Last November, there was a bitter contest for the position of Superintendent of Public Instruction in California.
The charter lobby pumped millions of dollars into the campaign of Marshall Tuck, former CEO of Green Dot charter schools. The charters spent twice as much as the California Teachers Association, which backed Tony Thurmond.
In a tight race, Thurmond won.
In two recent teachers’ strikes, in Los Angeles and Oakland, teachers demanded a moratorium on new charters until the fiscal impact of charters on public schools was thoroughly studied.
In response, Governor Gavin Newsom asked State Superintendent Tony Thurmond to set up a task force to examine the issues that charters raise and consider any needed revisions in the law.
Thurmond appointed an 11-member panel. Not a single one of the 11 is a teacher, even though teachers raised the questions in their strikes.
Worse, a possible majority of the panel represent the charter lobby that fought so hard to defeat Thurmond, smeared him with negative ads, and lost.
Here are some of the members:
- Cristina de Jesus, president and chief executive officer, Green Dot Public Schools California;
- Margaret Fortune, California Charter Schools Association board chair; Fortune School of Education, president & CEO;
- Lester Garcia, political director, SEIU Local 99; (Charter against Jackie 100K Broad IE)
- Beth Hunkapiller, educator and administrator, Aspire Public Schools
- Ed Manansala, superintendent, El Dorado County; board president, California County Superintendents Educational Services Association; (El Dorado Charter Officers. President. Marcy Guthrie … Ed Manansala, Ed.D., County Superintendent El Dorado Co. Office of Education
Rite of Passage Charter High School – El Dorado County Office of Education …
- Gina Plate, vice president of special education, California Charter Schools Association;
- Edgar Zazueta, senior director, policy & governmental relations, Association of California School Administrators. (LED Endorsement of Marshall Tuck)
It appears that seven of the 11 task force members are in the tank for charter schools.
This is by no means a balanced or open-minded committee.
How likely are they to propose tighter regulation of charter schools?
How likely are they to propose that districts should not be allowed to open charter schools in other districts, a policy that has led to financial abuses?
How likely are they to curb the waste, fraud, and abuse that allow fly-by-night charter schools to open in strip malls, collect money, then disappear?
Tony Thurmond, what happened?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
This is outrageous!! Who are the remaining committee members? Where did this info come from? I will contact my legislators.
Diane, I want to call to your attention to another issue in CA about the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS). I just spoke to my local school board about this Thursday night:
http://eduissues.com/2019/03/10/my-smuhsd-board-report-on-ngss-a-lot-of-people-of-good-will-trying-to-deal-with-a-tough-problem
David, I just read this piece and several others on your very interesting Eduissues Blog. You are the kind of critical thinker our profession desperately needs. Like Whole Language, Everyday Math, peer editing and other unproven fads that have overtaken our schools (and which you beautifully skewer), NGSS is an educational disaster in the making. You are right to wonder when our profession’s habit of uncritically adopting utterly unproven new fads will ever end. When will we ever become the kinds of critical thinkers we say we want our students to be? In a depressing irony, per Common Core, we teachers spend our days demanding that students offer proof for claims, and yet we never think to ask for proof from the hucksters and pseudo-authorities who pitch us their faulty wares! There usually is no proof! Keep blogging and speaking up!
Thank you very much, Ponderosa! Are you the person who mentioned a couple of weeks back that you were one of the few readers on Diane’s blog who still recall her book “Left Back?” I think I recall your pseudonym on that post?!??
In any event, whoever it was that mentioned, “Left Back,” thank you. I had read “Death and Life…” and “Reign of Error” but not that book yet. The comment led to my buying a copy.
Yes, I was recently recommending Left Back. You will find it rich with indictments of our sorry profession. We need to fix this mess! We need to educate ourselves about the sorry history of charlatanry in American education –it’s the only way we’re going to escape this cycle of folly and failure. I just heard about a new form of pure educational snake oil called Quad D. Look it up. To me it reeks of something a bunch of cynical scammers pulled out of their butts as a vehicle to sell some product. In the next year I hope to deepen my study of Left Back so as to memorize many of its facts and thus arm myself for righteous debates with the charlatans and their dupes.
Here’s the outfit that has given us the oh-so-authoritative and formidable sounding Quad D:
http://leadered.com/about-us/history.php
All the trappings of serious thinking, but none of the substance. Word salad. But perfectly pitched for sale to dim administrators who need a program to point to and say, “See I have a program –and a fancy-pants one at that!”
