Archives for category: Broad Foundation
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Chris Christie’s Plan to Privatize NJ’s Low-Performing Schools

By dianeravitch
August 2, 2012 //
21

The Education Law Center, an independent organization that advocates for the children of New Jersey,  obtained a copy of a proposal that the Chris Christie administration made to the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation in Los Angeles.

The plan calls for aggressive state intervention in the state’s lowest performing schools. Acting Commissioner Chris Cerf wants to set up an “achievement district” for the low-performing schools. These schools would likely be closed and handed over to private managers as charter schools. The state plan calls for eliminating collective bargaining in these schools.

The amount requested was $7.6 million, of which the Broad Foundation has thus far supplied $1.6 million.

This should not be a difficult sell for Cerf. He is a “graduate” of the Broad Foundation’s unaccredited Superintendent’s Academy. And the chairman of the board of the foundation is his former boss, Joel Klein.

It’s somewhat strange that people like Cerf (and Arne Duncan, for that matter) think that a school gets “reformed” or “turned around” by firing the staff, closing the school, and handing it off to a charter operator. Cerf is a smart enough guy, and he surely knows that charters on average don’t produce better results than the public schools they replace unless they push out the low-performing kids.

One of the news stories says that Cerf wants to use New Orleans “recovery school district” as a model for New Jersey, but I wonder if he knows that 79% of the charters in New Orleans were graded either D or F by the state, and that New Orleans ranked 69th of 70 districts in the entire state.

How long can this shell game go on?

I understand that the people in the Abbott districts (the poorest cities where the lowest-performing schools are) may be accustomed to getting pushed around by the state, but how will the people of New Jersey feel about Christie and Cerf bringing in a raft of charter school operators to privatize what used to be their public schools?

Categories Accountability, Broad Foundation, Cerf, Chris, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Klein, Joel, New Jersey, New Orleans

UTLA Lawyer: The Scoop

By dianeravitch
July 27, 2012 //
8

I have a copy of the judge’s writ and will try to post it (it is in a pdf file and I don’t know how to copy that).

Background: UTLA has resisted the imposition of value-added-assessments to evaluate teachers, knowing that research shows these measures to be highly unstable and inaccurate. UTLA was burned two years ago when the Los Angeles Times created its own rating system and used test scores to publish its ratings of thousands of teachers.

Subsequently a California group called EdVoice, funded by billionaire foundations (Broad and Walton), discovered a 40-year-old law called the Stull Act, which says that pupil performance should factor into the evaluations of teachers and administrators. EdVoice filed suit on behalf of anonymous parents to demand that the LAUSD school board start using test scores to evaluate teachers.

An interesting thing about the billionaire foundations: They want charters (and in Walton’s case, vouchers). They want teachers to be evaluated by test scores. But typically, when the law is written (as in Louisiana), teachers in charter schools are exempt from evaluation by test scores. What does that mean?

One critic wrote me to say that this is “Deasy v. Deasy,” since LA superintendent Deasey is known to support such measures. I am willing to give John Deasey the benefit of the doubt, as he has a chance to show that he stands against junk science (VAM).

And the law says both teachers and administrators so presumably the leadership of the district will be evaluated by test scores as the decision moves forward.

Meanwhile, here is the UTLA lawyer’s summary of the decision:

PLEASE DON’T BELIEVE EVERYTHING YOU READ IN THE TIMES OR DAILY NEWS. THE ONLY ITEM BEFORE THE JUDGE YESTERDAY WAS THE TIME FRAME WITHIN WHICH THE DISTRICT MUST COMPLY WITH THE DECISION REGARDING THE REQUIREMENTS OF THE STULL ACT. THE PLAINTIFFS WERE TRYING TO IMPOSE AN EARLY SEPTEMBER DEADLINE, WHICH WAS REJECTED BY UTLA, AND THE COURT. THE ONLY OUTCOME FROM YESTERDAY IS THAT THE DISTRICT HAS UNTIL DECEMBER 4 TO RETURN TO COURT TO SHOW COMPLIANCE, WHICH ALLOWS TIME FOR MEANINGFUL, GOOD FAITH BARGAINING. (IF THERE IS NOT MEANINGFUL, GOOD FAITH BARGAINING BY THE DISTRICT, UTLA CAN SEEK APPROPRIATE RELIEF FROM PERB.)

