Jeanne Kaplan is a veteran civil rights activist who was elected to serve two terms on the Denver school board. She has been active in multiple campaigns to stop privatization and over-testing and energize a genuine effort to improve the public schools. She wrote this piece for this blog.
THE SISYPHEAN TASK IN DENVER
The dictionary defines Sisyphean task as something you keep doing but never gets completed, an endless task. In Greek mythology Sisyphus is punished by the god Zeus and is tasked with endlessly pushing a rock up a steep mountain, only to have it roll back down each time he nears the top. I will leave the deeper philosophical meanings to others. Simply interpreted, public education advocates residing in the Queen City of the Rockies, “transformers” if you will, will find similarities to this story as we reflect on our battle to defeat “education reform.” In Denver’s case the Sisyphean task master has not been a vengeful god, but rather a school board member or a school board itself which through their betrayals continues to keep “transformers” tasked with pushing the education transformational rock up the mountain.
Call it the Sisyphean Challenge, Groundhog Day, a Broken Record, Déjà vu. However you describe it, these “transformers” are experiencing another setback in their attempts to stop or at least slow down the business-based “education reform” model. In 2009 Denver voters thought they had put an end to the then still budding “education reform” movement. “Transformers” won four of seven seats on the school board but quickly lost that advantage when, within hours of the election, one supposed “transformer” flipped sides. For the next ten years education reformers had free reign in Denver. Four to three boards became a six to one board, became a seven to zero board. All for “education reform.” Forward ten years to today. “Transformers” once again gained control of the Denver School Board in theory. This time the transformer majority was believed to be 5-2. But local education reformers – with a lot of help from national reform partners – once again figured out how to get their privatization agenda through this hypothetically anti-privatization 5-2 Board. By consistently voting to renew and re-establish privatization policies and projects, today’s Board has deprived Denver voters once again of reaching the mountain top, and usually by a 6-1 vote. And from today’s perspective the rock has once again rolled down the mountain.
The below listed organizations, initiatives and foundations have all had their hand in preventing educational transformation in Denver. The list is thorough but not comprehensive:
| 1 – A+ Colorado | 30 – Empower Schools |
| 2 – Adolph Coors Foundation | 31 – Gates Family Foundation |
| 3 – Anschutz Family Foundation | 32 – Janus Fund |
| 4 – Bellwether Education Partners | 33 – KIPP – Knowledge is Power Program |
| 5 – Bezos Family Foundation | 34 – Koch Family Foundations |
| 6 – Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation | 35 – Laura and John Arnold Foundation |
| 7 – Bloomberg Philanthropies | 36 – Laurene Powell Jobs – Emerson Collective |
| 8 – Boardhawk | 37 – Leadership for Educational Equity |
| 9 – CareerWise | 38 – Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation |
| 10 – Chalkbeat | 39 – Lyra Learning – Innovation Zones |
| 11 – Chan Zuckerberg Initiative | 40 – Michael and Susan Dell Foundation |
| 12 – Schusterman Family Foundation | 41 – Moonshot |
| 13 – Chiefs for Change | 42 – PIE Network (Policy Innovators in Ed) |
| 14 – City Fund | 43 – Piton/Gary Community Investments |
| 15 – City Year | 44 – Relay Graduate School of Education |
| 16 – Colorado Health Foundation | 45 – Richard and Helen DeVos Foundation |
| 17 – Colorado Succeeds | 46 – RootEd |
| 18 – Community Engagement & Partners | 47 – Rose Foundation |
| 19 – Daniels Fund | 48 – School Board Partners |
| 20 – Democrats for Education Reform | 49 – Stand for Children |
| 21 – Denver Families of Public Schools | 50 – Students First |
| 22 – Denver Foundation | 51 – Teach for America |
| 23 – Denver Scholarship Foundation | 52 – The Broad Academy/The Broad Center |
| 24 – Donnell-Kay Foundation | 53 – Third Way |
| 25 – EdLeadLeadership | 54 – TNTP |
| 26 – Education Pioneers | 55 – Transform Education Now (TEN Can) |
| 27 – Education Reform Now | 56 – Wallace Foundation |
| 28 – Education Trust | 57 – Walton Family Foundation |
| 29 – Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation |
Below are some of the reform ventures coaxed through by these groups. Many have been used to maintain the failing status quo. Some have been used to make money for friends and colleagues. Some have been outright failures. But by its failure to address them or by its continued tolerance of them, the DPS Board has sanctioned the continuation of privatization in our city:
