Eli Broad Obit: Billionaires Don't Know Everything

Yesterday noted L.A. philanthropist, insurance mogul, and developer Eli Broad, 87, reportedly died after being ill for quite some time.   Born in the Bronx in 1933, he didn't hang around there forever and instead fell in love with the West Coast, especially L.A.  He made billions of dollars in various ventures, and then he wanted to give back to the community who made his obscene wealth possible.  He was noted for his considerable efforts for establishing institutions for the arts.  He was like the late billionaire David Koch who was popular for his arts philanthropy in New York City, but unlike Koch, he wasn't off-his-rocker crazy politically.  He was a Democrat.

The big problem with Broad was the same as with so many of these extremely rich people.  He thought that because he went to school, he knew all there was to know about education, and because he made money in the business world and achieved material "success," he arrogantly thought schools needed "competition" via the failed charter schools model plus school administrators should run schools like businesses.  It wasn't important that superintendents first and foremost should be educators who know something about the field, but MBAs were ideal people for "leadership positions" in education.  Broad and his wife Edythe set up some foundations that sought to create a lot of trouble in public ed, including something formerly called The Broad Superintendents Academy.   As this blog, which hasn't been updated in many years, noted, it was and is an unmitigated failure.  Back a decade or so ago, it didn't matter the Academy was built on the faulty notion schools were businesses and should be run like businesses, for Broad and his Academy had the support of then-President Barack Obama and his idiotic Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan.  The Academy was especially damaging to urban school districts, which had been infested with these "graduates."  There were lots of scandals connected with "graduates" from this "academy."  The Academy was much like the equally disastrous Teach for America outfit.  Just put people out there in education or in educational leadership in these jobs because, after all, teaching is such an "easy job" populated by idiot education graduates who  have terrible SAT scores--a true measure of "intelligence" to these people--and jettison the all-important theory and methods courses, tools you NEED to be able to survive in the classroom.  No, just throw people with no experience in the classroom and no preparation as teachers and have them take classes to become certified while at the same time working alongside people who actually did the work of preparing to be teachers before being in the classroom.  It was disgusting because of the hateful attitude of these operators of the Academy and TFA toward the teaching profession.  Both have been failures.

Not a good legacy to leave, Eli, shitting all over the institution of public education just because you thought you knew it all.

Everything Eli Broad Touches Turns to Shit

This is another case of somebody with way too much money and too little brains to have any business affecting public policy. This is especially true with his education "reform" crackpottery.

Our tax laws need to be drastically overhauled, and these crooks be forced to pay way more taxes than they are paying now.

Every single person who is Broad-trained has turned out to be a mediocrity at best, a disaster at worst. Most are the latter.

Etc.

A custody fight is brewing over who will get Patrick, the horribly abused pit bull who has been nursed back to health.
_____

Guess who really is calling the shots at the Charlotte-Mecklenburg School District?

The Broad Foundation, of course.

The picture of ol' Eli DOES make him look like a vulture philanthropist.

Controversy over Broad, Gates and other high-powered education donors raises a chicken-and-egg question: Is the lure of big bucks driving public-policy decisions, such as CMS' pursuit of performance pay? Or are the philanthropists following the best thinking on reform, including ideas from local leaders?

Gorman insists there's no "Broad blueprint." He says he'd be working toward performance pay without grants, but he acknowledges that outside money has kept the project powering ahead through the recession.

The federal government and the Gates Foundation are the big spenders on CMS performance pay, according to a CMS tally. Broad's money is going toward "performance management," a data-focused project that includes performance pay and test development.

Broad's pervasive ties to educational leaders - from CMS to U.S. Education Secretary and former Chicago superintendent Arne Duncan - raise questions among skeptics.

Neal Thornburg, who calls himself a concerned Mecklenburg taxpayer, said he started delving into Broad's connections to CMS and other education groups, such as Teach For America, and found it "kind of frightening."

