Wanted: A Leader for My Daughter's School

Late last night I completed my duty as a parent member of the principal selection committee for my daughter’s high school. Fully aware there was a strong possibility that this was just a “phony committee” (a wise warning from my mother who worked as a medical school administrator for many years), I gave it my best anyway.

The candidates were discouragingly inadequate, both in number and in scope of experience. Despite months of lead time that this position would need to be filled; the district had only been able to scrounge up three people for us to interview, two had been held for a few weeks and one was slipped in at the very last minute that very same day; we barely had time to read the resume. These three are the only ones who had supposedly passed downtown's screening test and who would be willing to work at our 2000-student, comprehensive high school, a school which holds nearly 16% of OUSD’s high school student body.

Of these three candidates, only one had substantial high school administrative experience. One had a few years of administrative experience at a 260-student charter middle school in central California. The other was just slightly more experienced than that, and was the only one who had ever worked for our district.

Along the way it was admitted to us that OUSD is in crisis because it can’t get people to apply as principals for its schools. The district can’t attract people to apply for other types of administrative positions either, according to a friend who is working for the district as a teacher support person.

In regard to the lack of interested applicants willing to work at the high school level, the number is further reduced because only some are open to working at comprehensive high schools, preferring instead the small high schools. From what I've been told, the pay differential at the large schools isn’t enough to compensate for the increased responsibility and workload. I'm sure some principals would prefer comprehensive high schools, with all the interesting activities which accompany them, so perhaps part of the problem is that the district has passive headhunters. And I can’t help but think that an additional reason for the dearth is because the state-run leadership neglected the identification and proper fostering of its future leaders during its stay here. Now the rooster has come home to roost.

So when an already weak school district has been intentionally and heavily destabilized for six straight years by the manipulations and mismanagement conducted by a sequence of Broad-trained, disruptive-force minded state administrators, what would the appeal to working in that district be, especially since principals can make more money in every single neighboring district? It makes me especially sad to recall three great administrators I knew who were essentially driven away by the "new" mentality brought in by the state, and ended up taking early retirement. Believe me when I tell you they were not only skilled, but dedicated to Oakland's kids.

Before we concluded last night, we were compelled by the district rep to take a final vote to reflect our "choice." He said he was required to do this by his superiors. There was a short discussion about possibly developing a Plan B; some members accepted that as an option and others were strongly opposed. On my scrap of paper I wrote “abstain” and scrawled the message, “I don’t want any of these cars and am willing to keep taking the bus for now.”

Oh...sigh...

I occasionally envy oblivious parents; what people don't know can't hurt them. When I explained what had happened at this meeting to my OUSD teacher friend, she advised, “I say just go to Paris, drink absinthe and make art for awhile to get it out of your system.” Right now that sounds about right.

At any rate, in preparation for the above process, I did a little research about NewLeaders for New Schools.

NewLeaders for New Schools

NewLeaders for New Schools is a relatively new principal training program located in a handful of U.S. cities, including the Bay Area. Founded in 2000 by a team who had attended Harvard Business School and Harvard's Graduate School of Education, it was launched in 2001 in Chicago by the Broad Foundation and the Chicago Public Education Fund, Arne Duncan’s home stomping ground.

Among the goals NLFNS is working to achieve by 2014 is to create a “world-class, scalable, sustainable, data-driven organization that has created an essential knowledge base that is actively used by education policy and decision-makers to drive educational excellence at scale. This innovative "action tank" will blend the power of a think tank with the results of and lessons learned from highly successful schools and principals at increasing scale.”

Also: “By 2014, a critical mass of schools in most of our current partner cities--and a critical mass of principal vacancies--will be filled by high-quality New Leaders principals selected and trained by New Leaders with the knowledge, skills, beliefs, and frameworks needed to ensure 90-100% student success rates in their schools.”

Billionaire Eli Broad’s 990’s reveal that he gave NLFNS a total of $7,994,000 in the years 2001 through 2007. His early contributions were identified for use as start-up and first year implementation. He donated $1,056,000 in 2001, $1,218,000 in 2002, $2,250,000 in 2003, $2,000,000 in 2004, $720,000 in 2005, $375,000 in 2006, and $375,000 in 2007.