· At a time when education reform was truly hanging on by a thread in Denver, the Board assured its continued existence for the foreseeable future by voting to renew the use of the racially biased state accountability system, going even further into reformland by promising to develop a new accountability “dashboard” (a key “reformer” tenet). While testing is state mandated, the District did not even explore the possibility of waiving its obligation to rely on this system. This one decision has also allowed the proliferation of many of the above listed groups and has given new life to the overall privatization movement. A lot of new players are making a lot of new money from the public education system in Denver. After all, what is the business model really about if it is not about making money? This one vote has allowed the continuation of some of the most divisive and punitive practices such as:
1. Relying on high stakes testing even though the Board has given lip service to wanting a waiver this year due to COVID;
2. Relying on a non-transparent Choice system, which some believe is being used to fill unwanted charters;
3. Ranking of schools and continued competition resulting in winners and losers among students and schools;
4. Relying on Student Based Budgeting where the money follows the student;
5. Marketing of schools, whereby wealthier schools and schools with their own board of directors (charters and Innovation Zone schools) have a distinct advantage;
6. Giving bonuses to employees of schools based on test scores.
Other recent reform-oriented Board decisions include:
· Voting to renew or extend all 13 charter school contracts that were up this year even when some were struggling for enrollment and academic success. The Board claimed it did not want to disrupt kids and families. Portfolio model.
· Promoting school MERGERS as opposed to school CLOSURES for under enrolled neighborhood schools, somehow thinking voters won’t notice that merging schools results in the same failed policy as school closures, that campaign promises have been broken, and that charter schools are being treated differently. Portfolio model.
· Voting to approve new Innovation Zones, the hybrid portfolio model that supposedly gives schools more independence while, unlike charters, is still under the control of the school board. These Innovation Zones do, however, have their own administrative staff as well as their own boards and have ushered in their own cottage industry. Portfolio Model.
· Working with City Fund funded School Board Partners for Board training. City Fund is a relative newcomer to the education privatization world and is largely financed by Netflix Reed Hastings and John Arnold of Laura and John Arnold Foundation. Locally, City Fund has dropped $21 million into Denver’s own RootEd to assure “every child in Denver has the opportunity and support to achieve success in school, college and their chosen career.” This needs to be done equitably, of course! And only within a non-union school! Grant funding from private sources to promote private interests.
· Hiring a Broad trained Superintendent search company, Alma Advisory Group. Alma has also been involved in executive searches for both City Fund and The Broad Academy, two quintessential privatizers. More than four months have gone by since DPS Superintendent Susana Cordova resigned. Four metro Denver school districts have had superintendent vacancies this winter. Two have already found their leaders. Denver is still holding community meetings which if they follow DPS history, will end up be ing rather meaningless. Most importantly, will this “reform” inclined group be able to bring a wide-ranging group of candidates forward? The Broad Academy, training leaders in education reform.
· Continuing to allow and expand non-licensed teachers and administrators from programs such as Teach for American and Relay Graduate School of Education into DPS’ schools and continuing to tell the public they are just as qualified as professional educators. Anyone can teach!
Why do these examples matter, you might ask?
For starters, review the list of organizations and people pushing privatization. The sheer number is staggering. Then check out the similarity of language in their missions, visions, and goals and the uniformity of strategies and messaging.
· Every child deserves a great school.
· Every school deserves all the support it needs to ensure equity.
· Every school should have parent and community partners.
· Every school should be anti-racist, celebrate diversity, be inclusive.
