Tom Ultican has been writing about differentcities where the Destroy Public Education Movement has made extraordinary gains. Atlanta has fallen into the clutches of the DPE as a result of Teach for America’s success in electing its alumni to the school board, which hired a superintendent committedto the DPE agenda.
Ultican writes:
“On March 4, the Atlanta Public School (APS) board voted 5 to 3 to begin adopting the “System of Excellent Schools.” That is Atlanta’s euphemistic name for the portfolio district model which systematically ends democratic governance of public schools. The portfolio model was a response to John Chubb’s and Terry Moe’s 1990 book, Politics, Markets, and America’s Schools, which claimed that poor academic performance was “one of the prices Americans pay for choosing to exercise direct democratic control over their schools.”
“A Rand Corporation researcher named Paul Hill who founded the Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) began working out the mechanics of ending democratic control of public education. His solution to ending demon democracy – which is extremely unpopular with many billionaires – was the portfolio model of school governance.
“The portfolio model of school governance directs closing schools that score in the bottom 5% on standardized testing and reopening them as charter schools or Innovation schools. In either case, the local community loses their right to hold elected leaders accountable, because the schools are removed from the school board’s portfolio. It is a plan that guarantees school churn in poor neighborhoods, venerates disruption and dismisses the value of stability and community history.
Atlanta’s Comprador Regime
“Atlanta resident Ed Johnson compared what is happening in APS to a “comprador regime” serving today’s neocolonialists. In the 19th century, a comprador was a native servant doing the bidding of his European masters; the new compradors are doing the bidding of billionaires privatizing public education.
”Chalkbeat reported that Atlanta is one of seven US cities The City Fund has targeted for implementation of the portfolio district governance model. The city fund was founded in 2018 by two billionaires, John Arnold the former Enron executive who did not go to prison and Reed Hastings the founder and CEO of Netflix. Neerav Kingsland, Executive Director of The City Fund, stated, “Along with the Hastings Fund and the Arnold Foundation, we’ve also received funds from the Dell Foundation, the Gates Foundation, the Walton Family Foundation, and the Ballmer Group.”
“City Fund has designated RedefinED as their representative in Atlanta. Ed Chang, the Executive Director of RedefinED, is an example of the billionaire created education “reform” leader recruited initially by Teach for America (TFA).
“TFA is the billionaire financed destroy-public-education (DPE) army. TFA teachers are not qualified to be in a classroom. They are new college graduates with no legitimate teacher training nor any academic study of education theory. Originally, TFA was proposed as an emergency corps of teachers for states like West Virginia who were having trouble attracting qualified professional educators. Then billionaires started financing TFA. They pushed through laws defining TFA teachers as “highly qualified” and purchased spurious research claiming TFA teachers were effective. If your child is in a TFA teacher’s classroom, they are being cheated out of a professionally delivered education. However, TFA provides the DPE billionaires a group of young ambitious people who suffer from group think bordering on cult like indoctrination.
“Chang is originally from Chicago where he trained to be a physical therapist. He came south as a TFA seventh grade science teacher. Chang helped found an Atlanta charter school and through that experience received a Building Excellent Schools (BES) fellowship. BES claims to train “high-capacity individuals to take on the demanding and urgent work of leading high-achieving, college preparatory urban charter schools.”
“After his subsequent charter school proposal was rejected, Chang started doing strategy work for the Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP). This led him to a yearlong Fisher Fellowship training to start and run a KIPP charter school. In 2009, he opened KIPP STRIVE Academy in Atlanta.
“While complicit in stealing neighborhood public schools from Atlanta’s poorest communities, Chang says with a straight face, “Education is the civil rights movement of today.”
“Chang now has more than a decade working in billionaire financed DPE organizations. He started in TFA, had two billionaire supported “fellowships” and now has millions of dollars to use as the Executive Director of RedefinED. It is quite common for TFA alums like Chang to end up on the boards of multiple education “reform” organizations.
“Under Chang’s direction, RedefinED has provided monetary support for both the fake teacher program, TFA, and the fake graduate school, Relay. In addition, they have given funds to the Georgia Charter School Association, Purpose Built Schools, Kindezi School, KIPP and Resurgence Hall.”
Keep reading to learn the scope of the civic disaster in Atlanta, where DPE is rapidly applying its failed ideas and dismantling public education.
The sad part of DPE is that it proclaims lofty goals but eventually has to confront its failures, which are predictable.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
posted at OEN https://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/Atlanta-School-Board-Votes-in-Best_Web_OpEds-Agenda_Diane-Ravitch_Education_Governance-190327-243.html#comment729067
with this comment:
Keep reading ULTICAN’S article,”to learn the scope of the civic disaster in Atlanta, where DPE is rapidly applying its failed ideas and dismantling public education.The sad part of DPE is that it proclaims lofty goals but eventually has to confront its failures, which are predictable.”
and DID YOU KNOW that: ““TFA is the billionaire financed destroy-public-education (DPE) army. TFA teachers are not qualified to be in a classroom. They are new college graduates with no legitimate teacher training nor any academic study of education theory. Originally, TFA was proposed as an emergency corps of teachers for states like West Virginia who were having trouble attracting qualified professional educators. Then billionaires started financing TFA. They pushed through laws defining TFA teachers as “highly qualified” and purchased spurious research claiming TFA teachers were effective. If your child is in a TFA teacher’s classroom, they are being cheated out of a professionally delivered education. However, TFA provides the DPE billionaires a group of young ambitious people who suffer from group think bordering on cult like indoctrination.”
