Kevin Ohlandt has the story: The Design Thinking Academy, a charter school that won Laurene Powell Jobs’ XQ competition to “reinvent” the high school, is closing.
Ohlandt has documents demonstrating that the school was done in by adult mismanagement and greed.
The school received a five-year grant of $10 million in 2016. It was supposed to be a “school of the future,” but it experienced high teacher turnover, administrative churn, and consequently. declining enrollments.
One parent said she started “having doubts about the school earlier in the year, when she noticed mass teacher turnover.
“When you start seeing a lot of people leaving all at once, you know what’s happening,” she said. “At the end of the day, it’s a business.”
As Ohlandt shows, the problems of the school were even more serious than portrayed.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“When you start seeing a lot of people leaving all at once, you know what’s happening,” she [one parent] said. “At the end of the day, it’s a business.”
It’s a business at the beginning of the day too. I wish more parents would understand that before they enroll their kids.
I wish the parents would understand, too. The problem is that parents want more for their children and they can’t afford to pay for it or don’t want to pay for it as a good public education should be supported through federal/state taxes. I know I will take heat on this, but public schools are not providing “good” education…they are test prepping and providing CC drivel in lieu of quality education. Parents know that traditional public schools aren’t providing what is promised and they are doing everything they can to provide an authentic education for their children….even if it means that they are believing another lie. I can’t blame parents for trying to do what’s good for their children.
I can’t really disagree with you. It’s all part of the plan, after all. Make public education so unbearable that parents will demand something else…..
Parents should demand the elimination of useless testing, a standardized curriculum and imposed cyber instruction. These changes can only happen if communities reject the status quo in schools. We need to free teachers of ridiculous bureaucratic burdens and allow them to teach without continuous interference from the government and other outside interests.
Parents need to vote out complicit politicians that work for the 1%. They must support those that support academic freedom for public schools and fair funding. Privatization has been a costly distraction.
dienne77….We pay for private HS for child #2 because he was becoming a behavior problem due to being bored and not being challenged with the CC curriculum and test prepping….and he is NOT a genius! It has made all the difference. I now have a child who likes school and is willing to learn because it is meaningful. That’s what parents want for their children. I wish the public schools in my area would learn this, but they are so invested in the scores on the test because that’s what matters to the parents in my area…. because the score drive resources, tax base and real estate in our very wealthy county. The sad thing is how many of the kids in this county aren’t able to cut it in college and wind up flunking out or moving back home to go to Community College for a few years.
That’s it right there. You nailed it. The annual testing must be stopped. I wish all parents knew that charters tend to do even more mindless test prep than public schools, and I wish all parents knew that the test scores are meaningless. I wish more parents would OptOut. I was proud to have my first OptOut student this year. California law needs to be reformed so that I am able to do a better job of informing parents and students of their OptOut rights and responsibilities. My hands are tied.
Regarding XQ, like Summit, it should have been obvious to everyone that online education, popular with charters, was going to be frustrating and empty of value. Tech fantasies of “changing the world” for the better have fortunately created a techlash, but it shouldn’t have taken so long to happen. Tech billionaires shouldn’t have been allowed to infiltrate education in the first place, for that matter. Cease and desist, Jobs, Gates, Zucks, Hastings, Page…
So, if the Ed Deformers were smarter, they might have invented the Common [sic] Core [sic] and the testing mania just to make public schools unbearable so that teachers and parents would exit in droves, but they aren’t that smart. They actually believed in this nonsense. They actually thought that those puerile “standards” were “higher.” I know, that’s totally crazy, but they did. Certainly, they have been successful in making a lot of English and Math classes unbearable, but that wasn’t their primary goal. Their goal was simple: to sell more computers and software.
At the end of the Day”
At end of day
The day is done
At end of day
The night’s begun
At end of day
The chaste is pure
At end of day
The certain’s sure
At end of day
The plain is clear
At end of day
The end is here
and the first rule of modern-day ‘business’ is BIG CEO/INVESTOR PROFIT or close
The richest 0.1% who self-appoint to transmute democratic institutions..speaking of…the CAP-Fordham Institute’s “Moon Shot” project is evidently funded by Eric and Wendy Schmidt. Education Next identified Hoover’s Chester Finn as part of the project.
A research team at New America was allegedly fired last year at the request of Google’s Eric Schmidt. The grievance reportedly was that the team published findings about tech companies having too much power. (The team reformed independently and now operates as Open Markets.) New America’s recently appointed CEO is a school privatizer (a Broadie). If you were thinking that Wendy Schmidt might be a thin blonde who likes to look at carpet samples and to be on yachts similar to Betsy, you’d be correct.
