Tag Archives: Wendy Kopp

No Excuses Schools: Bad Theory Created by Amateurs

4 Sep

By Thomas Ultican 9/4/2021

Vanderbilt Professor Joanne Golann recently published Scripting the Moves. It is a book which expands on her research into no-excuses charter schools. Beginning in March of 2012, Golann spent 18-months doing an ethnographic study of a representative school employing the no-excuses approach. She discovered many unintended consequences.

In 2019, the leader of the Ascend Charters, Steven Wilson, wrote,

“And even when No Excuses was best realized at Ascend, its ceaseless structure was doing little to prepare our students to function autonomously in college and beyond.”

“Princeton sociologist Joanne Golann, in a groundbreaking ethnography of one high-achieving No Excuses school, identifies the “paradox” of the school’s success: ‘Even in a school promoting social mobility, teachers still reinforce class-based skills and behaviors. Because of these schools’ emphasis on order as a prerequisite to raising test scores,’ she argues, teachers end up stressing behaviors that would undermine middle-class students’ success.”

“Golann ends by asking: ‘Can urban schools encourage assertiveness, initiative, and ease while also ensuring order and achievement? Is there an alternative to a no-excuses disciplinary model that still raises students’ tests scores?”’

It is not just Ascend. In an August 2021 post at Princeton Press, Professor Golann reported,

“In March, Noble, the largest charter network in Chicago, apologized to its alumni for its ‘assimilationist, patriarchal, white supremacist and anti-black’ discipline practices. Last June, Achievement First promised not to ‘be hyper-focused on students’ body positioning,’ and ended its requirement for students to sit with their hands folded at their desks. KIPP, the nation’s largest charter school network, retired its founding motto, ‘Work hard. Be nice,’ explaining that it ‘ignores the significant effort required to dismantle systemic racism, places value on being compliant and submissive, supports the illusion of meritocracy, and does not align with our vision of students being free to create the future they want.’ (KIPP began plans to change the motto in 2019.)*

“The Wall Street Journal described KIPP’s statement as ‘woke nonsense.’”

Bad Practices at No-Excuses Charters Came from Amateur Founders and Funders

Perhaps the best known no-excuses charter schools are the KIPP schools. Two Yale graduates David Levin and Michael Feinberg founded KIPP in 1994. They were both members of Wendy Kopp’s third cadre of Teach for America (TFA) teachers who had five weeks of training; no education classes and no teaching experience. After the founding, Feinberg stayed in Texas to run KIPP Houston. Levin moved back to New York and founded KIPP Academy in the South Bronx.

To put it succinctly, two guys with recently minted bachelor degrees and a 5-week summer seminar founded the first no-excuses charter school.

 Professor Golann explained how they gravitated to the model,

“After a difficult first year struggling with classroom management, Levin and Feinberg were beginning to improve. They attributed their success to intensively studying and imitating the methods of effective teachers in their schools. Their most influential mentor was Harriett Ball, a charismatic and celebrated forty-six-year-old African American teacher who stood over six feet tall and who worked down the hallway from Levin. From Ball, Levin learned that what worked, in addition to songs and chants, was ‘instant and overwhelming response to any violation of the rules.’” (Scripted page 120)

The story of KIPP’s growth is intertwined with another no-excuses school founder, Stacy Boyd. She was working for Chris Whistle’s Edison Project when a Boston dentist selected her to be the founding principal of the Academy of the Pacific Rim (APR). Boyd hired her friend Doug Lemov to teach at the school that she ran while also finishing her MBA. When Boyd married Scott Hamilton and moved to San Francisco, Lemov took over at APR.

Scott and Stacy met while working at the Edison Project. They were moving to San Francisco because Hamilton was now working for two of the richest people in the country, GAP founders, Don and Doris Fisher.

It was 1999 and “sixty minutes” did a puff piece on KIPP. All of the sudden the possibility of going national arose. Feinberg’s first call was to his friend Stacy Boyd who knew something about developing large organizations. Stacy’s husband Scott sold the Fishers on creating business fellowships for KIPP school founders who would take the brand nationwide.  

The San Francisco billionaires who are obviously astute business people started pouring money into an education system being developed by people with limited knowledge and experience. They would have never turned over leadership at the GAP to people with little background and limited experience. Somehow, many of America’s financial elites believe that they understand education well enough to know how to improve it, and don’t recognize that they are amateurs.

Besides no-excuses charter schools, billionaire education amateurs have spent lavishly to finance TFA. At the beginning of the millennium TFA was struggling, but then the money started flowing. In her book Chronicle of Echoes, Mercedes Schneider recounted, 

“Despite the financial and organizational issues and bad press, Kopp managed to scrape by and carry TFA with her into the new millennium. TFA faced insolvency a number of times – until corporations and foundations began funneling money into the struggling organization. In 2001, TFA’s net assets totaled over $35 million. By 2005, TFA’s net assets totaled over $105 million. Finally, by 2010, TFA’s net assets had increased almost tenfold from 2001 to $350 million. And in 2011, the Walton Family Foundation gave TFA $49.5 million ‘to help double the size of Teach for America’s national teaching corps over the next three years.” (Chronicle page 47)

TFA teachers are unqualified to lead a classroom. However, Professor Golann notes, “It is not that Dream Academy did not have the option of hiring more seasoned teachers; they deliberately chose not to do so, which may be surprising given that teachers significantly improve in effectiveness during their first years of teaching.” (Scripted page 139) Teachers with experience and training were not as likely to embrace their no-excuses scheme. (Dream Academy is the pseudonym Golann chose for the school in which she was embedded.)

