poorly? The Partnership’s tax records reveal more than $9,000,000 a year in philanthropic donations to less than 20 schools. Additionally, the Wasserman foundation was providing many free services.

Tucks embrace of Teach for America (TFA) harmed the academic program. TFA teachers are youthful college graduates with no education training or experience outside of a five-week summer institute. A 2015 announcement from TFA shows that they were supplying more than 150 teachers to the Partnership.

The Partnership has less than 15,000 of LA Unified School District’s 700,000 students. Assuming that teachers average 20 students each, the Partnership would have about 750 teachers. That means that more than 20% of the teachers in the Partnership were untrained TFA candidates.

Tuck Opposes Workplace Protection for Teachers

John Fensterwald reporting on a Torlakson versus Tuck debate for Ed Source wrote:

“As he has done throughout his campaign, Tuck condemned Torlakson’s appeal of a Superior Court judge’s ruling in Vergara v. the State of California, overturning laws creating tenure in two years, governing dismissals and requiring layoffs by seniority.”

Tenure is defined as “status granted to an employee, usually after a probationary period, indicating that the position or employment is permanent.” Tenure insures K-12 teachers certain rights such as seniority protection and due process. It protects teachers from unjust attacks by powerful community members. It does not preclude firing for cause. I have witnesses several tenured teachers being fired for relatively benign reasons.

Since Socrates time, teachers have always been vulnerable to unjust social attacks.

When Tuck says he had to lay off more effective teachers than ones with seniority, I wonder how he measured that? Teaching is very difficult to evaluate. The seniority system works well; it is not perfect but it stops the firing of more expensive older teachers and diminishes favoritism. Which are both common problems at educational institutions.

Talk to any experienced teacher and they will tell you how much better at teaching they were after ten years than they were after five. Experience combined with training is the only certain path forward.

Assembly Women Shirly Weber of San Diego authored a bill (AB 1220) that would extend the teacher probationary period to three years and end seniority rights. Tuck told the ACSA, “It was disappointing that last-minute politicking was able to stall those efforts; that my opponent in this race was a primary obstacle to AB 1220’s passage, ….” (emphasis added)

Assemblyman Tony Thurmond offered a counter bill (AB 1164) that also extended the probationary period to three years but did not end seniority rights.

Thurmond’s bill also reinvigorates the peer review and evaluation or PAR process. The legislative analyst noted research showing, “PAR is a rigorous alternative to traditional forms of teacher evaluation and development, with research showing that peer review is far superior to principals’ evaluations in terms of rigor and comprehensiveness.”

Both Thurmond and Tuck agree that we have a teacher shortage in California. It does not make much sense – at least at present – to make the profession less attractive by removing legal protections.

Some Background on Tony Thurmond

Unlike his opponent, Thurmond could never be accused of “being born on third-base and thinking he hit a triple.” His mother was an immigrant from Panama. He was born at Fort Ord in Monterey, California, where his father, a native of Detroit, was training for Viet Nam service. Tony’s father abandoned the family of four children and it was not until Tony was 39 years-old that he saw his father again.

The family moved with their mother to San Jose, California where she was employed as a teacher. Tragedy soon struck when the six years-old Tony’s mother succumbed to cancer. He and a brother moved to Philadelphia where they were raised by a cousin.

Tony went to Temple University where he earned a BA in psychology and became the student body president.

He did his graduate work at Bryn Maw College (Bryn Mawr, PA) receiving a dual Masters Degrees in Law and Social Policy and Social Work.

Tony returned to the Bay Area with his wife Kristen in 1998. He soon had two daughters, Maya and Jayden.

For the 20 years preceding his election to the California State Assembly, Thurmond served in various positions at non-profit social service agencies.

His elective offices held are:

  • 2005-2008 Served on the Richmond City Council.
  • 2008-2012 Member of West Contra County School Board.
  • 2014-present Member of the California State Assembly

Conclusion

This is not the first time the ACSA has embraced billionaire education “reform.” In 2014, they refused to endorse Tom Torlakson over Marshall Tuck for Superintendent. On the ACSA webpage, teacher-basher, Katie Haycock’s Edtrust is championed as a partner. Now, this endorsement shows the ACSA to be a willing pawn in the DPE movement.

It is time for school administrators who believe in public education to act with good conscious and resign from the ACSA.

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