Changes at Broad

Hat tip to Ken Libby and Stan Karp for their rundown of the latest Broad Foundation changes, coming from a board meeting memo (obtained under the New Jersey Open Public Records Act). There's a lot here, most of it horrifying, so go read it; the part that particularly leapt out at me is the changes planned for Broad Academy training:

In addition to drawing from a larger pool, the memo proposes significant changes to the training program. In the past, roughly two-thirds of Broad Academy training was dedicated to “core knowledge” (e.g. “instruction 101” and “school operations”). The remaining third was divided into “reform priorities” (including “educator effectiveness,” “innovative learning models,” “accountability,” and “school choice”); “reform accelerators” (“change management,” “political navigation/stakeholder management,” “public contributions,” and “communication”); and “systems-level management” (“providing strategic frameworks,” “theory of action,” “applied learning projects”).
The proposed plan greatly reduces the time spent on “core knowledge” of school systems to less than 10% and instead puts much more emphasis on “reform priorities” (40%), “reform accelerators” (30%), and systems-level management (nearly 20%).

Remember, what Broad purports to be training here are superintendents, state education commissioners (whatever they're called), and other people who run school systems. They are now going to be required to have even less educational experience than they do now, and spend less than 10% of their time learning about education before being "qualified" to run a system.
Wow.
The only way to stop this is to insist on hiring people with educational backgrounds and experience. Broad can train, but at the end of the day, it's the states and the districts that hire.