 

Jesus E. Quiñonez

Holguin, Garfield, Martinez & Quiñonez, APLC

 
Categories Accountability, Broad Foundation, Los Angeles, Teacher Evaluations, Walton Foundation

Does the Public Have a Right to Know about Broad Academy?

By dianeravitch
July 27, 2012 //
29

We have visited the travails of the Huntsville, Alabama, schools before.

This is where a Broad-trained superintendent decided that recalcitrant kids should be sent off to live in a teepee until they learned to behave.

Then we learned that he bought 22,000 laptops for the district.

And this district laid off 150 experienced teachers to save money, but has given a contract to Teach for America to bring in rookie teachers.

Now we hear from a parent about life for his child in the Huntsville schools, where change is a fact of life. .

A Broad-trained superintendent in North Carolina left Michelle Rhee’s team and was hired by a Tea Party majority of the local school board in Wake County, North Carolina that wanted to eliminate the district’s successful desegregation policy, even if it meant resegregation of the schools. That board  was ousted last fall. The superintendent has stayed on, and the choice plan now in effect seems likely to undo years of work to avoid resegregation. The schools of Wake County were lauded (before the Tea Party takeover) as a model of desegregation by Gerald Grant in his excellent book, Hope and Despair in the American City: Why There Are No Bad Schools in Raleigh.

Chris Cerf in New Jersey was trained by Broad. So was Deborah Gist in Rhode Island, John White in Louisiana, J.C. Brizard in Chicago, and John Covington in Michigan. when Philadelphia picked a new superintendent recently, the two finalists were both Broadies. And there are many more. Read about them here.

Now that the Broad Foundation “trains” so many new superintendents, doesn’t the public have  a right to know what the Broad Academy is teaching its students?

The Broad Superintendents Academy is not certified, has no state approvals, is not subject to any outside monitoring, yet it “trains” people who then take leadership roles in urban districts and in state education departments. Many were never educators.

What were they taught? What principles and values were inculcated? On what research are their lessons based? How valid is the research to which they are exposed?

Inquiring minds want to know.

If the public has a right to information about teacher performance, doesn’t the public have a right to know who is training public school superintendents and what they are taught and how valid is the information and research they are given and whether they were exposed to different points of view?

By the way, the Broad Foundation just added new members to its board of directors. Here is the new lineup:

Officers:

The Honorable Joel I. Klein, Chair
CEO, Educational Division and Executive Vice President, Office of the Chairman, News Corporation
Former Chancellor, New York City Department of Education

Barry Munitz, Vice Chair
Trustee Professor, California State University, Los Angeles

Dan Katzir, Secretary/Treasurer
Senior Advisor, The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation

Members:

Richard Barth
Chief Executive Officer, KIPP Foundation

Becca Bracy Knight
Executive Director, The Broad Center for the Management of School Systems

Jean-Claude Brizard
Chief Executive Officer, Chicago Public Schools

Harold Ford Jr.
Managing Director, Morgan Stanley
Former U.S. Congressman, Tennessee

Louis Gerstner, Jr.
Retired Chairman and CEO, IBM Corporation

Wendy Kopp
Chief Executive Officer and Founder, Teach For America

Paul Pastorek
Chief Administrative Officer, Chief Counsel and Corporate Secretary, EADS North America
Former Superintendent of Education, State of Louisiana

Michelle Rhee
Founder and CEO, StudentsFirst
Former Chancellor, District of Columbia Public Schools

Margaret Spellings
President and Chief Executive Officer, Margaret Spellings and Company
Former U.S. Secretary of Education

Andrew L. Stern
Former President, Service Employees International Union
Ronald O. Perelman Senior Fellow, Richard Paul Richman Center for Business, Law and Public Policy, Columbia University

Lawrence H. Summers
Charles W. Eliot University Professor, Harvard University
President Emeritus, Harvard University

Kenneth Zeff
Chief Operating Officer, Green Dot Public Schools

Mortimer Zuckerman
Chairman and Editor-in-Chief, U.S. News & World Report
Publisher, New York Daily News

Categories Broad Foundation, Education Reform, Segregation , Racial Isolation and Integration, Teach for America TFA, Technology, Computers

Can TFA Save Itself from the Impending Disaster?

