Michigan’s troubled Education Achievement Authority awarded $1.7 million to a firm that never won an award. The grant is for principal training. EAA chief Virginia Conforme knew the bidders from their work in New York City’s Department of Education. They were not the low bidders; they were 8th of 10 bidders.
“The School Empowerment Network, or SEN, has no office, no listed phone number, an unfinished website and a seven-member staff. Its initial bid of $2.3 million was more than twice the $1-million bid submitted by the highest-scoring firm, Boston-based Public Consulting Group, which has 60 offices in the U.S., Canada and Europe.
Most of SEN’s current staff worked formerly for New York City schools at the same time Veronica Conforme, the current chancellor of the financially troubled Education Achievement Authority, also worked there. The EAA is SEN’s only client.”
Its business address is its CEO’s home address in New York City.
This contract smells bad.
How do you spell “cronyism”?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The EAA has gone down the rabbit hole, Diane. It is no longer mentioned in ed reform circles although they all promoted it long, long ago, way back in 2012.
They not only promoted it in Detroit, Eli Broad lobbied publicly to extend it to the whole state! If it hadn’t been for one or two dissident lawmakers in the statehouse, they would have privatized a whole bunch of districts in Michigan according to Broad’s directives.
We’re now pretending that 2012 never happened, and any problems from this date forward are to be categorized “Detroit Public Schools”.
This is one of the privatization lobbying groups in Michigan. They want the whole system privatized. Try to find a mention of the EAA, which is the privatized system experiment they ALL promoted in 2012:
http://www.mackinac.org/21895
It’s not even that facts don’t matter- recent history just disappears! They can’t mention the actual privatization experiment in Detroit, which is the EAA, so they simply ignore it and go all the way to Louisiana and New Orleans for an example of an ed reform success.
LikeLike
I spell it G-R-A-F-T …
LikeLike
Here’s Eli Broad, declaring the success of his EAA in Detroit and lobbying hard to extend it to all of Michigan:
“The EAA opened in September with more than 10,000 students attending 15 public schools in Detroit. The academic baseline was staggering. Only 2% of students were proficient in math — none in the sixth grade — and only 18% were proficient in reading. Ninety-five percent of students are low-income; 99% are students of color.
In the EAA, students attend a 7.5-hour school day, 210 days a year — compared with six hours and 180 days in the typical Michigan public school. That extension alone equates to an additional six
years of schooling for a student who starts in kindergarten. Each student has received a tablet computer and learns at his or her own pace. .
In five months, 22% of students have made more than a year of academic growth in math and 27% have advanced a year in reading.
These successful results should not be limited to only Detroit schools. We support the smart expansion of the EAA when it has the capacity to add schools statewide that are failing the majority of their students.”
This experiment has just been removed from the ed reform history books. It never happened. They’re now promoting a system-wide EAA while completely ignoring the results of the smaller scale EAA.
LikeLike
Be very weary of these “results”. I have many friends who teach for the EAA who are very concerned with the quality of the computing systems mandated for use, school quality, lack of admin. support, etc. Teachers may have “mini-lessons”, but most of the learning is done “self-paced” on the computer. Also, the quality of the education received on these computer systems is also poor. Many students are graduating illiterate and with less than basic math skills, despite their learning “gains”.
I would be super concerned with “self-paced” learning on a computer. I taught students in alternative schools whose instruction was completely conducted online. Many students learn to “cheat” the systems, which are already low quality. Also, students would finish a course with high marks, and not be able to tell you anything they learned about in the course. This was norm.
LikeLike
EAA schools, by law, are non-union schools. Also EAA teachers are not allowed to teach, are not allowed to do any interactive direct instruction. Many spots were filled by Teach for America, and there has been a constant churn of teachers. So EAA schools are staffed with non-union non-professionals. In that sense they got exactly what they wanted. In a side note, it’s remarkable that the EAA has not been able to even supply a graduating senior with their transcript; they had no records. It’s criminal how students lives have been sacrificed in the debacle.
LikeLike
So Broad said that the program made gains in math and reading. Did it? Is there a link to more info?
LikeLike
They used their own testing instruments.
https://sites.google.com/site/detroitdataanddemocracyproject/MEAP-Cohort-Data-Reveal-Stagnation-and-Decline-in-EAA-Achievement
LikeLike
Anything coming out of the deformers’ mouths cannot be trusted. The evidence is in front of our faces. OY!
And I am now sick in bed, honest. Been a rough two weeks.
LikeLike