Greg Windle, writing for The Notebook in Philadelphia, writes here about polite corruption in bidding for public contracts on the Philadelphia School System, which is run by a Broadie, William Hite.
“In a dispute over a lucrative contract for principal coaching, a bidder [Joseph Merlino] has accused the District of ignoring its procurement procedures, as well as state and local bidding requirements.
“The company has filed a complaint in the Pennsylvania Court of Common Pleas demanding the District and school board agree to follow their own contracting procedure in the future to avoid undermining public confidence in the integrity of the process…the District is preparing to argue that it has no obligation to follow state law or enter into competitive bidding when it awards contracts for professional services, despite promising to do so in its procedures sent to bidders.”
The contract was for training principals. The bidder who lost co,planned that his organization had a more experienced team and a lower bid than the bidder who won, which was The New Teacher Project. The decision was made by someone with informal ties to The New Teacher Project.
“Underlying this dispute is a concern over long-term outsourcing of this type of work, as well as a clash of philosophies over the best way to train teachers and principals in leadership. This clash pits those favoring more traditional means against others promoting a more “disruptive” approach that has been advocated by major national education players, including the Gates and Walton foundations, and the groups they fund, such as the New Teacher Project, which was awarded the contract….
“In a complaint sent to the District as a prelude to his court action, Merlino noted that the District’s deputy in the department that selected the New Teacher Project, out of nine who submitted bids, was on a two-year fellowship with School Systems Leaders, part of an informal network of organizations that grew out of Teach for America and includes the New Teacher Project. School Systems Leaders seeks to place Teach for America alumni in high-level administrative positions within public school districts….
“In his complaint, Merlino noted that the contract was awarded when Katie Schlesinger was a deputy in the office of Leadership Development & Evaluation, which managed the bidding process. At the time, she also had a fellowship through School Systems Leaders.
“School Systems Leaders and the New Teachers Project are both spinoffs of TFA, and both function by staffing rank-and-file positions with TFA corps members or alumni. And they both receive funding from the same venture capitalist firm – the NewSchools Venture Fund.”
One hand scratches the other.
This deal stinks.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“School Systems Leaders and the New Teachers Project are both spinoffs of TFA, and both function by staffing rank-and-file positions with TFA corps members or alumni. And they both receive funding from the same venture capitalist firm – the NewSchools Venture Fund.”
School Systems Leaders was THEN spun off from TFA and handed to an org called Cambiar Education. Cambiar Education is run by this person:
“Christina Heitz is the Founder and CEO of Cambiar Education. Cambiar supports transformative leaders of public school systems and educational entrepreneurs to develop innovative solutions that disrupt the patterns of educational inequity. Prior to her role at Cambiar, Christina served as Managing Director of The Broad Academy for 9 years, leading all aspects of recruitment, selection, session design and training, and professional development. She started her career as a brand manager with Ralston Purina. Christina has a bachelor’s degree in economics from Duke University and an M.B.A. from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. Christina is a Fellow of the sixth class of the Pahara-Aspen Education Fellowship and a member of the Aspen Global Leadership Network.”
All ed reformers sound the same because they all move within this tightly connected circle- here, it’s School Systems Leaders to the Broad Academy in 2 steps. They change the names of the orgs but it’s all the same people at the top.
Literally “the same people”- it’s musical chairs. Cambiar Education is the same as the Broad Academy, so the Broad Academy grads hire the Broad Academy.
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Ed reformers in Utah are angry that teachers refuse to park kids in front of screens for hours a day:
“Public school teachers are too slow to embrace classroom technology purchased by the state, according to some Utah lawmakers.
They voiced that concern Wednesday as members of the state Legislature’s Public Education Appropriations Committee met to discuss software “fidelity,” or the rate of students achieving a minimum number of hours using software programs.