Stacy Boyd’s friend, Doug Lemov, started gathering no-excuses techniques and wrote them into a book called Teach Like a Champion. Today, this compendium of methods serves as a handbook for no-excuses schools. One of the main objectives of the handbook is efficiency. It brings the early 1900s Taylorism into the classroom.

In the post “Teach Like its 1885.” published on Jenifer Berkshire’s blog, Layla Treuhaft-Ali wrote, “Placed in their proper racial context, the Teach Like A Champion techniques can read like a modern-day version of the *Hampton Idea,* where children of color are taught not to challenge authority under the supervision of a wealthy, white elite.” In addition to its racist implementation, the no-excuses model certainly elicits images of 19th century school discipline.

No-excuses Model a Disaster in Public Schools

The Tennessee’s Achievement School District (ASD) was launched in 2011 by the Commissioner of Education, Kevin Huffman, a TFA alum and for a short time Michelle Rhee’s husband. He brought in fellow TFA alum Chris Barbic – the founder of the no-excuses charter school YES Prep – to run ASD. Golann observed,

“Unlike typical no-excuses charters, in which families must apply and agree to certain commitments, these charters had to accept all students from the zoned neighborhood, which resulted in low levels of commitment from families to the school’s disciplinary practices, along with a student population that the school was unprepared to serve (e.g., students with special needs, students with high levels of residential mobility).  (Scripted page 173)

By 2016, the lofty goal of raising the bottom scoring 5% of the state’s schools into the top 25% was a complete flop. Even with concentrated test prep, most of the schools were still in the bottom 5%.

Some Conclusions

Two important points:

  1. On page 64 of her book, Golann references University of California San Diego Professor Hugh ‘Bud’ Mehan. From the two graduate school classes I had with Bud, I learned something about what good ethnographic studies looked like and it is clear that Golann’s scholarship is excellent. The book is well written and takes the reader inside the study. Anyone interested in education policy would profit from reading it.
  2. Without the unbelievably large amounts of money being spent by billionaire amateurs to drive education policy, there would be no TFA or no-excuses charter schools.

I will end with one last quote from Professor Joanne Golann’s Scripting the Moves:

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

Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

TNTP is a Part of the Destroy Public Education Infrastructure

10 Aug

By T. Ultican 8/10/2019

TNTP is one of several organizations that only exist because billionaires have financed them. Wendy Kopp founded TNTP (originally called The New Teachers Project) in 1997. She assigned Michelle Rhee, who had recently finished a two year Teach For America (TFA) tour, to run TNTP. Along with TNTP and TFA there are also the Broad Superintendents Academy and the fake school for professional educators called Relay Graduate School forming a significant part of the infrastructure instilling a privatization mindset into the education community.

TNTP says it mission is to partner with educational entities to:

  • “Increase the numbers of outstanding individuals who become public school teachers; and
  • Create environments for all educators that maximize their impact on student achievement”

These are laudable goals but why would any school district or state education department turn to an organization with minimal academic background and experience to train teachers and school leaders? Michelle Rhee earned a B.A. in Government from Cornell and a master’s in public policy from Harvard with no education studies. In the Book Chronicle of Echoes, Mercedes Schneider observes that “Wendy Kopp was a child of privilege”. She left her exclusive Highland Park neighborhood in Dallas to study International Affairs at Princeton. Kopp had no education experience or training and Rhee had five weeks of training to go along with two years experience teaching elementary school in Baltimore.

Wendy and Michelle

Corporate Media Embraced Kopp and Rhee as Education Reformers (Google Images)

In 2001 despite lacking expertise in training educators, TNTP was able to report,

“In its first full year of operation, The New Teacher Project entered into 3 contracts, and in its second year of operation, the number of contracts jumped to 11. This year, The New Teacher Project has over 20 contracts, and is working with school districts, state departments of education and universities across the country.” And they stated, “We have worked with numerous clients across the country, including The New York City Board of Education, Massachusetts Department of Education, District of Columbia Public Schools and East Baton Rouge Parish School System.”

The Billionaire Drive to Privatize Public School

Before the billionaire driven push to privatize public education a “non-profit” company like TNTP would have gotten no consideration for training teachers because they were unqualified. If policy makers in New York wanted to create and alternative teacher certification path, they would have turned to an established institution like Columbia University’s Teachers College to create and manage the program. If Washington DC schools wanted to develop a teacher professional development program, they would have likely looked to the University of Maryland. These are places with more than a century of experience studying education and training its leaders.

Papers coming from leading education institutions like the University of Texas or the University of California are peer reviewed scholarly efforts. Whereas TNTP produces non-peer reviewed polemics like “Widget Effect: Our National Failure to Acknowledge and Act on Differences in Teacher Effectiveness” a paper that accelerated teacher bashing. It looked like a real research effort but it was submitted through friendly media avoiding professional criticism. In 2001, a banner on the TNTP web page falsely claimed, “No single factor has a greater influence on student achievement than teacher quality”. Of course family income, mental health and the language spoken at home are much more decisive.