Hi Ponderosa (are you in the Lake Tahoe / Reno area?). I looked at the site above and glanced at a couple of their white papers. I completely agree that these guys are great at developing flashy marketing material. Haven’t had time to see if anything of substance lies behind it, but it clearly is pitching digital textbooks, “gamification of education” and the like to make education “more engaging” to students “who are always on their phones.” A similar line came up at our local Board meeting the other night, so they are definitely tapping into a thread that is popular in this state.
From a quick read it sounds like they have some kind of template process that they use to assist in local curriculum design, but that is all I have had time to read. Is your district directly impacted by this? They had a case study from San Bernardino on their website that I also skimmed through but there was not a lot of substance in it either.
When I see the amount of time and effort that the implementation process for NGSS is inflicting on our local teachers, I sometimes wonder if state mandates and related initiatives like the above are actually costing some districts more than charter schools do (but I am being a bit facetious here)!
In regards to your characterization of NGSS as another “disaster” coming down the pike, let me clarify for this forum that I am not opposed to the idea behind NGSS per se, but the way that it is implemented. NGSS was developed and endorsed by reputable scientific organizations, but when it comes to standards, I believe they should be treated like that quote about the Pirate’s Code in the first “Pirates of the Caribbean” movie: “they’re more like guidelines!”
The way things are going currently, every time one of these national organizations puts out a new standard it radically disrupts everything and turns into a bonanza for publishers and consultants like the ones you mention above. These standards organizations should work directly with publishers and some schools that volunteer (in exchange for additional funding?!? – that raises another can of worms though) to produce a curriculum over a number of years that the standards organizations then put their stamp of approval on. Apparently with Common Core the publishers started churning out books with a “Common Core” stamp on them that were not Common Core, and this led to the current mess with NGSS. The publishers were not trusted to do their job correctly for NGSS (several articles on this in Education Week that I cite on my blog). If the standards organizations had an official “Good Housekeeping seal of approval” that they controlled for stamping textbooks, then there would have been no reason to take the current CA route of forcing teachers to implement lessons directly from the NGSS standards without support.
This, however, would mean that publishers would have to delay selling new books until they were actually ready and there would be less consulting work as well!!!
I think, but I am clearly in the minority given what is happening right now in CA, that K-12 lessons should be revised slowly as textbooks are updated with new information. Teachers should be free to pick and chose what they think is appropriate for their classrooms out of this new material instead of being forced to follow a rigid standard that apparently can be completely disrupted on a seven year cycle.
This is no surprise. I posted about this while their election was taking place last November.
Thurmond or Marshall Tuck were the same.
CA Education is bought and paid for by billionaires in the tech industry and that’s why our school district has lost 800 kids over 8 years.
They are now in parochial schools or home schooled.
Hi Joan. The money from billionaires is part of the reason districts may be losing students, but please read my article on NGSS in the link in the first comment above. The top-down state standards mandates are also doing a fine job at damaging public confidence in public schools!! One can, of course, connect these two causes, but some of the damages are also self-inflicted by the education community, i.e., constructivist educational philosophies are creating far more concern among parents than many teachers seem to understand.
The most popular article on my blog is about the pros and cons of the CPM math curriculum. This curriculum draws constant parental criticism, but teachers unfortunately tend to shrug the criticism off, reasoning that the parents are amateurs and the teachers are professionals. I believe that if a sizable portion of the people that one is serving are unhappy, it makes sense to listen to their complaints, not just come up with reasons why they are wrong and continue doing what one is inclined by one’s training to do. That is not the way to save public education.
People need to contact the new State Superintendent about having a more balanced charter school panel — a panel that’s comprised of less than 50% of people (or of people allied with such people) — who spent $30 million to destroy him politically, an onslaught that the State Superintendent survived, so he wouldn’t have to put up with their attempts to quash charter school oversight and accountability.
Here’s Thurmond’s office phone number:
916-319-0800
Here’s Thiurmond’s email:
TThurmond@cde.ca.gov
I just noticed in your earlier article (3 hours ago) you stated:
“Four members of the task force are part of the charter industry.
Thurmond is amazingly evenhanded. In the race for the office last fall, the charter industry outspent him 2-1 and smeared him with negative advertising.”
I would hope that a public official would do his job and be evenhanded! The charter industry clearly has a right to be represented on the committee if they are going to be regulated by it, but, also even more clearly, they should not control the committee!!!
You obviously have received some new background info on these people in just the last few hours. This is a very bitter battle though, and I hope that your source is correct.
Not sure if Tony Thurmond was actually the person tasked to appoint this group. Says that they were appointed by the CDE with “consultation with the Governor’s office”. He is described as leading the group, but I’m hoping that he did not actually have a hand in
selecting it. Still not great…https://www.cde.ca.gov/nr/ne/yr19/yr19rel23.asp
People who’ve never had any “hands on,” in the classroom experience working closely with students in real public K-12 schools know very little about how things work or should work.
