Edumacation Archive

Like a sinister villain in a pulp novel, Eli Broad is the unseen hand behind the destruction of many urban school districts

[Continued from Part 3]

On April 2, 2009 Rhode Island hired Deborah Gist to be their Education Commissioner.   Gist was hired from Washington DC where she worked with Michelle Rhee in a similar capacity.   Another thing that Gist and Rhee have in common is a connection to Eli Broad.  In 2007, Gist was accepted into the infamous  national educational leadership program run by the Los Angeles-based Broad Center.  Where public education goes, Eli Broad has his tentacles reaching into dozens of school districts across the country wreaking havoc along the way.  He is the unseen hand behind the most destructive forms of school reform being perpetuated on the children, parents, and teachers of this country.

I am a supporter of President Obama.  I voted for him, I worked for him, and I contributed to his campaign, but I have always known his education policies would be a neo-liberal recipe that people like Newt Gingrich could campaign for, but that true progressives would be unhappy with.  His Race to the Top plan has encouraged states to do destructive things that will have long ranging and detrimental effects on the future of education in this country for years to come.   It is being administered by Joanne Weiss who is another disciple of Eli Broad.  Rhode Island’s approach to Race to the Trough was to mandate one of four possible remedies for schools with low test scores:

• Remove the principal and change curriculum
• Close down the school
• Do a turnaround plan where the teachers are all replaced
• Bring in a charter school to take over the school building

What’s sad is that absolutely none of these four strategies work.  There is conclusive evidence that the turnaround model does not improve student achievement that was released by the University of Chicago this Fall.  Charter schools score lower than their public school counterparts despite cherry picking top students.  When those schools are forced to administer a school in an urban setting without getting rid of the students, you get a disaster like the Green Dot schools in Los Angeles.

Central Falls High School teachers negotiated their contract using collective bargaining.  It was supposed to last from September 1, 2008 to August 31, 2011 when a new contract would be negotiated.  It was in this environment that Superintendent Frances Gallo made her demands of the Central Falls teachers:

• Adding 25 minutes to the school day (unpaid)
• Eating lunch with the students once a week (This  is lunchroom supervision.  Policing a couple hundred high school students eating lunch is actually a difficult job)
• Having a formalized before and after school tutoring schedule (According to the students, the teachers are already doing this.)
• Attending weekly after school data management meetings with other teachers for 90 minutes(unpaid unless Gallo can “find” some money)
• Two weeks of training in the summer (Paid at $30 per hour)
• A new evaluation procedure, which would be more rigorous, but which was unspecified.
• An unwritten 7th demand is that Gallo wanted to be able to fire 1/5 of the teachers, “If I could change 20 percent of the teacher population, I believed I could make a significant change in the culture of the high school.”

The union not surprisingly did not concede to these demands.  There was a time when a contract was worth something and the union didn’t particularly care for the idea of being forced to roll over for non-negotiated demands imposed on them by a superintendent that they already distrusted.   Gallo continued to issue demands and ultimatums and the union held firm.  The result is that they were all given pink slips.

This can happen at any school district in this country and in fact does.  A new breed of administrators are coming to the schools with little or no education background and teachers lose their jobs.  Education policy is being written that hinders rather than helps education by state legislators who haven’t been in a classroom in 30 years.  Some people will take comfort in seeing a union crushed.  However, it is ultimately the kids who suffer.   I have no doubt that Central Falls will be able to replace these teachers with new young teachers who are enthusiastic and work for less money.   However, they won’t have the trust of the kids, they won’t have experienced mentors who know the community to aid them, and they won’t have an administration that values what they do.  A judgment is being made at Central Falls, but it is not on a union that wouldn’t budge, it is on a system that disregards the life’s work of so many people and the education of the children that they have sworn to educate.

This entry was posted on February 21, 2010 at 10:19 pm and is filed under Eli Broad, Teacher Tenure, Teachers Unions. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments.

Tags: Central Falls, Deborah Gist, Eli Broad, Rhode Island, Teachers Unions