Jan Resseger reviews the story of Eli Broad and his leadership program, whose graduates have brought top-down management ideas and disruption wherever they go.
To keep the program alive, despite its long history of failure, Broad gave Yale University $100 million.
The Broad Leadership Institute is accredited (I have repeatedly called in unaccredited, but a reader pointed out to me that it was accredited in 2015). The fact that it is accredited is surprising, since I can’t find any evidence on the website of a faculty, a library, or any of the regular trappings of a genuine postgraduate program. Its accreditation is as bizarre as that of Relay “Graduate School of Education,” which has no one on its “faculty” with an earned doctorate (not yet, anyway), no library, no courses in the history or sociology or economics of education, no studies in child or adolescent psychology, no scholars or researchers.
Resseger writes:
The editors of PR Watch at the Center for Media and Democracy explain the curriculum of Broad’s Superintendent’s Academy and Urban Residency Program: “The Broad training curriculum for education minimizes subject areas like core education (10% of curriculum time). Instead it emphasizes ‘reform priorities’ (40%), ‘reform accelerators’ (30%), and systems-level management (nearly 20%). Training includes time with think tanks, businesses, and charter network administrators. Training does not prioritize classroom teachers, public school principals, or people knowledgeable about delivery of public education.”
LA Times education reporter, Howard Blume covered Eli Broad’s recent $100 million gift to Yale and the pending move of the Broad Center from California to New Haven: “The Broad Center, which has attracted praise and suspicion for its training of school district leaders, will move from Los Angeles to Yale University, along with a $100-million gift provided by founder Eli Broad… The donation is the largest ever for the Yale School of Management (SOM) and will help fund a master’s program for public education leaders and advanced leadership training for top school system executives—efforts that had been undertaken by the center in Los Angeles…. The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation has been the primary funder of the Broad Center, and in most years is the only one according to the center. The foundation has contributed $143.5 million to the center since 2001. The Broad Center’s budget for 2019 is $15 million.”
The Broad Center is a vanity projects, in most years wholly funded by one man. Now his vanity project will come with a Yale diploma.
Resseger reviews her clippings. It is one story after another of failure.
The song in “Fiddler on the Roof” says “When You’re Rich, They Think You Really Know.” Broad has demonstrated that he knows nothing about how to reform or fix schools. But because he is really rich, a billionaire, he can buy respectability for his failed management training program.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
People like Broad “MARKET” their frauds.
A shame that Yale prostituted itself in this way. I taught for many years at an institution that took Broad money. The dean was “all in” on the nonsense. It became a shameful story over time. Graduates of the principal preparation component of the deal were notorious for there heavy-handed manner once they were unleashed in local schools. I recall one sad incident in which a much-loved school counselor in an inner-city school was so appalled by the behavior of the new principal that she retired early and left the state. (Diane, you wrote about the city and the district back in 2010; the dean in question simply dismissed your work as the result of a “personal” change you had gone through. Thus was the pettiness and shallowness of a school of education. Of course, if you go back to 1985 you can find as severe an indictment of schools of education as can be imagined in Damerell’s “Education’s Smoking Gun.” As one reviewer noted, it was all too easy to dismiss his work as a “crank” who simply ranted and denounced teacher preparation. I do not want to rant and denounce but also found, after many years working in educator preparation, that it has been intellectually corrupted to its core. Ah, it is a sad part of our history.
well explained
Years ago (2006 or 7ish), when searching the web for special education data and info regarding charters (I’m a special needs advocate), I found the Broad Academy’s early website. It was more publicly user-friendly then so I was able to access a tab labeled “Tools” for Broad Academy “students”. One of those tool kits was titled “How to close a school and convert it to a charter”. It was blatant. Shortly after I brought it to the attention of the CA State Dept of Education, the info was no longer accessible without a username and password. At that time our state board was stacked with charter founders, supporters and funders (a true conflict of interest we complained about that was ignored) so after I flagged this at the state level, they circled the wagons.
Broad Academy’s intent was always to destroy, not improve public schools. The toolkit said it all.
Thank you for giving this a try, Sonja, and for sharing this story! This kind of thing happens a lot in Deformerland.
Find out who owns and controls the agency that accredited Broad’s Faux Education Academy.
Is it possible that Broad’s Faux Leadership Institute was accredited by a Faux Accreditation Agency?
“Accreditation of Colleges and Universities: Who’s Accrediting the Accreditors?”
“If you want a college or university degree, you need to understand school accreditation. Fly-by-night schools exist, dressed to impress, promising financial aid and printing fancy-sounding degrees, but in the end giving students neither the skills nor the credentials they need to advance their careers and lives.
