Some people think that Kaya Henderson is the Chancellor of the D.C. public schools. Think again. The real chancellor is a very wealthy woman named Katherine Bradley. She is married to a media mogul (The Atlantic), and she is very very interested in the public schools. She is quite certain she knows how to fix them. She works closely with the Gates Foundation, the Walton Family Foundation, and the Graham family that used to own the Washington Post. She is a power in D.C. politics. All decisions about the future of the schools must be cleared by her. You know by now that she believes in free-markets and privatization.
Katherine Bradley is a symbol of the erosion of democracy in our society. She has no obvious qualifications to make decisions about the future of public education. Being rich is not a qualification. I don’t know for sure, but I would wager that she didn’t go to public school, never taught in public school, and has never had a child in public school. So why is she the shadow chancellor? Why do her wishes decide the fate of a public institution?
A group called Empower DC sued to block the closure of D.C. public schools. Their request was rejected by a judge, but they were nonetheless able to obtain thousands of emails about the closures. Katherine Bradley pops up often in the correspondence.
This is one of the emails that was released:
“The bottom line is that overall there was not a huge difference performance change between students in schools which closed and all other students. The small difference there was was actually negative, so it’s probably just better to avoid this angle if it does come up.”
— Greg Garrison, DCPS Deputy Chief, Office of Data and Accountability (former) to Peter Weber, DCPS Chief of Strategy (November 7, 2012 – Bates # 014934)
Diane Ravitch's blog 
If you look back over Duncan’s tenure you’ll find him criticizing a lot of people and entities- labor unions, public schools, teachers, even public school parents.
You know what you won’t find? Any criticism or even public disagreement with the wealthy heavy hitters in ed reform. Duncan and his team apparently are 100% in agreement with these wealthy ed reformers on each and every issue OR they’re too cowed and captured to oppose any of them publicly.
Is there an ed reformer in government who has publicly disagreed with Gates or Broad or the Walton heirs or this Bradley person? Is there an example of that actually happening?
Until I see that I won’t believe they aren’t captured by these people. I want to see one ed reformer oppose one wealthy ed reformer on one issue, publicly.
American society as a board game for the rich.
yes, Monopoly!
Enjoy our take!
https://newarkschoolsforsale.wordpress.com/2015/12/13/turnarounds-buddy-katherine-bradleys-infamy-catching-up-with-the-blog-of-record/
Los Angeles is a good example of how powerful these people are. Imagine if a group of regular people had put forth a plan to radically transform the country’s 2nd largest school district. It would be ENDLESSLY evaluated and parsed. Every professional ed reformer in the country would be weighing in with opinions.
Broad does it and there’s this weird silence. They’re afraid to say anything. This individual is buying a school system and there will be no criticism or even discussion or analysis outside of the local school board. Arne Duncan has opinions on everything from school lunches to how to measure “grit”. He has NO opinion on privatizing a huge school district? What the hell is that all about?
Actually, it wouldn’t even be evaluated.
One of the supporters of the Broad-Walmart plan was refreshingly honest in an article, admitting it is, in fact, “a hostile takeover” by private interests, and damn it, so what if it is?
https://www.the74million.org/article/opinion-maybe-a-hostile-takeover-is-precisely-what-the-los-angeles-unified-school-district-needs
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NICHOLAS MELVOIN:
“School Board President Steve Zimmer denounced the effort — which would create 260 new public schools over the next eight years—and even went so far as to decry it ‘an outline for a hostile takeover.’ But if I were a shareholder of LAUSD — and as a taxpayer, I guess we all are — I might welcome a hostile takeover.
“In fact, a hostile takeover might be precisely what our district needs.”
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My favorite line:
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NICHOLAS MELVOIN: “Is the charter plan guaranteed to succeed? Of course not. And if it fails, we’ll try something new.”
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And what if, in the process, and in the course to that failure, you end up making things worse — far, far worse… irreversibly worse?