By dianeravitch
July 10, 2012 //
24

Gary Rubinstein told me a year or so ago that the corporate reform movement was living on borrowed time.

He believes that its ideas are so destructive and ill-conceived that it is certain to implode as failure after failure drags it down and as the public realizes that its public schools are being ruined.

In this post, he tries to figure out how Teach for America might salvage its reputation as the ship goes down. He explores his own hope that the original idea of TFA—recruiting top college graduates to teach–might survive.

He suggests that there are two different TFA legacies: One is the privatization/testing group (Rhee, John White, etc.), and the other consists of realists who have joined the education profession or found other ways to be constructive. He looks to the latter group as a saving remnant when the great ship Corporate Reform founders, as it inevitably must.

I find it hard to share Gary’s sunny optimism. I agree with him that corporate reform is a disaster and that it will collapse and die, weighted down by its failures and its inability to achieve its goals. But TFA has benefited so handsomely from the “reforms” and has produced so many of the leaders, that it is hard to see how the one good idea that launched TFA gets disassociated.

But I would like to believe. Is Gary right? Will he be the one who helped save TFA?

Categories Broad Foundation, Corporate Reformers, Teach for America TFA

About Those Superintendents on Broad Board

By dianeravitch
July 8, 2012 //
15

At the suggestion of a reader, I posted a list of the board of directors of a Broad Center for the Management of School Systems, dating from 2009. It included several school superintendents.

Readers have commented on the track record of the superintendents on that board.

Let’s see:

Joel Klein: Resigned in 2010, after NY State Education Department revealed  statewide score inflation and New York City’s celebrated test scores collapsed

Michelle Rhee: Resigned in 2010 after D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty defeated, largely because of her divisive reputation

Arlene Ackerman: Resigned in 2011 in Philadelphia after tempestuous reign

Maria Goodloe-Johnson: Fired in 2010 in Seattle

Arne Duncan: His plan called Renaissance 2010 failed to lift Chicago public schools, now U.S. Secretary of Education

Margaret Spellings: Not a superintendent, but architect of disastrous NCLB

And to think that this is the organization that is training superintendents to “reform” urban education!

Categories Broad Foundation, Chicago, Duncan, Arne, Education Reform, Klein, Joel, NYC, Philadelphia, Rhee, Michelle

Where Power Resides

By dianeravitch
July 7, 2012 //
10

A reader sent this list of the board of directors of the Broad Center for the Management of School Systems for 2009.

The center is part of the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, which runs a training program for urban school superintendents.

Some (many?) Broad-trained superintendents have been involved in controversy, due to their non-collaborative management style.

Joel Klein, Chair, Chancellor New York City Department of Education
Barry Munitz, Vice Chair, Trustee Professor California State University, Los Angeles
Arlene Ackerman, Superintendent of Philadelphia Public Schools
Richard Barth (Chief Executive Officer KIPP Foundation)
Henry Cisneros, Chairman of City View America, former U.S. Secretary of HUD
Arne Duncan, U.S. Secretary of Education (on Board until Feb. 2009)
Louis Gerstner, Jr., Retired Chairman and CEO, IBM Corporation
Maria Goodloe-Johnson, Superintendent Seattle Public Schools
Dan Katzir, Managing Director of the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation
Wendy Kopp (CEO and Founder of Teach for America)
Margaret Spellings, President and CEO of Margaret Spellings and Company, former U.S. Secretary of DOE
Melissa Megliola Zaikos, Autonomous Management and Performance Schools Program Officer, Chicago Public Schools
Michelle Rhee, Chancellor District of Columbia Schools
Lawrence Summers, Director National Economic Council
Mortimer Zuckerman, Chairman and Editor-in-Chief, U.S. News & World Report; Publisher of the New York Daily News
Categories Broad Foundation, Corporate Reformers, Education Reform, Klein, Joel, Rhee, Michelle

