Jan Resseger writes here about the difference between Superintendents who understand the importance of collaborating with and respecting the community they serve, and the Superintendents connected to Jeb Bush’s Chiefs for Change, who believe in state takeovers and imposing their views on their communities. She might have added the Brodie’s to the latter category, those who are “graduates” of the Broad Superintendents Academy. The BS Academy teaches Eli Broad’s corporate-style of Top-Down management.
She writes:
There is an ongoing battle of values and language that shapes the way we think about and talk about education. The current threats across several states of state takeover of school districts are perhaps the best example of this conflict. According to the Chiefs for Change model, the school district in Providence has recently been taken over by the state of Rhode Island. Texas now threatens to take over the public schools in Houston. In Ohio, four years of state takeover has created chaos in Lorain and dissatisfaction in Youngstown. East Cleveland is now in the process of being taken over, and the Legislature has instituted a one-year moratorium while lawmakers figure out whether to proceed with threatened takeovers of the public school districts in Columbus, Dayton, Toledo, Canton, Ashtabula, Lima, Mansfield, Painesville, Euclid, and North College Hill.
Among the most painful situations this summer is the threatened closure of the high school or the state takeover of the school district in Benton Harbor, Michigan, a segregated African American community and one of the poorest in the state. Michigan has actively expanded school choice with charter schools and an inter-district open enrollment program in which students carry away their school funding. The statewide expansion of charters and inter-district school choice has undermined the most vulnerable school districts and triggered a number of state takeover actions. Michigan State University’s David Arnsen explains: “In Michigan, all the money moves with the students. So it doesn’t take account of the impact on the districts and students who are not active choosers… When the child leaves, all the state and local funding moves with that student. The revenue moves immediately and that drops faster than the costs… In every case they (districts losing students to Schools of Choice) are districts that are predominantly African American and poor children and they suffered terrific losses of enrollment and revenue….”
Benton Harbor—heavily in debt and struggling academically—has been threatened with state intervention like Inkster, Buena Vista, Highland Park, and Muskegon Heights—whole school districts which were closed, charterized, or put under emergency manager control by former governor Rick Snyder. Now the new Governor Gretchen Whitmer has threatened to close the high school in Benton Harbor or eventually close the district.
If your superintendent supports state takeovers, mass firings, replacing public schools with charter schools, or other corporate management strategies, he is not on the side of your community.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
In my opinion superintendents from Chiefs for Change or the Broad Institute should not be permitted to lead a school district or state education department. They are not qualified to hold the position. These faux superintendents are political appointees designed throw the district or state into chaos in order to hasten privatization.
Authentic superintendents trained in institutions of higher education have the background to move a district forward. They understand their role in the community and have the training to serve communities well. They have studied school finance, leadership and law. They generally have experience as a teacher as well as a building or district administrator. They entered education to make a positive difference in the lives of young people, and they have experience working with parents and teachers.
Those trained by Broad or Bush have little to no relevant experience in education. They seek to undermine and destroy community based public education. They are agents of privatization.
Here’s what the great state of Indiana is doing. Bad funding, too much testing and political interfering has consequences. I sent this article along with my comments to Senator Niemeyer [R-IN] and Representative Chyung [D-IN].
…………………………………………
Schools leader: Indiana ‘in desperate need of a lot of teachers’
INDIANAPOLIS (WISH) — Indiana is in the middle of a teacher shortage.
As many students across the state returned to school, the Indiana Department of Education School Personnel Job Bank on Tuesday showed more than 600 available teacher positions.
“We’re in a teacher shortage. We’re in an administrator shortage. We’re in an educator shortage,” said Jennifer McCormick, the state superintendent of public instruction, on Tuesday. “We’re also in a bus driver shortage. We’re in a school cafeteria worker shortage. The list goes on.”
“A lot of it goes back to pay,” McCormick said. “We can tip-toe around the issue, but a lot of it, when you have unemployment this low across the state of Indiana and across the nation, it goes back to pay.”
McCormick said 3,500 teachers were on emergency teaching permits in 2018. The Department of Education’s website says, “An Emergency Permit is issued at the request of a school district in a content area for which the district is experiencing difficulty staffing the assignment with a properly licensed educator.”…
https://www.wishtv.com/news/indiana-news/schools-leader-indiana-in-desperate-need-of-a-lot-of-teachers/
Be careful promoting the “shortage” meme. As Peter Greene points out, just because you can’t find a Lexus for $5.00 doesn’t mean there is a Lexus shortage. There is only a shortage of teachers willing to be treated like crap for dirt wages. If we promote the “shortage” narrative, that leads to the “solution” of having any warm body be allowed to teach. While professionals with advanced degrees and experience may not be willing to be treated like crap for dirt wages, in this economy, there are plenty of not-qualified people who are willing.
dienne77: What you say is exactly what is happening. Qualified teachers are leaving the profession and the under-qualified are taking their place. 3,500 “emergency teaching permits”?
Our schools are suffering from lack of funding. That is what the State Superintendent of Education for Indiana is saying. Educators don’t want to work, and kill themselves off, for peanuts.
How large are classrooms now? I’d bet the classroom sizes are growing, making it hard to teach. Too much testing is also taking away teaching time.
I said in my letter to Niemeyer and Chyung that this is a politician created crisis.
