Who is Sponsoring that Free Event?

This week I received a newsletter, from a statewide school board association, which included an invitation to attend a November 18, 2020, “post-election event” with an organization called “Leadership for Educational Equity” (LEE) and former U.S. Secretary of Education Dr. John B. King, Jr. There are alot of free virtual events these days. Before attending one, I suggest you look into the host organization. Is this an event produced by advocates for public education or is the event sponsored by by so-called ed reformers, those advocating for the free market privatization of our public schools? Discovering that an event is sponsored by privatizers does not, necessarily, mean you shouldn’t participate – hearing all views can be helpful – but, in such situations, I encourage you to participate with a healthy does of skepticism.

Before registering for any event, I try to investigate the sponsoring organization. This is what I learned when I investigated this LEE event:

First, I searched the web for the sponsoring organization, Leadership for Educational Equity. At educationequity.org, I learned that LEE is a nonprofit leadership development organization “inspiring & supporting a network of civic leaders to end the injustice of educational inequity.” They claim to have a membership composed of “More than 45,000 civic leaders with a deep passion for educational equity.”

When you click on the “Why Leadership” tab, you learn that LEE’s members are actually Teach For America corps members and alumni and that the goal is to train them for leadership roles in communities so they can “serve as a transformative force for students, communities and the broader movement for educational equity.” Big Red Flag here.

Teach For America is a well funded, corporate ed reform initiative based on the premise that low performing inner city schools would perform better if their teachers were smarter. Evolved from an idea proposed in founder Wendy Kopp’s 1989 senior thesis at Princeton, Teach for America (TFA) takes high-performing undergraduates (initially focused on Ivy League grads) without education backgrounds and trains them for five weeks in exchange for a two-year commitment to teach in struggling public schools. The truncated training program focuses less on pedagogy and more on classroom discipline and preparing students to perform on standardized assessments. TFA embraces data driven education and test based accountability. TFA recruits find themselves teaching in the most challenging situations will little preparation and often little support and they don’t stay long: one study showed “69 percent of TFA teachers had left the classroom by the end of their second year of teaching, and 88 percent had left the profession by the end of their third year.”

Jack Schneider, in his book “EXCELLENCE FOR ALL: How a New Breed of Reformers Is Transforming America’s Public Schools,” explained how TFA transformed itself from a teacher placement program to a “leadership development” organization, placing TFA alums, and their ed reform ideals, into positions of leadership throughout the nation:

“A decade into its work, TFA’s message began to change subtly. Acknowledging retention issues, the organization began to promote itself as being equally committed to leadership development as it was to recruiting top college students into teaching. “The program was never intended to solve the teacher shortage problem or even to fix public education simply by preparing bright college students to teach for two years,” argued TFA advocate Julie Mikuta in 2008. “Instead,” she contended, “TFA intends to transform public education by exposing these talented people to the challenges of public education and engaging them in figuring out solutions.””

https://www.amazon.com/Excellence-All-Reformers-Transforming-Americas/dp/0826518117/ref=sr_1_4?dchild=1&keywords=jack+schneider&qid=1605802436&sr=8-4

Read more at https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2012/10/22/how-teach-for-america-became-powerful-2/

Leadership for Educational Equity is the leadership development arm of TFA. A quick check of the LEE Board demonstrates the close relationship between TFA and LEE:

• Elisa Villanueva Beard: Ms. Villanueva Beard became the sole chief executive officer of Teach For America in 2015, after serving as the co-CEO alongside Matthew Kramer for two years.
• Emma Bloomberg: Ms. Bloomberg is the eldest daughter of former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg (who was a pro-charter, anti-union “ed reformer”). She is the founder and CEO of an obscure, but well funded, ed reform organization Murmuration, She serves on the boards of the Bloomberg Family Foundation, the Robin Hood Foundation, the KIPP Foundation, New Classrooms, in addition to Leadership for Educational Equity.
• Mike Buman: Mr Buman is the executive director of Leadership for Educational Equity and serves on its board. He is a former partner at the management consulting firm McKinsey & Co, which has close ties with Teach for America, providing TFA pro-bono work on organization and growth strategy. According to 2018 tax documents, Buman receives an annual salary from LEE in excess of $450,000.
• John B. King Jr: Dr. King. is the president and CEO of The Education Trust, a well funded, nonprofit organization focused on identifying and closing opportunity and achievement gaps. King served in President Barack Obama’s cabinet as the 10th U.S. Secretary of Education following the resignation of Arne Duncan in 2015.
• Arthur Rock: Mr. Rock is a venture capitalist, founder of Intel corporation and a major Teach For America donor. He also serves on the board of Teach For America and is an active funder of KIPP.

In the past, Steuart Walton also served on the LEE Board. Walton is the grandson of Sam Walton, also served on the board. The Walton Family Foundation has spent hundreds of millions of dollars helping to expand charter schools and other privatized school choice options across the country. 

The connections between LEE, Teach For America, KIPP and the charter school industry are obvious. Two Teach For America alumni founded KIPP charter schools and many KIPP teachers are TFA alums. The Walton Family Foundation’s K-12 Education Director, Marc Sternberg, is also a TFA alum. TFA Alumni appear to be everywhere, even serving in the Obama White House, as state superintendent/commissioners of education and, likely, in a school board near you.

In Florida, TFA alumnus Rebecca Fishman Lipsey was the youngest person in history selected to serve on the Florida Board of Education, appointed by Governor Rick Scott in 2013. She served her term alongside Jacksonville grocer, Gary Chartrand, who was appointed by Scott in 2011 and served 2 terms. Chartrand lead the 2007 effort bringing Teach For America to Jacksonville, Florida and his donations were instrumental in bringing the first KIPP school to Florida. Chartrand currently serves on the boards of Jacksonville:Kipp and the Foundation for Excellence in Education, Jeb Bush’s national corporate ed reform organization.

So… what have we learned about Leadership for Education Equity, the sponsor of the aforementioned “post election event?” LEE is a corporate ed reform organization, led by Teach For America and charter school advocates, whose mission is to place Teach For America alumni in leadership positions where they can influence education policy. I chose not to register for the event, though I do, sometimes, attend ed reform conferences to try to understand how their policy agenda may eventually impact my community’s schools.

Elected school board members should be paying attention to who is behind the events they attend. In this case, LEE may not just be looking for ways to advance equity… they may be training candidates to run against you in your re-election campaign.