Another faux non-peer reviewed paper produced by TNTP was called “The Irreplaceables”. The paper defines the “irreplaceables” as the “top 20% of teachers in studied districts, as gauged by district data.” The gauge used was the widely discredited value added measures (VAM) which the American Statistical Association weighed in on stating,

“The VAM scores themselves have large standard errors, even when calculated using several years of data. These large standard errors make rankings unstable, even under the best scenarios for modeling”.

Although not a peer-reviewed paper, Bruce Baker of Rutgers University commented on the paper for the National Education Policy Center. He bluntly called it, “a report that is utterly ridiculous at many levels”. Baker powerfully demonstrated his point with the following graphs.

Irreplaceables

Baker’s Graphics Showing the Absurdity of the TNTP Claim

A central business of TNTP today, is training principals through its Pathways to Leadership in Urban Schools (PLUS). PLUS has a presence in Camden, Kansas City, New York, Philadelphia and San Francisco. In this program, PLUS provides academic training and places principal trainees in local district schools with contracted mentor principals.

Kansas City PLUS has a contract with Kansas City Public Schools (KCPS). They share about themselves:

“Kansas City PLUS is a two-year, practice-based principal certification residency and master’s program that helps talented educators become capable school leaders. With support from a leadership coach and experience managing teachers in a local school, our residents learn how to create a school culture in which students are challenged and inspired, and where teachers receive the feedback and support they need to grow.”

PLUS inadvertently shares the real reason KCPS contracted them instead of the Universities of Missouri or Kansas. TNTP lists among its partners:

“The Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, which funds Kansas City PLUS, was established in the mid-1960s by the late entrepreneur and philanthropist Ewing Marion Kauffman.”

“The Hall Family Foundation is a private philanthropic organization that makes grants to community programs in the greater Kansas City area.”

“The Walton Family Foundation is working to expand opportunities and empower children and families with educational options. Since 1992, we have invested more than $1.3 billion in K-12 education and supported a quarter of the 6,700 charter schools created in the United States.”

At the end of 2016 the smallest of these three funds was the Hall Family Foundation with assets of $833,764,620. Without these monies, Kansas City would be training all of its principals through university programs.

The Kauffman Foundation is emblematic of a growing problem in the philanthropic world. Ewing Kauffman graduated from public school and supported public education with both time and money. It would be surprising if he supported the privatization effort his legacy is being used to promote. Today, the $2 billion fund he founded is led by Wendy Guillies. She serves on the boards of the Greater Kansas City Chamber of Commerce, KCSourcelink, MRI Global, Folience and the Enterprise Bank Advisory Board. The Kansas City Business Journal named her to the Power 100 list in 2016 and 2017, and TechWeek KC named her to the Tech 100 list. Obviously she is a very accomplished women but her resume is consistent with the pro-privatization views espoused by the American Legislative Exchange Council and their chief supporter, Charles Koch.

The PLUS Program has Issues

I became privy to some inside communications when contacted about the possibility of a class action suit against TNTP. The warning that follows summarizes some of the negative feelings percolating within the PLUS organization. With the heading “Beware” the following is from a Principal Intern:

“This organization advertises 60,000 – 100,000. This is to lure you to apply for the position. You will be paid teachers salary and that will be based on your years of teaching and the school district you are partnered with. They will not tell you this upfront. You will initially be contracted as a teacher under a title such as “Instructional Coach”. You will work the same hours as your Mentor Principal. Your will work days that teachers are off, even though you are contracted as a teacher. Be prepared for an unorganized bunch of Plus Leaders who are mean and evil spirited, that lie and have no clue as to what they are doing. Be prepared to be treated like your personal life doesn’t matter, under the direction of an insecure clueless coach and unstable PLUS Leader. Even the Program Manager was incompetent and was belittled by the PLUS Leaders on many occasions.

“PLUS promises so much and offers very little. You have been warned. They attack your personal character and take things personally. Once you challenge them about anything, you will be targeted and provoked.

“In the end they will decide if you will become a principal, not the university, based on TNTP standards. You will also pay expensive tuition for a degree and certification that is offered much cheaper at other universities (for non-university curriculum in coursework). This information was also not given in the beginning.”

Claims of racial discrimination were also raised as a motive for a class action suit.

Unaccountable and Absurd Organizations that Should be Stopped

The ridiculous contention that TFA, TNTP, Relay Graduate School and The Broad Superintendents Academy are organizations that local elected officials should embrace is detailed in the post “Fake Teachers, Fake Schools, Fake Administrators Courtesy of DPE.” These organizations have one purpose and it is NOT improving education. They exist to advance the privatize everything agenda most wealthy elites support. The super-wealthy fear democracy and do not feel it is right for “makers” like themselves to be paying to educate the children of “takers” who should be responsible for educating their own children.

Working for these want-to-be oligarchs is lucrative. The last tax return from TNTP (Sep. 2017) listed the top 12 paid employees and all of them made more than $200,000 per year. “Thirty pieces of silver” is not worth undermining democratic rights and free universal public education.

Twitter: @tultican

Tags: , , , , , , ,

Fake Teachers, Fake Schools, Fake Administrators Courtesy of DPE

11 Apr

By T. Ultican 4/11/2018

The destroy public education movement (DPE) has given us Teach for America (Fake Teachers), Relay Graduate School (Fake Schools) and from the Broad Superintendents Academy (Fake administrators). None of these entities are legitimately accredited, yet they are ubiquitous in America’s major urban areas.