Sen. Howard Stephenson, R-Draper, said too many teachers are unwilling to abandon their traditional lesson plans in favor of computer-enhanced teaching. He then evoked a biblical reference, wondering aloud what it might take for Utah to see widespread ”
They’re measuring how many hours students spend working on the canned, cheap products they were suckered into buying. If they’re not in front of a screen for X hours of the school day, they scold teachers for not being “innovative” enough.
https://www.sltrib.com/news/education/2017/07/27/lawmaker-utahs-veteran-educators-may-need-to-die-off-before-technology-fills-classrooms/
Another great ed reform “innovation”, having cheap garbage ed tech product jammed down our kids throats.
This is a cost-cutting measure. They’re hoping to replace teachers with this crap.
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Thank you, Chiara! I hadn’t seen this article.
And that’s EXACTLY what Utah legislators are trying to do. Education is done on the cheap in Utah, and legislators always want to cut more to education, the more taxes to cut and give in corporate largesse. I have never understood how the legislature expects to attract all of these businesses when education is done so cheaply in Utah and when class sizes are the highest or nearly the highest in the country. But I digress.
I was told by my principal that the “ONLY way to get students engaged” was through technology. That’s pure crap, of course, but much of my staff believes him. The principal has run out most of the veteran teachers, who knew otherwise.
And Senator Howard Stephensen is the worst of them all. For some reason, he HATES public education. He is on the board of at least one charter school, and I think other family members may work for charter groups.
The good news is that Stephenson is FINALLY RETIRING at the end of this year. It’s the best news I’ve heard in years regarding public education in Utah.
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Bid rigging and cronyism are common in privatization which is backed by people with lots of money like Gates or Broad. Gates has an entire network at his disposal. His objective is death by infiltration. People like Gates are trying to get public schools to adopt, normalize and legitimize “reform ‘s” autocratic, date collecting, tech heavy standardization. Privatization relies heavily on outside vendors that can bring in the Broadies, TFA, or The New Teacher Project. All of these initiatives are a Trojan Horse to public schools. All the billionaires have to do is buy the compliance of the people at the top, and death from a thousand cuts can start. What is happening in Philadelphia and other cities illustrates this method of operation. This link from the Third Way explains the game plan, and it is frightening and sobering to consider how far they continue to march despite no evidence of value or success. https://www.thirdway.org/report/the-new-normal-in-k-12-education
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As we celebrate Independence Day and the values of our Democracy It is important to understand that In Philadelphia, the birthplace of American democracy, we have one of the least democratically governed and led school districts in America.
This is a matter of outsiders imposing their ideology upon Philadelphians and our teachers in insidious and back room ways all the while pocketing money that should be going to our school children.
I am a former teacher and administrator in Philadelphia who now advocates for Democracy in Education in Philadelphia. What this matter shows is everything which is wrong with what we have done in the last 17 years since the takeover of our schools and imposed the School Reform Commission upon our great city.
If anyone professes to be able to “train leaders” — they do not know very much about effective leadership. Leadership is learned through many years of experience and begins in our childhood.
If anyone thinks that such decisions should be made without transparency and without procedural safequards, I question those people.
Our community of advocates thank Greg Windle for his article for the Philadelphia Public School Notebook. I stand behind this lawsuit.
Public education is not our only value under attack — so is Our Democracy under attack.
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Thanks, Diane.Of course I will send you any follow-up stories.I expect that he will be going into detail about TNTP’s donors and business model (such as it is).
From: Diane Ravitch’s blog To: lmhaver82@yahoo.com Sent: Monday, July 2, 2018 9:02 AM Subject: [New post] Greg Windle: How Reformers in Philadelphia Rig Bids to Take Care of Their Own #yiv3018172010 a:hover {color:red;}#yiv3018172010 a {text-decoration:none;color:#0088cc;}#yiv3018172010 a.yiv3018172010primaryactionlink:link, #yiv3018172010 a.yiv3018172010primaryactionlink:visited {background-color:#2585B2;color:#fff;}#yiv3018172010 a.yiv3018172010primaryactionlink:hover, #yiv3018172010 a.yiv3018172010primaryactionlink:active {background-color:#11729E;color:#fff;}#yiv3018172010 WordPress.com | dianeravitch posted: “Greg Windle, writing for The Notebook in Philadelphia, writes here about polite corruption in bidding for public contracts on the Philadelphia School System, which is run by a Broadie, William Hite. “In a dispute over a lucrative contract for principa” | |
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Who is funding the marketing and promotion of “personalized learning” across ed reform?
