Tom Ultican blames Democrats for the destruction of public schools in Indianapolis, led by the well-funded Mind Trust.
What he describes is the Democratic party’s betrayal of public education and democracy. It is a shameful legacy, and it is not about the past. It is happening right now.
He writes:
”The Mind Trust is the proto-type urban school privatizing design. Working locally, it uses a combination of national money and local money to control teacher professional development, create political hegemony and accelerate charter school growth. The destroy public education (DPE) movement has identified The Mind Trust as a model for the nation.
“A Little History
“In 1999, Bart Peterson became the first Democrat to win the Indianapolis mayor’s race since 1967. Peterson campaigned on the promise to bring charter schools to Indianapolis. He claimed, “We are simply in an age where cookie-cutter, one-size-fits-all, 1950s style education just doesn’t work for a lot of kids. The evidence is the dropout rate. The evidence is the number of at-risk kids who are failing at school.”
“The new mayor joined with Republican state senator Teresa Lubbers to finally achieve her almost decade long effort of passing a charter school law in Indiana. In the new charter school law, Lubbers provided for the mayor of Indianapolis to be a charter school authorizer. Then Democratic governor, Frank O’Bannon, signed the legislation into law.
“During his first run for office, Peterson invited David Harris a 27-year old lawyer with no education background to be his education guy. Harris became the director of the mayor’s new charter school office. By the 2006-2007, the Peterson administration had authorized 16 charter schools.”
He then goes on to quote conservatives who are thrilled to see that Democrats have embraced their privatization agenda.
Tultican lists the board of directors of the Mind Trust. Notably, none are educators.
“It is noteworthy that no school teachers or parent organization leaders are on this board which is dominated by corporate leaders and politicians. It is possible that one of the four school organization chief administrators taught at one time during their career but no one with recent classroom experience is represented.”
Mind Trust leader David Harris became a rising star in the privatization movement. Tultican helpfully lists his peers, all prominent in the “Destroy Public Education Movement.”
And then there are the funders! Gates, Walton, the usual suspects, the crowd that is contemptuous of public schools.
“December 2016 the not so Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) published a lengthy piece lauding privatization and choice in public schools. They held Indianapolis up as being a leader in developing 21st century schools and The Mind Trust as the catalyst. The paper stated:
A key reason is The Mind Trust, founded in 2006 by Mayor Peterson and David Harris as a kind of venture capital outfit for the charter sector, to raise money and recruit talent. The Mind Trust convinced Teach For America (TFA), The New Teacher Project (now TNTP), and Stand for Children to come to Indianapolis, in part by raising money for them. Since then TFA has brought in more than 500 teachers and 39 school leaders (the latter through its Indianapolis Principal Fellowship); TNTP’s Indianapolis Teaching Fellows Program has trained 498 teachers; and Stand for Children has worked to engage the community, to educate parents about school reform, and to spearhead fundraising for school board candidates. The Mind Trust has also raised millions of dollars and offered start-up space, grants, and other help to eight nonprofit organizations and 17 new schools, with more to come.
“The PPI claims that bringing in 500 teachers who commit for just two years and have only five weeks of teacher training improves education. This is supposedly better than bringing in experienced teachers or newly minted teachers who are committed to a career in education and have between one and two years of teacher training at a university.
“They are also saying that having Stand for Children invade Indianapolis with their dark money and undermining local democratic processes is desirable.
“Instead of raising millions of dollars to improve public schools, The Mind Trust is using that money in a way that undermines the education of two-thirds of the students in Indianapolis who attend those public schools.”
This is as good an analysis of the privatization movement as you will read. And an ansolutely devastating critique of the role of the Democratic Party in promoting this anti-democratic attack on public education.
The Mind Trust has taken the lead role in destroying public education in Indianapolis. It is a shameful legacy.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Wasn’t Ted Kennedy in sync with George W. Bush on creating NCLB??
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NCLB couldn’t have been created without the “liberal lion” backing it.
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Kennedy was also at the center of trucking and airline deregulation in the late seventies, which might explain why living standards for almost everyone in those industries, except managers and shareholders, have declined.
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always so many hands-off always-been-wealthy “progressives” pushing clueless policy
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I think it is noteworthy how terribly Democrats in Indiana have done since their late 90’s embrace of public education privatization. It might not be the cause, but since then even a Pence or a Daniels were elected over a Democrat.
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“create political hegemony”
That’s true. The act as if they have this grand, open debate going on but it’s really narrow.
It gets narrower every year, too. The only thing they’re debating at this point is whether privatization will be 1. somewhat regulated or 2. unregulated.
All of the big decisions are made before they ever parachute into these cities. They’ll leave the nuts and bolts of HOW, specifically to eradicate public schools while keeping some sort of universal system running to the locals, but policy? The big picture executive stuff? That’s EXCLUSIVELY conducted by the self-proclaimed Best and Brightest.
I don’t even think they see it themselves. The assumptions and baked-in biases are so glaring to an outsider when reading ed reform that I tend to think they DON’T see it, or they would do a better job hiding it.
The bottom line for public school parents is our schools are a lower priority. There’s a grudging acceptance that there may have to be public schools as a kind of safety net for the “choice” schools, but ed reformers aren’t interested in them other than in so far as they make the “choice” system possible. That will inevitably harm public schools, IS harming them.
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The neoliberal Democrats are siding with conservatives to privatize public education. We often see the Waltons working with Gates to undermine public schools. Real Democrats should support democratic, transparent public education that works for equity and justice, not corporate schools and teaching temps, TFA, and their faux research that breaks the rules of authentic research.