Why are there no single small charters folks or conversion charters or charters that are affiliated on the list rather than the Charter Management Organizations. Not all charters are the same….
It’s true that not all charters are the same, David, but as a former LAUSD Board Member you should never conflate affiliated charters (which are unique to LAUSD) with independent charters.
Affiliated charters, such as the school where I teach, are LAUSD schools’ attempts to recapture naive parents by using charter branding. That, and the District made a decision six years ago to give “affiliated charter” schools an extra $200K-400K [only after taking away Title I Funding that amounted to $300K-600K.] It was a decision that was basically forced upon schools straddling the inner city-suburban divide.
But keep up your fight. I appreciate that you, like Wendy Goldberg, continue to advocate for what is right.
Reblogged this on Crazy Normal – the Classroom Exposé and commented:
Did a billionaire deposit a fortune in an offshore account and buy Tony Thurmond?
Hi Lloyd and others,
Before everyone piles on Tony, please read Oakland_mom’s and my comments above. It is very easy in the passionate debate to be misled. I’d like to get some more facts before I contact my legislators.
How much, if anything, did Newsome’s chief of staff, Ann O’Leaary have to do with the selection?
She was formerly with the Center for American Progress, an organization funded by Gates that promotes charters. Media refers to CAP as “the liberal voice”. Diane Ravitch and AOC are the liberal voice not the DINO’s (establishment Dems) of CAP who sell-out the 99% to corporate interests.
I think Linda is on to something here.
We’re being sold out by Newsome and charter advocates in the CDE: “…appointed by the CDE, in consultation with the Governor’s Office…”
Members of the task force (in alphabetical order) include:
So, yeah, Newsome and Thurmond are hedging their bets…
Cindy Marten is a great teacher, principal, and superintendent.
She is my friend.
She is going before the CA state board of education on Thursday to try to deny a renewal to a particularly dreadful charter school in San Diego. She needs your support, not scorn.
Did Linda Darling Hammond have input?
I’m very sorry about my comment on Cindy Marten. I saw a clipping that suggested she was placating the charter schools in San Diego and jumped to a very bad conclusion. I regret what I said.
That said, Edgar Zazueta was a fast-track political operative for the LAUSD brought in by Ramon Cortines, but who became a crony of Tamar Galatzan and Monica Garcia, both charter advocates.
I don’t even know why he is with the California Administrators Union, he never taught or administered a school in his life.
I think calling people like Cindy Martin political scum is unhelpful. Yes, she is not perfect, but she does have a lot of good instincts and is leading a district that is being devastated by the charter industry. I think we should keep our powder dry until we have more details. For sure, write Tony and ask what is going on, but don’t dump on friends before we have all the facts. For example, I know the Cindy Martin was at NPE Oakland a years ago and she appeared quite take my Jitu Brown’s presentation.
I sent an email to Newsom and the CDE.
My first thought when I saw the list of eleven names was about how charter heavy it was. My second thought quickly thereafter, though, was about the fact that Tony Thurmond runs this shindig. If he is shrewd, he might just be able to get all those chateristas to endorse an admission of the fact that charters drain money from public schools. Maybe he planned it that way. After all, they’re not really conducting a study; they’re politicians and company presidents having closed door policy meetings. And after all, the charter organizations have been admitting for years that they take from school districts, telling us we need to “streamline for efficiency” to make up for the loss. The deck of facts is stacked against the deck of charter heads. I hope this task force is a chess not checkers move. I hope.
One guess- the tech moguls, through women involved in the 2016 Democratic Presidential campaign, have influence. Hillary’s campaign manager, John Podesta, is linked to them and was linked to Obama. He can be seen in a YouTube with Jeb Bush and Chester Finn calling on donors to support privatizing candidates.
(1) Anne Marie Slaughter was described as an informal advisor to the campaign. Slaughter is CEO of Eric Schmidt-funded New America (Schmidt is Google). The COO of New America is a Broad Resident and worked in the U.S. Dept. of Ed. for Arne Duncan.
(2) Ann O’Leary was also linked to the presidential campaign and she was with CAP, (founded by Podesta) which is Gates-funded. CAP promotes charter schools. O’Leary advised the Silicon Valley Fund.
Podesta prepared a list of about 20 potential running mates for Hillary. Bill Gates and Bloomberg were on that list.
BTW- The Washingtonian posted an article that was a stinging rebuke of New America and its top manager.
