With the likely election of Democrat Bill de Blasio as mayor of Néw York City, the educrats at Bloomberg’s Department of Education are updating their resumes and starting to pack their bags.
First to jump ship is Deputy Chancellor Marc Sternberg, who is moving to Arkansas to help the Walton Family Foundation in its quest to replace public schools with vouchers and charter schools.
This article, written before the Democratic primary (which de Blasio won) explains why the DOE will no longer need Mr. Sternberg’s inestimable services:
“Two days ago NYC Mayoral Candidate de Blasio (the frontrunner for Tuesday’s Democratic primary) announced his support for a moratorium on ‘co-locating’ charter schools into buildings already occupied by neighborhood schools. If ‘co-locating’ sounds reasonable, well it’s because the practice was given a deceptively anodyne title.
“NYC co-locations are really hostile takeovers (sometime in whole, sometimes in part) of zoned neighorhood schools. Kids attending then’co-located’ neighborhood schools are kicked out of their classrooms and forced into yet more crowded classrooms. Charter schools don’t pay rent, often get the best facilities, and cherry pick the use of ‘shared space’. They often reject students who don’t fit in their managers’ model of the right sort of student.”
Apparently Sternberg will keep pushing those co-locations in NYC until the day he moves to Arkansas. The Bloomberg administration has a long list of co-locations that it expects to approve next month.
It is time for de Blasio to assert that the last-minute efforts of Bloomberg’s lame-duck Panel on Educational Policy to give as much space as possible to charter operators will be subject to a moratorium on January 1, when a new day begins for Néw York City
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“NYC co-locations are really hostile takeovers (sometime in whole, sometimes in part) of zoned neighorhood schools. Kids attending then’co-located’ neighborhood schools are kicked out of their classrooms and forced into yet more crowded classrooms. Charter schools don’t pay rent, often get the best facilities, and cherry pick the use of ‘shared space’. They often reject students who don’t fit in their managers’ model of the right sort of student.”
It’s just amazing to me that with all the millions of dollars in reform lobby groups and think tanks and thousands of employees and study after study, no one gave the slightest thought to what the kids who attended that school prior to the merger (or whatever this is) thought about that. Has anyone asked them? How did the public school kids in those schools fare? Did this benefit them in ANY way, or is it all just sacrifice? They were just the designated losers in the “reform” scheme? How is that fair?
Once again, I and millions of other parents are being told over and over that this is “about” improving “public education”, and I have yet to see the slightest benefit to existing public schools, or the children who attend those schools. It’s ALL loss to them.
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Chiara…yes, these are hostile takeovers, just as the Wall Street crew does it, and how the Broad Academy teaches their grads to do it. Venice HS in Santa Monica was able to deflect an embedded charter school to be run by Steve Barr (friend of Ben Austin of Parent Revolution), ex head of Green Dot, and his colluder, Deasy, who just showed up one morning without notice and thought their takeover was ‘a fait accompli,’ but the educated and tough educators, administrators, and parents, withstood this takeover.
However, in LA right now there is pending litigation to force these embedded to charters to have complete parity with the public schools in which they reside.
This means a Charter with 300 students insists on separate but equal classrooms, bathrooms, cafeterias, auditoriums, sports fields, etc., as has the public school student community of 2,000, and all at the taxpayers expense. The insanity of continually raping the taxpayers for their own enrichment is corporate socialism to the nth degree.
We must keep on educating the public about the scam of the Charter industry.
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It’s not about the kids…
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It never was . . . .
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I’m genuinely curious about the fall-out, because it’s tens of thousands of kids now after more than a decade of this in Ohio.
The largest school district in the state is now a for-profit cybercharter. They’re terrible “schools”. They’re collectively the worst “district” in the state.
That has to be showing up in community and state colleges (they’re all working class or middle class kids), because it’s more than a decade now. How do they do as compared to public school kids?
Someone should do a study on the effect of school reform on all these kids. What happens to the cybercharter kids after they attend the giant graduations where Jeb Bush makes a celebrity appearance?
Interesting that the billionaires aren’t interested in backing THAT research.