The Reformers’ “Fight Club”

By dianeravitch
June 29, 2012 //
25

Back when I was on the right side of the political fence, I was on the editorial board at Education Next. It is supported by the Hoover Institution and the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, both conservative think tanks with which I was affiliated. The journal, which is based at Harvard and edited mainly by Paul Peterson, was created to counter what was seen as the liberal bias of the mainstream education media.

Education Next is a well-edited journal (I used to write a monthly book review there), but it does have a strong bias in favor of charter schools, vouchers, and testing. It is the journal of the corporate reform movement.

The current issue of Education Next has a fascinating article about the “reformers’ fight club.” I have been writing and speaking about the interconnections among these organizations (and there are many more), and it is good to see confirmation of what I have been saying.

For some reason, these incredibly rich and powerful organizations like to portray themselves as underdogs in contrast to the teachers’ unions.

So, get this picture: On one side are the 3.2 million teachers who belong to the NEA and the AFT. On the other side are the Gates Foundation ($60 billion), the Broad Foundation (billions), the Walton Foundation (billions, and spent $159 million this past year alone on education grants), the Dell Foundation, big corporations, Democrats for Education Reform (Wall Street hedge fund managers who can pump millions into political campaigns at will), and 50CAN (more hedge fund managers). And there are supposedly “liberal” advocacy groups like Education Trust and Ed Sector.

Gosh, that is surely an unequal lineup. No wonder the “fight club” feels like underdogs. Those teachers’ unions are just so doggone powerful and rich. Why, they have the big foundations and Wall Street trembling. Who knew that teachers had so much power?

Diane

Categories Broad Foundation, Charter Schools, ConnCAN, Corporate Reformers, Democrats for Education Reform, Education Reform, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ), Privatization, Race to the Top, Stand for Children

Was I Mean to Eli Broad?

By dianeravitch
June 4, 2012 //
15

This morning my former colleague Mike Petrilli at the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute wrote a paean of praise in honor of billionaire Eli Broad. He began it by saying:

It wouldn’t be super-hard to poke fun at Eli Broad. (Diane Ravitch did a mean-spirited version of that when she called him and his peers “The Billionaire Boys Club.”) Here’s a man who made his fortune  building tract housing in the ‘burbs,  who micromanages grants down to the penny, a man who names more than a few things after himself (the Broad Prize, the Broad Fellows, and his latest museum project, simply The Broad). He’s the 1 percent of the 1 percent of the 1 percent, and not ashamed of it, either.

I was surprised to hear Mike say that it was “mean-spirited” of me to refer to him and Bill Gates and the Walton Family Foundation as members of “the Billionaire Boys’ Club.” They are billionaires and they are guys. So I wrote Mike and asked him if I had said anything that was inaccurate, and he said, no, nothing inaccurate, just mean-spirited.
I admit I didn’t realize that people as powerful as Eli Broad (“the 1 percent of the 1 percent of the 1 percent”) were so sensitive to criticism. If I offended him, I am truly sorry. I don’t aim to offend.
But I hope that he will give some thought to how his actions affect the lives of other people, people he will never meet. Certainly he is not sensitive to the pain that he causes parents and communities when he sends out graduates of his Broad Superintendents’ Academy to close down their neighborhood schools. No matter how much they cry, he doesn’t hear them.
And he doesn’t give a hoot when parents and educators complain that the people he trains have an unpleasant habit of taking control of the state or district political machinery and short-circuiting democratic control of public education. For a chilling reminder of the Broad methods, read this account of a letter from a former employee of the New Jersey Department of Education.
I wouldn’t want Eli Broad to think I was mean-spirited in describing him and his foundation. I didn’t intend to be mean at his expense. In turn, I wish he would be sensitive to the feelings of parents and educators who love their local public school and don’t want anyone to turn it into a charter run by outsiders. I know it is hard for extremely wealthy people (“the 1 percent of the 1 percent of the 1 percent”) to put themselves in the shoes of the “little people,” the people who are pulling down $40,000 or $50,000 or even $70,000 a year. It’s hard for a triple 1-percenter to imagine why such people care so much about their school or their job or their career or having a decent pension for their old age. But, Mr. Broad, if you should read this, please remember: They have feelings too.
Diane
Categories Broad Foundation, Corporate Reformers, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Ravitch, Diane, Walton Foundation

