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Tom Ultican Reports on the Highlights of the #NPE2022 Conference in Philly

By dianeravitch
May 13, 2022 //
1

Tom Ultican, retired teacher of advanced mathematics and physics in California, is now a significant chronicler of the Destroy Public Education movement. He attended the recent national conference of the Network for Public Education in Philadelphia and recapitulates the excitement we shared at being in person after a 2-year hiatus.

After every conference, attendees say, “This was the best one yet.” They enjoy meeting people who are doing the same work to fight privatization of their public schools. By the end of the conference, attendees say they feel energized, hopeful, and happy to know that they are not alone.

I urge you to read Tom’s post. You will get a sense of the embarrassment of riches available to attendees.

I should add that the Nebraska Save Our Schools group shared the Phyllis Bush Award for Grassroots Activism. Nebraska is one of the few states that has managed to protect its public schools and keep out both charters and vouchers, despite being a Red State.

The Pastors for Texas Children, a co-winner of the award, has repeatedly blocked vouchers in the Texas Legislature and has consistently fought for funding for public schools. PTC has opened chapters in other Red states, where they mobilize clergy to support public schools.

A high point for me was interviewing “Little Stevie” Van Zandt, a legendary rock star and actor (“The Sopranos”), who is dedicated to getting the arts into schools, not as an extra, but across the curriculum. we had a wonderful conversation. He has funded lesson plans based on rock and roll, available free at his website TeachRock.

All of the general sessions were taped. I will post them when they become available.

Categories Charter Schools, Civil Rights, Closing schools, Community Schools, Corporate Reformers, Corruption, Courage, Creativity, Dark Money, Democracy, Detroit, Disruption, Education Industry, Education Reform, Equity, For-Profit, Hope, Innovation, Network for Public Education, Networkfor Public Education Action Fund, Nevada, Philadelphia, Privatization, Racism, Resistance, Standardized Testing, Supporting public schools, Teachers

Charter Chain Fights Audit Demanded by Private Funder

By dianeravitch
July 11, 2021 //
16

I remember the original promise of charter schools when the idea was first floated in the late 1980s. They would cost less than district schools because of no bureaucracy. They would be more accountable than district schools because they would lose their charter if they didn’t meet their academic goals. We now know that none of this is true. Charter leaders demand the same or more funding than their public counterparts. Although many charters close every year, many low-performing charters are not closed. And now we find that there is no financial accountability, that religious schools may become charters, that white-flight academies may become charters, and that some charter leaders pay themselves far more than district superintendents.

The latest example of charter refusal to be accountable is the Cornerstone charter chain in Detroit, where a major donor is battling in court to see a financial audit. The donor is especially interested in a jump in the charter leader’s salary from $500,000 to more than $800,000 in a two-year period, following the death of the original donor.

The story begins

A fissure has erupted between Clark Durant, the founder of Detroit’s Cornerstone charter schools, and the executors of the trust and estate of the schools’ largest funder: the late Bill Pulte Sr.

Last week Mark Pulte, the son of Pulte Sr. and a co-trustee of the William J. Pulte Trust, submitted a complaint to the office of Attorney General Dana Nessel. In it he called for an investigation into Durant as, well as the New Common School Foundation (NCSF), a non-profit Durant created to raise funds for the Cornerstone schools, a group of private, religious schools he opened in the 1990s, and subsequently transitioned into public-charter schools.

“I have grown increasingly concerned that NCSF, which is ostensibly a Michigan non-profit public charity whose mission is to educate disadvantaged students, is actually operating as a for-profit entity with the primary purpose of financially benefiting Mr. Durant,” Pulte, whose father has donated tens of millions of dollars to the foundation over the last two decades, wrote in the Nov. 30 complaint obtained by 7 Action News.

Pulte’s complaint comes in the midst of an already tense legal battle between the trust and the foundation.

In March, following a 7 Action News investigation into ethical questions surrounding rental contracts between Cornerstone’s public charter school boards (which Durant advises as CEO of the Cornerstone Education Group) and the NCSF (which acts as landlord, as well as a charity fundraising for the schools), the trust requested an audit from the foundation.