Lynda Tredway, of UC Berkeley’s Principal Leadership Institute, reported to me that half of the program's curriculum is designed by NLFNS, and the other half is from the administrative training program at Cal State East Bay.

Potential applicants are tempted away from traditional, academic-based principal training programs, like the one at UC Berkeley, because they can't offer the advantages that NLFNS can. For instance, the NLFNS program does not charge tuition. Participants also receive a salary and an automatic administrative residency position (paid for by both OUSD and NLFNS) while they undergo their training. Undoubtedly, the benefits underwritten by the philanthropic funding which NLFNS receives work to entice people into the program, and to create an uneven playing field.

The overwhelming destinations for those who have graduated from the NLFNS Bay Area training program are both the charter and non-charter schools of OUSD. Of the 45 graduates listed in the Winter 2008 issue of the NLFNS Bay Area Community Newsletter, 32 are in the traditional and small schools of OUSD, 10 are at OUSD charter schools, and 13 are at other Bay Area and Central Valley schools, primarily charters.

One point to consider is that for the past several years, NLFNS graduates have been given special, automatic preference and access to leadership positions in OUSD schools by special arrangements made between NLFNS and the Broad-trained state administrators. So the program provides OUSD with candidates for principal positions while blocking good potential candidates from other programs at the same time.

Eli Broad (rhymes with toad) is a 76 year-old accountant by training, and a businessman by experience. He made his initial fortune in real estate and homebuilding (KB Home), then went on to become the founder and CEO of SunAmerica, a subsidiary of AIG (American International Group).*

Broad has no personal experience or training in the field of public education, or in the management of urban public schools or school districts. His massive wealth $6.7 billion (48^th richest American) has permitted him to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on education reform projects which he personally launches, including alternative training programs such as NLFNS. His base of operations is the Broad Education Foundation, an organization which is working toward “transforming urban K-12 public education through better governance, management, labor relations and competition."

*This is an insurance corporation heavily involved with the recent financial collapse, and recently listed as eighth of 655 on a list of bad-faith insurers.

Reform, reform, reform.

Here’s what John Thompson has to say.

Hopefully, Arne Duncan will listen closely to John Easton, Charles Payne, and others who have studied reform efforts in Chicago (and elsewhere). Payne calls for "Standards of Implementation" or guidelines for minimum prerequisites required for reforms to be successful. Just as teachers tend to be isolated from each other, "reformers are isolated - by ideology, attitude, ... and tribalisms." Just as teachers need learning "Standards," reformers need Standards or a guide as to whether a minimum amount of professional development, follow-up support, on-going assessment, and capacity for addressing disengagement are available. To borrow Payne's analysis of a previous systemic reform, "one need not spend a decade and $130 million dollars to find out that one doesn't have a theory of action connected to the real world."

In 1971, Seymour Sarason explained the failure of reformers to understand schools as social organizations and their cultures. For another 15 years, he kept a file of letters from people who led failed reform efforts and learned "that reformers ‘had vastly underestimated the force of existing power relationships and had vastly overestimated the willingness of school personnel to confront the implication of those relationships.’"

And above all, "when people who have led a reform effort are asked what they would do differently," writes Payne, "perhaps the single most common answer is "take more time.”

That sensible advice has arrived here too late to be of any help.

The Disadvantages of an Elite Education

Periodically I’ll take a look at Whitney Tilson’s blog. The first time I became aware of Tilson was when word went out about his account of Ben Chavis’ verbal attack on New York City Council Member Charles Barron at Sharpton’s National Action Network EEP forum. Chavis, Oakland’s notorious and poorly-behaved American Indian Public Charter School founder, had been invited to sit on the panel.

According to Tilson, Chavis approached Barron and said, “You're a mother f-ing black pimp, you're f-ing our kids. Come to the reservation and I'll beat your ass. You want our kids to take Home Ec? YOU should wear a dress!"

For those of us in Oakland who have been experiencing Chavis for years, hearing something like this was nothing new. But then there was Whitney Tilson’s enthusiastic response of, “I LIKE this guy!”

