The New York State Education Department is governed by the New York Board of Regents, which oversees education and professional certification in every field.

The Regents have recently come to rely on a small group called the Regents Research Fellows to develop policy and curriculum. This group is privately funded.

Reporter James M. Odato at the Albany Times-Union described this shadow operation:

Odato writes:

A team of two dozen well-paid analysts embedded in the State Education Department is having a dramatic impact on a reform agenda that’s causing controversy throughout New York.

None are public servants.

Supported with $19 million in donations from some of the nation’s wealthiest philanthropists, the Regents Research Fund team makes up a little-known think tank within the education agency. It is helping drive reforms that affect the state’s 3.1 million public school students and employees of almost 700 school districts.

The three-year-old operation, which now comprises 27 full-time staffers and a half-time intern, is unique in public education systems nationwide.

The group is an institute charged with helping the state Board of Regents and Education Commissioner John B. King Jr. find ways to improve student performance and ensure graduates are ready for college or careers.

Barely heard of outside education circles and a mystery even within them, the “Regent fellows” are paid from entities such as the Gates Foundation and some salaries approach $200,000 a year. The arrangement is stirring concern in some quarters that deep-pocketed pedagogues are forcing their reform philosophies on an unwitting populace, and making an end run around government officers.

“We’re a public education system,” said Carol Burris, principal of South Side High School in Long Island’s Rockville Centre. “Having the wealthy pay for it, you’re seeing an agenda that is being pushed … at a rapid pace, and outside the system of public accountability.”

Their responsibilities are extensive:

The fellows have been involved in mapping teacher and principal evaluations, redoing student exams and working through the state’s implementation of the Common Core standards — reforms that have moved with a speed that many parents and teachers across the state have protested as hasty and harsh.

Assemblywoman Catherine Nolan, D-Queens, chairwoman of the chamber’s Education Committee (which appoints the Regents), said she can’t explain what the RRF does. “I don’t know anything about it,” Nolan said.

Dennis Tompkins, King’s communications director, said the fellows offer unique skills and expertise. “They’re like rock stars,” he said, adding that without their help “we would be struggling.”

Burris, named the 2013 Principal of the year by the state School Administrators Association and the National Association of Secondary School Principals, calls the fellows agents of destructive policies. She and other question who they are serving — the Board of Regents, or the wealthy patricians who pay the fellows’ salaries.

Some educators have complained:

Many administrators say the fellows don’t listen to comments from the field, and act as de facto representatives of the state agency. “It is unsettling to watch the dismantling of public education by inexperienced employees hired from a special fund,” said Katie Zahedi, a middle school principal in Red Hook. “The fellows have taken the work out of the hands of appropriately hired, official NYSED employees and are acting as policy entrepreneurs.”

The Fellows are well compensated, with salaries near $200,000 each.

This is how it was reported when it began.

So many questions: In what way is this group transparent and accountable? Is it ethical to turn major public policy issues over to a group that operates outside the purview of government?

In this post, I will explain why I disagree with the prolific, brilliant Paul Thomas.

Thomas is offended that the mainstream media jumped all over Secretary Duncan’s insulting comment about “white suburban moms,” but has consistently ignored Secretary Duncan’s policies that disproportionately harm black and Hispanic children, their families and their communities.

Thomas elsewhere wrote: If white outrage is the only outrage that counts in the U.S., any victory won from that outrage is no victory at all.

Thomas writes:

First, Duncan’s incompetence is no different than the incompetence exhibited by previous Secretaries, such as Margaret Spellings. Where has the outrage been about the national leaders of education having essentially no grasp of data or statistics? Or the likelihood that they feel compelled to protect their partisan politics regardless of the truth?

Next, Duncan’s most recent embarrassment must be placed in the larger context of the entire education agenda under Obama—an agenda characterized by Civil Rights discourse used with Orwellian aims of masking classist and racist policies impacting negatively and disproportionately black, brown, and poor children (“other people’s children”) as well as English language learners. Where has the outrage been about maintaining and expanding two separate education systems—one for the privileged children of our leaders and another for the impoverished and marginalized?

Here, and in other posts, Thomas has expressed his frustration and dismay that the only way to awaken outrage is to belittle “white suburban moms.”

While I usually agree with Thomas and find his articles consistently insightful, I disagree with him in this instance. It has become obvious over the past decade that the mainstream media not only doesn’t care when black and brown children are harmed by misguided education policy, they typically accept the claims of those inflicting the harm. They report without any criticism the policies that bounce black and brown children around the school district as if they were checkers on a checkerboard. They ignore the protests of the parents of these children when their local school is closed to make way for a privately managed charter or for a condo. It is obvious to everyone but the media that they don’t hear the voices of these children or their parents.

So, yes, it took a condescending comment directed toward white suburban mothers by Secretary Duncan to get the attention of the media. You can bemoan that fact, as Paul Thomas does, or celebrate it as the beginning of coalition politics.

It is beyond argument that those in power will not listen to the poor. But when the black and brown moms (and dads) form a coalition with the “white suburban moms,” they are a powerful force that cannot be ignored.

I learned this lesson nearly half a century ago from the great civil rights leader Bayard Rustin. Rustin wrote and spoke often about the power of coalition politics. He patiently explained that the great weight of institutionalized oppression and powerlessness would not be lifted from black Americans unless they joined in coalition with the labor movement; he saw the civil rights movement and the labor movement as natural allies. And he was right. Together, they pushed American politics to adopt laws that benefited all Americans and established a legal framework of equity.

My advice to Paul Thomas, whose sense of outrage I share, is to embrace coalition politics. When the white moms and dads realize they are in the same situation as the black and Hispanic moms and dads, they become a force to be reckoned with. The coalition of diverse groups is a source of political power that will benefit children and families of all colors and conditions.