“The trustees remain confounded why your client refuses their reasonable request for an audit regarding the funds they have donated to the New Common School Foundation,” a trustee attorney wrote in a Mar. 12 email to the NCSF’s chairman Jeffery Neilson.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Detroit

Garrison Keillor: A Grim Anniversary in Detroit

By dianeravitch
July 23, 2020 //
9

This entry appeared today in Garrison Keillor’s “The Writers’ Almanac.”

It was on this night in 1967 that an uprising began in Detroit. An all-white squadron of police officers decided to raid a bar in a black neighborhood where there was a party to welcome home two recent veterans of the Vietnam War. The police stormed the bar, rounded up and arrested 85 black men and began loading them into vans.

The riot that broke out raged for five days. Thousands of soldiers from the Michigan National Guard were called in, along with tanks. The National Guardsmen fired off more than 150,000 bullets over the course of the riot. Citizens were terrorized, beaten, and murdered, as depicted in the movie Detroit (2017), based on the recollections of witnesses to the Algiers Motel Incident.

Forty-three people were killed and whole blocks of the city went up in flames. After the riots, many of the white residents of the city moved to the suburbs in “white flight.” Detroit became one of the poorest cities in America.

Categories Detroit, Racism

Thomas Pedroni: Detroit School Board Votes to Reopen Schools Despite Concerns of Teachers and Parents

By dianeravitch
July 15, 2020 //
21
Last night the Detroit Board of Education, which opened for summer school Monday, voted to unanimously reopen school on the regular first day in August. This happened despite three hours of unified testimony by teachers, parents, and community organizers that the schools should not be reopened until minimum conditions are met. We held a state wide Press conference this morning calling on schools not to open until a set of health conditions have been met. Here is some remarkable testimony given by one teacher to the board last night. 

.https://www.facebook.com/30308059/posts/10107099891572474/?d=n

Here is our archived press conference from this morning:

https://www.facebook.com/38514087/posts/10104168872243786/?d=n

Here are the demands:

https://mailchi.mp/afbe6d675b55/press-release-on-school-reopenings-5033109?e=71d7c71fdb

Best, Tom

Thomas C. Pedroni

Associate Professor, Curriculum Studies
Wayne State University 
Categories Detroit, Health, Parents, Safety, Students, Teachers

Nancy Bailey: How Betsy DeVos Fostered Squalid Learning Conditions in Detroit

By dianeravitch
May 7, 2020 //
8

Nancy Bailey just keeps getting better and better as she points her pen and her blog at malfeasance in education.

In this post, she points to the recent landmark decision that recognized that the children of Detroit have a right to literacy, a right not previously acknowledged by any court (or overturned on appeal). The court quite correctly decided that young people cannot exercise their rights and responsibilities as citizens if they can’t read.

What is DeVos’s role in the Detroit debacle? She has spent large sums of money to promote the false idea that the way to improve education is to expand school choice. Detroit is her handiwork, and it proves the failure of school choice. What she purchased was widespread inequity and inadequacy.

Open the link to read the full article and see the links to other sources.

Bailey writes:

The Detroit landmark decision that children deserve to learn to read in school is a case that reflects decades of troubled education in Detroit. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and school privatization are not mentioned in this case. But school privatization initiatives have been failing children in the Motor City for years. DeVos is the current face of a long line of those peddling such reforms.

Harmful school reform initiatives go back to Gov. John Engler’s administration. Many school reformers, both Republican and Democrat, have their fingerprints on the crime scene. The DeVos family is from Michigan and has affected Detroit and school reform there for years.

The U.S. Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled in favor of Detroit students who claim they were denied their rights to a “basic minimum education.” Called the “Right to Read” lawsuit, Gary B. v. Whitmer exposes the decrepit conditions found in schools run by State leaders who failed to support Detroit’s students. The case was originally filed under former Gov. Rick Snyder’s administration.

It’s critical to recognize DeVos’s connection to the Detroit school failures. During this pandemic she is flagrantly redirecting public money to the same privatization agenda. It puts democratic public schools in jeopardy, like schools were put at risk in Detroit. Here’s a petition you can sign now to try and stop her.

School privatization cheerleaders have for years promoted the idea that choice will equalize education by giving parents choices. They’ve pushed for online charter schools and school turnarounds that get tough on teachers and students of color. Choice failed in Detroit.

Reading

Schools had no literacy programs.

The case describes what good reading instruction should consist of in school. Sometimes it appears to be delving into the Reading Wars, emphasizing the loss of explicit phonics.