*** MORE DECEPTION FROM CAMPBELL BROWN ***
The article I cited was from Campbell Brown’s “THE 74” website, and describes the writer, Nicholas Melvoin, as “a teacher in Watts”. Melvoin gives the impression that he was just a teacher who chanced upon the leaked document of the Broad-Walmart plan … The Great Public Schools Now Initiative.
https://www.the74million.org/article/opinion-maybe-a-hostile-takeover-is-precisely-what-the-los-angeles-unified-school-district-needs
The article misleads folks into thinking that Nicholas Melvoin is merely a teacher unconnected to the Broad-Walmart Plan — though in obvious sympathy with it — who just happened to read the plan, and was chiming in on Campbell’s website:
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NICHOLAS MELVOIN:
“When I read the recently released memo outlining a plan to create more high-quality public charter schools in LA … ”
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Since there’s no mini-bio anywhere on this page nor any mention of anything but Melvoin’s teaching — a deliberate choice by Melvoin and Campbell Brown — and the only thing Melvoin will tell us is that he was “a teacher in Watts,” he’s misleading anyone reading this.
Indeed, what Melvoin fails to admit was that—at the time he “read the recently released memo”—he was a paid employee of the very same Great Public Schools Now Initiative.
To be precise, he is, according to a website of his law school alma mater …
” … the director of policy, communications, and legal counsel of Great Public Schools: Los Angeles. A new education start-up, GPS:LA is working to put together a coalition to elect reform-minded candidates to the Los Angeles school board—the governing body of the second-largest school district in the country.”
Melvoin was and currently is being paid not just to read the Broad-Walmart Plan (the Great Public Schools Initiative), but also promote it in articles like the one on THE 74, as part of his job … a six-figure job in the neighborhood of $100,000 – to – 300,000, if the pattern in salary of others similarly involved holds … especially for an employee with an NYU law degree.
Go here:
http://www.law.nyu.edu/news/nicholas-melvoin-vergara-v-california
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NYU Law School website:
“Following his graduation from NYU Law, Melvoin will continue in the field of education rights as director of policy, communications, and legal counsel of Great Public Schools: Los Angeles. A new education start-up, GPS:LA is working to put together a coalition to elect reform-minded candidates to the Los Angeles school board—the governing body of the second-largest school district in the country.”
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A TFA temp, Melvoin taught for two — count ’em — two years in LAUSD, where, concurrent with his teaching, he promoted the specious — and later reversed —- Reed lawsuit meant to eviscerate seniority protections under the guise of caring about the education of poor and minority children.
Now, he’s getting rich while working to privatize the public schools in Los Angeles.
Just as with Campbell’s refusal to admit and hide who her billionaire backers are — profiteers out to get rich privatizing public schools — and her falsely claiming that it’s “the parents” are driving both the Vergara lawsuit in California, and the similar lawsuit in New York, it appears that sleazy deception is also part of Melvoin’s modus operandi as well.
If not, he should go back and re-write the article with the truth, or include it in a mini-bio somewhere.
Also, if I’m wrong about the salary, feel free to correct me.
One more thing, his quote … “Is the charter plan guaranteed to succeed? Of course not. And if it fails, we’ll try something new.”
Seriously, that’s supposed to pass for public policy? Who elected him or Broad to impose this stuff, anyway?
I just read the Melvoin article.
This piece has every corporate reform cliche:
1) use of the phrase “status quo” – CHECK
2) false claim unregulated charters are accountable because they can be closed (it’s almost impossible in most places) – CHECK
3) turning schools over to private management = “innovation” – CHECK
5) use of term “college ready” and bogus “college ready” stats – CHECK
6) analogizes privatized charters with FED EX – CHECK
7) (debunked) claim competition from charters forces public schools to improve – CHECK
8) written by a two year TFA wonder boy now making a six-figure
salary to promote privatization — CHECK
… and on it goes…
In times gone by, abundantly wealthy people with an interest in education would create their own private schools in the manner to which they would like their chosen class of children to become accustomed.
