Tom Ultican, retired teacher of physics and advanced mathematics, is a specialist in the Destroy Public Education movement.
In this post, he describes the effort underway to take over the Providence public schools, a tactic that has not worked anywhere else.
He begins:
November 1, 2019, Angélica Infante-Green, Rhode Island’s new Commissioner of Education, announced the state was taking over Providence Public Schools. A neoliberal Democratic governor, a like minded mayor and the chamber of commerce appear to be instituting a school privatization agenda.
All power over schools in the state is held by the governor and mayors. Citizens do not have the right vote for local school leaders and school system leaders are subordinates of mayors. This structural weakness in Rhode Island has left public education vulnerable to the whims of a governor or mayor that does not respect professional educators and public education. [CORRECTION: A READER POINTED OUT THAT PROVIDENCE HAS AN APPOINTED SCHOOL BOARD, BUT OTHER LOCAL BOARDS ARE ELECTED.]
Governor Gina Raimondo holds the non-distinction of being the least popular governor in the nation, with a favorability rating of only 36%.
Gina attended private school while growing up in Providence. She studied economics at Harvard and sociology at Oxford University. Following Oxford she earned a juris doctorate from Yale Law..
Raimondo worked in Massachusetts at the venture capital firm Village Ventures which was backed by Bain Capital before she ran for to be Rhode Island State Treasurer in 2010. A puff piece in News Week describes how Gina defeated labor union opposition to roll back pension funds. The piece states, “The changes she persuaded the Democrat-controlled Legislature to pass over union opposition will save about $3 billion by delaying retirement, suspending cost-of-living increases and offering workers 401(k)-type savings plans.”
Her neoliberal pension reform plan matches the thinking of Charles Koch and the Cato Institute. The corporate supported American Legislative Exchange Council provides legal templates for reforming pension funds that look very much likeRaimondo’s Rhode Island pension reforms…
Raimondo is all in for charter schools. She especially admires Achievement First, a no-excuses charter chain based in Connecticut.
Raimondo selected a new state commissioner of education in the spring of 2019,
Angélica Infante-Green, who trained under Joel Klien and Michael Bloomberg in New York City. Infante-Green is a former Teach for America Corp member who began her career in New York City.
According to Angélica’s LinkedIn page, she taught at PS 4M, CS 77X, and South Park High School between 1994 and 1998. All of her administrative experience appears to revolve around bilingual education. She has never been a superintendent or a principal, which makes her an odd choice to lead Rhode Island’s schools.
However, she was in the first cohort of future chiefs at Jeb Bush’s Chief’s for Change. Their official comment on Angélica’s hiring came from Chief’s for Change Board member Pedro Martinez. He said, “We applaud Gov. Gina Raimondo for selecting a commissioner with a deep commitment to creating and expanding opportunities for all students.” Martinez is the Broad trained administrator who is instituting the billionaire financed portfolio model of education reform in San Antonio, Texas; a model that posits disruption as good and democracy as a hindrance.
Researchers from John Hopkins University conducted a review of Providence Public Schools. Their report begins,
“In May 2019, the Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy led a review of the Providence Public School District (PPSD). We did so at the invitation of the Rhode Island Department of Education (RIDE) Commissioner, Ms. Angélica Infante-Green, with the support of Governor Gina Raimondo and Mayor Jorge Elorza. The Partnership for Rhode Island funded the review.”
Infante-Green officially assumed her position on April 29 and in May she already had arranged for corporate money to finance a study of PPSD.
The corporate money came from The Partnership for Rhode Island, a group of leading CEO’s in the state. The Governor and the Mayor supported the new Commissioner of Education’s invitation for the study to be done. When the report was released, media, politicians and business executive started vehemently denouncing PPSD as a dysfunctional failure….
An amazing fact:
The Johns Hopkins study was commissioned in May and presented in June and by July 19th Mayor Elorza officially petitioned the state to takeover PPSD.
What kind of a study is commissioned in May and presented in June?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
There is no reason to believe that a state takeover will help the students of Providence. With leadership from the “Chiefs for Cash” and TFA, it is safe to believe that mass privatization will ensue. There is no evidence to indicate that either a takeover or privatization is an improvement plan. I hope the residents of Providence will organize and take to the streets to fight against this hostile takeover of their democratic public schools. It is time for the local community to fight back.