“Lubienski and Lubienski conducted a large scale research of education data and came to the surprising conclusion that public schools outperform privatized schools. They also saw that most of the “studies” that claimed otherwise were paid for by advocates and not peer reviewed.”
The neoliberal Democrats support the lies of “reform,” and voters should remember who they are and work to remove them from office, and replace them with Democrats that support strong public schools.
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I think Democrats have a political problem in that they are now indistinguishable from Republicans on education.
This idea they have that they are somehow going to distinguish themselves on MOTIVE for privatization – that we will somehow discern that Obama is different than Bush because Obama had “equity” motives while Bush is anti-union and anti-public ANYTHING is delusional. These policies are EXACTLY the same.
If privatization fails in 20 years no one will care that Democrats were (supposedly) “well intentioned”, just like no one in Sweden cares that the Greens joined with conservatives to privatize THEIR system.
Democratic politicians will be held responsible for privatizing the last universal public system in the US.
Boy, those privatized systems they envision better be VERY good, because they threw out the public system REALLY recklessly. They better keep their fingers crossed. If this experiment fails they’ll have some explaining to do.
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Chiara,
I totally agree with, “I think Democrats have a political problem in that they are now indistinguishable from Republicans on education.” The DEMs are STILL floundering.
I have noticed a slight difference. Now on a FEW of the questionnaires from the DEMs, there is in a FEW, a box for EDUCATION, but NOT for “Public Education.”
BOTH parties USED public education for personal GAINS. And unfortunately many public schools systems and our professional organizations actually cooperated with the DEFORMERS, too. NAIVE.
When the common gore and test items were written, both were “passed” in front of public school folks and professional orgs. asking for feedback WITHOUT ENOUGH TIME to provide thorough feedback. It was just a SHAM. Many knew their feedback would NOT be taken seriously, but went through the motions anyway.
Garbage in = Garbage OUT.
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Chiara,
I think what needs to be done is to examine why some (not all) Democrats are embracing privatization and distinguish the generally good ones who are “friendly” to privatization (Elizabeth Warren, Tom Perriello, Gov. Brown in California) from the ones who seem to be entirely owned by the privatizers and happily do their bidding (I’m looking at you Andrew Cuomo). Let’s get rid of the second kind by pointing out that these politicians are entirely owned by privatizers but not make it about the Democrats as a party being corrupt so that we help defeat the pro-public education Dems as well.
And we should also make it clear that there are Democrats like Tim Kaine, Ralph Northam, and Bill de Blasio who have tried very hard to stand up for public schools and try to encourage more Democrats like them to run instead of jumping on any misstep or stumble those pro-public education Democrats make and repeat the right wing propaganda designed to get pro-public education democrats out of office.
What we shouldn’t do is sweep out the pro-public school Dems along with the pro-privatizers. That just means the privatizers gain even more strength as there are no pro-public school Democrats left.
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Tony Blair and Bill Clinton nearly destroyed the Labour and Democratic Parties with their conservative politics in the Parties’ names. I think a great many otherwise liberal politicians were drawn into the neoliberal fray, and were left high and dry when the hidden agenda of triangulation was recently revealed. It will take time and effort to recover.
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All you have to do to watch the echo chamber in action is watch the revolving cast of “superstars” they all promote.
David Osborne is the current privatization guru but it was Michelle Rhee before him and they’ll be another one after him. These are essentially coordinated marketing campaigns. They are indistinguishable from an effort to sell a product.
There’s no criticism of Osborne’s gospel. There’s no debate. What’s shocking to me about it is how many of them come out of or work for universities. Think tanks I get- they’re political organizations now, but universities, many of which are publicly funded?
The simplest comparisons are never made. I would think by now there would have been a university study comparing states that adopted the ed reform gospel with states that DIDN’T – if they actually want to know if privatization is good policy they would look for that, would they not? Nope. Instead we get only rankings of the states that adopted the gospel to varying degrees. It’s NARROW and that’s deliberate. It has to be.
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Thanks Diane!
“The simplest comparisons are never made. I would think by now there would have been a university study comparing states that adopted the ed reform gospel with states that DIDN’T – if they actually want to know if privatization is good policy they would look for that, would they not? Nope. Instead we get only rankings of the states that adopted the gospel to varying degrees. It’s NARROW and that’s deliberate. It has to be.”
What if there IS research on that and it is deliberately hidden, destroyed?
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Kentucky didn’t have charters until recently and Indiana went bonkers for charters. Compare growth.
What’s the “growth measure” between urban areas in Virginia (a state that resisted ed reform fads) and DC (a city that adopts all of them).
Why don’t I see studies like that?
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I was born in KY, and educated at KY public schools. I live in northern VA, and I am very interested in WashDC publicly-financed education. I would like to see such a study, myself.
The recent gubernatorial election brought in a governor who is opposed to school choice. The state legislature has passed several school choice bills in the past, all vetoed. School choice in VA is probably dead, at least for the tenure of the incoming governor.
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They’re busily moving the goalposts, too. but ONLY if charters are threatened.
Ohio public schools complained for YEARS that they should be measured on growth and not raw score comparisons with wealthy districts. You know when we got a growth measure? When charter school scores came in and urban public schools were higher.
All of a sudden ed reformers wanted “nuance” and “context”, because the Holy Grail schools were looking bad. They lobbied for and got “growth” metrics.
It’s hysterical. Charter promoters in Ohio went from refusing to measure public schools within ANY reasonable context to insisting that charters required measures with context. They did a 180. No one even mentioned it. When the numbers they needed didn’t come in they changed the measure.
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Is the MIND TRUST a subsidiary of ALEC?
If ALEC is for Republicans, the Mind Trust, ALEC’s alleged partner, is for bought and paid for Democrats.
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