There was a time in the United States of America when scoundrels perpetrating this kind of fraud were jailed and fined. Today, they are not called criminals; they are called philanthropists. As inequitable distribution of wealth increases, democratic principles and humane ideology recedes.

It is time to fight the 21st century robber-barons and cleanse our government of grifters and sycophants.

Philanthropy in America is undermining the rule of law and democratic rights. Gates, Walton, Broad, DeVos, Bradley, Lily, Kaufman, Hall, Fisher, Arnold, Hastings, Anschutz, Bloomberg, Jobs, Zuckerberg, Dell and the list goes on. They have afflicted us with Teach for America (TFA), charter Schools, vouchers, phony graduate schools, bad technology and bogus administrators implementing their agendas.

Without these “philanthropists” and their dark money schemes none of this would exist. Public schools would be healthy and teenage suicide rates would be going down; not up. Instead we have mindless testing, harmful technology and teaching on the cheap.

This “philanthropy” is about profits, reducing tax burdens on the wealthy, imposing religious dogma and subjugation of non-elites. It is harmful to America’s children. The attack on public education was never primarily about benefiting children. It certainly was never based on concern for minority populations.

The Absurdity of Fake Teachers from TFA

 Over the last five years, there have been several wonderful books written on the politics of education reform and the best of them all have a chapter on Wendy Kopp and TFA. Diane Ravitch gave us Reign of Error, Dana Goldstein wrote The Teacher Wars and Mercedes Schneider produced A Chronicle of Echoes. I wrote a review of Chronicle. These three books are masterpieces of scholarship and research, however, my favorite book about the politics of education is Why You Always Got to be Trippin by Ciedie Aech which is a masterpiece of sarcasm.

The basic pitch of TFA has changed since Wendy Kopp’s 1989 senior thesis, “An Argument and Plan for the Creation of the Teacher Corps.” Later when creating TFA, Kopp reached out to the National Education Association (NEA). NEA VP, Sharon Robinson responded, “Even a suggestion that acceptable levels of expertise could develop in short termers simply doesn’t mesh with what those of us in the business know it takes to do the job – much less with what our young need and deserve” (Goldstein).

Kopp replied that the new teacher corps was merely “an emergency response to a shortage of experienced, qualified teachers” in high-needs schools, “and would therefore not be telling the nation that its inexperienced members were preferable to, or as qualified as experienced teachers” (Goldstein).

However, in 1997, Kopp founded The New Teachers Project now called TNTP and installed first year TFA alum, Michelle Rhee, to lead it. TNTP advertised itself as an agency helping people transition into teaching from other careers and also providing professional development to school districts. The Rhee led TNTP infamously initiated a relentless campaign of teacher-bashing. TNTP was virulently anti-teachers’ union and anti-tenure. Rhee inspired headlines throughout the country like these from California, State Needs ‘Lemon’ Law For Teachers, California Schools May Get Break from Bad Teachers  and Escape Hatch for Incompetent Teachers Closed .

The message was clear. Public education was failing because of bad teachers. TFA and TNTP offered the solution.

Mercedes Schneider described another TFA mission change:

“Though the TFA website notes that Kopp’s organization has ‘aggressively worked to grow and deepen [TFA] impact,’ Kopp’s initial push had nothing to do with placing former TFAers in educational leadership positions. By 2001, TFA began to clearly publicize its now-twofold mission: Yes, to continue to place ‘top talent’ in the classroom in two-year, Peace-corps style. However, in addition, TFA would enable those ‘teacher leaders’ to ‘force systemic change to ensure educational equity.’” 

Wendy Kopp was a child of wealth from the tony Dallas neighborhood of Highland Park. She attended Highland Park High with a predominantly white student body and a 95% graduation rate (Schneider). That graduation rate was before the current credit recovery fraud.

While at Princeton, Kopp became editor-in-chief of the student magazine “Business Today” which was founded in 1968 by Steve Forbes. Having a circulation of 200,000 in 1987, it could charge businesses $5,000 a year for advertising (Schneider). She demonstrated her ability to raise money and developed many personal contacts with important CEO’s while running “Business Today.”

After graduating with a BA degree in Public and International Affairs, she went to New York to start her Peace-corps styled non-profit. Kropp’s first grant for $26,000 came from Exon-Mobil. Union-Carbide gave her free New York office space. She sent fellow Texan Ross Perot her business plan and he came through with a $500,000 challenge grant which helped TFA raise an addition $1.5 million. Her first hire was a friend of her brother’s, Whitney Tilson (Goldstein). Tilson would later create the Democrats for Education Reform (DFER).

Early on, there was serious push-back against TFA by education professionals. After observing the TFA summer training in 1990, Education Professor Deborah Appleman called it “ludicrous.” In 1994, Linda Darling-Hammond, then a researcher at Columbia University’s Teachers College, excoriated TFA for being “a frankly missionary program” that elevated the resume building of its recruits over the educational needs of poor children (Goldstein).

Because of this pushback and Kopp’s lack of management training and experience, TFA went through a series of existential crises. Schneider noted, “Despite the financial and organizational issues and bad press, Kopp managed to scrape by and carry TFA with her into the new millennium.”