Tilson's day job is as the founder and managing partner of a New York company that manages investments. He also writes about financial investing and is a minor TV business celebrity. He has posted some of his appearances on YouTube.

In addition to the things above, Tilson's super-intense hobby is being involved with education reform-minded things. He co-founded Democrats for Education Reform, and is on the board of directors of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. He has spoken to Philanthropy Roundtable members, guiding and reinforcing their K-12 education philosophy. Tilson is a huge fan of Joel Klein, according to whom he meets regularly, he adores Michelle Rhee, and Jay Green gives him praise.

Whitney Tilson was the first person to join Wendy Kopp as a founding member of Teach For America. He is the vice chairman of KIPP Academy Charter Schools in NYC. All-in-all he is a big pro-charter, pro-voucher cheerleader of TFA and KIPP; possibly the ultimate neo-liberal education reformer of our day.

Tilson explains on his blog that his parents spent most of their careers doing international development. His interest in education came about because of both the work of his parents and from his experience with TFA.

“I remember the many times, going back to my teenage years, that she [his mother] reminded me of all the good fortune I’ve had in my life and told me that I had a duty to give back and make the world a better place.”

A photo posted online reveals that he was a high school student at Northfield Mount Hermon School (where today's current tuition, room, and board charge is $43,400+, and $30,500+ for day students). He attended Harvard, and eventually Harvard Business School. His education trajectory is very much like Duncan and Obama's.

Tilson invites his readers to look at the photos and videos of KIPP celebrations which he has posted online. I was surprised to see them intertwined with photos and videos of his personal life, and have no idea why someone involved in a controversial, public topic would do such a thing. But since he made them available to the world and I'm a curious person, I thought I’d take a look. I’m fascinated with trying to understand the make-up of people who think so differently from me. For some reason, or the other, I keep looking for a bridge.

The photos and videos feature the travel and activities of an extraordinarily privileged American family; Machu Picchu, Kenya, Prague, Jackson Hole, skiing, golfing, water skiing, private plane flying, white-water rafting, paragliding, and on and on and on. It strikes me that Whitney Tilson is one entitled dude. Incidentally, I learned that his children attend a private school who a mother described as "one of the most elite girls’ schools in the nation." It has a student to faculty ratio of 7:1 and its tuition is around $34,000/year. No public schools will be experienced here.

This all brings me to a fascinating and useful article I discovered during my googling of “elite schools,” The Disadvantages of an Elite Education by William Deresiewicz, a literary critic and former Yale professor. I love how he begins his piece:

It didn’t dawn on me that there might be a few holes in my education until I was about 35. I’d just bought a house, the pipes needed fixing, and the plumber was standing in my kitchen. There he was, a short, beefy guy with a goatee and a Red Sox cap and a thick Boston accent, and I suddenly learned that I didn’t have the slightest idea what to say to someone like him. So alien was his experience to me, so unguessable his values, so mysterious his very language, that I couldn’t succeed in engaging him in a few minutes of small talk before he got down to work. Fourteen years of higher education and a handful of Ivy League degrees, and there I was, stiff and stupid, struck dumb by my own dumbness. “Ivy retardation,” a friend of mine calls this. I could carry on conversations with people from other countries, in other languages, but I couldn’t talk to the man who was standing in my own house.

Here are nine additional excerpts which not only relate to Tilson and TFA, but also to the current state of education reform, the vision of which has been conceived, and is being pushed, by our nation’s elite. The article also gives us a clue as to why other social classes are being excluded from participating in important conversations about their own schools. Deresiewicz writes:

(1) It’s not surprising that it took me so long to discover the extent of my miseducation, because the last thing an elite education will teach you is its own inadequacy. As two dozen years at Yale and Columbia have shown me, elite colleges relentlessly encourage their students to flatter themselves for being there, and for what being there can do for them. The advantages of an elite education are indeed undeniable. You learn to think, at least in certain ways, and you make the contacts needed to launch yourself into a life rich in all of society’s most cherished rewards. To consider that while some opportunities are being created, others are being cancelled and that while some abilities are being developed, others are being crippled is, within this context, not only outrageous, but inconceivable.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