These are all worthy goals, albeit very general ones. But what is the overall strategy to achieve them? Privatization and the business model focusing on innovative and charter schools using an accountability system based on high stakes testing to define success seems to be their answer. And in spite of claims that “reformers” are agnostic as to the type of school they foster, there are a few common characteristics they demand in their privatized schools:
· the ability to hire and fire anyone at any time; employees do not have to be licensed; at-will employees if you will. That’s right. No unions in innovation or charter schools. Anyone can teach.
· an accountability system based on high stakes tests; schools and employees evaluated and punished by the results of these racially inappropriate tests.
· market-driven criteria used to define school success. Winners and losers, competition, closures, choice, chaos, churn.
· “learning loss,” the pandemic-based slogan, must be addressed by unrelenting dependency on high stakes testing. No test waivers for this crazy school year. “Reformers” must have that data, and they must remind everyone that in spite of Herculean efforts on many fronts, public education has failed.
Add to this scenario the amount of money being spent to further this agenda. Determining this takes some patience because the tax records are often difficult to find and decipher. Then try to deduce who is benefitting from each program. This also takes some digging, for let me assure you, public education has spawned not a cottage industry but rather a mansion industry! Search the group you are interested in and check out its board and staff. And finally, look at the effect all of this has had on kids. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Isn’t it always about the kids? In reality few of these extra ventures have had any effect on kids. Fewer still touch kids directly.
Each privately funded unit on this list has had a privatized DPS connection of some sort. Some initiatives are duplicative. Some are very narrowly focused. Some purport to be THE ANSWER to public education’s struggles. There is no tolerance for differing beliefs. Yet, after 15 years of experimentation Denver’s students remain mired in mediocrity, suffering from an ever narrowing curriculum and dependent on evaluations, ratings, and a definition of success based on racially biased tests. Nationally, Denver Public Schools remains a leader in implementing “education reform” but alas, it also remains a leader in teacher and principal turnover and home to one of the largest achievement/opportunity gaps in the nation.
We in Denver have been subjected to the high-octane version of “education reform” for more than 15 years. Choice, charters, competition, closures have resulted in three unequal tiers of schools (charter schools, innovation zones, neighborhood schools). Reformers call this “the portfolio model.” I call it structural chaos. Michael Fullan calls it fragmentation, a system wrongly focused on “academics obsession, machine intelligence, and austerity.” To those privatizers who say, “but you have no solution,” Fullan has one that would turn public education on its head and could possibly produce what all of us involved in the public education scene say we want: robust, equitable education for all. Fullan has a solution for whole system success that would be focused on the human elements of public education: learning and well-being, social intelligence, and equality of investments. But in order for anything like this to work the superintendent and the board must be on the same page. Elections matter. And candidates need to understand what is at stake and what they have been elected to do.
Public education is the cornerstone of our democracy. (Given today’s America it might have slipped to second place behind voting rights). I ran for school board on that belief, I witnessed its importance through the lives of my immigrant parents. I do not believe our democracy will survive without public education, but the cornerstone must change. Radically. Dramatically.
Imagine if all of the efforts of those 50 plus organizations were combined into one united movement focused on an anti-racist, equitable systemic change. And imagine how truly revolutionary, transformative and unifying this movement could be if it included voices and ideas not aligned with the business model but with people who are willing to truly look at things differently, people who were willing to be honest and show leadership. Imagine how during this unique time in our nation’s history this new system could have resulted in a new and exciting way of delivering and evaluating teaching and learning, well-being, equity and equality. Imagine how exciting this unique time in Denver could been had we taken advantage of this opportunity. , Instead, DPS decided to continue with the status where money and power continue to rule, where a business model has been buttressed to portray a non-existent success, and where an elected Board of Education has turned its back on its mandate.