The Philadelphia Story

By dianeravitch
May 26, 2012 //
2

These days, U.S. education is beginning to look like a slow-motion train wreck. In some places, it is fast motion, not slow motion.

One of the places where the train seems to be speeding rapidly towards a wreck is Philadelphia. The wreck will

There, the schools have been under state control for a decade, and the state legislature has underfunded the public schools to the extent possible, even though (or because) the school system has a large proportion of poor black and Hispanic students.

The city leaders, in their wisdom (or lack thereof), brought in one of those ubiquitous management consulting firms, Boston Consulting Group, to devise a “turnaround” plan for the public schools. Of course, this is treating public schools as if they were just any old business, selling auto parts or paper products, which they are not. Public education is not a product; it is not even a service. It is an essential part of our social fabric, a democratic institution that must be preserved and strengthened.

Business consultants don’t understand this. They look at public schools, and they don’t see teachers and children. They see an investment opportunity. They see a cash flow. They make calculations about return on investment. They see a deficit, and they think bankruptcy, reorganization, sell off the healthy parts, and kill the weak ones.

When you bring in business consultants, you can count on them to recommend that the “business” should be downsized and right-sized. It should be privatized. That’s the way they think. When you have a superintendent who was trained by the Broad Superintendents’ Academy, you can expect to get the same perspective.

The irony in Philadelphia is that the district tried privatization on a large scale a decade ago and it failed. The district has a sizable number of charters, a number of which are under investigation for corruption and financial malfeasance.

I guess the moral of the story is: If at first you fail, do the same thing over and over and over until public education has been completely eliminated.

I just came across this excellent summary of privatization in Philadelphia, which contains excellent links to sources: http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/05/2012521114853681761.html

The article says: “As in other cities, public money was extensively abused in real estate profiteering schemes, as charter school operators used schools as tenants, paying money to themselves to rent their own property. In one particularly classy instance, the charter operator was running a private parking lot on school property. Exorbitant salaries were common for the charter school operators, and some implausibly held fully salaried jobs in multiple schools, billing the city for more than 365 days in a year.”

This is what Philadelphia’s leaders want more of.

And for anyone wanting another story about the dismantling of public education in Philadelphia:

http://www.citypaper.net/cover_story/2012-05-03-whos-killing-philly-public-schools.html?viewAll=y

I cited this story before. It deserves to be cited whenever the Philadelphia situation is up for discussion.

Diane

Categories Boston Consulting Group, Broad Foundation, Philadelphia

What is NCTQ?

By dianeravitch
May 23, 2012 //
16

Several  months ago, U.S. News & World Report announced that it planned to rank the nation’s schools of education and that it would do so with the assistance of the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ).

Since then, many institutions announced that they would not collaborate. Some felt that they had already been evaluated by other accrediting institutions like NCATE or TEAC; others objected to NCTQ’s methodology. As the debate raged, NCTQ told the dissenters that they would be rated whether they agreed or not, and if they didn’t cooperate, they would get a zero. The latest information that I have seen is that the ratings will appear this fall.

To its credit, NCTQ posted on its website the letters of the college presidents and deans who refused to be rated by NCTQ. They make for interesting reading, as it is always surprising (at least to me) to see the leaders of big institutions take a stand on issues.