(2) The first disadvantage of an elite education, as I learned in my kitchen that day, is that it makes you incapable of talking to people who aren’t like you. Elite schools pride themselves on their diversity, but that diversity is almost entirely a matter of ethnicity and race. With respect to class, these schools are largely—indeed increasingly—homogeneous.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

(3) At the same time, because these schools tend to cultivate liberal attitudes, they leave their students in the paradoxical position of wanting to advocate on behalf of the working class while being unable to hold a simple conversation with anyone in it. Witness the last two Democratic presidential nominees, Al Gore and John Kerry: one each from Harvard and Yale, both earnest, decent, intelligent men, both utterly incapable of communicating with the larger electorate.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

(4) My education taught me to believe that people who didn’t go to an Ivy League or equivalent school weren’t worth talking to, regardless of their class. I was given the unmistakable message that such people were beneath me. We were “the best and the brightest,” as these places love to say, and everyone else was, well, something else: less good, less bright.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

(5) [Elite universities] …select for and develop one form of intelligence: the analytic. While this is broadly true of all universities, elite schools, precisely because their students (and faculty, and administrators) possess this one form of intelligence to such a high degree, are more apt to ignore the value of others. One naturally prizes what one most possesses and what most makes for one’s advantages. But social intelligence and emotional intelligence and creative ability, to name just three other forms, are not distributed preferentially among the educational elite. The “best” are the brightest only in one narrow sense. One needs to wander away from the educational elite to begin to discover this.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

(6) Elite institutions are supposed to provide a humanistic education, but the first principle of humanism is Terence’s: “nothing human is alien to me.” The first disadvantage of an elite education is how very much of the human it alienates you from.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

(7) The second disadvantage, implicit in what I’ve been saying, is that an elite education inculcates a false sense of self-worth… It’s been said that what those tests [SAT, GRE, and other numerical rankings] really measure is your ability to take tests, but even if they measure something real, it is only a small slice of the real. The problem begins when students are encouraged to forget this truth, when academic excellence becomes excellence in some absolute sense, when “better at X” becomes simply “better.”

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

(8) One of the great errors of an elite education, then, is that it teaches you to think that measures of intelligence and academic achievement are measures of value in some moral or metaphysical sense. But they’re not. Graduates of elite schools are not more valuable than stupid people, or talentless people, or even lazy people. Their pain does not hurt more. Their souls do not weigh more.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

(9) This is not to say that students from elite colleges never pursue a riskier or less lucrative course after graduation, but even when they do, they tend to give up more quickly than others… Because students from elite schools expect success, and expect it now. They have, by definition, never experienced anything else, and their sense of self has been built around their ability to succeed. The idea of not being successful terrifies them, disorients them, defeats them. They’ve been driven their whole lives by a fear of failure—often, in the first instance, by their parents’ fear of failure.

We need to have a public discussion about the extent of the patronizing contempt for the middle-class-on-down held by some of those in the non-public school using elite, and how it is manifesting itself in the way our public education system is being treated and where education reform is being headed. The People who actually use the public schools, and the providers who work in them, are being excluded from important decisions on both the local and national levels.
The response by the elite is always about how much they are trying to "help." Sorry, I just don't buy that, especially because so many of the reforms are being pushed onto communities after the elite arranges for general public input to be forcefully disengaged.*

Before a reader charges me with inciting class warfare, I hope they realize how much class tension is already there, and growing by the minute. Think of these entries as reports about what is going on at the ground level.

*Remember Joe Williams' (Tilson's buddy) description in his report for the Center of Education Reform of a desirable "politics free zone" conveniently created by the state control of Oakland's school district, and which opened the door for Eli Broad's reform ideas to be implemented?

Pimping for Privatization

By Steve Miller, a longtime Oakland public school teacher.

The privatization of public education has developed characteristics of both tragedy and farce. Suddenly Plainfield Asset Management, a hedge fund that has been trying to privatize New York City’s Off-Track Betting operations, is concerned about the achievement gap between African-American and Anglo-American students!