He wonders what kind of favors are being traded, and whether "a core of administrators with so much invested in Broad's educational philosophy" can objectively report results.

These "reformers" have been a collective disaster:

Has this big money made the big impact that they—as well as teachers, administrators, parents, and students—hoped for? In the first-of-its-kind analysis of the billionaires’ efforts, NEWSWEEK and the Center for Public Integrity crunched the numbers on graduation rates and test scores in 10 major urban districts—from New York City to Oakland—which got windfalls from these four top philanthropists.

The results, though mixed, are dispiriting proof that money alone can’t repair the desperate state of urban education. For all the millions spent on reforms, nine of the 10 school districts studied substantially trailed their state’s proficiency and graduation rates—often by 10 points or more. That’s not to say that the urban districts didn’t make gains.

The good news is many did improve and at a rate faster than their states 60 percent of the time—proof that the billionaires made some solid bets. But those spikes up weren’t enough to erase the deep gulf between poor, inner-city schools, where the big givers focused, and their suburban and rural counterparts.

That's because poverty is at the bottom of it. And thanks to these billionaires and other filthy rich getting more and more handouts courtesy of the average American taxpayer, the economic situation overall is getting worse.

Etc.

It's the poverty, stupid, when it comes to education.

Poverty and transience especially are vastly more important indicators of whether a child does well in school than anything going on in an individual school.
_____

If we need to generate "good jobs," it is important to define what a "good job" is.

We all know it, of course, and those "good jobs" were there largely because of unions or the possibility of unionization.
_____

Could Detroit be Eli Broad and the Broad Foundation's Waterloo?

And no, I didn't bother to watch the 60 Minutes puff piece on ol' Eli, either.

It's No Surprise At All

school districts in southern states, already impoverished like Detroit, are targets of Eli Broad's corrupt largesse.

The Education Wars: The Cancer of Eli Broad "Education Reform"

It is also infecting so-called parent groups. Naturally, it is another anti-public school propaganda effort:

Originally conceived in Los Angeles by Steve Barr’s (of Green Dot) Los Angeles Parents Union, and largely funded by the Broad Foundation, the "Parent Trigger" has spread east, and here and here. This is an initiative where if enough parents can be convinced, pressured, and tricked to sign a petition, a school will be closed down and replaced with a charter. On each Form 990 from 2005 to 2008, Steve Barr is listed as the CEO/President of the LAPU board.

Eli Broad contributed nearly 50% of the funding for the launch of the LAPU (formerly the Small Schools Alliance, aka the Parent Revolution). The money he supplied helped pay for the propaganda to make it seem like the movement is being generated by "the people," when in fact it is a carefully planned, targeted marketing campaign designed to wipe out the public schools.
The most important thing to know is that this organization is not grassroots; it's astroturf!

An absolute lie is being spread that it was "developed by the grass-roots group Parent Revolution in the Los Angeles Unified School District.’ The lie is that group was not a grassroots group by any means. Danny Weil explains its true astroturf nature. Community members in LA have even stated that they were offered monetary compensation [by Green Dot] in exchange for their signature on a petition. But when a potential buyer for the LA Times is Eli Broad, who would there be to investigate?

Broad-supported State Senator Gloria Romero, in the running as State Superintendent of Public Instruction, has been the main pusher at the California state government level.

The Education Wars: Eli Broad's Bullshit

More bribery money to get states to lengthen the school year, so that teachers work like 9-5 drones, 12 months a year, with no time off, which of course has nothing to do with the reality of teaching:

The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation has awarded $1.5 million to the National Center on Time & Learning to ensure that 1 million American public school students within the next 10 years have access to high-performing public schools that offer internationally competitive academic learning time through longer, modernized school calendars, the foundation and center announced today.

The National Center on Time & Learning (NCTL) is the leading organization helping public schools across the nation expand academic learning time. NCTL works with local, state and national education leaders to ensure that longer school day and year schedules – which research shows is a core strategy widely used by other nations and many successful U.S. public charter schools to raise student achievement and close achievement gaps – are likely to yield student gains.

