Tom Ultican, retired high school teacher of advanced math and physics, has embarked on a project to review the Destroy Public Education (DPE) Movement.
His latest topic is Denver. Privatizers point to Denver as a success story, but Ultican says the schools are a “dystopian nightmare.”
Denver is a classic example of impeccably liberal Democrats collaborating to undermine and privatize public schools.
They began, as they always do, by displaying dire statistics about the “failure”of the schools. Radical action is necessary. Denver leaders began by hiring non-educator Michael Bennett as Superintendent of Schools. Bennett had worked as managing director for the investment fund of billionaire Philip Anschutz, oil and gas magnate, fracking advocate, film producer (e.g., “Waiting for Superman,” “Won’t Back Down,” “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe”), and an Evangelical Christian and a funder of anti-gay activism.
“A key DPE playbook move is to leverage out of town money with local money and political muscle to purloin control of public schools. DPS schools were not dysfunctional nor were they failing. In several Denver neighborhoods, the schools were the only functional government entity.”
“Colorado launched annual state testing, which helped Bennett in his need to cry failure. He was a great believer in the “bad teacher” theory. He turned to Michelle Rhee New Teacher Project and Wendy Kopp’s TFA to import new teachers.
“Bennett enthusiastically embraced the portfolio model, treating schools like stocks: keep the winners, close the losers. No surprise: Almost all the loser schools were in poor and minority communities.
“The year that Bennet became superintendent, the heirs of the Walmart fortune opened the Charter School Growth Fund just 20 miles up highway-25 from downtown Denver. Carrie Walton Penner, sits on the board of the fund and Carrie’s husband, Greg Penner, is a director. Annie Walton Proietti, niece of Carrie, works for a KIPP school in Denver. There are other Walton family members living in and frequenting the Denver area.
“Joining the Walmart school privatizers is Bennet’s business mentor Philip Anschutz. He has a billion-dollar foundation located in Denver and owns Walden Publishing. “Walden Publishing company was “behind the anti-teachers’ union movies ‘Won’t Back Down’ and ‘Waiting for ‘Superman.’”
“These wealth powered people along with several peers promote school privatization and portfolio district management ideology.
“There is a widely held fundamental misconception that standardized testing proves something about the quality of a school. There is a belief among people than have never studied the issue that testing can be used to objectively evaluate teacher quality. It cannot! A roulette wheel would be an equally accurate instrument for measuring school and teacher quality.
“Another Non-Educator with No Training
“In 2007, Bennet asked Tom Boasberg, a childhood friend, to join DPS as his chief operating officer. Trained as a lawyer, Boasberg had worked closely as chief of staff to the chairman of Hong Kong’s first political party in the early 1990s, when the colony held its first elections in its 150 years of British rule. Before DPS, Boasberg worked for eight years at Level 3 Communications, where he was Group Vice President for Corporate Development.
“In the spring of 2008, Bennet and Boasberg were ready to tackle the pension crisis seen as sucking money out of classrooms. One month after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, Boasberg and Bennet convinced the DPS board to buy a $750,000,000 complicated instrument with variable interest rates. During the melt-down of 2008 Denver’s interest rates zoomed up making this a very bad deal for DPS. (Banking was supposed to be Bennet and Boasberg’s strength.)”
So these two financial geniuses cost the school district some $25 Million on a bad bet with district funds, but no one hel them accountable. They got rid of “bad teachers,” but no one got rid of them.
Instead, Bennett was appointed to fill an empty U.S. Senate seat, and he was succeeded by his friend Tom Boasberg. Boasberg is a “graduate”of the unaccredited Broad Superintendents Academy, which teaches the virtues of top-down management, closing schools, charter schools, and high-stakes testing.
Despite the usual reformer hype and boasting, test scores rose higher before Bennett started than after, yesterday reformers drooled over its “success,” which was in the eye of the beholder.
Ultican goes on to assert, with evidence, that Denver’s strategy has been ineffective and bad for kids. He shows that changing schools destabilizes neighborhoods and hurts kids; that the portfolio model is nonsense; and that inexperienced TFA teachers are not good teachers; and that running multiple school systems is more costly than running a unified system.
No miracle in Denver. Just disruption.
Diane Ravitch's blog 