The trouble is, one can’t get to a debate over how students learn to read, without overcoming the fact that students have untrained teachers and an atrocious learning environment.

It’s troubling to think the case might result in only professional development and a push for unproven programs, even online reading programs, that don’t address the need for creating quality schools, professional teachers, and more individualized attention for the children of Detroit.

School Buildings

Poor school conditions have been a part of Detroit’s schools for years. Students struggle to learn in slum-like conditions, no air-conditioning in the summer, freezing temperatures in the winter. Who can forget these pictures from 2016, the year the case was filed?

Vermin, mold, and contaminated drinking water plague the schools. Bullets, dead vermin, condoms, and sex toys have been found on the playground. Fire safety equipment and fire regulations are missing.

Betsy DeVos’s mantra is that education is about students and not buildings. She has done nothing to improve the condition of schools in Detroit or around the country.

Lacking Resources

Teaching resources were deficient. The case describes classrooms without enough textbooks, and old books that haven’t been updated in years.

The only school library mentioned had no librarian and was locked!

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Detroit, Education Industry, Failure, Funding, Inequity, Injustice, Privatization

A Statement by the Center for Educational Equity on the Landmark Detroit Decision

By dianeravitch
April 25, 2020 //
12

The Center for Educational Equity at Teachers College, Columbia University, issued this statement on the landmark decision in Michigan that students in Detroit have a fundamental right to education to prepare for citizenship.


In a landmark decision issued yesterday in the Gary B. v. Whitmer case, the U.S Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit held there is a “fundamental right to a basic minimum education” under the U.S. Constitution. The two-to-one decision of the three-judge panel defined the right in terms of “access to literacy.”

Students in very low performing schools in Detroit brought the case. They claim that—due to the absence of qualified teachers, crumbling facilities, and insufficient materials— the conditions in their schools are so bad students leave school virtually illiterate. As the decision states, “Plaintiffs sit in classrooms where not even the pretense of education takes place, in schools that are functionally incapable of delivering access to literacy.” Because of this, these students attend “schools in name only, characterized by slum-like conditions and lacking the most basic educational opportunities that children elsewhere in Michigan and throughout the nation take for granted.”

The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed a lower court ruling that had dismissed the case. The court held there is a “fundamental right to a basic minimum education” that provides access to literacy as a matter of “substantive due process” under the Fourteenth Amendment. The U.S. Supreme Court has held that a fundamental right for substantive due process must be “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition. Accordingly, the Sixth Circuit discussed in detail the history of education in the United States, especially at the time of the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment. The Court also relied on the precedent of the Supreme Court’s 2016 ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges that single-sex marriage was a fundamental right as a matter of substantive due process.

This is the first time a court has asserted a federal right to education. In 1973, in San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that education is not “a fundamental interest” entitled to strict scrutiny analysis under the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment (although the Court emphasized in the same decision that “education is perhaps the most important function of state and local governments,” as it had previously held in Brown v. Board of Education). Even though the Texas system of educational finance provided the plaintiff students only half the per-capita funding that students in a neighboring, more affluent district received, the Supreme Court deemed this a “rational” state policy because it promoted local control of education.

In the nearly 50 years since Rodriguez, a number of cases have sought to distinguish and limit the scope of that ruling, but none has succeeded prior to this major pronouncement from the Sixth Circuit.

The Gary B. case has been remanded to the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District in Michigan for a trial and further proceedings. Governor Whitmer and the other defendants have not yet indicated whether they intend to appeal the Sixth Circuit’s ruling.

For procedural reasons, the Sixth Circuit did not decide the claims plaintiffs had raised under the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. That issue may be decided by the U.S. District Court for Rhode Island where a decision is currently pending in Cook v. Raimondo, another case seeking to establish a right to education under the U.S. Constitution. The main argument asserted by the Cook plaintiffs is that, in the Rodriguez decision, the Supreme Court left open the question of whether there is a right to the “quantum of education” students need to exercise “meaningfully” important constitutional rights like the right to vote, to serve on a jury, to exercise free speech, and to participate in political activities.

