The New York City Department of Education announced that it was closing down the “Aspiring Principals” program, which was the linchpin of the NYC Leadership Academy. The Leadership Academy was launched by Joel Klein as a bold effort to attract business leaders, young teachers, and out-of-town principals who wanted a fast track to be a principal in New York City.
The first chairman of its board was Jack Welch of General Electric, who believed in grading all employees every year and firing the bottom 10%. The first CEO of the Academy was Robert Knowling Jr., a tech executive from Denver whose company had just collapsed. He brought a staff of more than 20 people with him to New York, including his personal coach.
Bloomberg raised $75 million for its first three years of operations. After that, the Department had a “competition” and awarded $50 million to the Leadership Academy, at which time Klein was chairman of the board.
The Leadership Academy was announced with great fanfare, like all Bloomberg initiatives, and school boards came from across the country to learn about it. What a great idea! Training business executives to be principals! It was about as good an idea as Bloomberg’s choice of a publishing executive to become chancellor after Klein stepped down. She lasted only three months.
The results of the Leadership Academy were unimpressive.
The only out-of-town principal who joined the program departed after six months. No business executives finished the program. It served as a pipeline for typically young teachers, who didn’t want to wait to gain the experience to become a school leader. Those who became principals found themselves in charge of a staff of veteran teachers who resented the quickie principals who had little experience and were in their late 20s or early 30s.
The city also cut its ties with TNTP, which Michelle Rhee created before she was D.C. Chancellor.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The Leadership Academy article did not mention the failure to account for city money, according to the Comptroller Scott Stringer’s office;
http://nypost.com/2017/07/29/doe-lost-track-of-101m-given-to-leadership-coaches-audit/
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That leadership Academy reminded me of what Marines in Vietnam called 90-day wonders who arrived in Vietnam after becoming a fast tracked lieutenant that arrived acting like they were some sort of god that knew everything. Often their decisions that weren’t to be questioned often put the troops they led in harm’s way. Many of those troops were already hardened combat vets and that included many of the non-coms (what most of the troops called lifers) that had served in other wars like Korea and World War II.
When that happened, it didn’t end well for those 90-day wonders. Fragging and friendly fire often took care of that threat to the lives of the men in units where the troops have bonded and watch each other’s backs. Any threat even from your own officers or non-comes is still a threat and is often dealt with quickly and viciously.
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A fascinating, deeply insightful analogy, Lloyd. BTW, to other readers of this blog, Lloyd’s novel about Vietnam is a superb read.
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Thank you. You’ve read “Running with the Enemy”? If you enjoyed the book, please leave a review.
When that book came out, I stepped into a flame trap defending another author and that sucked me into a flame war with a group known as the Goodreads bullies (trolls). One of the bullies posted a 1-star review of the book.
About the same time, Anne Rice was also attacked and sucked into a flame war. When the trolls wouldn’t let up on their brutal and merciless attack on Rice, she turned to her fans and asked for some support. Thousands turned out in defense of Rice, and some of Rice’s vampire lovers were hackers who used their skills to unmask the anonymous bullies and make their identities public. Then the trolls that started the flame war with Rice were getting death threats, and Amazon had to step in and delete the flame war taking place on their site.
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Will do, Lloyd. It deserves to be widely read.
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Thank you again.
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Interesting, as I was going to an adjacent place. Just as the Gulf of Tonkin incident was a fabrication, so are all of the “problems” points out by the sales pitches of the deformers. Those same deformers are intellectual failures in much the same way McNamara was: he focused on numbers, had no understanding of the enemy, and had a botched, malinformed view of what war fighting was about. McNamara and the deformers are like arm chair quarterbacks with no remotes sitting in front of broken, unplugged TV’s.
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McNamara wasn’t the only guilty party. Five U.S. Presidents were involved in the war in Vietnam starting with Eisenhower through Ford.
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Lloyd, I have to disagree about Vietnam. JFK sent in 15,000 “advisors.” LBJ escalated to about 500,000.
