This year, Chicago Public Schools CEO Jean-Claude Brizard helped Chicago teachers accomplish the impossible.
Under
a new Illinois law, the Chicago Teachers Union has to get a 75 percent
vote of its entire membership (not just those voting) to call a legal
strike. With such a high barrier, "the unions cannot strike in Chicago,"
boasted Stand for Children CEO Jonah Edelman, who pushed for the rule
with the help of millions of dollars from the Illinois business elite.
But
in June, after a year of Brizard and his boss, Mayor Rahm Emanuel, 90
percent of Chicago teachers voted to authorize a strike. The summer
ended with no contract and the teachers struck a week after Labor Day.
It's
been a tough year for Chicago teachers, but that's not a surprise,
considering that Brizzard trained at the Broad Foundation
Superintendents Academy, the most prominent and most controversial
training institute for school chiefs.
The Academy is the flagship
program of the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, the smallest of a
triumvirate of corporate foundations that are at the heart of the
billionaire campaign to remake public education in the image of
corporate America. The Gates Foundation, spending close to half a
billion dollars a year on education, is No. 1. The Walton Family
Foundation, started by the owners of Walmart, spends about a third as
much. Broad's education spending is much smaller—$26 million in 2009,
according to the
New York Times.
But Broad gets a big
bang for his bucks with his strategy for catapulting graduates of his
superintendents' program into the driver's seats of major urban
districts. The Academy says 30 of its alumni are now running big city
school systems, including Los Angeles, Dallas, and Denver, besides
Chicago. Philadelphia has just hired one. In Louisiana, Maryland, New
Jersey, and Rhode Island, Broad-trained superintendents have become
state education chiefs. In 2011, Broad alumni filled 48 percent of all
large urban superintendent openings, according to the Academy website.
But many Broad grads have compiled records that are not much to brag
about.
- In Oakland, three Broad-trained superintendents in a row left the schools in chaos and saddled with a gigantic deficit.
- In Seattle, Broad alumna Maria Goodloe-Johnson's four-year tenure was marked by fake statistics, disruption, and corruption.
- At least five Broad superintendents have earned no-confidence votes from their teachers.
When Dallas hired a Broad Academy grad last spring, Jim Schutze of the Dallas
Observer researched the Academy's track record and predicted: "There will be blood."
Many
Broad superintendents have fought pitched battles with teachers and
community organizations when they moved to close schools with low
student test scores and to open new charter schools—sometimes in the
same buildings, but usually not with the same students. Rating and
paying teachers based on student test scores are also high on Broad
alumni agendas.
These policies are not unique to Broad. They've
been promoted nation-wide by both the Bush and Obama administrations. In
fact, Broad is close to Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. "With the
election of President Barack Obama and his appointment of Arne Duncan . .
. the stars have finally aligned," the Broad Foundation wrote in its
2009-10 annual report, explaining that the Obama-Dun.can agenda "echoes"
Broad's.
But Broad superintendents tend to push that agenda more
aggressively than other school chiefs. They often seem to be spoiling
for a fight.
Some public school activists who go up against Broad
superintendents come away thinking these superintendents actually
welcome disruption because their real goal is to destroy urban school
systems, turning public education into a competitive marketplace.
"They
like to close schools and create churn," says Seattle parent activist
and Broad expert Sue Peters. "Sometimes the upshot is to make parents
more vulnerable to the charter people. Parents say, "Enough already, we
don't want all this churn. Give us anything but this.'"
Whether or
not privatization is the whole point, it's certainly a central feature
of the Broad program for big city schools. And privatization is hard to
reverse. Even if a Broad superintendent is finally chased out of town,
closed neighborhood schools stay closed and new charter schools
generally stay open.
In big cities with collective bargaining
laws, switching to charter schools is the surest way to weaken unions
and undermine teacher autonomy and power. The National Alliance for
Public Charter Schools boasts that their "market share" in big cities is
rapidly growing. They say six cities already have at least 30 percent
of their students in charter schools.
Erica Lepping, Broad
Foundation communications director, denies that Broad favors charter
over district schools, but her boss is not so shy. "Charter schools have
the competitive edge," he wrote in a
Los Angeles Times op-ed
piece. And although he claims he's not against unions, he says one of
the big advantages of charters is that "principals are empowered to
decide whom to hire, whom to fire."
A Tiny Cadre
Broad
launched the Superintendents Academy in 2002. Since then, the Academy
has trained a select group—about eight to 25 per year—in six intensive,
four-day sessions spread over 10 months. Altogether, through 2011, there
were 144 Broad Academy grads.