But where’s the fun in that compared to destroying what little the masses enjoy?
Reblogged this on Crazy Normal – the Classroom Exposé and commented:
Should we let the wealthy decide the fate of the education for OUR children?
I work with Empower DC and was part of the lawsuit, through the discovery phase of our lawsuit we obtained thousands of internal DCPS emails. Below is one that caught our attention, it is a person from City Bridge Foundation (Katherine Bradley’s foundation) communicating with a top person in the DCPS central office. When Kaya Henderson is forwarded the email and proposal from Bradley her answer is “Yes and yes!!”. The entire email exchange can be found via the link Diane has provided and it is document number — DCPS 001483
The FCC alluded to in the email is the Federal City Council (comprised of top business people in DC), which many Washingtonians believe to be our “Shadow Council of the District of Columbia”.
From: Henderson, Kaya (OCPS)
To: Weber, Peter (OCPS)
Cc: Ruda, Lisa M. (OCPS)
Sent: Thu Sep 20 12:17:53 2012
Subject: Re: Request from Katherine Bradley
Yes and yes!!
From: Extein, Jon
To: Weber, Peter (OCPS)
“Katherine wanted me to ask you two questions that we~d like to know before moving forward in fleshing out these project ideas for members to consider next week. Does the Chancellor still want chartering authority? And would the Chancellor find it helpful to have FCC members provide an objective, financial voice on DCPS closures with compelling economic data (the product tentatively being a report released with the final closure list in February/March)?”
There won’t be any public schools left in that city when they’re done.
They’re just winding them down, because it would be too disruptive and politically difficult to privatize them all at once.
So THAT’s the link to the Walton Foundation and the Atlantic. I wondered how that donation came to be.
Meanwhile, our representatives in DC do nothing about poverty, income inequality, wage stagnation, the loss of basic legal protections for working people…. because they can all get together and point their fingers at public schools!
This is the best “movement” ever. It demands absolutely nothing from lawmakers or the general public and dumps responsibility for every societal and economic problem on public schools.
And teachers. unfortunately, no relief with new leadership, the money is deep and unaccountable. It’s like a national ponzi scheme for the rich businesses and people. By the time the public wakes up, nothing will be left. Our elected so called leaders, their collective hands are out as they lead us to perdition.
Does anyone recall that when the Soviet Union collapsed at the end of the 1980s, people (“talking heads,” “experts”) like Henry Kissinger were speechless, caught completely off-guard about this historic event? (The CIA was caught short, too.)
But did the fact that none of our esteemed “experts” had any idea of what the heck had been going on in the Soviet Union mean they were no longer “experts”? Were they held accountable for their massive failure to anticipate this world-historical event? Did we send out a call for other voices to understand better what was really going on in our world?
Or, a bit more recently, when the financial crisis leveled the US economy in 2008, were our Nobel Prize winning economists asked to return their awards, having failed to let anyone know that the single most important economic event in the last seventy years was happening? Did we send out a call for other voices about how contemporary economies actually function?
When are we going to demand that our elites perform at the level they insist on applying to the rest of us? Have we become so uncertain of our own ideas, our own interests, and our own values that we can’t say out loud that the Emperor Has No Clothes?
Maybe it’s a scary thought to admit that the people with power in the US haven’t a clue about how to govern our society–it certainly scares me a bit. But if that’s the reality we face–and I believe the facts support such a conclusion–hadn’t we better accept it and begin to wake up to the costs of business as usual? For those of us who watch “the powerful” deal with the education of 40 million children everyday, there can be little doubt but that we currently obey an “elite” that is truly incompetent. B E Y O N D I N C O M-
P E T E N T.
Don’t forget: the cost of obeying these incompetent folks falls on us, not them. They will retain their salaries, their titles, their privileges. Just look at Henry.
