Tom Ultican, retired teacher of advanced mathematics and physics in California, has written a well-documented critique of the Broad Academy.
He describes its origins and purposes. Its primary purpose is to privatize public education. The Broad Academy, he writes, is the powerful force driving the Destroy Public Education movement. Including the current cohort, 568 people have learned the disruptive and destructive philosophy of billionaire Eli Broad.
Their track record is deplorable:
Broad trained Superintendents have a history of bloated staffs leading to financial problems like John Deasy in Los Angeles (Ipad fiasco) or Antwan Wilson in Oakland. They also are notorious for top down management that alienates teachers and parents. Jean-Claude Brizard was given a 98% no confidence vote in Rochester, New York before Rahm Emanuel brought him to Chicago where the teachers union ran him out of town. Maria Goodloe-Johnson became Seattle’s superintendent in 2007. She was soon seen as a disruptive demon by teachers and parents. There was great glee when a financial mismanagement brought her down.
He warns:
No school district trying to improve and provide high quality education should even consider hiring a candidate with Broad training on their resume. Neither the Residency nor the academy are legitimate institutions working to improve public education. Their primary agenda has always been the privatization and ending democratic control of schools by local communities. That is why the founding billionaire, Eli Broad, is one of America’s most prolific financers of Charter Schools and organizations like Teach For America. He believes in markets and thinks schools should be privately run like businesses.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
And don’t forget Wake County (Raleigh), NC’s hire of Broady Toña Tata, former Ops Director under Michelle Rhee. A new Wake Board fired Tata from his post at the 16th largest school district in the US.
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Can we just call these people Broadie’s Toadies?
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San Antonio’s superintendent is a Broadie and a Pahara Fellow.
The billionaires’ superintendents should wear a scarlet B on their jackets.
If they don’t, the public could put a sick it note with a letter “B” on their backs, like those signs that say “kick me”.
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Santa Barbara’s superintendent is Pahara.
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Broadies are a Trojan horse designed to disrupt and blow up existing public schools. Like TFA they are “fake” administrators. They are generally business people that are not properly trained in education. As I have said before, there is a reason to hire an authentic professional to do a job. Superintendents are often former teachers that have returned to school to get a master’s or doctorate in educational administration. They are trained in child development, curriculum, instructional methodologies, education law and leadership, hiring procedures, balancing school budgets, community outreach and setting school calendars.
A superintendent’s role is not a same as someone solely trained in business practices where CEO can make unilateral decisions. Superintendents are responsible to the communities they serve. That may be why communities dump their Broadie after the local community catches on to the fact that the goal is to undermine, not serve, the public schools. Broadies get passed around like bad pennies.
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Thanks for using the word “Disruption.”
In my new book, Slaying Goliath, I don’t call them “Reformers.” I call them Disrupters, because that’s what they do.
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best description: “fake” administrators presented as a Trojan horse.
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Search in reverse: A Broadie was hired by Rahm Emanuel and Emanuel brags about closing 50 public schools in one day.
Before becoming Chicago’s mayor, Rahm was the White House Chief of Staff for President Obama from 2009 to 2010.
Follow the tentacles/strings to see where they lead from a president through his former Chief of Staff to Eli Broad.
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One place the Duncan strings lead to is New America’s COO.
New America, funded by Eric Schmidt of Google, was in the news last year for firing the staff who issued a warning against the power of tech companies. The group independently reassembled as Open Markets led by Barry Lynn.
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Again with the Broadies! Like Arne Duncan & Paul Vallas, how do we make these people go away & leave our schools alone?
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“how do we make these people go away & leave our schools alone?”
History shows us the only way. One example from history is the French Revolution and their use of the guillotine. But if we had another Gandhi willing to starve, suffer and die a martyr, that might work, too.
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The first option is more consistent with American personality.
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We don’t need no Broaducation
We don’t need no thought control
No data mining in the classroom
Mr Broad, leave them schools alone
Hey, Eli, leave them schools alone
You are just a bully with a set of brass balls
All you do is tear the bricks from our walls
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Oh–& I meant to add, anyone else notice, after Haiti’s disastrous hurricane, that Valla$ & Duncan ran over there to “help fix” the education system in Haiti, but didn’t do the same in Puerto Rico? Why not, do you think? (Hint: $$$$ sent to Haiti, but paper towels for Puerto Rico.)
All of these villianthropists have an acute $en$e of $mell as to where the money I$.
Hey, I’m $urprised that those 2 (& Broad di$ciple$/grad$) aren’t “helping” to $et up $chool$ in the for-profit refugee detention center$.
Whoop$–$houldn’t be giving them idea$, now, $hould I?!
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After the earthquake in Haiti, Bill Clinton was named “czar” of the rebuilding project. Other than an athletic stadium that they didn’t need, very little was accomplished. Nobody knows what happened to the money.https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-clinton-foundations-legacy-in-haiti-haitians_b_57f604f9e4b087a29a5486fd
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First, read The Big Truck That Went by: How the World Came to Save Haiti & Left Behind a Disaster by AP Reporter Jonathan Katz (2014), & then a Slate post, “The Clintons Didn’t Screw Up Haiti Alone. You Helped.* 9/22/16.
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The Broadies may be bad, but, it isn’t just the Broadies.
Not so long ago, the “leaders” of the AFT and NEA went all-in on the Common Core, which had been largely created by the corporate business community and by the College Board and the ACT.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, the National School Boards Association, the National Association of Elementary School Principals, the National Association of Secondary School Principals, and the American Association of School Administrators issued a joint statement that said Common Core “tests are necessary” for “use in teacher and principal evaluation,” though they’d prefer some delays and the inclusion of other “timely data.”