So they “donated” $500,000 to the Education Equality Project! Here’s the background:

“The Rev. Al Sharpton and Schools Chancellor Joel Klein stunned the education world last June when they joined forces to reform the nation's public schools.

“They called their ambitious venture the Education Equality Project, and they vowed in a Washington press conference to lead a campaign to close the decades-old achievement gap between white and black students.

“What Klein and Sharpton never revealed is that the National Action Network, Sharpton's organization, immediately received a $500,000 donation for its involvement in the new effort.” (Juan Gonzalez, NY Daily News, April 1, 2009)

Such awesome generosity is typical of the corporations and their henchmen who are going all out to privatize the public schools of the United States! They have long experience is buying spokesmen to extol their corporations.

The Basic Premise

Now that these forces are out of the closet at last, we can examine their central premise, first articulated by that champion of civil rights and equality, right-wing economist, Milton Friedman.

Friedman demanded the total privatization of schools. He claimed that the so-called “free market” is the best guarantee of efficiency, quality education and equality (not to mention modernizing the system) because it introduces competition, which provides “choice” for parents.

This is in essence the corporate model for education. It is being sold across the country to parents, especially minority parents, who are quite clear that the public schools are more segregated than ever, and who are desperate for something different. Nationally, a gaggle of reactionary billionaires (the Walton family, of Wal-Mart, Eli Broad, of KB homes and AIG Retirement, and Donald Fisher of the Gap) have suddenly become champions of equality and are pushing charter schools as the solution.

So let’s examine how valid these assumptions really are.

People were shocked when the extreme right-winger, Grover Norquist made his famous call to shrink the government to the size where “we can drown it like a baby in the bathtub”. But this is exactly what has been happening for the last eight years. It is well known that the Bush Administration outsourced the war in Iraq to private contractors. He attempted to also privatize the Iraqi government.

The government’s pitiful and criminal response to Hurricane Katrina tells us a lot about privatization, because the relief effort was also privatized. Naomi Klein shows in her great book, The Shock Doctrine, how Bush privatized many of the federal governments functions by out-sourcing these to private corporations. Even the Bail Out is outsourced, with the law firm of Simpson, Thacher & Bartlett winning the contract to oversee distributing billions to corporations that are its own clients!

The government is getting out of the business of governing. So it should be no surprise that privatization is being forced on school systems across the country. The United States really has two highly segregated school systems. Suburban schools are the best in the world; urban schools are among the worst. Privatization is being forced on urban school districts alone.

Since the upsurges of the ‘60s, government at all levels has been forced to address the public demand to provide an equal and quality education to all students, regardless of race, nationality or class. What happens, then, when the government no longer handles public education? It is then absolved of this essential responsibility.

The next step then is to make the responsibility for the quality of education a personal one. Just like health care, “you get what you pay for”. The big ideological push for a decade now is to make everything personal responsibility. Then it’s your fault if something goes wrong. Government no longer is even expected to provide equal access.

Is this really what we want? To terminate the social demand of decades that the government makes good on its promise, without discussion? Ask yourself – when exactly was it that this was taken off the table?

When was it that the problem started being described, as in the article above, as “the achievement gap” rather than the refusal of government to fulfill the historical demand for real equality? Why do we now just assume that corporations are somehow going to do this better for us and let governments off the hook? Where were these discussions held?

These questions have answers. When you ask the privatizers these questions directly, they simply talk about something else.

Enter the Odd Couple.

Joel Klein is Chancellor of the New York public school system, the country’s largest. He is famous for stating that every school in New York should become a charter. He is also on of the signees of the notorious report, Tough Choices in Tough Times, which calls for ending local community control of schools, ending high school in the 10th grade, and replacing all public schools with “contract schools”. These schools would have total authority to determine what is taught and how it is taught. This removes the power over public schools from parents through their elected school boards.

Al Sharpton is an erstwhile “civil rights leader” who has inserted himself as a champion for the equality that the United States has never provided African Americans.

Both are now proponents of the corporate model for providing equality. Can this really be done?

Here is Barney Frank’s take on the question. Frank is the Chair of the House Financial Services Committee that “supervises” the $ 9 trillion in Bail-Outs so far to Wall Street.