"We must stop shortchanging our children. American students receive only a fraction of the academic time of many of their international counterparts. As a nation, we cannot afford to allow our children to be at a competitive disadvantage in the 21st century global economy," said Eli Broad, founder of The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, which in 2007 provided more than $1.1 million to NCTL's sister organization, Massachusetts 2020. "We are encouraged that a growing number of states and districts are choosing to modernize their school calendars, thanks to the Obama administration, the late Sen. Edward Kennedy and the founders of NCTL, Jennifer Davis and Chris Gabrieli."

This what clueless bastards these billionaires are. Continue with the discredited and debunked A Nation at Risk nonsense and screw teachers and kids over more.

So will teachers be paid more? I doubt it despite the claims in the article MORE hours would be a boon for teachers, since their unions would bargain for more money.

Duncan believes teachers should work year round like people in private business, totally ignorant of how absolutely labor intensive teaching is, not to mention their workday will be much longer than it is now. This piece was from last April:

During his visit, Duncan said American schools should be open six days a week, at least 11 months a year, to improve student performance.

"Go ahead and boo me," Duncan told about 400 middle and high school students at a public school in northeast Denver. "I fundamentally think that our school day is too short, our school week is too short and our school year is too short."

"You're competing for jobs with kids from India and China. I think schools should be open six, seven days a week; 11, 12 months a year," Duncan said.

There is NO evidence our schools are worse than those in China or India. I laugh because those two countries are at the heart of the low-wage sector worldwide.

Duncan is a fucking idiot.

Unions won't even exist if Central Falls, Rhode Island, becomes the national norm.

The Education Wars II: Eli Broad Blathers Again

about things he knows nothing about. This is from two years ago, but it is still apt:

Few professions in this country strike as deep a chord as teaching. Everyone has a warm memory that they can attribute to a teacher who made an impression on their youth. So it was no surprise that Jason Kamras and Andrew Rotherham held up the responsibility and credit for public education's future to the need to attract the right teachers with the right talents, pay them competitively, and equip them with the necessary tools to do their jobs [ America's Teaching Crisis, Issue #5]. Few people will argue with the importance of having the right people in the teaching profession. When they're successful, they're enormously successful. And when you've got a dud in the classroom, you have pretty much guaranteed that you will handicap about 30 kids for a year.

But Kamras and Rotherham miss a critical point in their argument, and that is the system in which teachers work. To use a business analogy, this would be akin to saying that regardless of the top management at a company and the systems and tools in place in that organization, the line workers are the determining factor in whether the company turns a profit. Are they important to the bottom line? Absolutely. But without the right systems--the leadership at the top and critical systems in place throughout the organization–success is, at best, left to chance. That's why shareholders demand good governance and operational systems from public corporations. When it comes to American public education, every citizen is a shareholder in how successfully schools educate our children–and we must demand more in how our schools are governed and run.

Improving the quality of teaching, as Kamras and Rotherham argue, is important. But how do you ensure that you have the right teacher in the right classroom? How do you give them the tools–like curriculum, benchmark assessments, and pacing guides–that, across the board, will move an entire grade level, school, or school district in the same direction at the same time? How do you measure their success? These are the underlying problems facing American public education. The real issue in today's public schools is the utter failure, at a systemic level, to create high-performing, well-functioning organizations, without which even the best teachers cannot do their best.

What a crock of shit.