This is a very sophisticated marketing campaign. I hope schools don’t get suckered into taking more bad advice from people who are hostile to public schools:
http://research.crpe.org/reports/personalized-learning/early-enthusiasm/?platform=hootsuite
It’s cheerleading and it’s coordinated across ed reform lobbying shops. They are going to jam cheap tech programs into low and middle income schools and we will all be stuck with another one of their gimmicky ideas that doesn’t live up the hype.
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If I had a way to post an image here, I’d place a meme of a computer with the words: THIS is a privatized/personalized teacher.
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Too late. The superintendent in my district is WAY into technology and spends enormous amounts of money on every technological bell and whistle that he can, but ignores major needs, such as crumbling buildings and lack of air conditioning.
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You would think air conditioning would make his list since computers do not like being too hot. Of course, how many of us have worked in buildings where the computer labs (and main office) are air conditioned and nothing else?
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Oh, we HAVE air conditioning, but only for computer labs. Nothing for the actual classrooms. Some of our classrooms last August and September started the day at 87 degrees–before students even arrived.
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We’ve been hearing for a long time (a bit before the State takeover and the creation of the SRC) that the school district “should be run like a business.” I always found that to be an idiotic, if not self-serving, attack attack on public education. School districts, including Philadelphia’s, have always been run “like businesses”.
At one point the Philadelphia School District had over 264 schools, well over 200,000 students and over 20,000 staff members. You don’t run an organization like that “off the cuff”. There was always a very well-defined financial department which oversaw how the School District spent its precious dollars so reliant on funding by the state legislature, since public education has long been a State responsibility, with financial input from local property taxes, etc. (notwithstanding the more recent abrogation of the State legislature to adequately fund the state’s public schools).
So, this deliberate wording as if the District was being run like a mom and pop operation is absurd, and was spun like the well-formed PR campaign it was – to simply tip the scales for who benefited from these expenditures more to private business operations instead of the educational needs of children in their years of critical academic, social-emotional and developmental stages long accepted in the medical, psychological and educational world. When you base your spending on the needs of your student population, you have a different balance sheet than when your primary directive is to make money, including spending money on corporate growth needs (as in all those “private” boards comprised of a handful of interested parties that actually run the “non-profit” boards and, where the door stops from us from “following the tax-payer seed money”), and reward your investors. Ever wonder why the administrative costs of these education reform groups are so high?
More important, you make far different decisions based on need, not future expansion plans and profits. After all, whether State or local in origin, public school funding is tax-payer based.
I can’t wait to read the continuing articles on Greg Windle’s look behind the curtain of the financial machinations of the School District in recent years.
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As a onetime procurement supv in an engrg co, I squint hard when I see statements like
(a)”the District is preparing to argue that it has no obligation to follow state law or enter into competitive bidding when it awards contracts for professional services…” – that’s a flaw in procurement procedures which can cost taxpayers plenty. Almost any work can be slyly re-spec’d as a lucrative open-ended time & mat’l + % contract for “prof svs”, where award leans heavy on who-knows/trusts-whom & light on unit prices/ budget.
(b) “…despite promising to do so in its procedures sent to bidders.” – Uh-uh. While procurement procedures may foolishly allow district to sole-source prof svs if they feel like it, basic contract law suggests you can’t request competitive bids & then ignore basis of RFP w/o expecting a fight on your hands.
Bigger picture… Principal training? For a district so poor last I looked they couldn’t even provide a FT nurse at each school? Why not promote from w/n, w/OTJ training of asst principals?
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