The Los Angeles Times reports that Billionaire Eli Broad is suspending the annual Broad prize for the most improved urban district. He will continue to award a prize for charter schools.
“Billionaire Eli Broad has suspended a coveted, $1-million prize to honor the best urban school systems out of concern that they are failing to improve quickly enough. And, associates say, he’s no longer certain that he wants to reward traditional school districts at all.
“The action underscores the changing education landscape as well the evolving thinking and impatience of the 81-year-old philanthropist.”
The truth comes out. Broad has low regard for public education. He thinks it works best when technocratic managers make data-driven decisions, close struggling schools, and open privately managed charter schools. He likes mayoral control, not democratic engagement. He funded a campaign to block a tax increase to support public schools in California. He thinks poverty can be overcome by good management .
“Some observers wonder whether Broad’s expectations for urban systems, including Los Angeles Unified, have been realistic.
“Urban schools are faced with huge challenges, some of which are simply related to concentrated poverty, and so many kids are coming to school with unmet needs,” said Pedro Noguera, a professor of education at New York University.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Eli’s a pretty sinister character… much like Mr. Burns on THE SIMPSONS. Broad deliberately attempts to gut funding to traditional public schools—i.e. his secret attempt to defeat Prop 30—so as to sabotage and starve public schools of funding… and then use the resulting “failure”—an outcome that he actually (and, in the case of Prop 30, secretly) engineered. This “failure” is then used as a justification to demolish public education, bust unions, and turn public education over to money-motivated privatizers like himself.
In a recent TV interview out here in Los Angeles, Eli celebrated the dilettante scabs that staff his beloved, non-union charter schools—the schools that are privately run and totally unregulated and out of the democratic control of citizen taxpayers.
In a statement that defies common sense, he made the utterly false and easily disproven claim that that these totally uncredentialed TFA teacher “tourists” with a mere five weeks of dubious “training” were, in fact, superior to fully-credentialed veteran teachers with Master’s degrees, and decades of experience.
Watch it for a laugh:
http://www.nbclosangeles.com/video/#!/on-air/as-seen-on/NewsConference-EXTRA–Eli-Broad–We-Should-Have-Done-More/274187301
————————————————–
Here’s the interchange: (approx. times… 02:30 – 03:36…
CAPITALS are mine, Jack)
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
CONAN NOLAN: “- Have you lost your enthusiasm
for the Teach for America program? I know your
foundation has provided money for this effort
to take college kids – ”
ELI BROAD: “-mm-hmm-”
CONAN NOLAN: “- and have them commit two years,
frequently to a low income school … uhhh… is that… ?
Is that good for education?”
ELI BROAD: “I think it’s great for education.
We’ve been involved with Teach for America
for fourteen years. They get the best
students out of liberal arts colleges to go
into teaching for at least two years, and
then most of them stay on in education
in one way or another.”
CONAN NOLAN: “Some have suggested
that the… the period for training prior to going
into a classroom isn’t extensive enough
for those young students or young
graduates who end up in… the…
Members of various teachers
unions call it ‘Teach for Awhile’, not
‘Teach for America’. ”
ELI BROAD: “Well, you know THESE
TEACH FOR AMERICA TEACHERS DO
BETTER — ESPECIALLY IN TEACHING
MATH AND OTHER SUBJECTS — THAN
VETERAN TEACHERS, and yes, they can
improve the way they train their teachers,
and they’re doing that.”
———————————————
This is such a blatant falsehood.
He’s either misinformed, or knows that
he’s lying.
It’s the “big lie”… if you repeat it often
enough, and for a long enough period
of time, people figure, “Well, it MUST
be true.”
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And on the same day I called out Delaware Governor Markell on discrimination against public school teachers.
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He should be ignored.
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Once again, an example of how the largesse and noblesse oblige of the charter members of the BBBC [BoredBillionaireBoysClub] is a slender reed on which to depend.
But only, of course, for public schools that take in everyone that comes in the front door, including Michael Petrilli’s “non-strivers” and Rahm Emanuel’s “uneducables” and a disproportionate [compared to charters] number of students with hardcore behavior problems and ELLs and SpecEd and such.
Public schools should never have to depend on the whimsical greed of clueless billionaires. And given that public schools are supposed to be the foundation of national security and economic health they should get all the resources and support they need.
Period. No excuses.
😎
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Good. I think it’s a more honest discussion when they drop the pretense of “improving public schools” and focus solely on replacing public schools.
Now if we could only get ed reform politicians to admit this is the goal we’d be making real progress on transparency. They should stop hiding the ball too. It’s dishonest.
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Atlanta Superintendent Dr. Beverly Hall received $$$, and the APS system principals were trained via Broad Principals Institute.