Michael A. Rebell, executive director of the Center for Educational Equity at Teachers College and lead attorney for the plaintiffs in Cook v. Raimondo, said:

We applaud the outcome of the Gary B. case, which may bring important relief to students in Detroit. Nevertheless we are concerned about the narrow scope of the right to education as defined by the Sixth Circuit opinion. We are
hopeful that Judge Smith in Rhode Island will declare that under the equal protection clause, or other constitutional provisions, students have a fundamental right to a more robust and and meaningful education—one that provides the
knowledge, skills, experiences, values, and civic integration necessary to prepare them to function effectively as civic participants in a democratic society.

The Center for Educational Equity | centerforeducationalequity.org

Categories Accountability, Citizenship, Detroit, Education Reform, Equity, Michigan

Michigan: Federal Appeals Court Rules that Students in Detroit Have a Fundamental Right to Literacy

By dianeravitch
April 23, 2020 //
5

In a major decision affecting students in Detroit, a federal appeals court overruled a lower court decision and concluded that students have a fundamental right to literacy. The dissenting judge, appointed by Trump, ruled that there is no such right. The case began in 2016, when Rick Snyder was governor.

The Detroit News reported:

The Sixth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals ruled Thursday that Detroit students have a fundamental but limited right to basic minimum education and have standing to sue the state for alleged violations of that right.

In a 2-1 ruling, the panel warned that the right to education “is narrow in scope” to include access to skills deemed “essential for the basic exercise of other fundamental rights and liberties, most importantly participation in our political system.”

“This amounts to an education sufficient to provide access to a foundational level of literacy — the degree of comprehension needed for participation in our democracy,” according to the majority opinion.

But the appeals panel ruled the students failed to make adequate arguments about equal protection and compulsory attendance at schools that are “schools in name only.”

Detroit U.S. District Court Judge Stephen J. Murphy III originally dismissed the students’ claimof a fundamental right to a basic minimum education, which the divided panel reversed. He is a President George W. Bush appointee.

“Plaintiffs contend that access to literacy, as opposed to other educational achievements, is a gateway milestone, one that unlocks the basic exercise of other fundamental rights, including the possibility of political participation,” according to the majority opinion by Judges Eric Clay, an appointee of former President Bill Clinton, and Jane Stranch, an appointee of former President Barack Obama.

Judge Eric Murphy, an appointee of President Donald Trump, wrote the dissent.

“While the Supreme Court has repeatedly discussed this issue, it has never decided it, and the question of whether such a right exists remains open today,” Clay wrote in the majority opinion. “After employing the reasoning of these Supreme Court cases and applying the Court’s substantive due process framework, we recognize that the Constitution provides a fundamental right to a basic minimum education.”

“In short, without the literacy provided by a basic minimum education, it is impossible to participate in our democracy,” the opinion says.

‘Thrilling historic victory’

Mark Rosenbaum, a lawyer for the Detroit students, called the decision Thursday “a thrilling historic victory for the community of Detroit that has carried on the struggle for educational justice for decades….”

“It affirms in these troubled times why our judicial system exists,” Rosenbaum said in a statement. “Every Michigander who loves children should cheer this decision.”

Literacy and education are inherent to participation in the state’s political system and are viewed as the “great equalizer,” the two judges wrote.

“It may never be that each child born in this country has the same opportunity for success in life, without regard to the circumstances of her birth,” Clay wrote. “But even so, the Constitution cannot permit those circumstances to foreclose all opportunity and deny a child literacy without regard to her potential.”

See also, the account of the decision in the Detroit Free Press.

Categories Citizenship, Civil Rights, Detroit, Education Reform, Equity, Michigan

Detroit: A Cautionary Tale of a Promising Charter School That Was Doomed to Fail

By dianeravitch
February 15, 2020 //
4

This is an extraordinary story, which I hope you will read to the end. It was published by Chalkbeat.

A group of concerned leaders in Detroit, including some retired educators, decided to open a charter school.  They won the endorsement of the city’s leading philanthropies. They won a federal grant from the Charter Schools Program.

The school struggled from the beginning. It struggled initially to attract students, because it was competing with so many other charters for the same students. It took in students from a closing charter, who were far behind. It searched for an educational management company, which drew off a large share of its income.

It housed its students in a closed elementary school, where there was far more space than the charter could use.

There was no shortage of potential authorizers. The sponsors were turned down by one, then found another.

Efforts to regulate charter schools in Michigan have run into fierce political headwinds, in large part because of DeVos and her family, who have used their considerable fortune to support a free market education system that allows charter schools to open wherever they believe they’ll succeed.