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Right now the three big ones: N.Y., LAUSD and Chicago have the capability of reinstating real public education devoluped and drawn from the public in open transparent decisions from now on concerning who will run their, not the billionaires, school districts. Billionaires are just one other person and let them get in line for three minutes like the rest of us. Who has the most students in public schools? Who generates the money that pays for this and for the billionaires to steal? Why the public. It is theirs. We demand to a say again. It is that simple. We are close to finishing the job and starting forward movement. We need help in pushing the snowball just a little bit more to the top and then it will naturally roll downhill gaining strength and speed. If it works at LAUSD which is a very large district, why not in the others. In order to have good student outcomes you must get the buy in of at least the students first, parents second, teachers third and community is the best combination. First they have to buy in. If you give them a say so in the selection for the board to make a decision they have a buy in. You have empowered them to help not fight you. It used to be that way. We figure at LAUSD it was around 13 years ago. That is a lot of lost students and ruined lives for nothing. This is unacceptable.
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Sadly this not how things are working at LAUSD. Crenshaw HS, Verdugo HS, Hamilton HS, and others over last few years built successful new programs from the bottom up, including in the planning all the community of students, parents, teachers, administrators, the public, and when Broad’s guy, Deasy was hired, he shut them all down, fired and/or moved teachers and administrators and installed his own choices.
And yesterday the LAUSD School Board approved the Deasy Common Core budget despite the iPad cost scandal. If the new Board member majority comprised of teachers cannot make change, it shows our community the power of Broad and his privatizer cohorts. It is only when a vocal majority of our LA community members join in unison and keep hammering away loudly, that maybe the tide will turn. Until then, it seems like Sisyphus.
But I still have hope that Ratliff, Zimmer, La Motte, Kayser, and Bd. Pres. Vladovic, will push for our tax money to be used to improve our schools rather than charterize them. California has more charters than any state in the union…and our unwitting taxpayers are being fleeced to support them all.
Many of these charters have Broad Academy-trained CEOs being paid 6 figure salaries, even the non profits, and most use TFA kids to teach the classes so as to cut costs of using real highly trained teachers.
This is what the LA Times should report on rather than talking about the “dysfunctional” School Board as they did yesterday…and also frequently lauding the Parent Revolution’s very hostile takeovers of inner city schools. Even our only major LA newspaper seems bought and paid for.
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Addendum…remember that the Walton Family Foundation gave over $14 million to Ben Austin to promote parent trigger laws, and they gave another $20 million to hire TFA kids to teach in these new charters. These are the same ‘community idealists’ who lead the charge by donating multi millions to initiate Stand Your Ground laws in all states in the US…so we can all carry guns,
Why isn’t the LA Times doing reporting on the major donors to all this chaos?
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The impending election of de Blasio will give Rahm pause, and then the efforts to wreck Chicago’s schools for their own good will ramp up. Though he may currently be in denial, Rahm has already seen some of the writing on the wall locally, and with the election of de Blasio in NYC on an assertively anti-Bloomberg education plank, he must realize that his re-election fantasies are going up in smoke. The most amazing thing would be if he came clean and admitted that “reform” has failed, but that’s just my momentary fantasy. His ego is too big for that kind of confession, and considering he ha no excuse for not knowing better, he’ll be looking for work in some plutocrat think tank.
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Sternberg is moving to DC not Arkansas to run Walton’s K12 programs. I think it is a conflict of interest the way he is still reserving space in public schools for charters, including 10 Success Academy charter schools that have gotten $2M from the Walton Foundation.
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It’ll be probably be interesting to hear from these kids when they’re old enough to start describing what this experiment was like from their perspective.
People have all sorts of memories of school, and very few of them revolve around academics. Did they think this forced “co location” was unfair or disruptive? Did they see the charter school that was in the same location as better resourced because of the private donor money they didn’t get? I’m 51 and I don’t remember learning any specific thing in my elementary school, but I do remember that it was a much happier and more harmonious place than the middle school I later attended across the street. I can still easily recall the physical layout of both schools. Judging from the fiction I’ve read, I don’t think I’m alone in that.
The adult recounting of these reform experiments should be interesting, to say the least 🙂
There may be an entire body of work out of New Orleans on what it’s like to change schools every year, or the memories of the kids in Ohio when their charter school closes with no warning, and they’re sent off in different directions to their (respective) local public schools. What happens to the friends they’ve made?
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Exactly right Chiara, Education is really about the kids. It should be all about the kids. Anything other than that is just wrong. Changing schools yearly, destroying relationships with other children and with their teachers is really bad for kids and seriously disrupts their learning process.
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I wonder if he’ll end up in Oklahoma as the “super star” the WFF is promising to deliver unto us.
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Would that mean the NYC would go, again, under the policies of progressives? (E.g. Dinkins). I was in NYC under Dinkins and NYC was a toilet. Gulliani and Bloomberg elevated NYC. Dinkins sank NYC into the toilet. Take your pick.
