Diane Ravitch popularized the term "Billionaire Boys Club" in her terrific book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education, which I reviewed in this diary, from which I quote:
After noting the power and money now arrayed against public schools and education as a profession, and reminding us of the devastation wrought by financial deregulation, Ravitch cautions us
Removing public oversight will leave the education of our children to the whim of entrepreneurs and financiers. Nor is it wise to entrust our schools to inexperienced teachers, principals, and superintendents. Education is too important to relinquish to the vagaries of the market and the good intentions of amateurs
Now we have an article in Dissent by Joanne Barkan that gives us the complete picture, particular of the influence of three foundations, Walton, Broad, and especially Gates. I am urging people to read Got Dough? Public School Reform in the Age of Venture Philanthropy, which I will explore below the fold.
First, let's set the scene, or if you will, the justification used for the actions advocated by the "reformers" funded by the Billionaire Boys Club. At least since a Nation at Risk in 1983, the American people have been hammered with the theme that our students are falling behind in international competitions. We heard that again with the release by OECD of the most recent PISA scores. But we should remember the caution of Mark Twain he attributed in part to Disraeli, "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics." Perhaps if we follow the logic of No Child Left Behind and insist upon a disaggregation of the scores on international tests we can see that the figures tell a story quite different than that pushed by the organizations backed by the Billionaire Boys Club.
Barkan reminds us that the latest figures for two of the three international comparisons - the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study and the Trends in International Math and Science Study - each done every five years and last releasted in 2006, break down the results by poverty. Those most recent results portray a very different picture when we take into account the high American rate of poverty:
students in U.S. schools where the poverty rate was less than 10 percent ranked first in reading, first in science, and third in math. When the poverty rate was 10 percent to 25 percent, U.S. students still ranked first in reading and science. But as the poverty rate rose still higher, students ranked lower and lower. Twenty percent of all U.S. schools have poverty rates over 75 percent. The average ranking of American students reflects this. The problem is not public schools; it is poverty. And as dozens of studies have shown, the gap in cognitive, physical, and social development between children in poverty and middle-class children is set by age three.
It is worth remembering that our own national statistic shows over 21% of American children living in poverty, as compared to well under 5% for Finland.
But this is an examination of the influence of the Billionaire Boys Club on schools, not on their not addressing the root causes of the differences in test scores.
Barkan seeks to explore 3 questions:
- How do these foundations operate on the ground?
- How do they leverage their money into control over public policy?
- How do they construct consensus?
The smallest of the three, The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, with assets of $1.4 billion in 2008 according to the Foundation Center, runs two training projects to move people from careers outside education into positions as superintendents and upper-level administrators at the school district level. Graduates of the Broad Superintendents Academy, according to the foundation's website,
currently work as superintendents or school district executives in fifty-three cities across twenty-eight states. In 2009, 43 percent of all large urban superintendent openings were filled by Broad Academy graduates.
The Residency Program places professionals with masters degrees " into full-time managerial jobs in school districts, charter school management organizations, and federal and state education department" while subsidizing their compensation during their first two years, and has placed over 200 people into fifty educational institutions include charter school management organizations, school districts, and the educational departments of the states and the national government. This approach allows Broad to leverage its money - placements from Broad hire other placements from Broad, creating a critical mass of like-minded individuals without having to directly take on the issues of educational policy in a manner that would allow the public to oppose the direction. The most notable success is the Los Angeles Unified School District, which at the start of 2010 had
Matt Hill, who oversees the district’s Public School Choice project that turns schools over to independent managers (Broad pays Hill’s $160,000 salary); Parker Hudnut, executive director of the district’s innovation and charter division (Kathi Littmann, his predecessor, was also a Broad resident); Yumi Takahashi, the budget director; Marshall Tuck, chief executive of the nonprofit that manages schools for Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa; Mark Kieger-Heine, chief operating officer of the same nonprofit; and Angela Bass, its superintendent of instruction.
This was topped by the hiring in June of 2010 of John Deasy as #2 in the district with the clear intent of his becoming #1, which he has now done.
It is worth taking a moment to provide some background on Deasy. Full disclosure - he headed the school system in which I now work. From us he went to the assistant director for education at the Gates Foundations, from which, as Barkan notes, he was hired for LAUSD. Prince George's County Public Schools is a substantial district, with over 130,000 students, several hundred schools and during Deasy's tenure around 9,000 teachers. But that provides a very incomplete picture of Deasy's background. Prior to PG he ran Santa Monica's public schools, with less than 10,000 students. Deasy spent only 2.5 years of his 4 year contract with PG. In other words, in around 4 years he went from running a district with less than 10,000 students to running a monster - LAUSD has around 700,000 students and more than 45,000 teachers. At the time of his hiring, Deasy had a total of 12 years experience of running 3 districts. Key besides his time at Gates was that he was a graduate of the Broad Academy.