DeVos and her allies have been so successful in blocking efforts to regulate charter schools in Michigan that when the founders of Delta Prep began looking for permission to open back in 2012, they had no shortage of options. They could pick from roughly eight colleges and school districts that were empowered to authorize charter schools, some of which would provide more oversight than others. When it finally opened in 2014, Delta Prep was one of more than a dozen schools that opened in Detroit and began competing for the same students.

The problems multiplied. Low enrollment. Discipline problems. A rotating cast of principals, year after year.

Delta officials had promised that “90 percent of students will attend every class, on time, every day.” But in the school’s third year, just 20 percent of students came to class with any regularity.

Officials said they would boost student achievement by borrowing from the playbook of a New York-based education nonprofit. Their goal: “85% of students will demonstrate competency in all core subjects via exit tests.”

But within three years, not a single Delta Prep 11th-grader was deemed proficient in math, compared with 13.2 percent in Detroit’s troubled main district. Just 10 percent of 11th-graders posted passing scores in SAT English, compared with 37 percent in the district.

Delta Prep had promised that “100% of graduates will be accepted to college.” But in 2016, the only year the state recorded graduate data for Delta Prep, just over half of the school’s graduates enrolled in college. Just six students — 10 percent of that first graduating class — went on to complete a year’s worth of college credits within a year of graduating.

If the data was concerning, the situation inside the school was even more dire. When Brandi North was hired as principal in 2017, the first thing she did was hire security. The sprawling school was built during an era when Detroit couldn’t find enough classroom space for all of its students, but now it sat mostly unused, and students tended to disappear into vacant classrooms. Teacher-student relations were antagonistic. North said her assistant principal’s hand was broken during an encounter with a student, and that she regularly contacted the police about student behavior.

The year before she arrived — and the year after the influx of students from recently closed schools — Delta Prep had slapped more than half of its students with out-of-school suspensions, resulting in nearly 1,000 missed days of school.

“In 15 years of education, it was the most stressful position I’ve ever had,” North said. “I worked in south central Los Angeles, and Delta was still my most stressful situation.”

North started at the school in March 2017, after the previous principal resigned and an interim principal decided not to take the job. She says she found tutors for students, brought consistency to a patchwork curriculum, even drove to students’ houses on test day to make sure they took Michigan’s standardized exam. But she left that June following disagreement with the management company that she declined to discuss.

She was not the only administrator unable to cut it at the school. Within a few years of its hopeful start, Delta Prep had become another Detroit school desperate to find the rare principal capable of quarterbacking a long-shot school turnaround. It had five principals in less than five years of operation…

In Detroit’s crowded education landscape, Delta Prep kept falling short of its 400-student target, creating a financial situation so bleak that students lacked textbooks and other basic supplies.

When officials from Ferris State came to check in on the school, they noted that only one-third of its budget was spent on instruction, while far too much went to the management company and other operating costs. Delta Prep’s reserve fund, set aside to protect the school against unforeseen problems, dipped to $217 in 2017-18.

Twenty-two days after the start of school in the fall of 2018, Delta Prep closed its doors, to the shock of students and parents, who suddenly had to find a new school.

In the business world, closings are not uncommon. In the charter world, school closings are not uncommon. Anyone who thinks it is easy to run and manage a school should read this story and think again.

Customers can find another place to shop when a store goes out of business. When a school closes, children, parents, teachers, and families are disrupted.

 

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Detroit, Education Industry, Education Reform, Failure, Funding, Privatization

Nancy Bailey: Students Should Sue Betsy DeVos and the Other “Reformers” Who Ruined or Closed Their Schools

By dianeravitch
December 21, 2019 //
26

Nancy Bailey explains here that if you are dissatisfied with your public school, blame the Disruption Machine, the ones who call themselves “reformers,” like Betsy DeVos.

They have run public schools into the ground for the decades.

They have imposed their malevolent ideas and policies on public schools, with no accountability for their mistakes.

She writes:

Frustrated by public schools? Look no further than the corporate education reformers and what they have done to public education.

Education Secretary DeVos and her corporate billionaire friends have been chipping away at the fabric of democratic public schools for over thirty years!