Adding, If…your church, temple, mosque, etc. supports privatization…it is not on the side of your community nor nation.
The Gates-funded Pahara Institute’s summer 2018 Fellows included representatives from social Darwinist Charles Koch, a Catholic Schools archdiocese and, from disaster capitalism’s Dept. of Ed. in Louisiana.
I hadn’t noticed that Broad Superintendents Academy abbreviated is BS Academy. Nice catch, Diane. That gave me a good chuckle. It’s funny because it’s true. Broad and Bush are full of it. Their baloney superintendents take money from schoolchildren to give to pay for, oh, let’s say illegal massages.
Chiefs of Change/ Gates’ Pahara Institute and the corporate raider handbook.
They falsely claim they have something of value to bring to an institution that others built. They decide to label the institution a failure and put their management team in charge. Then, they take the assets leaving nothing behind for the community.
The founder of Pahara identified the charter goal, “…brands on a large scale”.
What God-awful plunderers of the common good..
This is all part of the libertarian plan to dismantle the public schools and the public sector and turn the United States over to the private sector so our taxes will feed directly into the coffers of billionaires and soon to be billionaires … without any oversight.
The private sector market will become our government and profits will be the final decider of everything. For instance, if a bridge needs to be replaced so it doesn’t collapse and kill the people on it at the time it fails, and replacing that bridge cuts profits, then there will be no bridge. Just let the people who were on the bridge at the wrong time die.
I think that is called an autocratic kleptocracy.
All the early deaths caused by the profit-driven autocratic kleptocracy will be written off as justified collarteral damage.
That is what happens to our bloated military budget. There are swarms of private contractors that overcharge us for most goods and services, and we have no knowledge of it or control over it.
Perpetual war creates a glut of military generals.
Mattis, Kelley and Petraeus aren’t doing Americans any favors from their employment in the private sector.
While the U.S. fights too many wars like Vietnam, and Iraq and the 130 countries that special forces troops operate in annually in addition to all the meddling and nation-building, there is no glut of generals and admirals in the United States due to these limitations.
10 U.S. Code § 526. Authorized strength: general and flag officers on active duty
U.S. Code
(a)Limitations.—The number of general officers on active duty in the Army, Air Force, and Marine Corps, and the number of flag officers on active duty in the Navy, may not exceed the number specified for the armed force concerned as follows:
(1) For the Army, 231.
(2) For the Navy, 162.
(3) For the Air Force, 198.
(4) For the Marine Corps, 62.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/10/526
Now, a country like Venezuela does have a glut with about 3,000 generals and admirals for a military force that is at least a fifth of the U.S. if not less.
Adding- (1) The number is fixed at any given time. When generals retire early (Petraeus?), others move up into the positions, the number in the private sector increases. If the age at death for the population of generals increases, the number of retired generals increases. (2) “The general and flag officer corp has increased as a percentage of the total force over the past 5 decades. The share increased 44%.” (3) Since about 1995 the number of active duty military personnel has remained relatively constant. The number that is appropriate for a nation would, theoretically, change based on interventions requiring armed forces. Glut is a relative term describing unnecessary excess.
What was the size of the force when the code was passed that identified max. number of general and flag officers?
Idaho is having problems with awarding its teacher merit pay. What a stupid idea. Idaho ranks at the bottom of the country for salary and this is supposed to make up the difference? 120 hours needed to fill out the forms? Good grief. Stupidity reigns in red states. [I’m a graduate of Borah High School in Boise so I can complain.]
…….
MASTER EDUCATOR PREMIUM REVIEWS HIT SOME GLITCHES
Kevin Richert 08/15/2019
The state has run into a few glitches as it reviews applications for the new master educator premium.
But the State Board of Education is still hoping to award the $4,000-a-year bonuses by its Sept. 1 deadline.
The premiums are designed to reward high-performing veteran teachers with at least eight years’ classroom experience. More than 1,400 teachers applied for the premiums, completed detailed and lengthy portfolios laying out their case for a share of the funding.
But technical problems — such as bad links — have plagued some of the applications, making it difficult for reviewers to go over the portfolios. The State Board has hired two temporary employees to help sort out the applications and the link problems, spokesman Mike Keckler said Wednesday.
And there’s another hiccup. The State Board hired more than 300 teachers to review portfolios and recommend whether an applicant deserves a bonus. But with the school year approaching, six of these teachers had to bow out of the job, Keckler said.
This is the first year the state has awarded the master educator premium, and the rollout hasn’t been seamless.
By the State Board’s own estimates, between 8,000 and 10,000 teachers probably met the minimum requirements for the premiums, which means thousands of veteran educators didn’t apply for a share of the money. Idaho’s reigning teacher of the year, Marc Beitia of American Falls High School, was among those who didn’t apply — saying he and many fellow educators simply don’t have the time to fill out a portfolio, a job that has taken some teachers as much as 120 hours.
Meanwhile, a co-chair of Gov. Brad Little’s K-12 task force has questioned the effectiveness of the program, and the wisdom of expecting employees to fill out such a time-consuming application for a bonus. “I would never run any company this way,” Boise businessman Bill Gilbert said last month.
When the bonus amount is low relative to employee effort and the dissension that it provokes is high, failed management is evident.