That connection between Broad and Gates occurs again and again, as they are common funders of many programs pushed by what some of the opponents of this approach call the educational "deformers." The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which had $33 billion in June of 2010 and a commitment over a number of years of an additional $30 billion from Warren Buffett, is by far the nation's largest foundation (2nd is the Ford Foundation with just of $10 billion in assets). The career of John Deasy is one indication of the interrelationship between the Gates and Broad Foundations. Barkan notes another:
On September 8, 2010, the Broad Foundation announced a twist on the usual funding scenario: the Broad Residency had received a $3.6 million grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. According to Broad’s press release, the money would go "to recruit and train as many as eighteen Broad Residents over the next four years to provide management support to school districts and charter management organizations addressing the issue of teacher effectiveness."
There is no doubt Gates has been generous to public education, as the foundation also has been on some issue of health care, notably in Africa. Some are therefore reluctant to criticize. But it is worth remembering that the Foundation's first major educational effort was on small schools. Let me quote part of what Barkan offers on this:
he foundation didn’t base its decision on scientific studies showing school size mattered; such studies didn’t exist. As reported in Bloomberg Businessweek (July 15, 2010), Wharton School statistician Howard Wainer believes Gates probably "misread the numbers" and simply "seized on data showing small schools are overrepresented among the country's highest achievers...." Gates spent $2 billion between 2000 and 2008 to set up 2,602 schools in 45 states and the District of Columbia, "directly reaching at least 781,000 students," according to a foundation brochure.
The Foundationa has now pulled its funding for the effort, acknowledging that it was not a success, which did not surprise even advocates of small schools, such as Depaul University's Mike Klonsky, national director of the Small Schools Workshop, who has been critical of Gates' bigfooting of the movement for small schools. Barkan's quote from him is worth repeating in its entirety:
Gates funding was so large and so widespread, it seemed for a time as if every initiative in the small-schools and charter world was being underwritten by the foundation. If you wanted to start a school, hold a meeting, organize a conference, or write an article in an education journal, you first had to consider Gates ("Power Philanthropy" in The Gates Foundation and the Future of Public Schools, 2010).
Since the failure of the small schools initiative, the Gates Foundation has moved swiftly pushing for The Turnaround Challenge which just happens to provide the models that Secretary of Education Duncan used for Race to the Top - even though there is no research base that demonstrates success for any of the four models. Here I might add that most Americans first became aware of the impact of this approach when the superintendent of Central Falls High School in Rhode Island moved to fire all the teachers to meet the requirements of the turnaround model. Duncan supported the action. Only later did people begin to realize the real problem in Central Falls was very much the high degree of poverty. I might also note that several of the top aids to Duncan at the Department of Education came directly from the Gates Foundation. Barkan provides a description of the influence at the Department of Gates - and Broad:
Duncan’s first chief of staff, Margot Rogers, came from Gates; her replacement as of June 2010, Joanne Weiss, came from a major Gates grantee, the New Schools Venture Fund; Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Russlynn Ali has worked at Broad, LA Unified School District and the Gates-funded Education Trust; general counsel Charles P. Rose was a founding board member of another major Gates grantee, Advance Illinois; and Assistant Deputy Secretary for Innovation and Improvement James Shelton has worked at both Gates and the New Schools Venture Fund. Duncan himself served on the board of directors of Broad’s education division until February 2009 (as did former treasury secretary Larry Summers).
Given the mention of Summers, this might be an appropriate time to mention another initiative of Gates and Broad, and that was their establishment of a $60 million fund for the 2008 election cycle to try to get both parties to address the view of 'reform' being pushed by the two foundations. Barkan rightly notes that this amount of money dwarfs the $22.4 million effort by Swift Boat Veterans for Truth against John Kerry the previous cycle (although of course post-Citizen's United even that is surpassed by the efforts of the U. S. Chamber of Commerce).
