By John Thompson.

The front page New York Times article, by veteran reporter Motoko Rich has unleashed quite a backlash. Its title, “Oakland District at Heart of Drive to Transform Urban Education,” points to the reason why the high-poverty district’s ill-conceived corporate reform campaign yields important lessons for cities across the nation. Oakland is feeling the brunt of the Broad Academy’s edu-politics of destruction, but it is not alone. Broad brought the same discord to Los Angeles, Dallas, Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit, and my Oklahoma City. This is the second post focused on the mess that a Broadie caused in Oklahoma City — here is the first.

The current Oakland Broadie, Superintendent Antwan Wilson, is trying to bring the same plan for charters that was instituted in Denver, Washington D.C. and New Orleans. Despite being touted as a way to deter the increased segregation that inevitably follows charter expansions, these systems have a record of increasing segregation and the achievement gap. By the way, Oklahoma City rid itself of our Broad rookie after a disastrous six-month “reign of error,” but it looks like a quicker, cheaper, and doomed version of mass charterization is now being pushed on us.

The Times article explained that:

Broad-trained superintendents currently run districts in two dozen communities, including Boston, Broward County, Fla., and Philadelphia. They have lasted an average of four and three-quarter years, delivering incremental academic progress at best. Like others in the field, they have run up against the complexities of trying to improve schools bedeviled by poverty, racial disparities, unequal funding and contentious local politics.

Rich reports that the way Superintendent Wilson fares

may say a great deal not only about Oakland, but also about this moment in the drive to transform urban school districts. Many of them have become rivalrous amalgams of traditional public schools and charters, which are publicly funded but privately operated and have been promoted by education philanthropists.

She also describes how “the anger at Mr. Wilson boiled over and police officers helped quell the unrest.” As was also explained in the Contra Costa Times, a previous school board meeting resulted in a white substitute teacher being fired “after using the term ‘the new Jim Crow’ to describe Wilson’s policies.” The school district claimed that “the teacher was fired for giving out information that was inaccurate and violated the privacy of special education students.” But, the words of the Broad-trained superintendent seem to raise a question about that claim. Wilson said, “I can sit here and listen to a lot of things, but I’m not going to sit here as an African-American male and have someone that doesn’t look like me talk about Jim Crow whatsoever.”

It would be easier to sympathize with Wilson’s feelings if Broad and the rest of the Billionaires Boys Club’s public relations teams didn’t have such a long and disgusting record of using racial taunts against those of us, regardless of our race, who disagree with them. More importantly, the Broadie’s pain is dwarfed by that of poor children of color who increasingly find themselves in “apartheid schools” after competition-driven reformers use resegregation of schools as a supposed method for undoing the damage done by the old Jim Crow.

There are plenty of other educators who describe the damage done by the Broad Academy, so I will focus on my encounter with Oklahoma City’s Broadie, John Q. Porter, and just one aspect of the damage that he did to my school system. As explained in my book, A Teacher’s Tale, the rookie superintendent was unquestionably dedicated to the students, and he was a good enough sport to compete in my school’s first “Buffalo Chip Throwing Championship.” (Dressed in a fine business suit, the superintendent finished second, behind me, but unlike the champion buffalo feces thrower, he wore a plastic glove.) The Broad graduate enjoyed talking with my students, but he never seemed comfortable listening to teenagers when they disagreed with his policies.

In one such meeting, the superintendent acknowledged that his experience had been in a suburban district that had nearly three times as much per student spending, but he said that his former district had more low income students than the OKCPS had students. I remained silent as my students tried to explain the difference between one of the nation’s top school systems where only a quarter of students were low-income, and our schools where almost everyone was poor and most students were several years behind grade level. I was so proud of my students as they argued that poor kids in neighborhood schools could master the same high-quality material as kids in his old district, but the problems were more complicated than he realized. Afterwards, my student leaders were blunt, saying that the superintendent had no idea of what he was rushing into.

At the same time, the principals whom I most admired were clearly intimidated by their boss. Video cameras were installed in schools, not for supervising unsafe areas but as a first step toward monitoring routine activities. No memos, I was warned, should be sent by e-mail anymore. I wondered, perhaps naively, how policy discussions could be conducted without e-mail. Before long, however, it became clear that expressing dissent was no longer seen as appropriate and memos were no longer welcome. The job of educators was to “all get on the same page” in implementing the superintendent’s policies.The Broad graduate confirmed to my students and me that he ultimately wanted a system where he could supervise classroom instruction by video throughout the district from his office.

Five months into the administration, I was briefed on a discussion between the superintendent and the union. The inexperienced superintendent seemed to have learned the hard way that his job involved minutiae. He needed trustworthy advice, but was too late in realizing that honest information was most likely to come from the union. Unless the superintendent asked precisely the right question of administrators, who didn’t have union-backed due process rights, he would get no meaningful answers, placing him at risk of inadvertently violating regulations.

The superintendent resigned after a grand jury investigation found he had, “improperly sought reimbursement from the school system for personal, first-class airplane tickets to Washington; that he had been reimbursed for apparent alcohol purchases at expensive restaurants;” and that he had asked district employees to perform a personal task at his home. My reading of the grand jury’s evidence was that he had not meant to violate the law. But the people who knew the information that he needed were not invested in his success. Like so many Broad graduates, he didn’t know what he didn’t know about urban schools.

We knew, however that Oklahoma City had dodged a bullet. The novice’s micromanaging of issues that he knew nothing about would have been disastrous if fully implemented.

The Broadie was an expert, however, at the politics of demonizing opponents. He and his Broad Academy mentor were skilled at using race as a weapon to divide and conquer.

What do you think? Will elite reformers eventually get tired of experimenting on schools that they know nothing about?