The problems we see in public schools today are largely a result of what they did to schools, the high-stakes testing and school closures, intentional defunding, ugly treatment of teachers, lack of support staff, segregated charter schools, vouchers that benefit the wealthy, Common Core State Standards, intrusive online data collection, and diminishing special education services.

Big business waged a battle on teachers and their schools years ago. The drive was to create a business model to profit from tax dollars. Now they want to blame teachers for their corporate-misguided blunders! It’s part of their plan to make schools so unpleasant, parents will have no choice but to leave….

I student taught in an elementary school in Detroit, in 1973. Schools were certainly not perfect, but my modest school did a good job.

The third-grade teachers were excellent reading teachers. They organized rotating small groups of students based on their skill needs decoding letters and words. There were no data walls. No child appeared to compare themselves unfavorably to other children.

Students were encouraged to read, did free reading, lots of writing, and had access to plenty of books. The school had a nice library with a librarian who often read beautiful and funny stories to the class. They spent time studying social studies, science, and art and music. Teachers worked closely with the PTA and reached out to parents.

There was no testing obsession. Students didn’t fear failing third grade. They were continually learning, and most liked school. There were twenty-two students in the class.

Teachers did their own assessment, and they discussed the results with each other at their grade level meetings. The school had a counselor and I believe a nurse stationed at the school. We worried about the students and addressed concerns about issues like why some showed up without mittens in the cold weather.

Students did class projects to help remember what they learned in their subjects. For science, we created a rocket out of a huge cardboard box. We painted it and spent time studying the solar system. Children took turns sitting in the rocket pretending they were astronauts.

This school had an excellent Learning Center where teachers could share materials to cut down on costs. They had a nice collection of resources for every subject.

My supervising teacher was kind, well-prepared, and tough. She expected daily written lesson plans which she reviewed with me before I taught. She was an excellent mentor!

Where’s that school today? I wish I could go back and visit, but it closed years ago, razed and turned into a housing development. It was shuttered like 225 other public schools in Detroit!

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Common Core, Corporate Reformers, Detroit, Education Industry, Failure, Fraud, Privatization, Testing

Eli Broad Pays Yale University $100 Million to Take Charge of His Controversial Broad Leadership Academy

By dianeravitch
December 6, 2019 //
72

Many school districts have had unfortunate experiences with “Broadies,” the graduates of Eli Broad’s management program for future school leaders. The Broad Leadership Academy has sent forth hundreds of would-be superintendents to impose Broad’s top-down management style, his faith in data, and his belief that the best way to reform a public school is to close it and replace it with a privately managed charter school. Broad is one of the major funders of charter schools in the nation. Although he graduated from the public schools of Detroit, he has zero interest in public schools other than as objects for privatization. In my 2010 book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education, I referred to the Broad Foundation, the Gates Foundation, and the Walton Foundation as the Billionaire Boys Club. Since then, I have discovered that the club has dozens of billionaire members, and a few (think Alice Walton) are Girls, not Boys. All, however, share an animus toward public schools and a passion for privatization of what belongs to the public.

The big news is that Eli Broad has given $100 million to Yale University to administer his efforts to train future leaders of schools. It is not clear where the faculty will come from, since the Broad training program is unaccredited and is led by Broad allies, not academicians or scholars.

Now the graduates will be accredited, but their degree won’t mean much unless the philosophy of the program  changes from its current emphasis on DPE (“Destroy Public Education”) to SPE (“Support Public Education”). That change is hard to imagine. If you want to see the fruits of Broad’s distorted thinking, look no farther than Detroit and Oakland, where Broad-trained leaders encouraged (or imposed in the case of Oakland) massive charter expansion, a goal shared with Betsy DeVos. Michigan’s Education Achievement Authority, whose leadership he selected, collapsed in failure.  Oakland continues to suffer from the disruptive actions of Broadie leaders. His efforts to hand half of the students in Los Angeles over to charter schools have thus far been foiled.

Read Mercedes Schneider’s account of the multiple failures associated with Eli Broad’s agenda. 

Eli Broad is aggressive in using his money and policy agenda to destabilize and disrupt public education.

Here is the press release from the Broad Foundation/Broad Center, with the usual puffery and zero admission of the failed policies (privatization, school closings, high-stakes testing, VAM) that Broad and the graduates of his program have inflicted on American schools over most of the past two decades.