Schneider also wrote about improving the financial fortunes at TFA,

“…Wendy Kopp declared that she had a force of young, predominantly-Ivy-League idealists for sale, and Big Money arrived on the scene to make the purchase. No more insolvency issues for Wendy Kopp and TFA.”

 The money that came in is truly staggering to contemplate. Here is one paragraph from Diane Ravitch:

“When the U.S. Department of Education ran a competition in 2010 for the most innovative programs in education, with four top prizes of $50 million, TFA was one of the winners (the KIPP charter chain, headed by Wendy Kopp’s husband, Richard Barth, also won $50 million). In 2011, a group of foundations led by the Broad Foundation made a gift of $100 million to TFA. In the same year, the Walton Family Foundation – one of the nation’s most conservative foundations – pitched in $49.5 million, the largest single education grant made that year by a foundation committed to privatization. TFA also received federal funding through AmeriCorps grants and an annual congressional earmark of $20 million. In the five years from 2006 to 2010, TFA raised an astonishing $907 million in foundation grants, corporate gifts and government funding.”

TFA 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. Because a large percentage of TFA teachers do not stay past two years, it is impossible to run long term studies of their effect on students. However, it is well known that TFA induced teacher churn harms children. Today, a significant number of charter school teachers come from TFA.

Ciedie Aech faced some of the most virulent forces of the DPE movement while teaching in Denver, Colorado. Her comments about TFA are both amusing and prescient. She wrote,

“Good teachers; well, good teachers, and oh surely this was obvious – even glaringly self-apparent in the fast pace of magical days devoted to a truer national compassion: Good teachers? – Were young.”

 “Oh, those Teach-For-A-Minute girls, he now declared snidely. Really, who was surprised? Everybody knew: You couldn’t count on them.”

 “Despite their designated unreliability; despite, even, their surely ungrateful lack of loyalty for stoically sticking around and “taking” the abuses created by an ever-shifting, funding-lucrative reform – huge numbers of these oft-labeled undependable Teach-For-A-Minute girls (and oh, yes, a lesser number of surely just as undependable Teach-For-A-Minute boys) were now being ever more massively produced.”

 “As a journalist followed the teaching year of a suddenly deployed troop of Teach-For-A-Minute miracle workers, ultimately, he found only one greenhorn to be exceptionally able. (And so many others who were both frighteningly and disastrously unprepared.)”

Charter Industry Has Created A Fake Education Graduate School

The well-known blogger, Peter Greene AKA the Curmugducator, has a knack for colorfully and accurately summarizing creepy agendas. He concludes an article about Relay Graduate School:

“Reformsters have managed to build and fund an entire alternate education universe in which they make up their own credentials, their own schools, their own entire system built on a foundation of nothing but money, connections, and huge brass balls. There’s never been anything like it since hucksters pitched medicinal snake oil off the back of a wagon, and it would be kind of awesomely amazing, like watching a python consume an entire elephant– except that instead of an elephant, this parallel shadow system is gutting public education in the communities where it is most needed.”

The Alliance for Philadelphia Public schools learned that their schools were using training materials from Relay Graduate School (RGS). Kate Peterson, a graduate student at Arcadia University, investigated Relay’s founders and programs for Alliance. Her policy brief apprised,

“Relay Graduate School of Education is a stand-alone school based in New York City. It began as Teacher U in 2007, when Dave Levin, co-founder of KIPP Public Charter Schools, and Norman Atkins, co-founder of Uncommon Schools, decided to develop a program that would supply their charter schools and others with high-quality teachers, which they deemed as scarce. They partnered with the founder of Achievement First, Dacia Toll, to create their program. Receiving $10 million from Larry Robbins, founder of the hedge fund Glenview Capital Management and current board member of Relay, and $20 million from the non-profit The Robin Hood Foundation, the three charter school leaders partnered with Hunter College in New York to implement their program ….

 “In 2011, it was renamed Relay Graduate School of Education and was granted a charter by the New York State Board of Regents ….”

Peterson also pointed out that the lack of scholarship and experience in education among the three founders. She wrote,

“Based on their backgrounds, it is apparent that all three charter and Relay founders have little education and training in teaching. Atkins opened a charter a year after graduating with a M.A. in educational leadership with little to no experience teaching. Levin founded KIPP two years after working for Teach for America with no formal education in teaching as well. Toll too founded a charter a year after graduating with her J.D. and teaching certificate with very little experience in education. After founding these charters, they did not go on to be teachers in them, but rather managers of them. Thus, Relay’s founders began a teacher training program without much formal education and experience in teaching themselves.”

Mercedes Schneider took another look at RSG this March (2018) and began her piece,

“Relay Graduate School of Education (RGSE) is a corporate reform entity whose “deans” need not possess the qualifications that deans of legitimate graduate schools possess (i.e., Ph.D.s; established professional careers in education, including publication in blind-review journals).”

There are now fifteen “deans” of RSG each running a stand-alone campus that they themselves founded. Mercedes notess that twelve of the fifteen have light teaching experience with TFA and also reports on the qualifications of all the “deans.” She concludes with:

“There you have it: 15 “deans”; no Ph.D.s (but one almost); no bachelors degrees in education; no refereed publications, and not a one “dean” qualified for a tenure-track position in a legitimate college of education. But who needs legitimacy when you can franchise yourself into a deanship?”

