Laura Chapman writes here about the beast that wants to Destroy Public Education, which has many names:
Many of these schemes are part of the Education Cities initiative. I may have commented about this before.
About Education Cities: FUNDERS Laura and John Arnold foundation, Michael and Susan Dell Foundation, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, and Walton Family Foundation.
PARTNERS
“Education Cities works with leading organizations to help our members achieve their missions.”
“Bellwether Education Partners works with Education Cities on research and capacity building projects. Bellwether is a nonprofit dedicated to helping education organizations—in the public, private, and nonprofit sectors—become more effective in their work and achieve dramatic results, especially for high-need students.”
In Cincinnati, Bellwether was the recruiter for the “Accelerate Great Schools,” initiative that seemed to have appeared out of nowhere, pushed by high profile local foundations and deep pockets in the business community—all intent on marketing the need for “high quality seats” meaning you close and open schools based on the state’s weapon-ized system of rating schools. You also increase charter schools and hire TFA. (We have a TFA alum on the school board). The CEO of Accelerate Great Schools recruited by Bellwether was a TFA manager from MindTrust in Indianapolis. He lasted about 18 months and accelerated himself to a new job. http://www.cincinnati.com/story/news/education/2017/01/24/ceo-quietly-quits-school-accelerator/96997612/
“Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) at the University of Washington partners with Education Cities to analyze and identify policies that create the conditions that allow great schools to thrive. Through research and policy analysis, CRPE seeks ways to make public education more effective, especially for America’s disadvantaged students.”
CRPE should be regarded as an operational arm of the Gates Foundation. It marketed the Gates “Compacts.” These are MOUs (memoranda of understanding) designed to create a “make-nice-with-your-charter schools who want to have you for lunch.” The MOUs mean that districts agree to give central office resources to charters (e.g., deals on meals and transportation) with charters promising to share their “best practices” and other nonsense. The bait to districts included $100,000 up front with the promise of more money to the district if they met x, y, z, terms of the MOU. Only few districts got extra money. Many reasons, some obvious like the departure of the people who signed the MOUs.
“Public Impact” partners with Education Cities (and Bellwether Education Partners) on research and capacity building projects. With a mission to dramatically improve learning outcomes for all children in the United States, Public Impact concentrates its work on creating the conditions in which great schools can thrive. The Opportunity Culture initiative aims to extend the reach of excellent teachers and their teams to more students, for more pay, within recurring budgets. Public Impact, a national research and consulting firm, launched the Opportunity Culture initiative’s implementation phase in 2011, with funding from The Joyce Foundation, Carnegie Corporation of New York and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.” Current work is funded by the Overdeck Family Foundation and the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation.”
Get past the self-aggrandizing rhetoric and you see that Public Impact is marketing 13 school turnaround models, almost all of these with reassignments of teachers and students to accommodate “personalized” something. One arm of the “opportunity culture” website is a job placement service for teachers. In prior USDE administrations, Public Impact and Bellwether worked together to get federal support for charter schools.Both have political clout.
“Thomas B. Fordham Institute partners with Education Cities to analyze and identify policies and practices that create the conditions that allow great schools to thrive. The Thomas B. Fordham Institute works to advance educational excellence for every child through research, analysis, and commentary, as well as on-the-ground action and advocacy in Ohio.”
Well, we have a pretty good idea in Ohio of how all of that pontification worked out.
Here are the cities in the foundation-led move to eliminate democratically elected school boards and fold public schools into a portfolio of contract schools that receive public funds but are privately operated. At one time the number of Education Cities was 30, then 28, now 25.
Albuquerque, NM, Excellent Schools New Mexico
Baton Rouge, LA New Schools for Baton Rouge
Boise, ID Bluum
Boston, MA Boston Schools Fund, Empower Schools
Chicago, IL, New Schools for Chicago
Cincinnati, OH, Accelerate Great Schools
Denver, CO, Gates Family Foundation, Donnell-Kay Foundation
Detroit, MI, The Skillman Foundation
Indianapolis, IN, The Mind Trust
Kansas City, MO, Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation
Las Vegas, NV, Opportunity 180
Los Angeles, CA, Great Public Schools Now
Memphis, TN, Memphis Education Fund
Minneapolis, MN, Minnesota Comeback
Nashville, TN, Project Renaissance
New Orleans, LA, New Schools for New Orleans
Oakland, CA, Educate78, Great Oakland Public Schools Leadership Center, Rogers Family Foundation
Philadelphia, PA, Philadelphia School Partnership
Phoenix, AZ, New Schools for Phoenix
Richmond, CA, Chamberlin Family Foundation
Rochester, NY, E3 Rochester
San Jose, CA, Innovate Public Schools
Washington, DC, Education Forward DC, CityBridge Education
These cities have been targeted by national and local non-profits for capture by promoters of choice, charters, and tech. This is a national effort designed to make school “reform” look like it is a local initiative, inspired by generosity and driven by civic values and “partnerships” in combination with “forward thinking” associated with a chamber of commerce campaign. Look at the names of these initiatives; New Schools, Education Forward, Comeback, Renaissance, and so on. Marketing market-based and corporate managed education is the aim and it is sought by pushing the idea that established public schools are failures
Diane Ravitch's blog 
It’s typical ed reform- run by TFA graduates, promoting only Official Ed Reform Approved Policy- here they combine their focus on vouchers with the ed reform favorite, “blended learning”:
“Accelerate Great Schools, a nonprofit fund founded in 2015 to ensure every student in every neighborhood of Cincinnati has access to a great school, has announced its first two grants. Accelerate Great Schools is investing up to $128,000 to support Cincinnati Public Schools’ (CPS) work with TNTP (formerly The New Teacher Project) on attracting, supporting and developing school principals and assistant principals, and Seton Education Partners will receive up to $1.3 million to transform two additional Archdiocese of Cincinnati schools into blended learning academies.”