About half of the participants come
from the world of education, the other half from business and the
military. You don't need to know how to teach children, Broad believes,
to lead a big city school system.
Fifty-one percent of Academy
grads are people of color; 43 percent are women. When a superintendent
starts closing schools in communities of color, it helps to be a person
of color or a woman. It can stymie and divide the opposition.
Lepping
insists that the Academy is all about improving management, not
fighting unions. And when Broad started it 10 years ago, he invited
union leaders to come speak to the students. One of the lecturers was
Adam Urbanski, president of the Rochester Teachers Association. Urbanski
is the founder and director of the Teachers Union Reform Network, a
group of locals whose goal is, in his words, "to make [unions] stronger
partners for improving public schools, and redefine who the client is:
not just our members, but students." He adds, "Teachers will do well
only if students do well. No community should tolerate dysfunctional
schools."
Urbanski agreed to teach Broad's aspiring school leaders how collaborating with unions can make for better schools.
But
he grew increasingly disenchanted with Broad's corporate ideas, which
Urbanski summarizes as "The boss is in charge and the rest should be
obedient. Leadership means you have to be strong rather than making
others strong. Competition is always good. Anything that can't be
measured shouldn't be valued. The ends justify the means."
Finally, Urbanski refused to continue.
In
2007, his last year at the Academy, Urbanski met Jean-Claude Brizard,
who was then a New York City school administrator. Urbanski was
impressed and told Brizard about a superintendent opening in Rochester.
"Noise" in Rochester
Brizard got the job and Urbanski says he started well.
"He
was promising respect for teachers and collaboration with the union,"
says Urbanski. "He asked us to design focus groups of teachers to advise
him. But then he started using them to circumvent the union."
Brizard claimed that there was no space to reduce class size, but then he offered free space to charter schools.
He dissolved an elected parents' organization and substituted parents handpicked by school principals.
"When
teachers expressed opposition to merit pay, that was "noise.' When
parents opposed closing schools, he called that "noise,'" says Urbanski.
The
conflict heated up. Brizard said his problem was with the union, not
with teachers. The union put that to a test, organizing a no-confidence
vote by secret ballot. With a turnout of more than 80 percent, the vote
went against Brizard by 95 percent.
"Buy-in" in Chicago
The
no-confidence vote from Rochester teachers didn't stall Brizard's
career. Rahm Emanuel, the newly elected mayor of Chicago, fresh off his
gig as Barack Obama's chief of staff, promptly hired him to run the
country's third biggest school system.
In Chicago, the mayor
currently picks the school board. At their first meeting, which was also
Brizard's first meeting, Emanuel's board rescinded a previously
bargained 4 percent raise for teachers. The board said they needed to
plug a hole in their budget. But the next week, with more than 1,000
teachers protesting outside, the board set salaries for five new top
administrators far above those of the administrators they replaced.
Brizard got $20,000 more than his predecessor.
In February,
Brizard announced plans to close six schools, subject 10 more to
disruptive "turnaround," and open 12 new charter schools. The Chicago
Teachers Union, together with the Kenwood Oakland Community Organization
and Occupy Chicago, immediately organized angry demonstrations.
"We
were never consulted," said CTU President Karen Lewis. "He needs to
listen to the community and to the people who do the work." She said
Brizard and his team "don't want collaboration. They want "buy-in.'"
In
March, Brizard spoke out for vouchers, saying public dollars should
follow students when their parents put them in private schools.
And
in May, he announced he was applying for a Gates Foundation grant to
open 60 more charter schools, which would bring the total to one quarter
of Chicago schools.
Meanwhile, in contract bargaining, Brizard's
negotiators demanded that Chicago teachers work 20 percent longer for 2
percent raises.
That was the background for Chicago's "impossible" strike vote.
A "Frankenstein Monster" in Oakland
Oakland,
California, is probably the only city to have suffered through three
Broad chief executives in a row. California State Superintendent of
Public Instruction Jack O'Connell (to whose election campaign Broad had
contributed $100,000) installed one after the other from 2003 to 2009,
after he seized control from the elected school board. Oakland was
vulnerable to takeover because of a budget gap that was estimated at
somewhere from $35 to nearly $100 million—they didn't even know how big
it was.
But once in charge, the
Oakland Tribune reported,
"the state administration appeared to be more focused on redesigning
schools and overhauling central office services than on stabilizing the
district's finances."
