Over recent years, I have received complaints from parents about superintendents “trained” by the uncertified, unaccredited Broad Superintendents Academy. Eli Broad is a multi-billionaire who freely admits that he knows nothing about education but everything about management. He firmly believes that when school systems have good managers, tests scores rise and the system gets better. He also puts great stock in closing low-performing schools instead of helping them. He espouses “creative disruption,” which seems to be popular among moguls.
Lately, I have heard rumblings about Montclair, New Jersey, a suburb known for its high-performing, well-respected, and racially integrated public schools.
Then someone sent this article, which sounds sadly familiar to the Broadie style.
“Scott White, the Director of Guidance at Montclair High School, leaving left the district this month after 22 years to take a position at Morristown High School. He’s going with some major criticisms. He has been blogging at “White’s World,” in which he discusses what he thinks are problems in Montclair.
In his post “Montclair Has Lost its Way,” he says: “The desire is to get rid of every experienced, thoughtful teacher and administrator and replace them with compliant, cheap and willing newcomers who do not know what it is like to be treated with respect.” He goes on to say that the same people (education reformers) also have the desire to leave every public school as a “rotting carcass after every student of quality has moved to charter schools and private schools funded by vouchers.”
“In his post titled, “Issues at Montclair,” (This post was removed from his blog after we ran this story) he states, “Morale is as low as I have ever seen it. Virtually every teacher I speak to, especially the strongest teachers, are planning their exit strategies. The environment is about compliance and loyalty and there is absolutely no emphasis on strong teaching.” He goes on to say that “the administrative team is extremely weak,” “Teachers are writing lesson plans that are never read,” and “We are being treated as a failing school when there are some highly successful things about the school.”
“In his post about Superintendent MacCormack called “MacCormack to the Rescue,” he talks about her training from the Broad Institute and business style and says “Like any oppressive regime, the workers are afraid to speak out and the managers are learning that unquestioning obedience is the only way to survive.”
Public education will survive. A better day is coming. It won’t happen as a matter of course. The present era will end when parents rise up and fight for their community public schools. We cannot allow the destruction of a precious community asset, destroyed by the whim of a billionaire in Los Angeles who knows nothing about education or learning or teaching or children. Those who have received Broad “training” must strive to unlearn it and remember that they are educators, not managers. They are preparing children to be good people, not fodder for global competition.
“…every student of quality….”??? I understand what s/he’s saying, but that was awfully poor word choice.
The most difficult part about watching school reform is how no one looks at the track record, and there IS a track record.
Eli and Edythe Broad are from Michigan. I know they live in Los Angeles, but they have been huge drivers of public school privatization in Michigan.
Michigan has completely privatized districts now. There are places in Michigan where one cannot “choose” a public school. There are none. They’re gone.
“Here, then, are three facts about the charter school system that exists today in Michigan:
Michigan has more for-profit charter schools than any other state in the country. “We’re an anomaly in the nation,” says Western Michigan University professor Gary Miron. He says over 80 percent of the charter schools in Michigan today are operated by for-profit companies. The national rate is 35 percent.
Detroit’s charter school enrollment rate is second-highest in the country. 41 percent of Detroit’s students went to a charter school last year, according to the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. That rate is second only to New Orleans, where the school system was completely rebuilt after Katrina. Flint and Grand Rapids also rank in the top 20 nationwide for charter school enrollment rate. These numbers are from before the state lifted its cap on the number of charter schools that can open.
Large, nationally-operated charter school companies are expanding more rapidly than small, locally run non-profit charters. Gary Miron of WMU says we are increasingly moving away from what he says was the original charter school “ideal.” Miron, a charter school believer who actually once helped open a charter school in Sweden told me, “I kind of resent the fact that some people are still referring to these massive, national networks of charter schools as charter schools. Because they go against the original idea, which was going to be small, innovative, locally run schools. That’s not what we have today.”
Gary Miron was a reform supporter. He now testifies at the MI statehouse begging them to slow down and reconsider this massive privatization push.