Since neither the Governor nor the State Commissioner has ever turned around a single school, how will they turn around an entire district?
NCEA?… in the state with the highest percent of Catholics.
The political, Providence Bishop Tobin said in a tweet this summer, Catholic schools are a viable option to public schools..
Not surprising- establishment Dems are on the side of the marriage of theocracy and oligarchy.
well said
Unless public schools show a vision for the future, they will perish.
Does that mean that the Republican Party will perish, since it has a vision for the Age of the Robber Barons, not the future?
Will the family perish?
Visions for the future have a long history of being wrong. I once wrote an article about educators’ abysmal track record of predicting what the future held in store. They were all wrong.
As evidence that you are right, caplee, the marriage of theocracy and oligarchy is winning. Their vision is to buy the politicians with money and promises of Catholic and evangelical votes.
SCARY how strong this partnership is right now
For many decades now, as in any occupied country, the Deformer/Disrupter occupiers of U.S. education–the invasion force that went forward, financed by Gates and Walton dollars, to take over our federal and state governments, has dominated discourse about education in the United States. In Vichy France, the motto of the Revolution, liberté, égalité, fraternité, was replaced by the motto of the fascist collaborationist Pétain regime, travail, famille, patrie. These were high-sounding words–work, family, and country–but they masked a terrible reality as the Jews and Socialists started disappearing. Conservatives embraced the official collaborationist view as a corrective to the licentiousness of an era of jazz and night clubs, short skirts and sexual libertinism. There was a resistance, yes, but it operated in the shadows. Moderates found it easy to ignore the disappearances and the surveillance state and to embrace the discourse of the occupiers–to become de facto collaborators–because the alternative was dangerous.
For many decades now, the language of the Deformers/Disrupters has become the official language of the federal government, the state departments of education, of administrators of our schools, and of our textbooks, print and online. It’s as though there were an unwritten but rigidly, severely enforced rule that one was never to mention the puerile, backward Gates/Coleman bullet list of abstract “skills” without prefacing the term “standards” with the adjective “higher.” Everyone throughout the educational system is forced to speak in terms of “data-based decision making” and “accountability,” even if they know quite well that the tests that provide this supposed”data” are sloppy and invalid–a scam. Teachers are given no choice but to post their data walls and hold their data chats. All coherence in ELA textbooks is gone, their texts and study apparatus having been replaced by random exercises, modeled on the state tests, on applying random items from the Gates/Coleman list to random snippets of text. The goals set by the occupiers–school letter grades, the average test scores needed to get an “exemplary” rating as a teacher or administrator, the test scores for avoiding third-grade retention or necessary for high-school graduation–are very like the constant barrage of production figures for pork bellies and pig iron constantly broadcast by fascist regimes. And everywhere are the reports on the glorious successes of regime–the graduation rates, the improved scores, cheered and written about in news stories even as everyone knows them to be lies.
The Chiefs for Ka-ching are The Party running the Vichy Occupation.
But enough with the abstraction. Let’s dig a little deeper. Let’s look at U.S. literature texts before and after Gates and Coleman. Before, there was no top-down curriculum commissariat, but habits of the tribe and tradition and teacher concerns about quality ensured that from one basal program to another, the contents were pretty much (about 90 percent) the same. Poe’s “The Raven” and “The Cask of Amontillado.” Check. Wordsworth’s “I Wondered Lovely as a Cloud.” Check. Hughes’s “A Negro Speaks of Rivers.” Check. The Allegory of the Cave from Plato’s Republic. Check. Substantive literary works. Classics from the canon. And almost all schools used these basal lit texts.
Every selection in these literature textbooks was followed by a series of questions, beginning with factual questions, moving to analysis questions, and ending with evaluation questions, that took students through a step-by-step close reading of the substantive, classic selection. These were followed by extension activities–language activities about grammar or usage or vocabulary in the selection. Writing in response to or in imitation of the selection. Walk into any school in America, and kids were using these texts. In high-school, almost all schools were using a basal world literature text in Grade 10, an American literature survey text in Grade 11, and a British literature survey text in Grade 12. In the non-survey years, the texts were usually organized coherently by genre–poetry, the short story, drama, the nonfiction essay–or, by theme. But always, one had the substantive, classic selections and the close reading questions–facts, analysis, synthesis, following Bloom’s taxonomy.