The ASCD was a Common Core enthusiast too.
In the not so distant past, Fairfax County, one of the biggest and “best” school division i Virginia recently hired a new superintendent who’d previously been in Houston. While in in Houston, she led the development of ASPIRE, a merit-pay program, that was funded (in part) by the Broad, Gates and Dell foundations, the very same groups that fund corporate-style “reform” and that support the Common Core. And while researchers and test experts cautioned against the use of value-added models to evaluate teachers, this person called value-added models “proven methodology” that are both “valid and reliable.”
Can you say clueless?
When the hiring was announced, the Fairfax school board chair said she wowed the board with “her vision in leadership.” A Republican board member said the new hire represented “the beginning of a sea change in Fairfax.”
Just a few years back, the Virginia Association of School Superintendents (VASS) released a “New Blueprint” for the future of public education in the Commonwealth.
The “New Blueprint” said that the role of public education is to prepare students to “compete across the world.”
This, by the way, was the core purpose of the Common Core. The Virginia superintendents called it a “shared vision.” And yet, it was basically the equivalent of educational garbage because it’s based on a lie.
The “New Blueprint” said the purpose of education is “to enhance student performance.” To do that teachers must be expert at obtaining and analyzing “data.” Then, the superintendents advocated “differentiated compensation to reward meritorious performance”, i.e., merit pay. To put it mildly, the research on merit pay is not so hot.
More recently, a Republican state delegate in Virginia and a conservative public school superintendent came up with a “new” idea to improve teacher morale and recruit new teacher candidates to the profession. The idea? The issuance of a state license plate with a slogan that says ‘Virginia loves teachers.’
And speaking of teachers, what about those who mindlessly jump on the STEM and Advanced Placement bandwagons? What about those who identify themselves as “gifted” teachers? Or those who subscribe to the idea that PSAT and SAT scores represent “intelligence?”
Yeah, the Broadies have not been good for public education. But neither have lots of others.
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The superintendent of the Los Angeles diocese of Catholic schools became a Fellow of Gates-funded Pahara in 2018.
In the midwest, you find Catholic schools where public education should be. Ohio politicians dole out an estimated $50,000,000 to $130,000,000 to Catholic schools for the vouchers that were found to have no positive effect on outcomes. (In 2012, a researcher found a majority of Catholic schools were non-union despite the social justice verbiage). It’s a good sweetener to get congregants to vote for the party of Trump in Ohio. The influence of the Catholic school brand is also found in Illinois and Kentucky
The chair of the Ohio senate education committee, who never met a common good she liked, even said the payoffs made no sense.
Education Next in Spring 2011, had an article that tied the future of Catholic schools to the “burgeoning charter school movement”.
(Catholic Ethos, Public Education) In 2014, Chester Finn of Fordham wrote, “…there’s opportunity for Catholic schools…weakening of teachers unions.”
It’s a replay of British overlords and Catholic Church with the Irish great hunger result
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Democracy,
If you do some digging, I expect you will find Gates cash behind many of those endorsements of the Common Core.
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Bellwether Education Partners (Gates funded) site- “Bellwether Exec. Search- Client/Project List”
About 70 organizations listed- the usual organizations, Stand for Children, KIPP, TNTP, Chiefs for Change, Relay, TFA,… and, one religious group, Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston, Superintendent of Education.
Bill Gates “participates in” the Catholic Church that his wife attends with their children. (Relevant magazine’s summary of a Rolling Stone Interview with Bill Gates)
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Diane, Yes, I know that Gates spread lots of money around to gain Common Core endorsements, including those that came from the AFT and the NEA. But that doesn’t explain why so many school board members, principals, and teachers hop on educational bandwagons that are mostly bogus. Too many educators just don’t do their homework.
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You mention so many important distinctions: we often see directly where the Broadies (and others like them) attack public schools while missing (or intentionally overlooking) the many, many ways that the entire education system is complicit
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Ciedie…yep. There are way too many people in our current system who subscribe to educational myths.
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Why aren’t Catholic schools calling themselves public? (Most of the estimated $50 mil to $130 mil. of taxpayer money for Ohio vouchers is given to Catholic schools.)
I want wall and shelf space for my religious icons at the schools I pay for.
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They are selling morality, not religion. Morality is in natural conflict with socialism.
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Harlan, morality does not need religion to exist. You see, there is this thing called secular morality. In fact, without religion to forgive our sins, if we want to be a good person, we have to live a moral life and religion does not define morality, Culture does that.
“Morality is more than possible without God, it is entirely independent of him. That means atheists are not only more than capable of leading moral lives, they may even be able to lead more moral lives than religious believers who confuse divine law and punishment with right and wrong.”
“Secular morality is the aspect of philosophy that deals with morality outside of religious traditions. Modern examples include humanism, freethinking, and most versions of consequentialism. Additional philosophies with ancient roots include those such as skepticism and virtue ethics. Greg M. Epstein also states that, ‘much of ancient Far Eastern thought is deeply concerned with human goodness without placing much if any stock in the importance of gods or spirits.'[1]:45 An example is the Kural text of Valluvar, an ancient Indian theistic poet-philosopher whose work remains secular and non-denominational.[2][3][4] Other philosophers have proposed various ideas about how to determine right and wrong actions. An example is Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative.'”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secular_morality
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