Do people in Montclair, NJ really want to adopt the Broad template? It’s a disaster.
http://michiganradio.org/post/three-little-known-facts-about-charter-schools-michigan
to me the hardest part is sitting in a room full of parents who are being fed the catch phrases, having learned all I have by reading this blog. I am scared for my state. I am sad. I came into my “search for answers” quest last year because I sensed something was not right, and yet I see very little I can do. When the person paid to enforce CCSS and testing and mandates in our building willingly admits that numbers can be used to make any case, but that we “have to let it play out,” I become very nervous. I suppress my nervousness for an assertive positivity, using creativity as my compass and the children as my reason for staying positive (actually, I don’t suppress it. . .I go to Zumba classes and sweat it out!). But I get very nervous when I see my state headed down a path that is already proving unnecessary and negatively fateful . Very nervous.
On NPR this morning they were discussing Detroit and the guy who owns Quicken Loans (who has invested a lot in Detroit, waiting for a return on his investments) and who very badly wants the bankruptcy to go through said, “We need to just suspend democracy for a while and get it over with.” And I think that must be the guiding principle of a lot of education reform efforts in the last decade. And if the impetus for that was simply easy, greasy money and a false sense of fear about national security and competition, at the expense of something that should be a given as Americans (the schools that belong to them/us), then I am just that much sadder.
But I take heart in Diane’s last paragraph here: public education will survive. A better day is coming.
I hope so.
We were sold ed reform with the promise that it would improve public schools. Not inspire a charter industry, not subsidize private schools, but improve existing public schools.
It’s been more than a decade. I think parents need to ask “is my public school better or worse as a result of these reforms?”
It’s a simple question. Better or worse?
They don’t have to get into the complicated world of charter school finance or get a self-taught grad degree in Ed Reform Industry Studies.
Media and politicians and (to a certain extent) public school advocates focus on charter schools and vouchers, but if we want to reach public school parents we have to ask, “what is the affect of ed reform on YOUR public school” – if for no other reason than 90% of kids attend existing public schools. If ed reform fails 90% of kids, damages their schools, creates chaos and discord, wastes funding on measurement schemes, etc., ed reform has failed.
My local public school is now embarking on Ohio’s teacher rating scheme. This is a district that had to let the art teacher go and is relying on a volunteer for art classes. How much are we spending on this teacher-testing mandate, money and time? I am not aware of a single public school parent who was demanding our teachers be “ranked”. This came out of foundation think tanks and the stupidity and capture of politicians. It didn’t come out of any local demand.
Someone needs to take Montclair parents on a field trip. They can go look at the Broad’s handiwork in western Michigan. It’s a sea of unregulated, for-profit charters. National media talk about Detroit, but that’s not the whole story. It’s the whole state.
Ask the Broad-trained superintendent why privatization follows everywhere Mr. Broad touches down.
Can Mr. Broad show us a single district or state where his money and vast clout have actually benefitted EXISTING public schools? One state or district.
A child of immigrants, he attended public schools in Detroit and graduated from Michigan State University, yet he wants to deny future generations of Americans the same opportunities that American TAXPAYERS provided for him.
Even superintendents with an education background who have taken on a business-model mentality can do significant damage to a school and it’s faculty. I work in such a district in Bergen County.
Eli Broad? An ‘expert’ in management??? Well, for all his proclaimed ‘expertise’ he sure builds some buttugly tract houses — that seem to lose value, rather than gain it, over time….
One of the lessons of this is that everywhere we all have to stop playing that darned game of GOOD TEACHER BAD TEACHER.
Or is you are a literary fan, THE SNEECHES.
Montclair is just experiencing the same divide and conquer craziness that has worked for woefully too long in too many places.
But it’s not getting away with itself as much as in years past.
Take Illinois. During the recent Illinois Federation of Teachers (IFT) convention (held this past weekend in Rosemont, outside Chicago) representatives of local unions across the state met and passed what amounts to an action agenda to defend public education — from Pre K through post graduate.
One of the reasons why we are (finally) so united is that the attacks that began against schools in Chicago (and a few other high poverty districts in Illinois) have now been taken across the entire state, and expanded to include our brothers and sisters teaching in colleges and universities (see, for example, that ridiculous Bill Keller Op Ed in The New York Times the other day).