Oh, they have a “clue” about governing all right, catastrophic though it may be: privatize public resources and extract wealth from them, while using rents, interest, fees, patents/intellectual property rights and licenses granted by a captive state to further enrich themselves and control everything, while allowing law enforcement to act with violent impunity in defense of their Smash and Grab policies.
Since racism is the default program in American life, African Americans are hit first and hardest, but they are coming for everybody. The working class in this country is already rapidly being immiserated – witness the sudden decline in life expectancy among working class whites, and their irrational political responses – but the scapegoating and attacks on teachers demonstrate that they’re coming for the assets of the middle class, as well. Thus, the successful attacks on public sector pensions, despite their “protection” under many state constitutions.
It’s called Class War, and as Warren Buffet indiscreetly admitted to Joe Nocera of the New York Times in 2006, the Overclass is waging it, and winning it.
The only alternative is to fight back, or they will take every last nickel and every last protection we have.
“Maybe it’s a scary thought to admit that the people with power in the US haven’t a clue about how to govern our society–it certainly scares me a bit.”
And I have the same scary thought of those in power in public education in relation to equity and fidelity to truth in teaching and learning practices. I see mainly (not all of course but the vast majority of) administrators to be not much more than semi-educated educrats whose main concerns are Going Along to Get Along, blindly following the inane and harmful dictates of those in authority above them instituting proven false, error filled practices that cause violence to the most innocent, the students. Thoreau had the educrats pegged 150 years ago:
“The mass of men [and women] serves the state [education powers that be] thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies. They are the standing army, and the militia, jailors, constables, posse comitatus, [administrators and teachers], etc. In most cases there is no free exercise whatever of the judgment or of the moral sense; but they put themselves on a level with wood and earth and stones; and wooden men can perhaps be manufactured that will serve the purpose as well. Such command no more respect than men of straw or a lump of dirt.”- Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) [my additions]
And when confronted with their collaboration in harming children most administrators will respond with “Well, we HAVE to do it” or I’ll lose my job if I don’t do it” or some other hackneyed excuse. To which I ask them to consider whether personal expediency should triumph over equity and justice. And then ask them to read what Andre Comte Sponville has to say about expediency vs justice:
“Should we therefore forgo our self-interest? Of course not. But it [self-interest] must be subordinate to justice, not the other way around. . . . To take advantage of a child’s naivete. . . in order to extract from them something [test scores, personal information] that is contrary to their interests, or intentions, without their knowledge [or consent of parents] or through coercion [state mandated testing], is always and everywhere unjust even if in some places and under certain circumstances it is not illegal. . . . Justice is superior to and more valuable than well-being or efficiency; it cannot be sacrificed to them, not even for the happiness of the greatest number [quoting Rawls]. To what could justice legitimately be sacrificed, since without justice there would be no legitimacy or illegitimacy? And in the name of what, since without justice even humanity, happiness and love could have no absolute value?. . . Without justice, values would be nothing more than (self) interests or motives; they would cease to be values or would become values without worth.”—Comte-Sponville [my additions]
And don’t forget who has been the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic since 2006. James Bennet, brother of former Denver public schools superintendent Michael Bennet (now US Senator).
I do not think for a moment that the interest of Katherine Bradley or other very wealthy ed. reformers is inherently an interest in education. What they are interested in is money–namely, the public money that comes with schools that their foundations can control and through which they garner political power.
That is why charter schools are so very interesting to them–charter schools are a vehicle by which public money can be controlled by private interests for private gain while appearing to solve very difficult problems in public education.
This is also why ed. reformers like Bradley focus their efforts on large urban school districts. There is a lot of money available (> $1 billion) in those public schools and a lot of dissatisfaction because urban school districts often have larger numbers of kids who do not score well on tests and whose schools struggle with lack of resources.
The wealthy ed. reformers like Bradley capitalize–quite literally–on all of that. And the more control they have of/in schools across the country, the bigger influence they can wield in places where they might otherwise not be able to gain a foothold.
Theirs is a political movement that is underscored by a desire for controlling the flow of public money without true accountability to the public that provides it.