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This piece explains the involvement of each of the 5 presidents starting with Eisenhower. Some were worse but it took the first one to start it all. Eisenhower dived down the rabbit hole first.
“Following the French defeat in the First Indochina War and subsequently the Geneva Accords leading to a partition of Vietnam, President Eisenhower decided to support anti-communist leader Ngo Dinh Diem in consolidating power in the South. …
“In February 1955, President Eisenhower sent the first American military advisors to
Vietnam to help build up Diem’s army. When Diem announced the formation of Republic of Vietnam (later known as South Vietnam) in October 1955, Eisenhower immediately recognized and offered military and economic assistance to the new nation.”
https://thevietnamwar.info/us-presidents-during-the-vietnam-war/
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When I was in hs, Q’s about our involvement in VN were always answered with “the domino theory”. Then “The US in Viet Nam” was published in 1967, a history co-authored by two local profs, Kahin & Lewis. We used it to school our parents. My mother actually read it & it changed her mind.
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(Ken Burns’ Vietnam, Sept 17, 2017, PBS)
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thank you
another vet told me about this
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Neutron Jack Welch, the Olympian self-promoter with the messy divorce and 3rd wife.
Welch who hand-picked a successor that found a way to substantially avoid paying corporate federal income taxes (lobbying for loopholes and “innovative” accounting).
Welch, originator of the soul-sucking no loyalty prescription for an organization’s workers.
It’s past time for Welch to be figuratively buried.
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Love it . I was thinking precisely along those lines.
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Upon his retirement from GE, Jack Welch wrote a book of managerial wisdom entitled “Straight From The Gut.”
Yes, and we now know the mess landed on teachers and students.
There are many millions of dollars to be saved by removing the still size able vestiges of the Bloomberg/Klein regime at the DOE. This is an excellent place to start.
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On his way out GE’s door, the stuff Welch gave himself (via the board) would have embarrassed all but the petty and vainglorious.
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I will miss the new and inexperienced principals from the Leadership Academy. I worked every fall term and some spring terms programming high school schedules since retirement January 2, 2010. This “opportunity” occurred because these principals didn’t understand the importance and complexity of programing high school schedules. Some thought they could save money by closing programming offices and hiring part-time computer techies with disastrous results such as happened in my school where I was the program chair. This resulted in students beginning the fall term without programs for over a month. Students were programmed into classrooms randomly to keep the halways clear. In the middle of the October the principal reluctantly asked me to resume my programming duties to repair the mess created by hiring a part-time computer techie without any classroom experience to program a big complicated school working two nights per week.
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The two years when I taught a course that required a two period block, it took the school until the end of October and the entire first semester the second year to get all the schedules correct. I had students scheduled for two first hours, two second hours, three periods, and one period as well as a first period in one block and a second in another. Add on to that debacle, it took until mid-October, at least, to get my computers up and running (part of the program), but since they couldn’t manage to fix the schedules or get the right number of students in the classes it was a real juggling act to give them equal access to the computer resources. I remember I had one student and his father come in and tell me he didn’t belong in my self contained class. He had always been in a regular English class. I told his father to go directly to the counselor who had made his schedule and demand that the situation be corrected immediately; I knew I would have zero influence in getting him moved quickly. No one seemed to care that students were getting behind while they were essentially warehoused in the wrong place.
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Not surprised. Many schools opened in the fall term without programs during Bloomberg/Klein era. It was all about cost cutting and students paid the price.
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I think of the interview with the employee of Wells Fargo. She recalled the pressure put on her by executives that followed similar logic. Soon production outweighed morality in a corporate culture set up by those who thought the numbers should do a particular thing. Sound familiar?
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Just in case you didn’t hear about this. I remember you talking about this program, thought you’d be pleased at this development.