Historically “transformers” in Denver have been dogged in their attempts to get that rock to the mountain’s peak. We have kept fighting even when betrayed by school board members, even when organization after organization has put down roots to continue the mirage of success, even when untold millions of dollars have been invested in programs that have yet to make a significant difference in educational outcomes. Can we in Denver defy Greek mythology and end this Sisyphean nightmare? Or are there too many yet unknown obstacles in our path to stop us once again? Elections will decide. Time will tell.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
It’s really something when you see the echo chamber orgs listed.
Count the billionaires- Coors, Koch, Broad, Gates, Zuckerberg, Bezos, Walton, DeVos, Arnold, Jobs, Bloomberg.
There are COUNTRIES who don’t have the money and clout of the “education reform movement” and all this massive firepower combined with hiring every revolving door former federal employee they can possibly put on the payroll, one would think they would win every election- yet they don’t. Maybe the plans aren’t as popular with the public as ed reform claims they are?
They sure don’t lack money and prestige and political clout. They could easily purchase every school board in the country. They don’t just have “wealthy” backers- they have the extreme tippy-top of the 1% in the United States. Just about all of them.
Sisyphis, interesting how a story about a guy who liked rolling rocks down a hill gets retold incessantly until it just gets stupid. Pretty neat mountain to. If you ever seen it, it looks just like a pyramid. It’s in bosnia.
The ed reform echo chamber are moving aggressively into workforce training and labor and workforce policy:
“America doesn’t have a jobs problem. It has a pathways-to-jobs problem. Our economy is producing jobs — there were 7.4 million open jobs as of February in the midst of a pandemic — but our education system isn’t preparing people to fill those jobs.”
Led by, of course, Jeb Bush. I hope Biden has a couple of independent voices to push back, or the same 15 billionaires who own “ed reform” will be setting US work and labor policy. Aggressively anti-union, anti-tax and low wage. Some of their plans include people who make 35k a year entering into 5 year payment plans for workforce training. The plans take the entire cost of training employees and shifts it from employers to the employees themselves.
It would be a shame if the echo chamber dominated workforce and labor policy like they dominate education policy. It’s the same people and the same “market based” ideological approach. It’s mindblowing to me. They looked at the massive income inequality in this country and said “let’s put Bezos and Gates in charge of workplace and labor!” It goes beyond “clueless” to a kind of collective insanity.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/04/08/perspectives/jeb-bush-american-worker-training/index.html
Congress has already allocated hundreds of millions of dollars for career and technical education. If we want the same ed reformers who have been running US K-12 education for the last 20 years to bring the same exact set of “solutions” to that- literally exactly the same individuals- we’ll allow it.
Make sure Biden hears from someone outside the echo chamber, or US labor and workforce policy is going to be designed by the Walton heirs.
It’ll all be privatized, anti-union and race to the bottom on wages. They may succeed in actually eradicating private sector unions if they’re given workforce training and labor issues under the guise of “career and technical education” and you can forget about regulating workplaces on wages and safety- they’re anti-regulatory.
The Biden administration appointed Marty Walsh as the secretary of labor. He is a former mayor of Boston and someone with neoliberal tendencies. During his time in Boston he represented the the interests of developers in his city, not the workers.https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/03/05/as-labor-secretary-will-marty-walsh-represent-all-workers/
The wealthy billionaires behind the charter lobby have no intention of improving public education. They intend to destroy a public asset and transfer all those public dollars into private pockets. They do so by stacking the deck against public education. Denver is the perfect example of this MO. From this post we can see the sheer number of stink tanks and foundations that are leading the assault, it is truly a David and Goliath scenario. These groups hire mostly business types that develop strategies to undermine public schools by flooding school board elections with cash or buying complicit politicians through campaign donations. These profiteers have so much money, they can continuously work to derail elections and seize control of education policies. Privatization is a policy choice. Before there was money to be made in education. these billionaires were not involved in public education at all. Now that they see an inroad to the public money, they are actively pursuing the destruction of democratic public education.
Yesterday I received a letter back from Sherrod Brown (actually his ed staffer, having written many of these myself) in response to my request to support the ending of standardized testing. It’s incredible gobbledygook:
Thank you for getting in touch with me about the impact of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic on standardized testing requirements.