The Education Wars

Kenneth Saltman has a piece about the Broads and their attempt to destroy public education in the United States:

In the past decade educational policy and reform has come increasingly under the sway of a new form of philanthropy. Venture philanthropy is modeled on venture capital and the investments in the technology boom of the early 1990’s. VP not only pushes privatization and deregulation, the most significant policy dictates of neoliberalism1 by championing charter schools, voucher schemes, private scholarship tax credits, and corporate models of curriculum, administration, and teacher preparation and practice, but Venture Philanthropy is also consistent with the steady expansion of neoliberal language and rationales in public education, including the increasing centrality of business terms to describe educational reforms and policies: choice, competition, efficiency, accountability,
monopoly, turnaround, and failure. Venture philanthropy in education whose leading
proponents include the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Eli and Edythe Broad
Foundation, and the Walton Family Foundation departs radically from the age of
“scientific” industrial philanthropy characterized by Carnegie, Rockefeller, and Ford. These traditional philanthropies, despite pursuing a largely conservative role of undermining radical social movements, nonetheless framed their projects in terms of the public good and sought to provide individuals with public information through schools,libraries, and museums.

Venture philanthropy treats schooling as a private consumable service and promotes
business remedies, reforms, and assumptions with regard to public schooling. Some of
the most significant projects involve promoting charter schools to inject market
competition and “choice” into the public sector as well as using cash bonuses for teacher pay and to “incentivize” students. VP treats giving to public schooling as a “social investment” that like venture capital, must begin with a business plan, must involve quantitative measurement of efficacy, must be replicable to be “brought to scale”, and ideally will “leverage” public spending in ways compatible with the strategic donor. In the parlance of venture philanthropy grants are referred to as “investments”, donors are called “investors”, impact is renamed “social
return”, evaluation becomes “performance measurement”, grant reviewing turns into
“due diligence”, the grant list is renamed an “investment portfolio,” charter networks are referred to as “franchises” -- to name but some of the recasting of giving on investment.

Within the view of venture philanthropy, donors are framed as both entrepreneurs and
consumers while recipients are represented as investments. One of most significant
aspects of this transformation in educational philanthropy involves the ways that the
public and civic purposes of public schooling are redescribed by venture philanthropy in distinctly private ways. Such a view carries significant implications for a society theoretically dedicated to public democratic ideals. This is no small matter in terms of how the public and civic roles of public schooling have become nearly overtaken by the economistic neoliberal perspective that views public schooling as principally a matter of producing workers and consumers for the economy and for global economic competition.

It's absolutely bad shit, and most people don't even know their public schools are under attack.

The Education Wars

A charter school chain gets a big fat gift.
_____

So what is Eli Broad and his educational "philanthropic" organizations really about?

In brief, they are about destroying public education and turning them into private businesses.
_____

Michigan teachers talk about how horrible the situation is there:

The state of Michigan is on the verge of enacting massive cuts to elementary and secondary public education in the state, forcing administrators and school boards to scramble to avoid bankruptcy.

All told, the state appears set to slash per-pupil funding for schools in the state by nearly $300. Some schools, largely in the suburban areas of Detroit, face substantially higher cuts of as much as $500 per student. Among these are major school districts such as Dearborn, an inner-ring suburb and the headquarters of the Ford Motor Company.

There is some possibility that the size of these cuts could be reduced if Senate Republicans approve a House measure using more federal stimulus dollars to relieve school districts this year. However, that would only defer more cuts until 2011—what some are referring to as “the cliff year.” Commentators predict that cuts for 2011 could go as deep as $600 per student.

The Education Wars II

One of the leading culprits in the destruction of public education in this country is billionaire Eli Broad. He has created all kinds of mischief, and perhaps the worst thing he has done is set up a "superintendent academy" for truly unscrupulous types to run urban school districts as businesses.

A blog has been created to follow this "reformer's" dubious attempts to destroy public schools:

The Broad Report

The Education Wars

If you have the stomach for it, there is a video available of leading privatizers Eli Broad and Michelle Rhee gleefully talking about "reform." Rhee just loves the idea she can break tenure laws and fire teachers after only two years on the job. Teaching is a craft which requires YEARS to hone the skill, but hey, that means having to pay full vesting of retirement and the like.

The "competence" is all about standardized testing scores.

