Tom Ultican, a former teacher of physics and advanced mathematics in California, is diligently analyzing the tentacles of the Corporate Reform Movement, which he calls the Destroy Oublic Education Movement.

Relay Graduate School: a Slick “MarketWorld” Education Fraud

In this post, he scrutinizes the Relay “Graduate School of Education,” a program run by the charter industry to give master’s degrees to charter teachers who have mastered the arcane arts of no-excuses discipline and test-score raising.

You must read the entire post. It is carefully documented and chilling. He names the key players, the funders, and gives powerful insight  the emptiness of the program.

He begins:

Relay Graduate School of Education is a private stand alone graduate school created and led by people with meager academic credentials. Founded by leaders from the charter school industry, it is lavishly financed by billionaires. Contending that traditional university based teacher education has failed; Relay prescribes deregulation and market competition. Relay does not offer “coursework in areas typical of teacher education programs—courses such as school and society, philosophy of education, and teaching in democracy ….” Rather, Relay trains students almost exclusively in strict classroom management techniques.

Ken Zeichner is one of America’s leading academics studying teacher education. In a paper on alternative teacher preparation programs he noted that Match Teacher Residency and Relay “contribute to the inequitable distribution of professionally prepared teachers and to the stratification of schools according to the social class and racial composition of the student body.” Zeichner clarified,

“These two programs prepare teachers to use highly controlling pedagogical and classroom management techniques that are primarily used in schools serving students of color whose communities are severely impacted by poverty. Meanwhile, students in more economically advantaged areas have greater access to professionally trained teachers, less punitive and controlling management practices and broader and richer curricula and teaching practices. The teaching and management practices learned by the teachers in these two independent programs are based on a restricted definition of teaching and learning and would not be acceptable in more economically advantaged communities.”

Relay is another component of the destroy-public-education infrastructure that mirrors Professor Noliwe Rooks’ definition of segrenomics; “the business of profiting specifically from high levels of racial and economic segregation.”

Founding Relay Graduate School of Education

Relay’s foundation was laid when the Dean of City University of New York’s Hunter College school of education, David Steiner, was approached by Norman Atkins of Uncommon Schools, David Levin of KIPP charter schools, and Dacia Toll of Achievement First charter schools. Dean Steiner agreed to establish the kind of Teacher Preparation program at Hunter College that these three charter industry leaders wanted. The new program which began in 2008 and was called Teacher U.

Kate Peterson studied Relay for a Philadelphia group. She noted,

“Receiving $10 million from Larry Robbins, founder of the hedge fund Glenview Capital Management and current board member of Relay, and $20 million from the non-profit The Robin Hood Foundation, the three charter school leaders partnered with Hunter College in New York to implement their program ….”

The following year the newly elected and extremely wealthy Chancellor of the New York State Board of Regents, Merryl H. Tisch, tapped David Steiner to be Commissioner of Education.

Read it all.

Personally, I find it offensive that a charter industry program calls itself a “graduate school of education” when it has no scholars on its “faculty,” no library, no research. It is a training program with one purpose only: to award master’s degrees to charter teachers who know nothing of the history, philosophy, economics, or sociology of education, who know only one form of pedagogy, who know nothing of child or adolescent psychology. Their students are indoctrinated into the charter way of thought, not educated to think for themselves, not exposed to different points of view.

Robert Hutchins, who was president of the University of Chicago and a great thinker, said long ago that the purpose of professional education is to teach people to become critics of the profession.

That will never happen at Relay.