Accurate, reliable, and timely testing can be a valuable tool for both educators and policymakers. However, some parents, students, and teachers have expressed concerns over the burden standardized testing can place on our nation’s schools, especially as schools and communities continue to recover from the pandemic. At the same time, many civil rights and disability rights organizations have highlighted the importance of collecting information on how students are performing in order to better understand the impact the pandemic has had on student outcomes and to help direct resources to students, schools, and districts that need them the most.
When the pandemic first disrupted education across the country, the Department of Education issued a blanket waiver from federal testing requirements for the 2019-2020 school year. In February 2021, the Department of Education announced that it would not be issuing a blanket waiver, meaning states will need to administer standardized achievement exams in 2021. However, states were granted additional flexibilities and were given the ability to modify the format of their exams or delay the exams. Further, states can apply for waivers from key accountability requirements around federal standardized testing. This announcement poses challenges for educators and schools who must safely administer tests to millions of students after a year of disrupted learning. We must provide schools with the the necessary resources to ensure they can conduct examinations safely and efficiently.
I have been calling for a more efficient approach to testing for years, even before the pandemic. I have cosponsored the Support Making Assessments Reliable and Timely (SMART) Act, which would help states ensure local and statewide assessments are aligned to college and career ready standards as well as reliable and timely. The SMART Act would also help them eliminate duplicative and outdated tests and provide states funds to quicken the delivery of assessment data to teachers and parents to better inform instruction. Key provisions of the SMART Act were included in the December 2015 Every Student Succeeds Act, which reauthorized the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.
Accountability is important and schools ought to be able to show that their students are learning, but a balance must be reached that promotes academic achievement without undermining the creative aspects of quality education or overburdening students. It is also essential that student progress, school improvements, and teacher quality and effectiveness are measured with fairness and flexibility, so that resources are directed where they are needed most.
Thank you for sharing your thoughts with me.
My response:
The response written by your staffer to my request to oppose standardized testing in elementary and secondary schools is extremely disappointing and reveals an ignorance of the issue as is exposed in the first sentence: “Accurate, reliable, and timely testing can be a valuable tool for both educators and policymakers.” The notion that standardized tests can be “accurate, reliable, and timely” has been proven in study after reputable study (I’ll be happy to share some with you should you actually be interested) to be inaccurate, unreliable and not anything close to worth the time and resources they waste. Educators do not need standardized tests to inform them how their students are learning. They need to be treated like professionals, given autonomy to teach, and supported by administrators, parents, and policymakers to be allowed to do their jobs. Colleges and universities throughout the nation are increasingly discarding standardized tests as a gauge for admission. Standardized testing is a nefarious tactic of private interests who seek to make our schools profit centers. It is disheartening that a senator I once supported and respected falls victim to this spurious equivocation.
As long as cut scores are subjective and there are dire consequences from the results including retaining students, firing and rating teachers and closing public schools, the test results are being misused. Students should opt-out!
As a native Ohioan I used to call Sherrod Brown my Senator, since Colorado’s long time DINO senator is the reason “education reform” is so well established here. But he has made several decisions of late, including repeatedly supporting non-progressive candidates, that have caused me to pull back my support. His education stance is another reason to question his commitment to the people.
Reblogged this on Kaplan for Kids.
Jeanne, once again you have nailed it!
Deform is like pumping raw sewage to the top of a hill, with the school down below.
It’s a Mobius sewage loop
And the billionaires like Gates and Broad are the prime pumpers.
essentially explained: “Voting to approve new Innovation Zones, the hybrid portfolio model that supposedly gives schools more independence while, unlike charters, is still under the control of the school board. These Innovation Zones do, however, have their own administrative staff as well as their own boards and have ushered in their own cottage industry. Portfolio Model.” KEY INFORMATION.
You got it. Such an important point that most people, including me, have not given enough attention. As more schools come into the ZONEs and as more charters come on board, the fewer schools are under the Board’s purview. Could that be the goal? No real public schools? Just askin’