Enter Gates. Gates wanted a single bullet list, nationally, to key depersonalized education software to. He saw the current system for educating Prole children as terribly wasteful of money spent on facilities and teachers, who could be replaced by computers. And by doing that, he and others in the computer industry could make a LOT of money. So, when he was approached by Coleman and another guy from Achieve, he was all over the idea of national “standards.” Any bullet list would do, and any guy, even Coleman, despite his lack of relevant expertise.
And what did Coleman do? Well, he and his pals reviewed the mediocre, skills-based, lowest-common-denominator existing state standards and cobbled together a list based on those. And his list, like the execrable state “standards” that proceeded it, was almost content-free–it was a list of vague, abstract “skills.” In his ignorance of the fact that there was a de facto, default canon in U.S. literature textbooks of substantive works from British, American, and World literature, he called for “reading of substantive works” for a change. In his ignorance of the fact that EVERY basal literature program was organized around close reading questions, he called for “close reading.” In his ignorance of the fact that every high-school in the U.S. was using a basal lit text in Grade 11 that contained a survey of American literature, including foundational documents like the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Federalist Papers, and in ignorance of the fact that almost all schools were doing a Brit Lit survey in Grade 12, he called for reading of “foundational documents” in American literature in Grades 11 and 12 (one of the very, very few actual bits of content-related material in his “standards.”
And what was the actual result of this? Well, before Gates and Coleman, editors and writers of U.S. literature texts would sit down and coherently plan a unit to teach, say, the elements of fiction. It would contain substantive short stories from the canon and treat, in turn, such elements as the central conflict, plot structure, character types and methods of characterization, setting, mood, and theme. After the Coleman/Gates bullet list and the high stakes attached to tests based on this (school, administrator, teacher, and student evaluations, punishments, and rewards), the bullet lists and the tests became all important. Educational publishers started making TEACHING THE BULLET LIST the goal of education. (They didn’t do this when there were differing, competing state “standards.”) The publishers started beginning every project with a spreadsheet containing the bullet list on the left and the place where the item from the list was “covered” to the right. The “standards” and the test question types became the default, de facto curriculum. COHERENCE AND CONTENT IN US LITERATURE TEXTOOKS WAS GONE. They became a random series of random exercises on random snippets of text meant to teach incredibly vague “skills,” some in print, some in online replacements for textbooks. Vague, content-free kill drill.
And now, a whole generation of teachers has entered the profession and grown up under a Vichy regime that treats this madness, this devolved, trivialized curriculum, as ideal.
And after decades of this, after the utter failure of Deform to improve test scores or close achievement gaps, the Deformers want to double down. Stay the course, but add a national Curriculum Commissariat and Thought Police to serve as curriculum gatekeeper. And, ofc, put some idiot like Coleman in charge of it–someone who gets his or her marching orders from Gates or the Waltons. Kill any possibility of innovation by researchers, scholars, and classroom practitioners, whose ideas for modifications of the curricula won’t matter because THEY ARE NOT ON THE LIST. Hew to the list! Do as your betters tell you to do! Yours is to obey. Your superiors will take care of the command and control (and coercion).
Enough. It’s time to start challenging the Deformer/Disrupter NewSpeak at every turn. No, this is not “actionable data” because it comes from invalid, sloppy tests that don’t measure what they purport to measure. No, writing that applies the “standard” to the text doesn’t reflect normal interaction with texts, in which we are interested primarily in the experience of the work and what its authors and characters had to say. No, these “standards” are trivial and vague and backward, not “higher.” No, these test questions are tortured and awkward and invalid and do not reflect normal interactions with texts. If anything, they are superb examples of misreading that misses the point of why people write and why others read. No, teachers are autonomous professionals not to be scripted. No, teaching is a human interaction between people, and computers can’t do it.
Enough. Send the Deformers packing. Vive la révolution!