“Greenwashing” is a form of spin in which green PR or green marketing is deceptively used to promote the perception that an organization’s products, aims or policies are environmentally friendly.
We may need a new word for when large entities create and fund “local” affiliates and then deceptively present the new organizations as “local” when in fact it’s exactly the same agenda ed reform is promoting everywhere. “Localwashing” ?
YES: beware the “community” schools push based upon PORTFOLIO MANAGEMENT: “We may need a new word for when large entities create and fund “local” affiliates and then deceptively present the new organizations as “local” when in fact it’s exactly the same agenda ed reform is promoting everywhere.”
Laura,
I am grateful for all your insightful research into Education Cities (and the GreatSchools websites). I wonder how legally binding the MOUs are. If a district were to stop holding up its end of the agreement, what would happen? Would it just be that the extra money wouldn’t be received? The extra money is a drop in the bucket of my district, and Deasy of the Broad (Non)Academy is gone, hiding in the shadows somewhere. Could there be unwritten a sort of memorandum of misunderstanding?
InService: I am not certain about MOUs for Education Cities. The work of “Education Cities” is all about increasing the share of charters with mostly local foundations enlisted to help get parents involved and organized to help make the case and make these takeovers look like grassroots efforts when they are not.
As a matter of interest, I did check on another reform effort in California where MOUs were required, the CORE District waivers from NCLB, now part of an ESSA plan submitted to USDE for approval. CORE refers to the California Office to Reform Education, not state agency but a non-profit umbrella for reform work in large California districts.The original MOUs seem to survive if there is a change in superintendents, if the new hire wants to continue the program. This was true for Oakland, California with a new hire for that post.
It appears that the CORE districts are hanging together, whether by virtue of the original MOU or for the foundation money and perceived clout. Their ESSA plan was designed to continue the waiver with some tweaks calculated to pass muster with the new law. The legal arm of the Oakland Schools lists the CORE waiver as one of the arrangements for which it has oversight.
The CORE districts are now being envisioned as an “innovation zone,” with some prospect that structure will remove as much state oversight as possible and also migrate to other states. The payoff for being in an innovation zone is supposed to be that outside experts construct accountability measures and track “continuous improvement.” IN California, Linda Darling-Hammond is part of this effort as well as USC and Harvard.
http://coredistricts.org/an-innovation-zone-is-key-to-continuous-improvement/
https://rossier.usc.edu/magazine/spring-2017/setting-the-pace/
Thank you, Laura. It’s difficult sometimes to keep all these groups straight.
These “partnerships” are a Trojan Horse to entice school districts to sign on to some form of blended and/or depersonalized learning. These are “nose in the tent” opportunities for privateers to get a foothold in any school district dumb enough to takes the bait. Clearly, the next move will be to push for more students in cyber programs to the exclusion of human instruction. The end game is to declare human instruction so last century. When the cyber instruction fails, districts will be hard pressed to get back what they have lost.
This brings to mind a few questions: why don’t progressives fund at least one “think tank” that espouses the benefits of public funding of public projects? Where is the progressive analog to the Powell memorandum? Why does the “center” keep moving to the right? https://wp.me/p25b7q-221
Wgersen, there is one DC think tank that defends public spending on public projects. The Economic Policy Institute. It is the only progressive think tank in DC.
The EPI is great… and they DO offer lots of good articles and insightful research… I wish the progressives had as many “think tanks” (I use the term advisedly) as the conservatives and got as much traction from their efforts. If they did get more traction we might read more articles like the ones you link to in the mainstream media… I also wish some politician would unapologetically support more public funding for government projects and stop promoting the notion that “business” is the solution to everything. I just read an article on the opiod crisis in the NYTimes by one of Joe Biden’s former domestic advisors who suggested foster care agencies need “professionals with private-sector expertise to partner with child welfare agencies and bring the system into the 21st century.” Every time the Democratic Party advocates a “private sector solution” they are undercutting the government… and playing into the hands of those who try to paint the public schools as deficient because they are “government” schools.
You missed San Francisco…with Innovate Public Schools