Slick Broad Foundation Roped in Andy Stern -Scoop From Ravitch

The Broad Foundation. One of those philanthropy foundations that are determining education policy, instead of people determining public education policy.

Eli Broad and his billionaires buddies Bill Gates and the Waltons can be very good with coloring education deform policies with "liberal" or "civil rights" language.

So it is no surprise that Broad's foundation chose blue dog Democratic congressman Harold Ford (TN) or Andy Stern, former president of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), to shore up the liberal credentials.

But WHY did Andy Stern have to join the Broad Foundation, an organization so antithetical to education workers' interests? He could have turned it down. By signing up he gives the impression that organized labor is fine with collaborating with a foundation that drives the education deform or stand-on-children abuse of school policy, teachers and children.

We're not surprised by Joel Klein, Jean Claude Brizard, Michelle Rhee, Margaret Spellings, Wendy Kopp and Mortimer Zuckerman.

But why couldn't Stern practice some labor solidarity and keep more than a 10 foot pole's distance from the noxious company of the Broad Foundation?

Read more about the unhappy details at "Does the Public Have a Right to Know about Broad Academy?" by Diane Ravitz:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Inquiring minds want to know.

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

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

Officers:

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

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

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

Members:

Richard Barth
Chief Executive Officer, KIPP Foundation

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

Jean-Claude Brizard
Chief Executive Officer, Chicago Public Schools

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

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

Wendy Kopp
Chief Executive Officer and Founder, Teach For America

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

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

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

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

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

Kenneth Zeff
Chief Operating Officer, Green Dot Public Schools

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

Click over to the Ravitch story for the 23 comments.

60 Minutes runs piece on Megalomaniac Philanthopist Eli Broad

Local journalist Christopher Knight calls him Eli "Strings Attached" Broad (pronounced as in "road").

As in an earlier post last week dealing with his Broad Foundation's education philanthropy, "No. Denver News: Parents fight back vs. Eli Broad Foundation's wreckage of education,"
real estate mogul Broad gives, with manipulative strings attached, in medicine, education and the arts.
Mysteriously, the 60 Minutes segment just grazed over the topic of education.

Viewer discretion advised: Prince Michael (Bloomberg) speaks glowingly of his methods.

The link: http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=7363440n.

No. Denver News: Parents fight back vs. Eli Broad Foundation's wreckage of education

The Broad Foundation, the education policy play-thing of billionaire philanthropist / public policy meddler Eli Broad, is influencing education policy nation-wide.
Cities across the country are feeling the chaotic effects of his Foundation's training of superintendents.

Now, parents are fighting back against his manipulation of education, against his free-of-accountability policy influence.
Read this Scribd pdf from North Denver News.
Parents group hits back at billionaire Broad's influence on education
Contributed by Staff
Wednesday, 20 April 2011

A national parent group is attacking the influence of LA billionaire Eli Broad's influence on public education, a reach that extends into Denver with the controversial non-educator Superintendent of Denver Public Schools, Tom Boasberg.
Parents Across America have published this parent's guide to the influence of the Broad Foundation:

The question I ask is why should Eli Broad and Bill Gates have more of a say as to what goes on in my child’s classroom than I do? – Sue Peters, Seattle parent

In recent months, three prominent school district superintendents have resigned, after allegations of mismanagement, autocratic leadership styles, and/or the pursuit of unpopular policies. All three were trained by the Broad Superintendents
Academy: Maria Goodloe-Johnson (class of 2003) of the Seattle school district, LaVonne Sheffield (class of 2002) of the Rockford, Illinois school district, and Jean-Claude Brizard (class of 2008) of the Rochester New York school district.
Brizard resigned to take the job as CEO of Chicago schools, but his superintendency in Rochester had been mired in controversy. Another Broad-trained Superintendent recently announced his resignation: Tom Brady (class of 2004) of Providence, Rhode Island.

Three more Broad-trainees have been recently placed in new positions of authority: John Deasy (class of 2006), as Superintendent of the Los Angeles United School District, John White (class of 2010), Superintendent of the Recovery School District in New Orleans, and Chris Cerf (class of 2004), New Jersey’s Acting Education Commissioner. Tom Boasberg was appointed Denver’s Superintendent in January 2009, shortly after taking an “Intensive” training at the Broad Academy. (See map . . . from the Broad website, showing where until recently their trainees served.) (Actually, notice how the cartographer placed Cincinnati in Indiana --maybe he or she thought that geography was too teacher-centered.)

This summary is designed to help parents and other concerned citizens better understand the Broad Foundation’s role in training new superintendents and other “reform” activities, and how the foundation leverages its wealth to impose a top-down, corporate-style business model on our public schools. It is time for communities to become aware of how this major force works.

What is the Broad Foundation?

The Edythe and Eli Broad Foundation engages in venture philanthropy in four areas: education, medical research, contemporary art, and civic projects in Los Angeles. The foundation was established in 1999 by billionaire Eli Broad (b. 1933) who made his fortune in real estate and the insurance business.
. . . .

How the Broad Foundation affects public school families

Broad and his foundation believe that public schools should be run like a business. One of the tenets of his philosophy is to produce system change by “investing in a disruptive force.” Continual reorganizations, firings of staff, and experimentation to create chaos or “churn” is believed to be productive and beneficial, as it weakens the ability of communities to resist change.

As Jack Welch, former CEO of General Electric, a proponent of this philosophy has said,“…we can afford to make lots more mistakes and in fact we have to throw more things at the wall. The big companies that get into trouble are those that try to manage their size instead of experimenting with it.”

A hallmark of the Broad-style leadership is closing existing schools rather than attempting to improve them, increasing class size, opening charter schools, imposing high-stakes test-based accountability systems on teachers and students,
and implementing of pay for performance schemes. The brusque and often punitive management style of Broad-trained leaders has frequently alienated parents and teachers and sparked protests. . . .

(Read more at the North Denver News site: http://northdenvernews.com/index2.php?option=com_content&do_pdf=1&id=2270)