Eli Broad says he is stepping down from leadership of his foundation to “devote more time to his family.” This is cause for the New York Times to speak of his many gifts to the cultural life of Los Angeles.
We can only hope that he steps away from his hyperactive efforts to privatize public schools in Los Angeles and elsewhere. Eli Broad and his wife Edythe are graduates of the public schools of Detroit. But they feel no gratitude to the Great Democratic Institution that helped to lift them into a life of great riches.
Maybe they hated their teachers.
For whatever reasons, Eli Broad has contributed a significant bit of his vast fortune to training Superintendents to close public schools and replace them with privately run charters. They are known across the nation as “Broadies” and are viewed by parents and teachers as top-down bullies. He has created a plan to put half the children in Los Angeles into private charters. He contributes to publications and policy groups that defame public schools.
Why the hostility to public schools? Why doesn’t he want to make public schools the best they can be instead of undermining and closing them?
I don’t have the answer but I do recall meeting with Eli in his gorgeous penthouse on Fifth Avenue in New York City. What stuck with me was his frank admission that he knew nothing about education but was certain that good management was the key to solving the problems of urban education.
When he looks over his accomplishments, education reform will not be one of them. He meddled heavily in Detroit, and he and DeVos cannot call it a success for their shared philosophy.
There is not a single district he can point to with pride and claim success.
He has been a destructive force in the world of education. His love of disruption produced nothing but disruption.
While he is retiring from an active role in philanthropy, don’t be surprised if he continues to meddle in education, about which he admittedly knows nothing but has very strong opinions.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Isn’t “spending more time with my family” code for “I have been/am about to be caught with my pants down” (literally or figuratively)?
Dienne, people of 84 don’t use that excuse. Curious.
Link is not working. I think you also have a few typos.
I doubt that the Broad influence will be diminished unless he dismantles his whole operation, lets go all of his workers on education, stops funding alumni meetings, and shuts down his website, Even if he has a lower profile his Broadies will still do hops, skips, and jumps from job to job, perhaps believing that Broad-style management is a panacea.
Laura,
I fixed the typos. This is what happens at 2 am when I write a post after a long day of travel! Carelessness!
Laura,
Right. The Broad Floundation will simply be led by a Broad toady instead of by the horrible man himself. He’s passing the greed baton. By the way, I’m pretty sure one of the ten plagues was Broad toads.
I never understood the whole frog plague thing.
I mean, what’s the big deal about frogs, anyway?
“This is what the great LORD says: Let my people go, so that they may worship me. If you refuse to let them go, I will plague your whole country with frogs. The Nile will teem with frogs. They will come up into your palace and your bedroom and onto your bed, into the houses of your officials and on your people, and into your ovens and kneading troughs. The frogs will go up on you and your people and all your officials.
— Exodus 8:1–4
Frogs in your bedroom and bed, oh my. Run for the hills!
There was also something about locusts too.
What Exodus left out was hurricanes and fires.
I’d be terrified if my pad was overrun by frogs. They come sailing in across the ocean, kill a bunch of small woodland creatures for their fur, eating cheese and drinking wine all along the way. They invade, invade, invade. The sheer Gaul of them! The only frogs worse than that little one called Napoleon are the Vichy frogs. I would definitely not want any part of some onion smelling frog plague. (Apologies to the great people of France and to everyone’s sense of humor.)
All this discussion of the plagues of Egypt is something I take as quite fascinating from a historical perspective. It is indicative of the ancient human tendency to search for gods in nature, a sort of left-over animism that was a part of the Israelite search for their God. Anything coincidental or elegant in its simplicity was taken as a part of the god thing, and any human capturing it was bringing himself closer to the status of being a god.
Observation of natural events and relating them to omens of catastrophic future is not something that has gone away, nor should it. Dark clouds on the horizon may still mean storms. Science has taken the presumption from us that angry gods lurk behind natural phenomenon. Still, guilt and accusation still link us to events too complex for all of us to understand. Thus the modern link to those who still have a picture of gods (more often singular in our world) who swoop down on guilty man, punishing those with whom we disagree.
Religion nowadays is just a way for billionaires like Betsy to get around funding public schools. And on the other side of the aisle, the other god, technology is just a way for billionaires like Bill to get around funding public schools.
A plague of frogs I am not worried about (don’t frogs actually eat locusts?)
But a plague of Betsy’s — and in my bedroom! — is another matter entirely.
Both Betsy’s and Broad toadies eat everything in their path: locusts, public funds, frogs, wild beasts, the firstborn, schools, grizzlies… Everything. Truly mortifying, though, are Bill and Melinda’s genetically mutated chickens.
Eli Broad needs to crawl under a rock permanently.
You mean the one he crawled out from under?
Make that a boulder that he crawls under just before it falls off the cliff and turns him into an ink-blot test also known as a Rorschach Test that allegedly reveals his personality. His ink-blot will look like one of Satan’s demons.
Wikipedia says he graduated from Detroit Central HS in 1951. I wonder if there was a segregated arrangement with Detroit schools at the time, and if so, how Detroit Central aligned in that arrangement.
Eli Broad didn’t want to privatize just Detroit. The goal was to put his “vision” in for the whole state. The one and only reason he failed was there were several elected representatives at the state level who blocked it. Broad and Co tried to jam it in fast before the results of the reforms in Detroit came in because they over-promised in Detroit and they knew it.
One man who isn’t elected and doesn’t even live in Michigan would have upended all the schools in the state BUT FOR a handful of Democrats in the legislature. It was breathtakingly arrogant.
The results in Detroit then came in and they were horrible, so that effectively killed the state-wide take-over plan. It would have been all of Michigan if it had been up to Broad.
“It has been nearly five years since Gov. Rick Snyder announced the formation of the Education Achievement Authority”
What crazy ed reform convening produced this language? What is an “authority”, anyway?
The only other time I have ever seen this used was when we invaded Iraq and took over their government. There’s an ed reform policy paper somewhere where this opaque, unaccountable anti-democratic “governance” model was developed, you just know it.
Probably ALEC.
Hates local control.
Broad also has said that he prefers to invest in schoools where the mayor or state is in charge.
Democracy is messy.
Who cares what public thinks.
How can he step down when he is already at the bottom?
Is this like the Escher Staircase?
Typical media puffery of an Overclass monster.
Instead of highlighting Broad’s reputation-laundering via the arts, medicine and “reinvigorating” (read “gentrifying”) downtown Los Angeles, the headline should have mentioned his developing white-flight gated suburbs in Southern California (via Kaufman and Broad builders, source of his initial fortune) and attempting a hostile takeover of public education.
A classic study of his breadth: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/12/06/the-art-of-the-billionaire