 

The Broad Center Will Become Part of Yale University to Train Future Generations of Public School Leaders

$100 Million Donation from The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation will Fund The Broad Center at the Yale School of Management to Offer Tuition-Free Master’s Degree to Emerging Education Leaders and Advanced Management Training to Superintendents and Senior Leaders in Public School Systems

 

Los Angeles, CA – With a gift of $100 million to Yale University, The Broad Foundation today reaffirms its commitment to public K-12 education and makes possible the launch of a major new initiative of the Yale School of Management focused on strengthening leadership in public education. Building on transformative work by The Broad Center in Los Angeles, the initiative will ensure in perpetuity high-impact programs to advance excellence and equity in education.

 

The Broad Center at Yale SOM will develop research, teaching, and policy initiatives devoted to improving the effectiveness of top leaders in America’s public school systems. The ambitious initiative will leverage Yale SOM’s expertise in delivering rigorous management education to talented professionals in fields that have broad societal impact, while furthering and amplifying the previously independent Broad Center’s mission of ensuring high-quality leadership in public education.

 

“I’m very proud of what we’ve accomplished in the last 20 years and I can think of no better future for The Broad Center than Yale University,” said Eli Broad.

 

The gift is the largest ever received by the Yale School of Management and will enable the creation of a master’s degree program for emerging public education leaders and advanced leadership training for top school system executives—successors to The Broad Residency in Urban Education and The Broad Academy, respectively. The Broad Center at Yale SOM will also develop extensive research endeavors aimed at assembling the premier collection of data on public education leadership.

 

“With its mission to educate leaders for business and society, Yale SOM is a natural home for The Broad Center,” said Yale SOM Dean Kerwin Charles. “We have long recognized public education as critical to the health of our communities, and we believe that our distinctive approach to management education and research can have tremendous impact. Our efforts will build on the extraordinary work of The Broad Center team over the past two decades. Indeed, we are impressed by and grateful for what they have done to advance excellence and equity in public education.”

 

The Broad Foundation has learned through its 20 years of investing in public education that schools alone can’t solve for the inequities, indignities, and challenges facing students from underserved communities: Having The Broad Center housed at Yale SOM means all of its programs can be enhanced with input from Yale University’s leading thinkers in management, public health, law, child development, policy, criminal justice and economic development. The center will draw on the experiences and insights of practitioners, including Broad Center alumni and Yale SOM graduates, to help guide and inform its efforts in both teaching and research.

 

“I am honored that The Broad Foundation is entrusting Yale to carry out this important part of Eli and Edye’s philanthropic legacy. Educating leaders who will serve all sectors of society is part of Yale’s mission, so it is fitting that the Yale School of Management is creating a master’s degree program tailored to delivering management and leadership training that meets the unique needs of public education,” said Yale President Peter Salovey. “The school’s dedication to leadership education and cultivation is unmatched. Its track record of producing transformational leaders across a range of fields speaks to the tremendous promise of the new Broad Center at Yale SOM.”

 

The two programs of The Broad Center, The Broad Academy (founded in 2002) and The Broad Residency in Urban Education (founded in 2003), have trained more than 850 education leaders working in over 150 urban school districts, public charter school networks and state education agencies nationwide. More than 150 Broad Center leaders have served as superintendents or chief executives of local and state systems, and over 70 are currently in these roles. Each program has made great strides in building a diverse network of leaders that better represent the students and families they serve.

 

“The Broad Center has been committed to evaluating and evolving its work since it was founded – continuous improvement is in our DNA,” said Becca Bracy Knight, Executive Director of The Broad Center. “Organizational leadership has a direct effect on school quality, which is why The Broad Center has worked for two decades to elevate the field of public education management. We look forward to new opportunities to increase our impact by combining each organization’s unique and complementary strengths in service of our shared mission to improve public education.”

 

The current cohorts of fellows and residents will finish their programs through The Broad Center as currently structured; successor programs run by SOM will begin in 2020.

 

In its 20 years of investing in public education, The Broad Foundation has made grants to transform school governance, improve district operations, grow high-quality charter management organizations, engage in education policy and advocacy, and develop talented leaders, managers and teachers for public school systems.

 

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Categories Accountability, Broad Foundation, Charter Schools, Closing schools, Corporate Reformers, Detroit, Education Industry, Failure, Los Angeles, Michigan, Privatization
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