We are still involved in the never-ending Cheating Scandal, paying $M to lawyers, and unearthing the ‘unbelievable progress’ made by low lerforming students…just to earn the $M, show off the gains, celebrate miraculous progress by Children in Poverty – AND – Dr. Hall was celebrated as the NATIONS’ BEST SUPERINTENDENT, while teachers were preassured within an inch of their lives and their professions.
Thanks all you Corporate Profiteers who harmed thousands.
You will walk that same walk to your banks as have all the SHYSTERS who participated in the mortgage bubble & many other bubbles. Shame on you! It will not impact you, because sociopaths have no inner core for morals.
Welcome to the #ToxicTestingBubble!
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I would like to see a study of the criteria operating in the award of the Broad prize, the credentials of the judges, whether the same judges served for more than one year, and the current status of the Broad prize winners starting with the first awards in 2002.
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I would agree with Pedro Noguera.
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I would agree with Barbara except he is very hard to ignore when his agenda has completely infiltrated your district. We have a Broad-washed board of women (who don’t have children in the school system any longer) who hired a Broad superintendent who brings in lots of Broad residents, and they are all carrying out the corporate reform agenda set forth by Broad, Gates, Rhee, etc. We call the board the stepford grandmas because they let the charming Broad supt have his way with them and the district. Sadly, I think many of them believe it is the right path. In Georgia, these Broad folks hit a particularly sweet spot for their work bc the state permits districts to choose to be “charter systems” so they can waive state laws as they like. It gives the district charter status rather than the individual schools. Parents are ignoring the Broad agenda here to their detriment.
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Soon, not too long, two more Metro ATL school systems will march down the Charter System ¿Broad/Gates & Co? Road!
So easy when $B are not an object for Billionaires & money is EVERYTHING to their bottom-feeders.
Selling total access to our children is a small price for all of us to pay. You think?
Looks that way!
Who will c,ean up after this mess? Still paying for the ATL Scandal $$$$.
Stay tuned!
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Big deal. 1 million bucks may seem like a lot, but in reality isn’t. It would run our rural district with about 800 kids in Northern NY for less than a month.
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It’s obvious that Eli Broad is deaf, dumb and blind to the facts, and his chosen bias will keep him from seeing the truth of how wrong he is. This is one old man closing in on death who will never admit he is wrong.
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Since any sum of money to any school district. His reason for withdrawing the support is telling. The districts were not improving fast enough. But what is fast enough? Does it mean “doing what I want” even though there is no evidence that what he wants is a real solution?
What happens when all the philanthropists throw in the towel? Will we be left with only the “pigs at the trough” of tax payer money?
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Sorry for the too soon posting. It should read, “Any sum of money to any school district is needed.”
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Considering how much education should have to do the job properly, $1 million dollars is one drop in the ocean. Last year, Melinda Gates announced that their foundation was going to donate $1 million dollars to teachers to buy supplies. When you know how much money teachers spend out of their own pockets annually, it becomes clear this was a PR stunt designed to make it look like Bill and Melinda Gates actually cares about children and education.
I wrote a post about this deception called “The Bill and Melinda Gates Deceptive PR Machine in Action”
And the Bill and Melinda Gates $1 million contribution represents only 0.625 percent of what public school teachers spend out of their own pocket annually on classroom supplies and gear.
But Bill and Melinda have dedicated billion of dollars to destroy public education and break the backs of the teacher unions and destroy the lives of several million hard working public school teachers.
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The money quote from an article in the NYT:
“Eli Broad was wrong about what was needed to improve public education,” said Diane Ravitch, the education historian and activist, in an email. “He thought that management and charters could overcome poverty, and his cancellation of the prize is his admission that he was wrong. The problems are deeper than he imagined.”
also:
“Julian Vasquez Heilig, associate professor of educational policy at the University of Texas at Austin, said, “I think that parents and stakeholders are a lot more suspicious of these types of reforms because we’ve been at it for more than a decade and they haven’t really moved the needle.”
The link:
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What is going on at the NYT? Two articles in five days about “reform” failures! TFA on the front page, now Eli Broad questioning “reform.” One of the few honest things I have witnessed regarding the Broad prize is the fact it was never awarded to Denver Public Schools, in spite of the hype, in spite of the shout outs by the Feds, in spite of the former superintendent, now Senator Michael Bennet, touting Denver’s successes repeatedly on his soapbox at the Senate HELP committee. The reality of being “disappointed with the overall progress in urban public schools” is probably one of the most honest statements to come from the Broad foundation. This won’t stop the “reforms” from being pushed relentlessly, but at least there is a crack that even the NYT can’t ignore in this ten year failure. I anxiously await the light bulb going off about charters!
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