What galls me is the nation got Trump because of the arrogance and poor decision making associated with Hillary’s campaign but, the linked people still get to be in an inner circle of Democratic policy makers.
You left out one very important thing:
Podesta might have paraded a list of about 20 potential running mates for Hillary and Ann O’Leary might very well be completely owned and operated by pro charter billionaires, BUT
For Vice President, Hillary Clinton chose pro-public education Democrat Tim Kaine, Governor of Virginia, where the education reformers have been unsuccessfully trying to turn the state into a pro-charter clone of California. (Remember that it was Bernie Sanders who campaigned very hard for a DFER politician to be Governor of Virginia to replace a pro-public education Democrat.)
I love Bernie on most issues, but I’m pointing out that it is more complicated than just Podesta. I wish it were that simple because I wish that the progressive Democrats and Independents were strong supporters of the NAACP’s moratorium on charter schools. Progressive politicians are just as likely to spout the same pro-charter propaganda and unfortunately, when it comes from them the more educated public believes it.
Maybe there is a more complicated chess game going on here by Thurmond, but that list of the task force seems ripe to see only what they want to see just like the SUNY Charter Institute Board — another oversight board which too many pro-charter progressive politicians cite as a model oversight board.
AOC’s Justice Democrats- the group that is the voice of democracy.
BTW, why didn’t Northam’s primary opponent find the yearbook photos?
It’s a ridiculous list, with the exception of Erika Jones, who is technically still a teacher. She’s a temporarily on leave to serve on the CTA board — she temporarily left the classroom last year, and will return to it.
SEIU is a union that, incredibly, is allied with the Charter school industry. Given that the charter industry that, as a rule, treats and pays its own employees (teachers) horribly, this means SEIU leaders have probably been bought off.
Erika Jones is currently on leave from teaching at a school in the South Central section of LAUSD, located in a neighborhood which has been inundated and overly saturated with unnecessary and unregulated charters, the majority of which suck on ice… according to parents who’ve taken their kids out of these schools with whom I’ve spoken personally, and whose kids are back in traditional public schools.
Thus, she’s a great person to make the case against charters, but she’s way outnumbered, and not enough to counter this majority.
Supe Thurmond, if you’re reading this:
How about adding a parent activist such as Carl Peterson, whose blogging on this issue has been on fire as of late? Or how about Karen Wolfe, also a parent activist?”
Here’s a report on charters that discusses Carl and Karen’s expertise and activism:
Click to access NPE-Report-Charters-and-Consequences.pdf
“”Parent activists and bloggers, Karen Wolfe and Carl Petersen, regularly report on the problems with charter schools in the area. Wolfe provides updates through her psconnectnow blog and Petersen regularly blogs for K-12 News. Petersen’s recent series on the financial scandals at El Camino High School asked hard questions about the lack of oversight provided by the Los Angeles School Board. Petersen is running for a seat on the Board in part to ensure greater oversight of charters.””*
Jack…read the report just now and it mentions Mike Matsuda…he would be a strong representative/administrator on the committee. Also Scott Shmerelson would be an insightful candidate. Both men are experienced and honorable. Both understand all the issues as former and current Supts.
Karen Wolfe no longer lives in California…she has moved to Texas. Carl has been on fire with his blog reports the past few months and would be an outstanding parent member IMO.
All comments here are so valuable to the discussion and particularly glad to read those of Ponderosa, and of course other old friends. I worry at this selection in light of the LAUSD disaster that Beutner and Garcia are exacerbating. Broad’s plan is being laid out for the charterization of 32 districts, and so much is being done behind closed doors. Garcia, who is running for LA City Council still has her face and name before the public daily. SEIU is a lost cause…traitors to teachers. Hope insiders here are watching for the old shriveled hand of Broad dangling his cash. Sounds like one more Blue Ribbon panel of those with a predetermined privatization agenda. Shocking.
Charter schools have a lot of support in CA by both parties. It is difficult to get support for any changes to charter laws & regulations despite abuses. If charter school leaders in this task force suggest needed charter school reforms, do you think the CA legislators would be more or less likely to pass those reforms?
If this task force supports any reforms, they would pass. Given the charter industry’s adamant opposotion to any o ersight, anythingthetask Force proposes is likely to be toothless and meaningless. The 11 task force members include 2 charter lobbyists and at least four others directly involved in thecharter industry. Do you trust Big Tobacco to regulate cigarette industry or Big Pharma to regulate opioids?
Heather Rose’ argument reminds me of the excuse the AARP made for funding the Koch’s ALEC.
Heather Rose asked a question — I don’t see an argument in her post.