Another reason is leadership. Karen Lewis and those of us leading the Chicago Teachers Union have been patiently (and sometimes impatiently) explaining to our brothers and sisters that this is not about those of us from Chicago teaching the roughest kids in the most tragic circumstances “failing.” And most of our brothers and sisters now “get it.”
It is now clear to virtually all real teachers that the corporate “reform” agenda targets all of us with its cheap shots and cheaper talking points. For more than a decade, the divide and conquer (did you get that star on your belly?) script was working. The “bad teacher” script to attack (all of) us didn’t end with the debacles of “Waiting for Superman” and “Won’t Back Down.” As Diane Ravitch and others have pointed out, this is for us an assault on public education, and more broadly (as John Nichols reminded us in his speech to the IFT) an assault on public services and public servants.
I went to high school in Newark and lived most of my younger life in Linden (both New Jersey) before moving to Chicago, where I’ve lived for 49 years more or less. At first, I wouldn’t have believed that the “reformists” could try and attack Montclair (when I was working as a Teamster in Newark during high school, Montclair was “where the rich people lived…” — what did we know in those days).
But the Broadies are basically a sect (to use a religious metaphor) or a democratic centralist cadre grouping (if the religion we are critiquing is Mickey Maoism). The Broad Foundation is training cadre to replicate the same centralized attacks from Los Angeles through Chicago and to Monclair and elsewhere.
Of course, to quote from Montclair: “Teachers are writing lesson plans that are never read,” and “We are being treated as a failing school when there are some highly successful things about the school,” is the kind of mistake teachers first make when the attack sneaks up on us.
This is an example of still longing for that star on the belly, instead of sticking together as all Sneeches should. We’re getting there.
Chicago is currently on our second Broadie “Chief Executive Officer.” Our first, Jean-Claude Brizard, was driven out of Rochester New York and immediately hired by Chicago at the highest salary of a Chicago school official in history ($250,000 a year) a long with “relocation expenses” ($30,000) because he had to move from out of town because Mayor Rahm Emanuel couldn’t find anyone already living in the third largest city in the USA fit to CEO our public schools.
Brizard lasted from May 2011 through October 2012 (when he was given another quarter million as a Golden Parachute; he’s now landed at the College Board) and was canned after his failure to head off the Chicago Teachers Strike of 2012.
Instead of hiring someone from Chicago or Illinois, however, Rahm returned to the Broads and brought down Barbara Byrd Bennett, who had been up in Detroit destroying public education there behind that “austerity” smokescreen they all use. She got the same pay package as Brizard, and immediately began hiring the Broads from all over the country to create her so-called “cabinet” —
— John Barker from Memphis
— Jack Elsey from Detroit
— Bob Boik from Detroit
— Tracy Martin from Cleveland…
It goes on and on.
The Broadies add to the austerity by spending lavishly on one another while expanding the charter schools ruthlessly and cutting real public schools (Byrd Bennett murdered 49 of Chicago’s real public schools last school year, following the Broad Foundation’s school closing scripts).
Once we are all united against these people, it’s easier and easier to organize the opposition. Their scripts are rather childish, and since they lack both imagination and integrity they simply repeat the same nonsense over and over and over. Hence, we knew pretty much how the school closing script was going to play out in Chicago (even though we didn’t have the power to stop it; our protests were massive and continue…).
The one thing we haven’t done enough of is share information about these infectious louses (lice?) so that we can stop the next wave of infections before we get scalped (again).
And one of the reasons why we’re still not completely organized to fight off the Broad infection is that some people are still playing GOOD TEACHER BAD TEACHER.
When that ends, which will be soon, the future of the Broads will be as certain as the future of other totalitarian mercenaries. It was only a couple of years ago that Broad and other dollars were going to fill those buses for “Waiting for Superman” and some of those people were actually talking about an academy award for that nonsense touting Michelle Rhee and (let’s never forget) Geoffrey Canada.
Good luck, homeboys and girls. One of my high school friends went to Montclair State, while I headed west and lost contact. Back then at least we knew that public service wasn’t an obscenity — but greed and mendacity were.
Speaking of ADHD and testing for it as well as the new crazed testing madness in schools today…. Pearson has acquired an ADHD testing company; Bio Behavioral Diagnostics.
http://www.prweb.com/releases/2013/8/prweb11061295.htm