The hilarious thing is that this tyro, this neophyte, Lord Coleman, appointed High Sheriff of US education by Gates, knew NOTHING of actual practice in U.S. ELA curricula and classrooms, and because of his toxic combination of arrogance and ignorance, made a terrible mess of things. The trivialization and debasement of U.S. curricula and pedagogy as a result of his ignorance will take a lot of undoing.
High priests, figuratively and literally.
With their magical incantations: CHOICE! HIGHER STANDARDS! DATA! 21st CENTURY SKILLS! RACE TO THE TOP!
A great doctoral thesis topic for an enterprising graduate student: do a comparative analysis of basal literature textbooks, K-12, in the United States before and after the Common [sic] Core [sic] State [sic] Standards [sic]. What you will find is that the text quality has devolved, coherence has disappeared, close reading isn’t actually modeled. Trivialization and incoherence. Why? Because the standards are made high stakes because of the tests, and the standards themselves are almost completely content free, vague, abstract “skills” that leave out much of what is essential to reading literature.
Don’t even get me started on the language and writing “standards.” These are even worse.
Coleman’s talk of close reading of substantive texts was rather like someone saying, as though it were revelation, that people would find it easier to go through their day if they only wore shoes. It’s time to start wearing shoes!!! LOL. And, ironically, as a direct result of basing education on tests of his abstract, vague, backward, puerile skills lists, exactly the opposite happened. We got random exercises on random snippets from any crappy text whatsoever because THAT’S WHAT KIDS WOULD BE TESTED ON.
Deformer cocktail: one part arrogance, one part ignorance, two parts Gates money. Shake until disrupted. Retire to the Deformer echo chamber and enjoy.
There is not a shred of evidence to support the merit of takeovers or mass privatization. The disruptors seek to monetize our public asset of public education. Test, punishment, starving public schools do nothing to make schools better.
We need a new vision. We should start with investment and equitable funding for urban schools. We should offer wrap around services to help struggling students and their families. This is a positive way to move forward.
The Deformers and their Vichy collaborators are either of or representatives of the oligarchical class. This is all about command and control of the Proles. Teach them to shut up, sit down, and do whatever trivial crap their superiors tell them to do. It has NOTHING to do with continuous improvement or nurturing of intrinsic, life-long love of learning and everything to do with subverting democratic institutions and processes.
The same religious forces that are outlawing adoption by LGBT couples (today, it’s Tennessee), plot against public schools. It’s never been about better outcomes. The ruse wasn’t even used in the case of adoptions. But, the theocracy/oligarchy thought the false flag necessary to convince the public to allow the legal theft of their communities’ assets.
In the case of adoptions, Linda, there are numerous studies showing that kids adopted by gay and lesbian couples have better outcomes–happier, more successful in school and in careers. So, the troglodytes can’t make the case based on “outcomes.”
They can’t make the case about public education either, e.g. Prof. Figlio’s voucher study in Ohio.
When a person thinks God is confirming his prejudice, facts don’t matter.
There is a serious factual misstatement here. Schools in Providence may be run by an appointed school board. However, in most communities, there is an elected school committee.
As a resident of Providence I lok at the school takeover with HORROR. The governor is an incompetent fool and almost all of her appointments are the same. And I have no expectation that this takeover will work, infact I very much doubt it wil be anything other than a waste of money
As a resident of Providence I lok at the school takeover with HORROR. The governor is an incompetent fool and almost all of her appointments are the same. And I have no expectation that this takeover will work, infact I very much doubt it wil be anything other than a waste of money
As a resident of Providence I lok at the school takeover with HORROR. The governor is an incompetent fool and almost all of her appointments are the same. And I have no expectation that this takeover will work, infact I very much doubt it wil be anything other than a waste of money
It was a study in name only that was designed to support the take-over. The Deformers have proven repeatedly to be deceptive/sneaky in achieving their draconian, autocratic, profit-driven plot to destroy the public schools in the United States.
The ever more meretricious Mike Petrilli of the Fordham Foundation for the Payment of Big Bucks to Officers of the Fordham Foundation has a piece today in the “Gadfly” newsletter on “Staying the Course with the Common Core.” Of course he does. Must be time for the wire transfers to be going out from the Gates Foundation for the Privatizing and Computerizing of U.S. Education. Ofc, I am intending both the newer and the older meanings of the term “meretricious.”