“So, when you start to seriously check out a school that you think you might want to attend, don’t just ask, “Is this school accredited?” You need more than just a simple yes or no answer to that question. You also need to ask, “Who accredited this school, and why should I trust their accreditation? Who are the legitimate accreditors?”
https://thebestschools.org/degrees/accreditation-colleges-universities/
If you go the “The Broad Center” you will quickly discover that the Accreditation is claimed to exist but there is no name or link to the alleged Accreditation agency.
https://www.broadcenter.org/broad-residency/about/accreditation/
In addition: LOS ANGELES (March 30, 2015) — The Broad Center for the Management of School Systems has been granted INITIAL Accreditation by the Western Association of Schools and Colleges’ Accrediting Commission for Senior Colleges and Universities.
What does “INITIAL” mean? I think “INITIAL” means Broad filed the application but it wasn’t accepted.
I went to WSCUC.org and could not find the Broad Academy (or any school with the name Broad in it) listed on their site:
https://www.wscuc.org/institutions
I then went to the page for “formerly accredited” and also couldn’t find Broad’s Faux Leadership Institute listed there. This is the list of schools that lost their accreditation.
https://www.wscuc.org/institutions/formerlyaccredited
Here is the link
https://www.wscuc.org/institutions/broad-center
Too bad. To me, that says WASC has been compromised by the corrupt billionaires that fund the greedy deformers of public education.
The link I found between Broad and WASC is this:
Dr. Ginger Hovenic, former charter school principal and executive director of the San Diego-area Business Roundtable, is now the Director of Member and School Services for Southern California.
Click to access WASCWORDS-2010.pdf
and she is mentioned several times here:
https://epdf.pub/cheating-our-kids-how-politics-and-greed-ruin-education.html
Broadies being certified is like TFAers being certified, total and unjustifiable deregulation. The certificates are worthless, like the “Nobel” Economics prize. When Broad, Gates, Waltons, Hastings… don’t find statutes suitable for their game, they just have exceptions to the rules written into the books. The cheating billionaires and their undeserved fortunes must be reigned in.
The worse aspects of today’s education leadership culture occurs as a result of an unholy alliance between educators and marketing/finance bros. Inside our teacher preparation program, we knew the Broadies are ‘The Enemy’ and now they are gaining power. Finance & business management has clobbered all sanity.
Marketing/finance bros don’t think child centered learning or developmentally appropriate. They think: Profit Center or Cost Center. If you are within a Cost Center—they want to starve you and get rid of you, if possible, no matter how many PhDs you have.
Only Profit Center people matter. THAT is what the Broad accreditation means. There is no floor for bad when marketing/finance bros buy their way into education.
Look at what Deborah Gist has done to Tulsa Public Schools. Her Broadie strategies have butchered a fine school system and only enriched private business bank accounts.
I don’t want to distract from the needed attention to all of the Broad trained misssionaries who are out to destroy public schools, but it is also important to look at the growth of free-standing graduate programs of education–with the Broad one version for school administrators.
The Relay Graduate School of Education (RGSE) now has leaders who have earned doctoral degrees at… Teachers College, Ball State University, St. Thomas University, Johns Hopkins University, Fordham, and The Harvard University Graduate School of Education (Doctorate in Educational Leadership, no dissertation). Several other Relay leaders are listed as “Dr.” but have not completed the degree. Several do not indicate the nature of the doctoral degree (e.g., Ph.D or Ed. D). One who has not-yet-finished but who claims to be “Dr.” is studying at The University of Southern California Rossier School of Education. //relay.edu/about-us/relay-leadership
There are other graduate schools, like RGSE, detached from universities.
One is High Tech High Graduate School of Education located in the High Tech High charter school franchise. Search for “Scholarship and Graduate Culture at the HTH Graduate School of Education”
Another is the Sposato Graduate School of Education with teacher training for Match charter schools in Boston.
http://www.sposatogse.org
Another is the Alder Graduate School of Education which began as a training program for Aspire charter schools. https://aldergse.edu/about/
The University of Southern California Rossier School of Education is really devoted to charter schools. https://rossier.usc.edu/?s=charter+schools
The National Center for Teacher Residencies lists 29 programs that offer a master’s degree with some variant of the Teach for America model. Academic institutions are enlisted for some coursework and credibility but these are basically on-the-job teaching apprenticeships.
The New Teacher Project is another version of teacher preparation untethered from university programs https://tntp.org/become-a-teacher.
I am old-school on teacher education. These ventures are intended to produce “classroom ready teachers” who also have a narrow view of teaching as a job, not a profession.
The marketing of residency programs for teachers is based on a false narrative that these are comparable to a medical residency. They are not, but that is another story.
The Dean of Rossiter is a Fellow of the Gates -funded Pahara Institute.
This is just one of the more blatant examples of a trend–oligarchs buying university-level indoctrination of the next generation.
The Center for Media and Democracy is the citizens’ hope for a government of the people, by the people and for the people.