The Unaccredited Broad Superintendent Academy Trains Public Education Destroyers

Eli Broad, estimated to be worth $6 billion, made his fortune by building two fortune-500 companies, KB Homes and Sun America. He is a product of public education but is determined to privatize the system.

The Broad Academy is an unaccredited administration training program for school leaders run by the Broad Foundation.

Broad’s theory is that public school administrators and elected school boards lack the financial background to run large organizations. Motoko Rich’s Times article explained, ‘“The new academy,’ he said, would ‘dramatically change this equation’ by seeking candidates in educational circles as well as recruiting from corporate backgrounds and the military, introducing management concepts borrowed from business.”

In her book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System, Diane Ravitch related what she learned about Broad’s thinking during a 2009 meeting with him. She wrote,

“He believes that school systems should run as efficiently as private sector enterprises. He believes in competition, choice, deregulation, and tight management. He believes that people perform better if incentives and sanctions are tied to their performance. He believes that school leaders need not be educators, and that good managers can manage anything if they are surrounded by smart assistants. Broad told an audience in New York City in 2009, ‘We don’t know anything about how to teach or reading curriculum or any of that. But what we do know about is management and governance.’ The Broad education agenda emphasizes the promotion of charter schools, the adoption of corporate methods for school leadership, and changes in the way teacher are compensated.”

Broad is rich so his ideas about education – which are based on little beyond opinion – are taken seriously. He has created an administrators school that ignores 200 years of public school and scholarly experience. It is ludicrous that any state would accept this kind of training as legitimate. Unfortunately, graduates from the fake Broad academy are working in school systems across America.

Past Time to Say, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore.”

Fake School

Time to stop the bi-partisan theft of public education from Americans. Stop fake teachers entering classrooms. Stop fake administrators doing damage like Deasy in LA or Bersin in San Diego or Wilson in Oakland or White in Louisiana or Bobb in Detroit or Klein in New York or etc. Perpetrators of a fake graduate schools are criminals. Temporary teachers with no credentials, no training and no experience are a hoax. Billionaire trained administrators are a menace. Time to end this charade.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,

Hagiography – Stinking Thinking and Profits

18 Sep

By Thomas Ultican 9/18/2016

It is stinking thinking to ignore professionals and allow amateurs to guide almost any endeavor and that includes schools. Milton Friedman was enamored with classical liberalism and the antiquated ideas of Friedrich Hayek the Austrian economist he met at the University of Chicago. Based on bankrupt economic theories he called for ending universal public education and replacing it with a privatized system not required to educate everyone.

Classical liberalism’s flaws led to another bad economic idea, Marxism. Although antithetical in nature Marxism and classical liberalism share a striking similarity; they are both promoted by economic theorists who see people as means. The logical outcome of these ideologies is authoritarianism. Basing school reform on the writings of economists like Milton Friedman or Eric Hanushek is like Boeing Corporation basing aircraft structural safety on the philosophy of Friedrich Engels. Neither Friedman nor Hanushek know anything about cognitive development or the principals of pedagogy. They are ivory tower professors with weird schemes who have no experience in k-12 education. Letting their amateur blather drown out sage counsel from experienced professionals indicates cognitive malady.

A fundamental tenant of education reform for most economists and businessmen is demanding efficient systems that hold educators accountable for training economic assets. It is the principle that educating children is ultimately for the benefit of the state or business or military needs.

Milton Friedman may be thought of as the father “school choice” however, he was rightfully ignored for more than two decades. His ideas on education were resuscitated by the Reagan administration’s polemic, “A Nation at Risk.” Promoting a utilitarian philosophy of education, it said:

“Knowledge, learning, information, and skilled intelligence are the new raw materials of international commerce and are today spreading throughout the world as vigorously as miracle drugs, synthetic fertilizers, and blue jeans did earlier. If only to keep and improve on the slim competitive edge we still retain in world markets, we must dedicate ourselves to the reform of our educational system for the benefit of all–old and young alike, affluent and poor, majority and minority. Learning is the indispensable investment required for success in the ‘information age’ we are entering.”

A more correct view of how people in the 21 century should be viewed is put forward by Daisaku Ikeda the founder of Soka Schools. When discussing his concept of “a century of life,” he said:

“A century of life, simply put, refers to an age, a society, a civilization based on respect for the dignity of life. Respect for the dignity of life means that people’s lives, their dignity and their personal happiness must never on any account be exploited or sacrificed as a means to some end. I am speaking of a society and civilization grounded on a firm commitment that all endeavors serve to support people’s lives, their dignity and their happiness, and that these must never be used as means to any other purpose or goal.” (Living Buddhism, September 2016, page 58)

 Another of hero of mine, Martin Luther King’s views on education are instructive:

“Education must also train one for quick, resolute and effective thinking. To think incisively and to think for one’s self is very difficult. We are prone to let our mental life become invaded by legions of half-truths, prejudices, and propaganda. At this point, I often wonder whether or not education is fulfilling its purpose. A great majority of the so-called educated people do not think logically and scientifically. Even the press, the classroom, the platform, and the pulpit in many instances do not give us objective and unbiased truths. To save man from the morass of propaganda, in my opinion, is one of the chief aims of education. Education must enable one to sift and weigh evidence, to discern the true from the false, the real from the unreal, and the facts from the fiction.