Haha. I was on the board of New America about ten years ago. Eric Schmidt was also on the board. At the time, NAF’s Mission was to find and nurture budding young journalists by giving them a stipend. It is now like other DC think tanks, trying to guide federal policy in many areas. I left the board because I was kicked off. I offended someone powerful.
The guy who was fired was Barry Lynn, who writes about the dangers of monopolies and closed markets. When he started writing about tech monopolies, he got the boot. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_C._Lynn
I’m curious.
What’s it like being on a board with people like Eric Schmidt?
What do they talk about in private? How dumb the American public are?
Schmidt was not talkative or assertive. He and a major defense contractor named Bernard Schwartz were the biggest donors. Schwartz was CEO of Loral and a major donor to the Clintons. I think I live in my head and am oblivious to lots of things, like picking up pearls of wisdom from major CEOs. Fareed Zakaria was also on the board, and he is very impressively smart.
CAP’s person in charge of post secondary education was formerly with New America. The content in his Forbes-published piece… expected.
“Design thinking” is another business concept that is trendy right now.
Why do so many ed reform initiatives come out of MBA programs? You know, the accusation that they think students and schools are a business is brutally accurate. They take ALL their ideas from private sector, for profit entities.
Can’t we have a public sector AND a private sector? Wouldn’t that make sense? Why does everything in the world have to be turned into a business? And not just “a business”- the most gimmicky, trendy business imaginable.
I read their stuff, the slogans and on and on and it ALWAYS comes from whatever is currently fashionable in private sector management and consulting. They’re not “inventing” anything. They’re taking private sector management-speak and putting it in a “public” school.
Global GERM is led by business types that see everything as a market. If it is a public service, they figure out a way to turn it into a market. Then, they keep fighting for a bigger market share regardless of results.
My son-in-law is getting his driver’s license in Texas. He passed the written exam and was told he will have to wait until the end of August to take the road test! However, if he pays for a private driving school to take him out at a cost of $100, he can take the road test sooner. This is a perfect example of designed public failure to promote a privatized service.
In England they are moving privatized police, mostly from a business background, into management positions within the department. Sound familiar? They also experimenting with private police departments in some small communities. These business types are inserting themselves in public services to monetize the service.
I know one of the founders of this school. The concept of design thinking in this case is from longstanding practice and education in architecture, landscape and interior design, and fashion design, theater design, graphic and product design, and “experience design.” The latter is exemplified by the mega entertainment sites of Disney World and the placement of goods in large grocery stores where flowers and baked goods are near entrances. Both founders of the school were among the first to leave. One, whom I do not know, was trying to profit by setting up an LLC to offer services to the school and to create a marketable “platform” for scaling up, in manner of the Summit model. The grandiose thinking required by the competition lead to shark-tank presentations and promises in order to win the award. Evidently, the applications that received awards were treated as if contracts with deadlines, and performance measures.
“The school officially cut ties with the two, citing differing visions for the school’s future and removing all references to Design-Lab Schools LLC, the legal entity created by Alvarez, from its charter. The board also accused Alvarez of improperly charging the school over $750,000 for services provided before it opened.”
For one school? Show me the public school administrator or employee who pays themselves $750,000 for a school redesign concept. It’s ridiculous. Especially because none of these people “invented” design thinking, which as I said is a business management idea that already exists. What is this money for?
Business managers did not invent design.
It has been with us since we came out of the trees and maybe even before. Chimpanzees havd been known to fashion sticks into probes for getting to termites, which is really a crude form of design.
Tools have been designed for ages.
You gotta love business “experts” who take credit for everything and provide nothing of any value.
We went through a phase in education called Understanding by Design. The idea was to start from the result you want to achieve and work backwards.
This Understanding by Design stuff was just EduPundit marketing bs. State the blindingly obvious as some sort of revelation. Here: a do-it-yourself kit for that: https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/2014/04/01/becoming-an-edupundit-made-ez/
The Understanding by Design guy, Wiggins, became a Vichy collaborator with Ed Deform, writing defenses of the indefensible Common [sic] Core [sic] “standards.” https://grantwiggins.wordpress.com/2013/05/01/the-common-core-standards-a-defense/
This was the same guy who, prior to the Common Core testing nonsense had spent years punditizing about the evils of summative testing and touting formative testing as an alternative. He was right about that. When those holding the levers of power started pushing standardized summative testing based on the Common Core, however, he did a complete 180. Suddenly, these tests were not only acceptable, they were the grail. Whoosh, all his principles, out the window.
Buy hey, what’s an EduPundit to do when the rivers of green are all flowing from Gates, the Waltons, Hastings, Jobs, Bloomberg, and the like?
I’m going to design a school based on whatever theory of management strikes my fancy this year. I claim I invented this. Please pay me 750,000 dollars.