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The Waltons are heavily invested in the University of Arkansas. Also, Alice Walton’s pet project Crystal Bridges.
So, they funded a study to prove the benefit of field trips to art museums…
http://www.arktimes.com/ArkansasBlog/archives/2013/09/16/now-it-can-be-revealed-field-trips-to-crystal-bridges-good-for-students
Because…Walton
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Art museums, what crap. Why would we want students to see art, let alone have evidence that going to an art museum improves their critical thinking skills? Students should stick to reading and math, the basics.
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http://www.ed.gov/news/press-releases/us-department-education-awards-30-million-grants-support-teacher-and-principal-d
TFA just got another huge chunk of change from Arne Duncan. They’re the largest single recipient in this round of grants.
Aren’t public entities at a huge disadvantage when competing for grants against Walton-funded orgs like TFA? How is this grant process equitable? The wealthiest reform orgs also get the most federal funding?
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Chiara…thanks for the link. I cannot understand how they hand out taxpayer funds to private for-profit orgs such as WestEd.
We the People have NO voice.
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I wish someone would do an analysis of these federal grants. I’d like an accounting of who the winners and losers are over the last five years. I don’t believe it’s a level playing field if the “reform” orgs have hundreds of millions from wealthy donors and a public entity has to compete for additional funding with them. The public sector entities are operating with a skeleton staff after 6 years of austerity. How are we in the public supposed to compete against Walton and Gates for federal grants?
Public schools just lose and lose and lose under reform. There is LITERALLY no upside for the 95% of kids who attend traditional public schools. It’s just brutally unfair to public school kids. They don’t have an advocate outside of local school boards. No one is looking out for their interests. It’s mind-blowing to me because they are the vast majority of kids!
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@Chiara… how Duncan has the authority to use our tax money basically to fund a privatization venture as in TFA is beyond me! WHEN CAN WE THE PEOPLE DUMP THIS FOOL FROM THE ED POSITION HE UNFORTUNATELY HOLDS!!!!!!
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It’s a market-based system. If you attract private capital, you also win federal funding, because you are The Best, or billionaires wouldn’t have backed you.
That this method skews wildly towards billionaires winning in the “marketplace of ideas” doesn’t seem to have occurred to Arne Duncan.
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When you think about all the people who were originally hired by Klein reeking havoc in other districts, cities and states, this is not surprising news. I am sure she and others will be paid handsomely to destroy public ed.
Did you see the NYTimes report on the success of schools under Bloomberg? Once again the NYTimes is not allowing for comments. (Probably can’t take the heat). But the reporter had to put in a zinger against de Blasio…
“The Democratic nominee, Bill de Blasio favors undoing much of the Bloomberg administration’s centerpiece educational policies by slowing the growth of charter schools and ending, for at least a year, the practice of closing low-performing schools. The Republican candidate, Joseph J. Lhota, has defended the mayor’s record on education and wants to expand the number of charter schools.”
Thank God he want to “undo” the Bloomberg policies. Maybe (and I am praying) education under de Blasio will become a stellar example for all cities to follow. One that does not scapegoat teachers–many who supported him despite the UFT endorsing Thompson.
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In a more just world, Sternberg would be shopping for a criminal defense lawyer, not receiving blood money from the Waltons, given his collusion with Eva Moskowitz and other charter school racketeers.
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Jason Bedrick critiques Diane’s new book; Jason Bedrick is a policy analyst with Cato’s Center for Educational Freedom (his article is up on Education Next the Fordham Institute affiliate at Harvard in Cambridge MA. I have been writing so many comments on the E.N website that they autoatically delete me so if anyone wants to place a comment there. In particular, the ad hominem attack “cue the dramatic chipmunk” is part of his fatuous so-called humor? But it isn’t funny because this is also where Checers Finn calls us “acolytes” and “marriage wreckers”. If you write a comment would you also post it here? We have FairTest in Boston that is more progressive; we have Pioneer Institute which leans right but sometimes describes the situation well in terms overtesting (and Sandra Stotsky’s standards work)…. but Education Next is always one way. I started writing to their board members when they delete my comments.
More on Bedrick: he received his Master’s in Public Policy, with a focus in education policy, from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. His thesis, “Choosing to Learn,” assessed the scholarship tax credit programs operating in eight states including their impact of student performance, fiscal impact, program design, and popularity.
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and we thought incest was immoral and illegal…. go figure
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