U.S. News defended the project, saying that it had been endorsed by leading educators. The specific endorsement to which it referred came from Chiefs for Change, the conservative state superintendents associated with former Governor Jeb Bush. This article, by the way, has good links to NCTQ’s website, describing the project and its methods. Two of the conservative Chiefs for Change are on NCTQ’s technical advisory panel.

Just this week, NCTQ released a new report about how teachers’ colleges prepare students for assessment responsibilities. The theme of this report is that “data-driven instruction” is the key to success in education. The best districts are those that are “obsessive about using data to drive instruction.” The Broad Prize is taken as the acme of academic excellence in urban education because it focuses on data, data, data. The report acknowledges that the data it prizes in this report is “data derived from student assessments–ranging from classwork practice to state tests–to improve instruction.”

Data-driven decision making is now a national priority, it says, thanks to U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, who required states “to improve their data systems and create high-quality assessments” if they wanted a crack at his $5 billion Race to the Top.

Unfortunately despite a massive investment in data collection by states and the federal government, the report says, teachers don’t value data enough. Reference is made to the report sponsored by Gates and Scholastic, which found that most teachers do not value the state tests. I wrote about that report here. How in the world can our nation drive instruction with data if the teachers hold data in such low regard?

The balance of the report reviews teacher training institutions by reviewing their course syllabi. The goal is to judge whether the institutions are preparing future teachers to be obsessed with data.

Now, to be candid, I am fed up with our nation’s obsession with data-driven instruction, so I don’t share the premises of the report. The authors of this report have more respect for standardized tests than I do. I fear that they are pushing data-worship and data-mania of a sort that will cause teaching to the test, narrowing of the curriculum, and other negative behaviors (like cheating). I don’t think any of this will lead to the improvement of education. It might promote higher test scores, but it will undermine genuine education. By genuine education, I refer to a love of learning, a readiness to immerse oneself in study of a subject, an engagement with ideas, a willingness to ask questions and to take risks. I don’t know how to assess the qualities I value, but I feel certain that there is no standardized, data-driven instruction that will produce what I respect.

And then there is the question that is the title of this blog: What is NCTQ?

NCTQ was created by the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation in 2000. I was on the board of TBF at the time. Conservatives, and I was one, did not like teacher training institutions. We thought they were too touchy-feely, too concerned about self-esteem and social justice and not concerned enough with basic skills and academics. In 1997, we had commissioned a Public Agenda study called “Different Drummers”; this study chided professors of education because they didn’t care much about discipline and safety and were more concerned with how children learn rather than what they learned. TBF established NCTQ as a new entity to promote alternative certification and to break the power of the hated ed schools.

For a time, it was not clear how this fledgling organization would make waves or if it would survive. But in late 2001, Secretary of Education Rod Paige gave NCTQ a grant of $5 million to start a national teacher certification program called the American Board for Certification of Teacher Excellence (see p. 16 of the link). ABCTE has since become an online teacher preparation program, where someone can become a teacher for $1995.00.

Today, NCTQ is the partner of U.S. News & World Report and will rank the nation’s schools of education. It received funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to review teacher quality in Los Angeles. It is now often cited as the nation’s leading authority on teacher quality issues. Its report has a star-studded technical advisory committee of corporate reform leaders like Joel Klein and Michelle Rhee.

And I was there at the creation.

An hour after this blog was published, a reader told me that NCTQ was cited as one of the organizations that received funding from the Bush administration to get positive media attention for NCLB. I checked his sources, which took me to a 2005 report of the Inspector General of the U.S. Department of Education (a link in this article leads to the Inspector General report), and he was right. This practice was suspended because the U.S. Department of Education is not allowed to expend funds for propaganda, and the grantees are required to make full disclosure of their funding. At the time, the media focused on payments to commentator Armstrong Williams. According to the investigation, NCTQ and another organization received a grant of $677,318 to promote NCLB. The product of this grant was three op-eds written by Kate Walsh, the head of NCTQ; the funding of these articles by the Department of Education was not disclosed.

Diane

Categories Broad Foundation, Chiefs for Change, Duncan, Arne, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Klein, Joel, National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ), Rhee, Michelle
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