 “The function of education, therefore, is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. But education which stops with efficiency may prove the greatest menace to society. The most dangerous criminal may be the man gifted with reason, but with no morals.”

 One of the loudest and most persistent voices supporting what is now widely known as “corporate education reform” is a man who served as CEO for both RJR Nabisco and IBM, Louis Gerstner. In his 1994 book Reinventing Education, Gerstner wrote:

“Schools must meet the test any high-performance organization must meet: results. And results are not achieved by bureaucratic regulation. They are achieved by meeting customer requirements by rewards for success and penalties for failure. Market discipline is the key, the ultimate form of accountability.”

Mr. Gerstner has obviously been very successful at hawking cigarettes (to children?) and technology products. Plus, he attended school and even hired people who went to school. However, none of this provides him with even a shallow understanding of education and certainly not the kind of profound understanding that would qualify him to lead the reform of America’s public school system. MLK’s quote above fits Mr. Gerstner better than one of his hand tailored suits.

Hagiography

In 2014, Elizabeth Green wrote a strange book, Building A+ Better Teacher, about improving teaching and its history. Strange because it was like two different books the first half chronicled efforts to improve teaching and went in great depth about Michigan State University and Spartan Village. It presented the history of Magdalene Lampert, Deborah Ball, Lee Shulman and Judith Lanier. It was a story of dedicated professional educators studying teaching and developing better methods and better training. The second half of the book was full of praise for a group of youthful amateurs who rejected the work of professional educators and take credit for starting the no-excuses charter school movement.

Green goes into great detail about Doug Lemov and Stacy Boyd. She recounts how Doug while in graduate school at the University of Indiana became incensed when tutoring a football player who had ability but was reading at a third grade level. She called this his turning point that led him to become obsessed with teaching. She says he eventually called a like-minded friend, Stacy Boyd and the two decided to start a new school called Academy of the Pacific Rim (APR). Green described the founders of APR:

“APR’s founders also rejected almost everything associated with ed schools, including their ideas about teaching. Many of them, Doug included, hadn’t gone to ed school.”

“Doug and his friends were just as likely to have degrees in business as in education. Instead of epistemology, child psychology, and philosophy, their obsessions were data-based decision making, start-ups, and ‘disruptions.’ They were more likely to know the name of Eric Hanushek, the economist who invented the value-added teacher evaluation model, than Judy Lanier”

One year after APR’s founding, Green left for San Francisco and Lemov replaced her as principal. After two years, Doug Lemov took a job in New York. He became the Vice President for Accountability at the Charter Schools Institute, State University of New York, Albany. It was while observing teachers at New York charter schools that Green claims Lemov gained the insight to develop “an American language of teaching” and write the successful and pedagogically backward (think 19th century) book Teach Like a Champion. (Clarification: Green indicated the opposite of “pedagogically backward.”)

The blogger, ‘educationrealist’, makes a compelling argument that Green’s account of APR’s founding is hagiography. It appears that Elizabeth Green had a message to sell and facts were not that important. ‘Educationrealist’s’ documented post says:

“In the second APR origins story which, unlike Lemov and Boyd’s claim, is well-documented, Academy of the Pacific Rim was founded by Dr. Robert Guen, a Chinese dentist, and a host of community members, who went through tremendous effort to produce one of the earliest charter applications, began in 1994 but delayed to 1995 to make a stronger pitch. The community founders clearly anticipated a primarily Asian school, although they promised to seek a diverse class. The original 1995 application shows the founders had not yet hired a principal.”

This explains the strange name. Why would Boyd and Lamov call their Boston based charter school Academy of the Pacific Rim? The ‘educationrealist’ also made this observation:

“Maybe reformers call themselves “founders” if they are early employees. John B. King, NYC czar of public schools, writes in his dissertation that the founding group behind Roxbury Prep, of which he, a black and Puerto-Rican teacher, was a member, spoke “explicitly” of their goals in the charter application. But Michele Pierce, who graduated from Stanford’s Teacher Education Program was the person identified to work with founder Evan Rudall to run the school, modeled after their work at Summerbridge. …. So King wasn’t involved in the charter application and wasn’t technically a founder, either.”

 Profits, Prestige and Connections

John King eventually found his way back to New York City and where his three years teaching at a charter school qualified him as an education leader. He was recognized as a 2008 Aspen Institute-NewSchools Entrepreneurial Leaders for Public Education Fellow (meaning he was on the privatizer fast track). After failing miserably as New York State Commissioner of Education he joined Arne Duncan in the Obama administration and is now Secretary of Education of the United States. We must be living in upside down world.

Wendy Kopp’s TFA has been an integral component of the effort to privatize public education by providing teachers to the no-excuses charter school movement.

TFA is based on her 1989 Princeton University undergraduate thesis. Members of the founding team include value investor Whitney Tilson; former U.S. Commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service, Douglas Shulman; and Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) President and CEO, Richard Barth. Richard Barth is also Wendy Kopp’s husband. Charity Navigator puts TFA’s net worth at $437,000,000.