Nobody in his or her fucking mind would go into teaching now that it has been deliberately ruined.
_____

Ohanian and this writer are wrong: Reading IS a skill that has to be formally taught. Ohanian is one of these whole language types, a teaching philosophy which has wrecked havoc on public education and I argue is one of the reasons why schools are in the mess they are in now because it opened the way for all of the "reform" garbage.
_____

The Education Wars

The destruction of the public school system continues unabated, regardless of whether we have a "Democrat" in the White House who buys into think tank propaganda. All kinds of corporate money are being funneled into charter schools, which are private schools financed by the taxpayers:

While charter schools are publicly funded, they often don't have the same access to bonds and other financing available to mainstream public schools. That forces many to operate in places like storefronts or church basements, said Todd Ziebarth, vice president of policy for the alliance.

They're not public schools. They were created as a way to push through privatization.

Friedmanism is alive and well despite the fact it is a fraud and doesn't work in any sector designed for the "common good."


And of course public schools are already infected with this privatization cancer. Superintendents, for example, who used to be educators with a lot of teaching experience, are now being taught MBA-style "management" techniques, i.e., ways to get around tenure and union contracts, not to mention know how to milk the system for their benefit, by attending the Eli Broad Academy and becoming "fellows," like the new WCSD superintendent Heath Morrison.

From the same website is this article from Forbes about six years ago about the academy, which numerous public school superintendents have attended:

Most district superintendents are trained teachers but must run multimillion-dollar budgets, haggle with unions and spend face time with parents, teachers and politicians. Little wonder they now last an average of only four years on the job. In big cities, principals jump from crisis to crisis, devoting little time to academics, National Center on Education & the Economy research has found. "He has the right idea," says U.S. Education Secretary Roderick Paige of Broad, a close ally. "Governance of many schools is such that you turn the steering wheel but the vehicle doesn't turn."

Sensible as Broad's strategy sounds, getting big education to buy in is the real test, as many would-be reformers have discovered. A century ago upper-crust do-gooders replaced corrupt ward bosses with professional school managers. In time the system mutated into a lethargic bureaucracy. Two decades ago a report titled "A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform" created a new sense of crisis, yet little has changed since. "Rich white guys have been doing this [trying to reform education] for a long time," says Jeffrey Mirel, a University of Michigan professor of education and history.

Yep, it's real progress, replacing the corrupt standards of public education with the corrupt practices of corporate America, or the Enronization of public education. In fact, today it is MUCH worse to work in public education than it was twenty or thirty years ago before the privatization mantra took hold. Meanwhile, the kids are screwed over royal.

The Education Wars

The privatizers want to crap on Detroit's schools.

Detroit -- Billionaire philanthropist Eli Broad said today he is committing hundreds of thousands of dollars to help Detroit Public Schools' new financial manager review the district's finances, and promised to continue to support the school system's efforts to transform itself.

Broad, a graduate of Detroit's Central High School, has made minimal donations to Detroit Public Schools through the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation over the years, but nothing compared to the amount he is contributing to the district now.

Oh, brother.
_____

My former school district, or rather its insurance company, has to cough up $400,000 in a harassment suit alleged by a Muslim student:

Jana Elhifny, an American-Egyptian who openly displayed her Islamic faith and wore a religious headscarf, dropped out of North Valleys High School in 2004. In a federal civil rights lawsuit, she said she was too frightened to attend school and that teachers and administrators did not take steps to stop the harassment.

In a related settlement also announced Wednesday, Stephanie Hart, a non-Muslim who said she was ostracized and forced to leave school when she befriended Elhifny, will receive $50,000. The district also agreed to provide services for her to achieve a General Equivalency Diploma.

Well, if the district and districts all over the country can freely abuse teachers and get away with it, why is it not surprising bullying goes on with students?

The ACLU of Nevada was involved in this case.
_____

You Can Be Sure Robber Barons

in business are robber barons in every other endeavor, including so-called "philanthropy."

Just a Few of Broad and Gates' Lies

about American public schools are exposed here.

A Brilliant Post

over here nails it about the billionaires' nefarious scheme to destroy public education.

Everybody should know what is going on.