Public education belongs to all of us, however, and the more business that is done in places removed from the public eye and public access, the weaker our democracy is, as public education is the foundation of democracy (as always, not my opinion; the state's Constitutional argument for public education).
Thus it was that Empower Schools presented earlier this week at noon on a weekday to a conference room at lunch.
While it's generally referenced as "non-profit," Empower doesn't appear to have an independent tax existence; its 990 form is that of the National Center on Time and Learning/ Mass 2020, which were ("are" in the case of NCTL; Mass2020 doesn't appear to have an online presence any longer) earlier projects and interests of Chris Gabrieli, in that case on extended learning time (NCTL he founded in 2007 as an outgrowth of Mass2020 which he founded in 2000). He also (in between Empower and NCTL) founded Transforming Education in 2009.
Gabrieli, who now mostly is in the public eye due to his position as Chair of the Board of Higher Ed and in Empower, at one point was best known for having run for governor in the Democratic primary in 2006 after races for lieutenant governor in 2002 and Congress in 1998. After he lost to Deval Patrick in the primary, Patrick appointed him to chair the Springfield Finance Control Board, which ran municipal finances from 2004 to 2009. He made his money (before all of this) as a venture capitalist of which this quote from the article regarding Gabrieli's run for governor is on point:
"You're always conceptually selling," Hardymon, a professor at Harvard Business School, said of the venture business. "You have to shape ideas and get people to buy into them. That's the raw material he had in spades."And essentially, that's what the meeting was: this was Empower's sales pitch.
Note, by the way, that it isn't that Gabrieli is making anything out of this; he doesn't draw a salary, per the 990 from Empower, and by all accounts, he doesn't need to.
You don't only buy things with money, however.
The opening of his presentation is indicative of where this is coming from:
Okay, so that's Camden Public Schools whose "governance change" was state takeover under Governor Christie in 2013; Denver Public Schools whose "governance change" was a pro-charter board and superintendent (no longer the case); two mayoral-control cities; the iZones, which are more of the "innovation zone" models; the Education Achievement Authority of Michigan ("could fairly be regarded as a train wreck of educational policy") and the (New Orleans) Recovery School District (which I really hope someone's been writing a book or two on) which is going away; teacher-powered schools (which appears to include everything from Mission Hill to the BTU pilot), the Mind Trust (which grew from the "hey let's let the Indianapolis mayor allow for charter schools" idea), pilot schools in LA, and the Boston Teachers' Union logo, which I assume is a reference to the Boston Teachers Union School.
So: State control; charterizing; mayoral control; innovation schools; or teacher-run schools...pretty much covers those examples.
Which brings me back to the question of whom we are empowering here?
The state run districts clearly have removed power from anywhere near the people who live in the place the schools are. While mayoral control generally is argued for as "making one person responsible," it has generally meant that those who care about schools don't have a place to go with their concerns (particularly when it comes to political action). Charters, we know, don't answer to their communities (and don't have to). Pilots and teacher-run schools may answer to those inside the building; it's not always clear if they anwer to those outside the building.
We've been living in an age of accountability; it is stunning to hear advocated that the local ability to hold accountable those running the schools should be removed.
Empower itself doesn't have a lot of evidence that what they're doing is working on turnaround in Springfield (link is to my notes from their Board of Ed presentation earlier this school year). Empower, of course, came into Springfield as a result of the threat of state takeover, a question about which Gabrieli ducked at his presentation this week. And this is Springfield's third year. That may explain why the Empowerment Zone in Springfield is now interested in other methods of assessment beyond the test scores that brought them into Springfield:
Springfield is doing this:
One wonders if they should talk to MCIEA. In any case, the irony is rich.
Why this would be necessary in a district with nine innovation schools (as many as Boston) which have the same ability to create and use autonomies that the zone schools do would be impossible to understand were it not for the one district: they don't answer to a publicly elected board.
"School committees come and go; superintendents come and go," said Gabrieli when asked what might preclude the school committee from creating a zone. And thus one wants a "zone" outside the elected and appointed process, so it will continue forward, come what may.
Perhaps there are some to whom that sounds like a good thing; to me, it sounds invented by someone who doesn't understand democratic goverance (and if that sounds ironic from me, imagine that). Local democracy is messy, and thus is harder to control; that was much of the discussion of Jennifer Berkshire and Jack Schneider's conversation last June about school boards. It also continually brings me back to this column on democracy being a two-way street when it comes to schools.
The local body has to answer to the whole community, even those outside the innovation creation. They have to take questions at public meetings that have to be publicly accessible.
Local democratic governance isn't perfect--there's a reason why there are, for example, civil rights oversight of districts--but to paraphrase Churchill, it beats the others that have been tried.
I put a few other things that didn't fit here in this post.
