Led by the privatization-mad Mind Trust, Indianapolis is bringing in Sajan George to take over a low-performing school. Sajan George is not an educator. His schools in Detroit and Newark failed. So of course, Indianapolis must hire this proven failure.
Saman George is a management consultant who had a top job with Alvarez & Marsal as they pillaged their way through New Orleans, St. Louis, and New York City, collecting huge fees ($500 an hour) to introduce business practices into education. In St. Louis, A&M installed the retired CEO of Brooks Brothers clothing store as superintendent. $5 Million later, they left town, and the struggling district lost its accreditation (it just now won it back).
In New York City, Sajan George led the A&M effort to revise the city’s complex bus schedule. The plan was rolled out on the coldest day of the year, and thousands of children were stranded by poor planning. A&M collected $15 million in a no-bid contract from Joel Klein for that failure.
Recently Sajan George has re-emerged as a “turnaround specialist,” although he failed in both Detroit and Newark. Chalkbeat tells the story here.
“When it comes to turning around troubled schools, Matchbook Learning has a troubled history — two schools it took over were closed soon after. But Sajan George, founder of the management group, thinks Indianapolis is his chance to succeed.
“Indianapolis Public Schools leaders have recommended Matchbook as a partner to restart School 63, a school with chronically low test scores. The nonprofit operator has been through layers of vetting from the district and its partners. But the network’s past troubles raise significant questions about whether it is likely to succeed in Indianapolis and highlight the limited pool of partners with the interest and experience in restarting failing schools.”
Mercedes Schneider carefully examined the dismal record of Sajan George and A&M here:
When It Comes to Employing Services of Sajan George, Indy Is a Sitting Duck.
Reformers are never deterred by failure. If at first you fail, try again. If at second time you fail, try again. Never learn from experience. Failure apparently is just another path to profit.
Indianapolis is off to a bad start in their zeal to wipe out public schools.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“Nothing $ucceed$ like Failure”
The failure sails
To golden sta$h
And never fails
To get the ca$h
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How fitting a name! Matchbook is one of the preferred tools of arsonists, Destroyers of Public Education. I suppose the next consultant group will be called Gasoline Can.
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Given the double meaning, how about “Mother Of Bombs”? (MOB)
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“Deformer Group Names”
Mother of Bombs
Father of Fails
Brother of Rahms
Sister of Flails
Family of Fools
Husbands of Rhees
Cousins of Mules
Gathering fees
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That’s a good one!
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Sadly, with Mindtrust driving privatization in Indianapolis, there is little hope to preserve any type of traditional education for poor minority students. They have drunk the “reform” Kool Aid and will continue to commodify education in the city. George’s failures matter little to the rabid “reformers” in the city. They see his failures as success because he has been able to move millions of public money into private bank accounts, and that is the target goal. The city is knee deep in spin doctors.http://www.themindtrust.org/about/our-beliefs/
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Interesting. Not a word about traditional public schools in Indianapolis. Just the charters and the quasi-charters.
I guess they’re omitted from The Plan. Do public school families in Indianapolis know that the self-appointed “leaders” of the school system have omitted the schools their children attend?
Maybe they figured it out by now. Oh, well. Too late.
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We have to get it through our heads that Public School Raiding is a bribery-kickback scheme. The legisraiders don’t care where the money goes (1) so long as it doesn’t go to public schools where it will be accountable to public watchdogs and (2) so long as they get their cut, in advance or by kickback and under the table. In that light, the more dishonest the vendor the better for them all, so long as he/she is sneaky enough to pass them the cash before skipping town.
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It is a gigantic pay to play scheme with billionaires and corporations priming the pump. If you read some of the propaganda from these think tanks they act as though the hostile takeover is a “fait accompli,”
and the details just need to be ironed out. I read a “Third Way” propaganda piece that details their plan for the future of education, and this so-called modernization turns teaching into another gig job where migrant teachers follow the “crops.” They detail what the new pension will be. It will be one that will allow Wall St. to make the most money off of them. It’s a dystopian wonderland.http://www.thirdway.org/report/the-new-normal-in-k-12-education
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“Pay to Pray”
We’re really making headway
Cuz what was “pay to play”
Has now become a segway
To Betsy’s “pay to pray”
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“Pay to Prey” also works
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I wonder who paid for that shill piece of edudeformer propaganda, retired teacher. Any idea? I couldn’t read a paragraph without screaming, bullshit, bullshit, more bullshit and then I’d read the next paragraph and repeat the same mantra.