To Sharon Higgins, who was a middle school
parent coordinator at the time, the deficit was just an excuse. "They
gave our district to the Broad people to try out their ideas," she said.
"Their reason for coming here was to alter the district, not to heal
the problem that put us in state takeover to start with."
Much more visible were Ward's
moves to close low-scoring schools and hand out new charters. "We really
took accountability seriously," he told a pro-charter writer. "We set
up a free market."
Ward left for San Diego after three tumultuous years and was replaced by two more Broad chiefs who continued in his path.
Higgins got angrier and angrier. After four years, she spoke out publicly in a letter to the
Oakland Tribune,
charging that students were being subjected to "a constant turnover of
people, positions, and programs . . . with no end in sight." The schools
were now "controlled by outsiders with no sincere allegiance to the
well-being of our city." The state, she wrote, "has produced its very
own Frankenstein monster." Her bosses asked her to resign, and she did.
Then
she started digging deeper into Broad, tracking the adventures of Broad
alumni all over the country and posting her findings in
an excellent blog.
When
the state finally gave Oakland its schools back in 2009, the deficit
was estimated at $89 million, probably bigger than ever.
Shuffling Students in Seattle
When
the Seattle school board hired Broad-trained Maria Goodloe-Johnson as
superintendent in the spring of 2007, Sue Peters hardly noticed. She was
a young mother not involved in politics. But she paid attention in
November 2008, when her 4th-grade son brought home a note saying the
district wanted to close his school.
"That's what made an activist
of me," says Peters. "[Goodloe-Johnson] wanted to evict all the kids
from my son's school, put half in one building, and half in another.
There was a special education program in the school and those kids were
going to be left high and dry."
One of those fighting the closures
alongside Peters was Jesse Hagopian, a 7th-grade social studies
teacher. "[The superintendent] had a business mentality," says Hagopian.
"Our students are not widgets that can be moved from one neighborhood
to another." On a Seattle radio show, Hagopian argued that "closing
these school buildings is more than just terminating a brick-and-mortar
edifice. You're really hanging a "Closed' sign on the hopes and
aspirations of a community."
Goodloe-Johnson, on the same radio
program, said a budget crunch forced her to close schools. But, she
added, "if we weren't in a budget crisis, we still would have excess
capacity and we would not be financially efficient, and we would need to
close schools."
Sue Peters and her allies eventually saved her
son's school, but half the students were sent away and replaced by
students from another school. Most of Goodloe-Johnson's other closures
went through.
Goodloe-Johnson defended her disruptive policies by
arguing that the school system was failing its students and needed
drastic change. She and other school leaders used a dramatic statistic
to make their point: Just 17 percent of Seattle's high school graduates
met the entrance requirements of four-year colleges.
That figure was widely accepted for two years until the
Seattle Times
reported it was simply false. The true number was 63 percent. It turned
out that 17 was the percentage of graduates who took four years of
math, three years of science, and maintained a B average—which are not
required for college admission.
Goodloe-Johnson did more than
close schools, shuffle students, and pro.mote fake numbers. She also
boosted testing, and she pushed to tie teacher evaluations to student
test scores—a high-priority "reform" for Broad (and Bush and Obama)
which, like charter schools and closing low-scoring schools, has no
research to support it.
Standardized testing is the engine of
corporate reform and test scores drive almost all of the policies Broad
promotes. From the district's central office, Broad-trained managers
can't watch the human interactions of teachers and students inside every
school to see whether teachers or school leaders are effective. If
command and control is to be concentrated at the top, the easiest
measure of success is sets of numbers.
The next step after using
student scores to rate teachers is to pay teachers according to those
scores—"merit pay"—and that, too, is high on the Broad agenda. Merit pay
has been carefully studied in two large, controlled experiments, in New
York City and Nashville, Tennessee. Both found no benefit, not even in
test scores.
The New York program was funded by the Broad
Foundation. So—is it time for this "data-driven" foundation to say, "We
were wrong"? Lepping laughed at that suggestion. No, she said, the New
York program's bonuses were too small, and they were schoolwide—they
weren't limited to the specific teachers whose students' scores went up.
The
Nashville bonuses were as big as $15,000 and they went only to teachers
whose scores rose, but Lepping is still not convinced. We need to keep
looking for a merit pay system that does work, she said. "Really, the
consideration should be, is it something that teachers want, that would
help keep great teachers in the systems," she added.