The Small Schools Initiative was not the first failure in education by the Gates Foundation. Barkan reminds us that Gates invested $90 Million in Chicago for the Renaissance 2010 project. At the time Arne Duncan headed Chicago Public Schools, under the system of mayoral control that both Gates and Broad favor. He was already Secretary of Education by the time the results became known. Barkan quotes from the devastating January 17, 2010 Chicago Tribune piece titled "Daley School Plan Fails to Make Grade." -
Six years after Mayor Richard Daley launched a bold initiative to close down and remake failing schools, Renaissance 2010 has done little to improve the educational performance of the city's school system, according to a Tribune analysis of 2009 state test data.
...The moribund test scores follow other less than enthusiastic findings about Renaissance 2010—that displaced students ended up mostly in other low performing schools and that mass closings led to youth violence as rival gang members ended up in the same classrooms. Together, they suggest the initiative hasn't lived up to its promise by this, its target year.
Perhaps you are wondering how two such major initiatives could go on so long without appropriate warning signs that they were failing to meet their expectations. Barkan provides some information by the parallel of what has happened with the medical efforts in Africa. Let me offer just a small part of that section:
On February 16, 2008, the New York Times reported on a memo that it had obtained, written by Dr. Arata Kochi, head of the World Health Organization’s malaria programs, to WHO’s director general. Because the Gates Foundation was funding almost everyone studying malaria, Dr. Arata complained, the cornerstone of scientific research—independent review—was falling apart.
Many of the world’s leading malaria scientists are now "locked up in a ‘cartel’ with their own research funding being linked to those of others within the group," Dr. Kochi wrote. Because "each has a vested interest to safeguard the work of the others," he wrote, getting independent reviews of research proposals "is becoming increasingly difficult."
Barkan goes on to quote extensively from the work of Frederick Hess, who is based at the American Enterprise Institute and who has in general been a supporter of the "reform" movement, about the tilting of the coverage of educational "reform." He notes that in the major press the ration of positive to critical coverage of educational initiatives of the 5 biggest foundations operating in the field (also including Annenberg and Milken) was 13-1. Hess also notes about the outside researchers who should provide an independent check of such initiatives
...Researchers themselves compete fiercely for the right to evaluate high-profile reform initiatives. Almost without exception, the evaluators are hired by funders or grantees....Most evaluators are selected, at least in part, because they are perceived as being sympathetic to the reform in question.
We have a government institution that should provide elements of professional review, most notably the National Research Council. Race to the Top (RTTT) has done more to distort educational policy in this country than anything done in any administration since the Federal government first got heavily involved during the Johnson administrati (and Barkan provides a thorough summary of the aspects of the program). Many of the proposals pushed by Arne Duncan are right out of the Gates Foundation playbook. It is also worthwhile to note that the Foundation actually underwrote the costs of a number of states applying for RTTT funds. One of the most important of these is the insistence upon using student tests scores as the primary metric. Let me offer a slighly longer extract from Barkan that shows what happened:
On October 9, 2009, Edward Haertel, chair of the National Research Council’s Board on Testing and Assessment (BOTA) sent a letter-report to Arne Duncan to express BOTA’s concern about the use of testing in RTTT’s requirements.
Tests often play an important role in evaluating educational innovations, but an evaluation requires much more than tests alone. A rigorous evaluation plan typically involves implementation and outcome data that need to be collected throughout the course of a project
REFLECTING "A consensus of the Board," the nineteen-page letter went on to review the many scientific studies that demonstrate the pitfalls of using standardized test scores as a measure of student learning, teacher performance, or school improvement. BOTA recommended that the DOE use these studies to revise the RTTT plan. Unfortunately, as Haertel explained in his cover note, "Under National Academies procedures, any letter report must be reviewed by an independent group of experts before it can be publicly released, which made it impossible to complete the letter within the public comment period of the Federal Register notice [for RTTT’s proposed regulations]." The scientists needed a peer review of their work, so they missed the Federal Register deadline, and that meant Duncan could ignore their recommendations—which he did. Haertel’s letter (www.nap.edu/catalog/12780.html) makes for poignant reading in the twenty-first century: science imploring at the feet of ideology.
Again and again we see the Billionaire Boys Club shaping educational policy in ways not supported by research but which align with what they advocate. Here's a partial list of some of the other examples cited by Barkan.
... $64.5 million from 5 foundations (including the big three in education) to fund the merit pay plan Michelle Rhee was imposing on DC Public schools. That funding was at least originally contingent on Rhee remaining as Chancellor.
... Gates and Broad personally donated millions to Learn-NY, a lobbying effort to overturn the 2-term limit for NY Mayors so that Michael Bloomberg, a strong advocate and exemplar of the mayoral control favored by the Billionaire Boys Club, could stay in control.