The “Third Way” is the dimocraps tried and true method of capitulating to the rethuglicans.
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Peter Greene wrote about the leaders of this ‘No Way,’ and it includes the usual suspects including elitists, techies and financiers. These are many of the people that expect to make a bundle from grabbing gobs of public dollars. http://curmudgucation.blogspot.com/2016/05/thethird-way-to-make-bundle-in-education.html
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Once again I forwarded an article to my Indiana state Senator and Representative, requesting that they read the full blog. [It won’t get through heads of concrete but I try.]
………………………..
Dear Senator Niemeyer and Representative Slager,
Once again politicians are proving that they are working to wipe out public schools and support proven failures. You apparently are never deterred by failure…just keep trying again and again and don’t learn from experience. Please read the whole blog article and see that Sajan George is not a reliable person to ‘turn around a failing school’. He has failed before and will fail again, and this time with Hoosier tax payer money. Shame on anyone who voted for this scam. Work on eliminating poverty and then see a difference.
“When it comes to turning around troubled schools, Matchbook Learning has a troubled history — two schools it took over were closed soon after. But Sajan George, founder of the management group, thinks Indianapolis is his chance to succeed.
“Indianapolis Public Schools leaders have recommended Matchbook as a partner to restart School 63, a school with chronically low test scores.”
Sincerely,
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They’re bound and determined to push blended learning down our throats whether it “works” or not.
That was actually part of the PR strategy for the US Department of Education. Drop “choice” and instead use “personalized” and “innovation”.
They’re all parroting it in unison now. Frank Luntz held a focus group and he told them what to say.
Arne Duncan said companies have invested 9 billion in ed tech, and that was 5 years ago. They’re not going to flush that investment down the toilet. Public school families will get this stuff pushed on them until they recoup the 9 billion. That’s a lot of contracts and a lot of kids used as guinea pigs.
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These privatizers will not stop as long as they can continue to bribe their way into mass adoption. As long as education is commodity, they will always seek to expand into new markets. All students, not just urban children, will be their eventual target.
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“BRIBE” is indeed the operative word, here. SLIME rises. SAD that this country has been reduced to CRIMES AGAINST DEMOCRACY for GREED. SICK.
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I don’t mind that ed reformers want to privatize public schools. It’s an opinion and an ideology and they’re entitiled to it.
I mind that they won’t admit that’s the goal. That’s deceptive and it’s unfair to the public.
Let’s have a real national debate about whether we want to privatize public schools and drop this nonsense that they’re “agnostics”. It’s baloney.
If the mayor of Indianapolis had run on privatizing public schools would he or she have won? Would the governor have won? The statehouse reps?
They need to RUN on this, and they don’t. It isn’t a “debate” when one side hides their agenda.
There isn’t a dime’s worth of difference between a charter school and a privatized contract to provide public services. I guess they’re hoping no one notices public schools are gone until it’s too late to undo.
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Chiara: you have reminded us of a point that is so simple, yet so fundamental to the strategy and tactics of the principal funders, beneficiaries, enforcers and enablers of corporate education reform.
Their instinctive reaction to any substantive move in the direction of transparency, openness and a wide-ranging frank & honest debate and discussion is—
SILENCE. This is their preferred setting when it comes to anything remotely resembling a tallying up of their promised successes and their proven failures. Remember that hundreds of millions of dollars can be found when it means opening up new lines of investment and return. But consider: what would an honest rehash of New Orleans or Chicago or Los Angeles or Detroit do for the $tudent $ucce$$ bottom line?
Best to let a myriad of not just inconvenient, but profit-rotting/robbing facts, be forgotten.
And best for them to spend so much of their resources—financial and moral—on selling [literally] fantastical quick fixes to complex and thorny difficulties.
Don’t forget that there is an added, er, plus to all this. It is tragicomical that much of the effort to make their Rheeality Distortion Fields more effective—is so that they can convince THEMSELVES that they are doing the right thing. In other words, among a crowd characterized by a contemptuous disdain for “excuses” and “easy praise” we can observe the spectacle of them paying handsomely for the unabashedly self-gratifying experience of being told how wonderful they are. Ah, the joy of being, as it were, in their own bought-and-paid-for Happy Places!