“The warning signs appeared soon after Denise Kawamoto accepted a job at Today’s Fresh Start Charter School in South Los Angeles.
Though she was fresh out of college, she was pretty sure it wasn’t normal for the school to churn so quickly through teachers or to mount surveillance cameras in each classroom. Old computers were lying around, but the campus had no internet access. Pay was low and supplies scarce — she wasn’t given books for her students.
She struggled to reconcile the school’s conditions with what little she knew about its wealthy founders, Clark and Jeanette Parker of Beverly Hills.
When Kawamoto saw their late-model Mercedes-Benz outside the school, she would think: “Look at your school, then look at what you drive.”
“That didn’t sit well with us teachers,” she said.
The Parkers have cast themselves as selfless philanthropists, telling the California Board of Education that they have “devoted all of our lives to the education of other people’s children, committed many millions of our own dollars directly to that particular purpose, with no gain directly to us.”
But the couple have, in fact, made millions from their charter schools. Financial records show the Parkers’ schools have paid more than $800,000 annually to rent buildings the couple own. The charters have contracted out services to the Parkers’ nonprofits and companies and paid Clark Parker generous consulting fees, all with taxpayer money, a Times investigation found.”
I know ed reformers are vehemently and ideologically anti-union, but they should put in whistle blower protections for employees of charters. At minimum. They don’t have any way to track if and why and when charter employees are fired. It’s a disaster waiting to happen. They won’t report problems if they can be fired at will and this is all public money.
They all point to labor union data to indicate there are problems with public school employees, but they HAVE that data, which is the only reason they can point to it.
They don’t know how many charter teachers are removed (or not removed) or WHY they are removed. They’re not comparing apples and oranges. They’re comparing apples and…nothing.
https://www.latimes.com/local/education/la-me-edu-charter-schools-20190327-htmlstory.html
Last October, one of Oakland’s school board members, James Harris, made a special trip to Atlanta to meet with the school board and discuss Oakland’s own System of Schools aka the portfolio model. Guess Mr. Harris made a big impression on Atlanta’s school board. Likely that that the trip was bought and paid for by GO and/or the City Fund. Oakland voters, hijacked by billionaires, elected a school board so toxic that it could actually spread its own portfolio poison to other cities. My sincerest apology to the city of Atlanta.
“I would like to report on a school in Los Angeles that is run poorly and is a danger to their students,” wrote Andrew Goudy on the first of nine pages that detailed problems including cracks in classroom walls, broken air-conditioning and heating systems, and cafeteria food served spoiled or undercooked. He had, he wrote, maybe one textbook for every three students.
Goudy wrote that he’d overheard an administrator call several students a “total waste” and speak of the opportunity “to get rid of” those with disabilities.
Years later, in an interview with The Times, he said had never worked at a school that showed so little regard for students’ well-being.
“Every day, it was like, what should I do?” Goudy said. “Should I run in there and call 911? Should I just get out and work at Starbucks?”
The choice, he said, was made for him. Shortly after he sent the emails, he said, he was fired.”
Private sector hiring and firing won’t work with public money. Thousands of highly paid ed reformers who designed these systems and no one considered this? Not one charter cheerleader in the Bush, Obama or Trump Administration thought about protections for charter teachers who register complaints?
It’s bad government. They invented a publicly-funded sector with no built-in protections for children, teachers, or taxpayers. It’s probably worse at the voucher schools that are popping up all over the place in Florida. They’re not regulated at all.
This is the new ed reform talking point on the massive federal voucher program they’re all promoting:
“Betsy DeVos
#EducationFreedom Scholarships empower states to work hand-in-hand with existing public education options.”
None of this funding is going to public school students or families. It’s deceptive to pretend they benefit.
If they want to work exclusively for students in charters and private schools, fine, I’m not thrilled about paying public employees who refuse to work on behalf of public school students, but I get it- our schools are unfashionable and ideologically incorrect, because they’re public and unionized. But please don’t pretend any of this benefits the 90% of families who use public schools. They weren’t even considered when these schemes were hatched and they’re never included in any of the Grand Plans.
Why certain cities were selected first for exploitation via school privatization-
Detroit- 82% Black population, Memphis, 64%, Baltimore, 63.7%, N.O., 60.2%, Atlanta 54%, Cleveland, 53.3% Wash. D.C., 50.7%, Cincinnati, 45%, Little Rock, 42.3%, Rochester and Buffalo, about 40% each.
Privatization promotes racist opportunism at the expense of democracy. Privatization is underwritten by billionaires that seek to monetize our students. Privatizers hire ambitious young people with little to no background in education. They are eager to prove their value by paying to manipulate people at the top to sell out the most vulnerable, poor minority students. The whole bottom 5% rule is a scam to create a ready stream of students eligible to be monetized by corporate overseers. The portfolio model is a corrupt system that targets mostly poor, minority communities. It turns students into a commodity and treats students like a corporate asset in order to transfer public money into private hands. The people of Atlanta should be asking themselves, “What would Martin Luther King do about this hijacking of democracy and human rights?”
“Rand Corporation researcher named Paul Hill who founded the Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) began working out the mechanics of ending democratic control of public education”
Thanks to Tom Ultican for naming names.
The only thing that will make people think twice is if their bogus writings, reporting, etc have personal consequences (eg, not being able to get a job outside a place like Ayn RAND Corporation)
More of this naming names needs to happen .