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I served under two of the “alumni” of this program, and you won’t be surprised to hear, I imagine, that they were impressive–only not favorably. One was removed from an otherwise well-functioning school; the other started his own school (“Aspire Prep” on Wallace Avenue in the North Bronx–if you search it, you can read about its myriad problems) and ran it into the ground.
When will these people figure out that educational institutions aren’t businesses, and cannot be operated like businesses?
Good riddance to this bad idea.
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Incompetence and tyranny reigned through the Leadership Academy. I worked for one principal (little educational experience) who was found guilty of sexual harassment of young teachers and fired by superintendent. Klein reinstated him, only to have this principal further destroy a school that had potential and continue to hire young teachers for his own “exploitation.”
The “graduates” of this program often knew nothing of programming and credits. Individual feudal kingdoms were set up. Basic knowledge of running a high school was missing. Students would only receive lunch on their programs in Sept. The list goes on.
Students and staff suffered under their reign.
Glad to see the ending of this farce.
There are times that I am reminded of these days as I watch Trump operate with arrogance, incompetence and ignorance. Also the acting of this as normal behavior by others, is often alarming as it was listening to a Leadership principal at meetings making NO sense. Good bye Leadership Academy. You did far too much damage.
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Time to replace this failed institution with a new, improved, online version, InstaPrincipal dot com. InstaPrincipal dot com will marry the extraordinarily successful model provided by Trump University with the wonders of teacher-free computer-adaptive education to provide a learning experience like no other. Simply send your $1,000 tuition via PayPal for an InstaCredential in a lovely “gold”-embossed frame. Transcript of credits earned JUST FOR BEING YOU included at NO ADDITIONAL CHARGE!!! Offer void in sane jurisdictions.
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It’s gonna be YUUGE!!!
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I’ve already got a better app. It’s called Principal For America. As soon as you graduate from grade school with proficient CCSS scores in grades three through six, you can be a principal with just a few days of anti-teacher indoctrination. Not anti-teacher indoctrination, I meant training. For six weeks, you will watch videos of Eli Broad and Michael Bloomberg TRAINING you to bankrupt, totally and completely bankrupt any school district willing to give you a try. What’s better, it doesn’t cost $1,000 for tuition. It doesn’t cost $900. It doesn’t even cost $937. It’s free! Your tuition is paid by special regressive taxes PFA’s benefactors Will. Make. Happen. Join PFA today!
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This is the thing that kills me about this – traditional teachers EARN their way “up the ladder” by X amount of years teaching, and Administrative college courses. Those are the requirements, right? But, business men, mayors and billionaires bypass this with such nonsense as Leadership Academy and Broad’s Supes Academy (Ugh, I hate to even use Capital Letters on them) and TFA as well, and Relay, and idiots like Chris Christie APPOINT them as Superintendents and charter chains hire them as principals, vice principals, talent coordinators, etc. Its really sickening. Other than the pay for play, there’s no reason this should have ever happened, been allowed, or back-door dealed. We really do have to blame the politicians, right? What made anyone think that Wendy Kopp had THE WAY to fix impoverished kids from impoverished neighborhoods by tossing out real/true teachers and hiring her young snobbish “corps” members instead. Its just too sickening.
Good riddance to bad rubbish.
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Wendy Kopp presents herself as an expert on teaching but she has never taught a day in her life. She is a terrific entrepreneur.
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The damage has been done. The effects will last for decades. Nazi academy was highly effective
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Ultimately I blame Obama. The assault on public education/teachers exploded during his tenure. As I said repeatedly during his administration, Obama was for me the “Duplicitor-in-Chief” because of the many reversals from his 2008 campaign pledges.
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This is so very true. It likely contributed to Hillary’s loss because people didn’t want more of the same. IDK what to feel about Obama anymore. He did some good, he did some bad, but he absolutely did his best to kill public education. Shame on him.
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Agree.
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Agreed!
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big white teeth big ears small brain…we all know who I am talking about and yes this hypocrite destroyed the livelihoods of many. hard working educators.
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