🙄
Thank you for your comments.
😎
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You know, 5 years ago these same ed reformers said the people who were saying ed reform would lead to vouchers were “hysterical”
But that, in fact, is EXACTLY what happened. They’re pushing voucher schemes all over the country. So did they lie to the public?
As soon as they finished jamming charter schools thru state legislatures they all immediately started lobbying for vouchers and the moment they jam a voucher plan they start lobbying to expand it.
They already have a bill in the Ohio house to “reform” education funding to make it a 100% voucher system. Once again they misled the public.
If they wanted “backpack vouchers’ why didn’t they say so? I’ll tell you why- because they knew they wouldn’t get elected if they had told the public their actual plans.
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I smell the odor of Koch and DeVos money. A foul smell. Destroys democracy.
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The more I learn about “Innovation schools” the less sense they make. The name is great but the innovation process seems to mean that district administrators no longer lead and protect schools; insuring professionalism and sound policy. It is doomed to have many of the same kind of corruptions plaguing charter and voucher schools. Genuine accountability to the community is required to avoid skulduggery. I guess this kind of school leadership makes sense to bankers, lawyers and billionaires, but not to professional educators.
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“Innovation schools” is a euphemistic title for computer driven instruction with endless testing a data mining. It is nirvana for Silicon Valley.
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This is ploy to ENSLAVE everyone via that dang screen and make $$$$$ at the same time. SICKening.
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It’s a (Common) Coregasm
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“Data…don’t hand corporate America control”
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jan/31/data-laws-corporate-america-capitalism
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You are right.
It’s the same sort of “innovation” that drove the housing bubble and eventually led to the financial meltdown of 07/08: subprime mortgages packaged up as derivatives and sold to the public (eg, to state retirement systems and other unsuspecting saps) as Investments” with triple A ratings
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Innovation refers to putting an unaccountable management board in between public money stream & schools. It’s money for doing absolutely nothing of value.
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“Indianapolis Public Schools leaders have recommended Matchbook as a partner to restart School 63, a school with chronically low test scores. The nonprofit operator has been through layers of vetting from the district and its partners.”
There is little attention paid to how public school “leaders” allow this to happen. If layers of vetting occurred it demonstrates what I have been feeling for years, schools are white spaces that perpetuate societal beliefs about who can learn and how learning is measured.
1) Many of our “leaders” believe that test scores are measures of learning.
2) Their “vetting” process is an echo chamber of “solutions” to improving test scores, which are really just keeping in place structural racism.
3) School district power structures mimic other government structures these days. Ideology over the common good.
Just as much as we pay attention to outside forces, we need to pay attention to the people inside who are complicit. A public school system approved Matchbook.
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Aware out there: “A public school system approved Matchbook.”
I agree with you. Our public school systems are not always run by people who serve the public. However, it is the administrative people who lack abilities to serve. Teachers are in the pits working overtime to help all students.
It is lawmakers who allow this injustice to continue. They have control of the number of vouchers and the number of charter school and the number of schools that can be taken over by those who want to make big bucks while helping no one.
I’m tired of the injustices that go under the name of helping our children thrive. They are not helping anyone but someone at the top is making money from tax payers. This has to stop.
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“However, it is the administrative people who lack abilities to serve.”
I don’t call them adminimals for nothing.
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“If layers of vetting occurred it demonstrates what I have been feeling for years, schools are white spaces that perpetuate societal beliefs about who can learn and how learning is measured.”
For the umpteenth time: THERE IS NO MEASURING OF THE TEACHING AND LEARNING PROCESS. There never has been, there isn’t any now and there never will be!!!!!
The most misleading concept/term in education is “measuring student achievement” or “measuring student learning”. The concept has been misleading educators into deluding themselves that the teaching and learning process can be analyzed/assessed using “scientific” methods which are actually pseudo-scientific at best and at worst a complete bastardization of rationo-logical thinking and language usage.
There never has been and never will be any “measuring” of the teaching and learning process and what each individual student learns in their schooling. There is and always has been assessing, evaluating, judging of what students learn but never a true “measuring” of it.
But, but, but, you’re trying to tell me that the supposedly august and venerable APA, AERA and/or the NCME have been wrong for more than the last 50 years, disseminating falsehoods and chimeras??