Stacy Boyd went to San Francisco with her new husband, a fellow reformer as this puff piece in the pro-privatization publication Education Next reported in 2009:

“In January 1992, as Levin and Feinberg were writing up their applications for Teach For America, a tall, dark-haired former U.S. Education Department policy aide named Scott Hamilton was showing up for his first day at a new job. He had been hired by the Washington office of the Edison project, an effort to improve inner-city schools and make a profit. The only person Hamilton found there was a talkative red-haired 23-year-old researcher named Stacey Boyd, in whom he took an immediate interest.

“In the annals of the charter school movement, the meeting of Hamilton and Boyd would take on considerable significance, particularly in the history of KIPP. … By 1999, the couple was in San Francisco, …. Hamilton was working in San Francisco for two of the richest people in the country, Don and Doris Fisher, founders of the GAP clothing stores. They wanted him to find education projects where money from their new Fisher Foundation could make a difference.”

Stacey Boyd who had one-year experience teaching English in Japan went to the Edison Project and there met her soon to be husband who has no real education experience. The Edison Project was Chris Whittle’s dream of getting rich by developing a private school system that could outperform public schools. As Samuel Abrams book Education and the Commercial Mindset documents, the Edison Project was a fiasco that hurt both investors and students.

For unknown reasons, Stacy was subsequently hired by the Chinese dentist in Boston to be the first principal of his new school, APR. Stacey hires her friend who six year earlier had taught at a prep-school for one year, Doug Lemov. Stacy leaves and Lemov assumes the principal position for two years before he leaves. This is the extent of their experience in education. Yet they are lionized by writers like Elizabeth Green and financed lavishly by billionaire foundations.

Wendy Kopp who has no education training or experience starts “teach for a minute” and her husband becomes the CEO of the KIPP schools. Wendy and Richard who both have no teaching experience each receive grants of $50,000,000 from the Department of Education for their respective organizations. They also receive obscene amounts for money from Gates, Broad, the Walton Foundation, the Fisher Foundation and many more. Such large grants that the two $50 million grants from the Department of Education look like chump change.

The Education Next quotation above mentions Michael Feinberg and David Levine. These two each had two years’ experience teaching as TFA teachers in Huston when they started a charter school destined to be the second largest charter school chain in America, KIPP. Their five weeks of training and two years’ experience earned them almost immediate financing from Scott Hamilton and the Fisher Foundation for their new project.

As is consistent with all developments in the profit and privatize movement, all of the players seem to take credit for founding the Relay Graduate School of Education. Like the uncertified Broad Academy for Administrators, its purpose is de-professionalizing public education. Seton Hall’s Danial Katz described the school for Huffington Post:

“For those who are unfamiliar, Relay “Graduate School of Education” was singled out as an innovator by Secretary of Education Arne Duncan last November, but it is a “Graduate School of Education” that has not a single professor or doctoral level instructor or researcher affiliated with it. In essence, it is a partnership of charter school chains Uncommon Schools, KIPP, and Achievement First, and it is housed in the Uncommon Schools affiliated North Star Academy. Relay’s “curriculum” mostly consists of taking the non-certified faculty of the charter schools, giving them computer-delivered modules on classroom management (and distributing copies of Teach Like a Champion), and placing them under the auspices of the “no excuses” brand of charter school operation and teachers who already have experience with it.”

 How absurd is a graduate school of education based on the writings of a guy who has almost no experience in education? These things do not pass the smell test. Ultimately it is about getting at the massive amount of money taxpayers provide for education. In a level playing field none of these people would be taken seriously and we would have never heard of them. But they suited the interests of some wealthy, arrogant and morally bankrupt individuals. Their rewards for privatizing schools are enormous and just think about the kind of rewards the puppet masters are expecting.

In 2014, Annie Em wrote an article for Daily Kos that she called, “Is public school for Sale the Cost of KIPP.” Check out these eye-poppingly corrupt and large remunerations:

“Michael Feinberg works 30 hours a week for KIPP Foundation at San Francisco for $196,117; 50 hours at KIPP, Inc. in Houston for $216,865 for a total of 80 hours and $412,982 annually.

“David Levin works 30 works hours a week at KIPP Foundation in San Francisco for $175,000; 50 hours at KIPP New York City for $243,189; 5 hours at Uncommon Knowledge and Achievement for $50,000 NYC; and an unspecified amount at Relay Graduate School of Education NYC for a total of 85 hours+ and $468,189+ annually.

“Wendy Kopp works for Teach for America (also Teach for All, Teach for China, and Broad Center for Management of School Systems) supplying uncertified corps members to serve as teachers at KIPP for which she is compensated $468,452 annually.  KIPP schools would not be sustainable without the overworked, underpaid faux teachers provided by TFA. Wendy’s a busy girl and extremely well-compensated for having zero education credentials.

“Richard Barth works 60 hours a week at KIPP Foundation in San Francisco (while living in New York) and is compensated $374,868 annually. He, too, has zero education credentials.”

 By the way, the largest charter school system in the United States is under the control of the mysterious Turkish Imam, Fethullah Gülen.

All of this is harmful. It is stinking thinking to allow children to be educated by people that do not know what they are doing or have agendas that are not necessarily aligned with the best interests of America. It is time to end the raid on education dollars by privatized schools and phony educations schemes designed to sell technology. Opt out of charter school. Opt out of testing. Opt out of computer delivered bad education.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,