Is the “philanthropy” tax deductible?
Chiara, here’s my DIY Kit for coming up with your EduPundit magic formula for curing all educational ills. This, in combination with a willingness to purchase lots of depersonalized education software with the money you get from whatever state you are in, will ensure your $UCE$$!
https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/2014/04/01/becoming-an-edupundit-made-ez/
cx: $UCCE$$, ofc.
Edu-innovation
To reinvent the high school
You need to close it up
Cuz closure, as a general rule
Is innovative stuff
Poet, Great poem.
Recently, the staff at a Florida school (of course) were in the news for a values problem. Before that, the school’s management was praised by tech companies and the school’s leaders received awards from the tech industry. Apparently the school took pride in trying every new product. Their stated reasoning, “if you don’t try, how do you know”.
Discernment and tech product purchase, mutually exclusive.
I went to the XQ “Super School” website and then called the phone number listed. I hung up after being on hold for 20 minutes and listening countless times to a recording, XQ’s “specialists are assisting other callers…”. Maybe they were in conference about their failures like the one in Delaware.
If I had ordered from the store at the site which sells totes, T-shirts, sweat shirts, collapsible plastic cups, skateboard decks and an inspiring poster with the imprint, “Sitting Doesn’t Make You Smarter”, I may have received quicker service. (It’s hard to describe the cartoon figure on all their merchandize but, tacky or hokey comes to mind.)
A “Proud to be Arne Duncan and the Emerson Collective” t-shirt wasn’t listed as an item for sale.
Linda, perhaps XQ should innovate a new answering system for themselves.
Neither XQ nor Emerson Collective provide e-mail contact info. Corporations that are unaccountable act similarly.
Maybe they disrupted their answering system!
The Emerson Collective has a majority stake in The Atlantic.
In Feb., the egomaniacal Rahm Emanuel had a piece about education published by the Atlantic. He wrote, “The debate between charter and neighborhood (schools) …It’s time we stopped fighting about brands.”
His statement demonstrates an egregious disrespect for democracy.
I’m curious if The Atlantic, given its ownership, will publish an essay by Diane Ravitch.
Oooo–the Emerson Collective: Laurene Powell Jobs & Arnie Duncan, who is saving all those young people that his stupid, failed programs helped to put in juuvy in the first place.
I left a comment awaiting moderation, by AKIS…..Is there any way to sort out accountability…if any…for, Obama, Clinton, Arne Duncan, Trump, Devos, Bill Gates? Additionally are there insights to learned about presidential candidates Warren, Harris, Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden….Are all those people without relevance to this?
What other industry has a high turnover?
The fast-food industry and Walmart — most of the employees in these two industries are paid poverty wages with few of any benefits.
If we want to see what is going to happen to all educators in the U.S. from K through college if the vampire voucher and/or charter school Kleptocrats achieve their ultimate goal to destroy the real public education system that still survives today, look no further than the fast-food industry and Walmart.
It takes a real special brand of mismanagement to close in less than four years after receiving a $10 million grant!
It’s the special brand of mismanagement called “take the money and run”
The XQ schools adhere to a neo-hippie, neo-Deweyan, utopian vision of what school should be that is dear to the hearts of Bay Area billionaires like Powell-Jobs and George Lucas (Edutopia). It has never worked, but the dream never dies. There is a real wisdom deficit amongst the billionaire edu-meddlers….but also in the American education world more broadly, I’m afraid. Nobody reads Mortimer Adler or E.D. Hirsch or Kandel or Demiaskevich anymore. I wonder if anyone even reads Diane’s illuminating history of American education, Left Back. Part of its value is that it reveals alternatives to the current orthodoxy. One cannot be called free if one does not even know of alternatives. I wonder what the yearly sales numbers are for Left Back. I’ve hardly met a single teacher who has a solid foundation in the history of education, so should it be any wonder that dilettantes like Powell-Jobs or Gates are ignorant too.
Left Back is brilliant. I once started an education reading group. Left Back was the first book I had them read.
I swear I did not see this before I posted “take the money and run” above.
Ha ha ha.
Perfect, Jon!
Wendy Schmidt’s addition (Moon Shot for Kids) fills out a six-pack of rich women who married well and self-appointed to impact millions of kids’s schooling. The children affected are from families and communities that evidently the richest 0.1% have little or no interest in nor concern for.
The six-pack’s dilettantism is an affront to working people and it would be exploitive even if the gals coughed up sufficient money to pay for the schools they mutate via the governments they and their husbands own.
“Moon Shot for Kids” is a project of Fordham/CAP, a uni-political think tank. The project touts the involvement of Hoover’s Chester Finn.