Who are you to question the authorities in testing???
Yes, they have been wrong and I (and many others, Wilson, Hoffman etc. . . ) question those authorities and challenge them (or any of you other advocates of the malpractices that are standards and testing) to answer to the following onto-epistemological analysis:
The TESTS MEASURE NOTHING, quite literally when you realize what is actually happening with them. Richard Phelps, a staunch standardized test proponent (he has written at least two books defending the standardized testing malpractices) in the introduction to “Correcting Fallacies About Educational and Psychological Testing” unwittingly lets the cat out of the bag with this statement:
“Physical tests, such as those conducted by engineers, can be standardized, of course [why of course of course], but in this volume , we focus on the measurement of latent (i.e., nonobservable) mental, and not physical, traits.” [my addition]
Notice how he is trying to assert by proximity that educational standardized testing and the testing done by engineers are basically the same, in other words a “truly scientific endeavor”. The same by proximity is not a good rhetorical/debating technique.
Since there is no agreement on a standard unit of learning, there is no exemplar of that standard unit and there is no measuring device calibrated against said non-existent standard unit, how is it possible to “measure the nonobservable”?
THE TESTS MEASURE NOTHING for how is it possible to “measure” the nonobservable with a non-existing measuring device that is not calibrated against a non-existing standard unit of learning?????
PURE LOGICAL INSANITY!
The basic fallacy of this is the confusing and conflating metrological (metrology is the scientific study of measurement) measuring and measuring that connotes assessing, evaluating and judging. The two meanings are not the same and confusing and conflating them is a very easy way to make it appear that standards and standardized testing are “scientific endeavors”-objective and not subjective like assessing, evaluating and judging.
That supposedly objective results are used to justify discrimination against many students for their life circumstances and inherent intellectual traits.
C’mon test supporters, have at the analysis, poke holes in it, tell me where I’m wrong!
I’m expecting that I’ll still be hearing the crickets and cicadas of tinnitus instead of reading any rebuttal or refutation.
Because there is no rebuttal/refutation!
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“Saman George is a management consultant…”
Is this an intentional misspelling of Sajan?
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Bringing in a total failure like Sajan George tells me the Koch brothers and the other extreme alt right privatizers of everything public and democratic are scrapping the bottom of the barrel to find enough corrupt leaders, fraud, liars, and traitors to do their bidding as they attempt to destroy the Republic that the U.S. Founding Fathers created with the U.S. Constitution.
The Koch brothers allegedly illegal (https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/part-I/chapter-115), treasonous, seditious, and subversive organizations are flush with cash but small in membership. ALEC has about 2,000 members. The Koch brothers’ Libertarian Party has less than 400,000 registered voters nationwide (0.17 percent of the total number of Americans that vote).
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Considering the low numbers of libertarians, it is shocking how much policy they influence. Their impact is a testament to how money has in inordinate influence on our policies. We have got to limit the amount of money in politics if we expect the voice of the people to be heard.
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The Koch brothers have spent heavily to roll back any restriction on political contributions.
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Cross posted at https://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/Indianapolis-Hires-Failed-in-Best_Web_OpEds-Corporate-Crimes_Corporate-Fraud_Corporate_criminality_Diane-Ravitch-180211-515.html#comment689361
with this comment
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David Koch ran as the Libertarian Party’s vice-presidential candidate in 1980. Here are some of the “principles” of the Libertarian platform:
“We urge the repeal of federal campaign finance laws, and the immediate abolition of the despotic Federal Election Commission.”*
“We favor the abolition of Medicare and Medicaid programs.”*
“We favor the repeal of the fraudulent, virtually bankrupt, and increasingly oppressive Social Security system. Pending that repeal, participation in Social Security should be made voluntary.”*
“We support the eventual repeal of all taxation.”*
“We support repeal of all law which impede the ability of any person to find employment, such as minimum wage laws.”*
“We oppose all government welfare, relief projects, and ‘aid to the poor’ programs. All these government programs are privacy-invading, paternalistic, demeaning, and inefficient. The proper source of help for such persons is the voluntary efforts of private groups and individuals.”*
Excuse me while I barf.
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For more depth on what these corporate raiders did in St Louis see https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/news/answer-sheet/wp/2017/09/07/the-sad-story-of-public-education-in-st-louis/
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