Frank, a self-described capitalist and liberal, stated in a House Financial Services meeting, on Wednesday, July 16, 2008, “No one expects equality, equality is not a good thing. You can’t have an economy that works if everything is equal.”

Frank has emphasized this before. In Business Week, February 2006, Frank wrote, “Inequality is not a bad thing in a free market economy; indeed, it’s essential if we’re to benefit from the incentives and efficiencies that make the market so effective a producer of wealth.”

Turning a public good, provided by the government, into a private service, provided by corporations for profit will do exactly what Frank describes. We are witnessing this with the Bail Outs, which are shrouded in secrecy and lack any public control or oversight. If we have trillions for banks, imagine how war a mere $100 billion would go to create a real system of equal, quality education, free for all.

If they are so sincere about addressing the history of inequality in this country, how would Klein, Sharpton and the privatizers address these issues?

Choice

The idea of school choice is another “get rich quick scheme” that sounds good until it is examined. What happened in America that should we even have to choose at all

In 1999, David Hughes and others wrote Trading in Futures. Why Markets in Education Don’t Work. In it they concluded, “in effect education markets trade off the opportunities of less privileged children to those already privileged.” (p 2).

Other books document the same effects: Michael Appel’s Educating the “Right” Way, Helen Ladd’s introduction in Choosing Choice, Joycelyn Berthelot’s Education for the World, Education for All. Alfie Kohn also provides abundant material.

Data from countries like Chile, Britain under Thatcher, New Zealand, Sweden and other countries all show the same result. Schools push out the students who take more time and resources to educate. Once privatized, schools compete for the “good” students. Middle-class parents, who have the time and know-how to work the system, get their kids into the “right” schools. Parents from poorer families generally lack these resources and usually wind up taking whatever they are given.

To paraphrase… the law, in all of its magnificence, allows poor parents, as well as rich, to drive their students across town twice a day in their Porsche SUVs to insure their kids are receiving a quality education. “Choice” benefits parents who have the resources to choose. It simply does not carry the same guarantees as a “right”.

New Orleans all but privatized its school system. What do we see there? Boutique schools for well-off families and poorly supported charters for the poor. How’s that for “efficiency, quality education and equality”?

The End of Equality?

The idea that the so-called “free market” can solve social problems is a scam and a fraud. For 40 years, the US has pushed the economics and politics of Neo-Liberalism on countries from South America to Asia and Africa every time there has been an economic crisis. Now that we are beginning to live through what clearly is the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression, these policies are being forced on the American people.

Back in the ‘90s, Edward Luttwak, a champion of the “free market” described their agenda this way. He could be describing our current public school policy:

“At present, almost all the elite Americans, with corporate chiefs and fashionable economists in the lead are utterly convinced that they have discovered the winning formula for economic success – the only formula – good for every country, rich or poor, good for all individuals willing and able to heed the message, and of course, good for elite Americans: PRIVATIZATION + DEREGULATION + GLOBALIZATION = TURBO-CAPITALISM = PROSPERITY”. (Thomas Frank, One Market, Under God, 2000. p 17)

We are now living out the results of “Turbo Capitalism”. It ain’t prosperity that’s for sure. Markets have never solved social problems. They create them.

All we have to do is look around to find the answers. The “free market” Bailouts are creating social problems in all directions, not eliminating them. This is the inevitable result of turning the responsibility for public problems over to private forces. The privatizers are all about deregulating public schools by eliminating public control.

Markets are designed for profit making. Remember when Bill Clinton told us that corporations were the best institutions to tackle the national health care disaster? HMOs have made things much worse, producing the worst health care for the highest price in the industrial world – and – completely outside public control. Sharpton and Klein support the domination of EMOs (Educational Maintenance Organizations) and the elimination of the responsibility of government to address the concerns of society.

In a ironic fashion, the “free market” imposes an equality of sorts on all the peoples of the US. This is the equality of poverty and its misery. This is not the concept of equality that drove this country forward for the last 60 years to say the least. If not deregulation, privatization and the market, what is the alternative?