... they were funders of "Waiting for Superman" (my review of which can be read here);
- both Foundations were important funders of NBC's Education Nation.
NOTE: for those interested in how skewed that was might I suggest reading my diaries that touch on the topic,
The problem with NBC's Education Nation - where are the voices of parents and teachers?,
"Waiting for Superman and Education Nation - more concerns,
Teacher Anger - and more,
"Does Education Need a Katrina?",
NBC's Teacher Town Hall - reaction/reflection,
and The attacks on education - more reactions.
Further, Learn-NY is not the only way the Billionaire Boys Club wind up running educational policy. Consider this paragraph:
In its "advocacy and public policy" work, the Gates Foundation also funnels money to elected officials through their national associations. The foundation has given grants to the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices, National Conference of State Legislatures, United States Conference of Mayors, National Association of Latino Elected Officials Education Fund, and National Association of State Boards of Education. They’ve also funded associations of high nonelected officials, such as the Council of Chief State School Officers (see gatesfoundation.org).
I think I have provided enough - from Barkan and elsewhere - to demonstrate the first of my assertions - that the Billionaire Boys Club is running education.
Perhaps you might want to argue with the second - ruining education? Yet I have pointed you at the concerns about the reliance on testing raised by National Research Council’s Board on Testing and Assessment. The chair of that Board, Ed Haertel, was later one of the signatories to a Policy Brief (about which I wrote here) that heavily criticized use of student test scores to evaluate teachers, even through so-called value-added assessment. Yet that is a keystone of the approach of the Billionaire Boys Club, it has been included as a key element of state applications for Race to the Top Funds even though that required some states to change laws with no guarantee they would receive any funds - after two rounds some states which made such changes still have not. Barkan provided - and I quoted - from the assessment of Renaissance 2010 in Chicago (itself the base for much of what Duncan is trying to do to national educational policy) by the conservative Chicago Tribume
There is one truly telling paragraph in Barkan's piece, about when Gates decided to move away from the emphasis on small schools to what we are seeing now not only in foundation funding but also national educational policy. Consider this:
In November 2008, Bill and Melinda gathered about one hundred prominent figures in education at their home outside Seattle to announce that the small schools project hadn’t produced strong results. They didn’t mention that, instead, it had produced many gut-wrenching sagas of school disruption, conflict, students and teachers jumping ship en masse, and plummeting attendance, test scores, and graduation rates. No matter, the power couple had a new plan: performance-based teacher pay, data collection, national standards and tests, and school "turnaround" (the term of art for firing the staff of a low-performing school and hiring a new one, replacing the school with a charter, or shutting down the school and sending the kids elsewhere).
Having spent billions of his own money on an initiative lacking research demonstrating its effectiveness, Gates - and his fellow members of the Billionaire Boys Club - have pivoted to another set of initiatives also lacking research demonstrating their effectiveness. Only this times the billions that will be spent are ours, yours and mine and everyone else's. It is tax dollars, federal, state and local, being committed to a course of educational action that has no evidence it will work and in several cases - the turnaround model implementation in Chicago under Duncan, for example - clearly been shown NOT to work.
Public schools are an important part of American democracy. Damage them and you damage the democracy. Diane Ravitch and others have strongly argued that what we are doing with public schools removes them from democratic control, makes them instruments of those who do not truly value democracy.
I have no doubt of the threat to public education - and as a result to our liberal democracy - of the efforts of the Billionaire Boys Club. I know this posting is long. It had to be.
Let me make it just a little bit longer by closing with the final two paragraphs of Barkan's piece. Consider them carefully, for the future of the nation is, in my opinion, very much hanging in the balance:
Can anything stop the foundation enablers? After five or ten more years, the mess they’re making in public schooling might be so undeniable that they’ll say, "Oops, that didn’t work" and step aside. But the damage might be irreparable: thousands of closed schools, worse conditions in those left open, an extreme degree of "teaching to the test," demoralized teachers, rampant corruption by private management companies, thousands of failed charter schools, and more low-income kids without a good education. Who could possibly clean up the mess?
All children should have access to a good public school. And public schools should be run by officials who answer to the voters. Gates, Broad, and Walton answer to no one. Tax payers still fund more than 99 percent of the cost of K–12 education. Private foundations should not be setting public policy for them. Private money should not be producing what amounts to false advertising for a faulty product. The imperious overreaching of the Big Three undermines democracy just as surely as it damages public education.
Peace?????