By that
measure, merit pay is a bust. There aren't many teachers clamoring to be
paid or evaluated according to their students' scores.
In
Seattle, teachers fought back and Goodloe-Johnson compromised: Student
scores would not count directly in evaluations, but if students don't
raise their scores fast enough, the principal is supposed to observe
their teacher more frequently.
Seattle teachers accepted that in
their contract, but they were so fed up with their superintendent that
they voted no confidence in her at the same meeting.
Closing
schools in low-income neighborhoods, exaggerating students' academic
shortcomings, trying to punish teachers for low scores—Seattle parents
and teachers were up in arms, but Goodloe-Johnson managed to ride out
every storm.
Then the state auditor's office discovered
long-standing corruption in a school department program intended to help
small businesses compete for school contracts. Goodloe-Johnson had been
warned about what was happening more than a year earlier, but she
didn't stop it. That was the final straw and the school board ushered
her out.
She is now deputy chancellor of Michigan's Education
Achievement System, which is supposed to improve the lowest-scoring 5
percent of Michigan schools, starting in Detroit. She was chosen for
that job by another Broad alum, Chancellor John Covington. Covington was
hired after he ran the Broad steamroller through Kansas City, Missouri,
closing half that district's schools and "reassigning" half its
employees.
Unstoppable?
In Oakland and
Seattle, years of organizing by parents and teachers did eventually end
with the Broad superintendents leaving town. In Chicago, the fight goes
on.
Although Mayor Emanuel and CEO Brizard keep saying they are fighting for the children, most Chicagoans aren't buying it. A
Chicago Tribune
poll in May found that 40 percent of Chicagoans supported the union, 17
percent were with the mayor, the rest were undecided or supported
neither; 86 percent thought teachers should be paid for working longer.
How
did the union get the community on its side? By fighting on the
community's side. In 2008, a small group of teachers formed the Caucus
of Rank and File Educators (CORE) in response to then-CEO Arne Duncan's
program of closing and privatizing schools.
CORE members were
angry that their union was not fighting the closures, so they started
doing it themselves, speaking out at hearings and joining with
neighborhood organizations trying to keep their schools open. Together,
they saved some schools.
After two years of action, CORE had grown
from about 10 people to more than 400 and swept an election for
leadership of the CTU (See "A Cauldron of Opposition in Duncan's
Hometown," Fall 2010).
The arrogance of the Emanuel-Brizard
leadership helped solidify the opposition. According to CTU President
Karen Lewis, Emanuel told her soon after he was elected that, in her
words, "25 percent of the students in this city are never going to
amount to anything and he was never going to throw money at them."
Emanuel
insists he never said that, but his policies—starving neighborhood
schools while expanding charter and selective public schools—speak
louder than his denials.
"I work in a poor neighborhood, and the
schools in the poor neighborhoods just get nothing," special education
teacher and CTU leader Cielo Munoz told a radio news reporter. "When I
started there, we used to have two music teachers. They've taken all of
that."
When Emanuel and Brizard decided to extend the school day
and year without extra pay, they overreached. A neutral fact finder
blasted the school board and recommended big raises.
A week later,
Emanuel and Brizard gave up their demand for more teaching hours and
agreed to hire back nearly 500 laid-off teachers to cover longer days.
But progress stalled and the teachers struck over a range of issues,
including teacher evaluation and recall rights for laid-off teachers.
Teachers kept student education front and center. "When you make me cram
30–50 kids in my classroom with no air conditioning . . . take 18–25
days out of the school year for high-stakes testing . . . close and
turnaround schools . . . that hurts kids," wrote social studies teacher
Xian Barrett in an open letter to Brizard. "I am willing to sacrifice an
awful lot to protect [my] students."
Parents and students joined
the teachers' picket lines. A new poll found that most Chicagoans—and
two-thirds of public school parents—supported the strike.
The confrontation drew national and international attention. As
Rethinking Schools
went to press, the outcome was still uncertain. But, like teachers in
Seattle and Oakland, Chicago teachers are showing that the best response
to corporate attackers is not to retreat. It's to make common cause
with communities in the fight for better schools.
Kids can be motivated to change the world and many are doing so one at a time. Craig Kielburger started as a seventh grader many years ago and in a 60 Minutes piece, he explains how his organization "Children Helping Children" is accomplishing that. As a volunteer teacher for People to People, I have witnessed first hand what projects can do when students harvest ideas, partner with other like minded people and the will to carry out the projects. 