The only counter to privatizing and ending the control of the public is to de-privatize and extend the control of the public. Who says that everything we fought for 60 years is off the table? Why are we supposed to settle for this scam? It’s not time to let government off the hook. If a privatized government cannot guarantee a free, equal, and quality education for everybody, and maintain education as a public good, then the public must replace the government.

Steven Miller
April 9, 2009
Oakland, California

Joel Klein and the Billionaires

Oakland and New York City are soul mates. They met in hell.

The New York Times published an article today about Joel Klein, billionaire Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s-appointed Chancellor of the New York City Department of Education. This move was originally facilitated in some secret way at some secret venue by billionaire Eli Broad (see article proudly posted on Broad’s Superintendents Academy website).

Here my response:

Has anyone else noticed that our nation's schools are only "failing" in districts which the middle class abandoned long ago? Has anyone else noticed that a small set of extraordinarily powerful people, namely the billionaires Gates, Bloomberg, Broad and the Walton family, and a few assorted millionaires, have now gained control of school districts primarily filled with poor kids?

Has anyone else noticed that the members of these targeted communities are often people who are not sufficiently inclined toward strong democratic engagement, either because they are poorly educated [and have inadequate, or non-existent levels, of English language literacy], &/or because they have a long history of having had their voting rights suppressed, &/or because, as recent immigrants, they are not accustomed and habituated to participation in our American democracy?

Decades ago, BEFORE the schools had gone “bad,” the middle class fled those districts because parents couldn’t deal with their kids being in close proximity to poor, minority kids. When the middle class parents uprooted themselves, their input and support vanished, too. The remaining parent body didn’t have the same sense of know-how and entitlement, or skill set, to steer their schools in a powerful and effective way. Without the pressure for maintaining high standards, the schools were left to languish. That's when they went "bad."

Of course, the only middle class advocates remaining at the schools are the teachers. But whenever they happen to complain about the neglected situation, they are blamed for having “self-interest” and their observations and complaints are totally dismissed.

Now the plantation-owner class of today has arrived to rescue and “fix” the schools. They hire people like Klein and Rhee to be their overseers, and very devoted overseers they are. [Perhaps] Sharpton has been [royally] duped.

No, none of these ruling class people are going to do what actually needs to be done, such as build the parent-citizens’ capacity for asserting themselves and then respond appropriately to those assertions. They refuse to listen deeply to the parents’ complaints, or take them seriously, or work to correct the things parents have been complaining about all along (such as neglected physical plants, [in]adequate staffing, inadequate supplies, lousy school-to-home communication, etc.).

Oh, no. Instead of doing things which will actually empower the schools that exist -- and the citizens who happen to use them -- these managers-of-the-people (who have little experience in such schools and could care less about them) choose to close the schools and demolish the close human connections which have been made there over time. It’s a bit like destroying families. [just like was done during slavery’s days]

That doesn't matter to them because keeping the communities weak and destabilized is the ultimate end that justifies their means. They’ve discovered the alarm that constantly screams out “low test scores!” will keep everyone on edge.

After they neglect the schools, and then close them for the consequences of being neglected, then they offer up a platter of substitute schools -- various versions of privatized “public” schools which have been concocted by their friends. These schools offer parents even less of an opportunity to have any say. So then the package is tied up tidily and stashed away.

This billionaire class wouldn’t dare try this maneuver in other American communities; more empowered people wouldn’t put up with it at all. The BloomKlein approach is happening all over our country (Chicago, DC, Oakland, etc.) and is based on suppression, not encouragement, of the public voice. It is the ultimate threat to our democracy.

By the way, since Broad played a key role in former U.S. Assistant Attorney General Joel Klein’s appointment as New York schools chancellor, it appears that Klein's $2,000,000 Broad Prize was only a plantation-owner's reward to an overseer’s job well done. Broad’s wealth is listed at $6.7 billion. This means his gift is like a person with a net worth of $50,000 giving $15 to someone they like. If you don’t believe me, do the math yourself.

Fight the stranglehold of the billionaire eduphilanthropreneurs* and restore democracy to public education today!

*This might be even better: “the billionaire eduphilanthropists and all their eduentrepreneur friends.”