The New York Times’s “Oakland District at Heart of Drive to Transform Urban Education,” by veteran reporter Motoko Rich, clearly explains why the discord brought to Oakland illustrates why corporate reform is a threat to urban schools across the nation. The Broad Academy has brought the same conflict to Los Angeles, Dallas, Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit, and my Oklahoma City. The current Oakland Broadie, Antwan Wilson, is trying to bring the same plan for charters that was instituted in Denver, Washington D.C. and New Orleans. Even though it is 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. 

This post will describe how the Broad approach sowed racial antagonism in Oklahoma City in a way that is eerily similar to the anger that Motoko Rich and others describe in Oakland. (Another post explains how the disastrous six-month “reign of error” by a Broad-trained superintendent in my school system was the result of the “my way or the highway” mentality nurtured by top-down corporate reformers.)

Rich reports that Broad-trained superintendents, “Like others in the field, … have run up against the complexities of trying to improve schools bedeviled by poverty, racial disparities, unequal funding and contentious local politics.” Rich also reports how many districts that have adopted the corporate reforms which are being imposed on Oakland “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 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 (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 (illogically) try to use resegregation of schools as a method for undoing the damage done by Jim Crow.

As explained in my book, A Teacher’s Tale, I first encountered the Broad mentality in 2007 when Oklahoma City hired a Broad Academy graduate as superintendent. Hoping to get off to a good, collaborative start, I introduced myself to the mentor that the academy assigned to him. She was sitting with several of my old friends and civil rights allies, African-American women with decades of administrative experience that they also would have gladly shared with the rookie superintendent. The Broad Academy mentor wiped the smiles off our faces when her first words to me were, “Why don’t you in Oklahoma City teach our African-American boys to read?”

At first, I thought we could have better luck communicating with the new superintendent. He was a good enough sport to compete in my school’s “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 superintendent 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 explained that he wanted an aligned and paced curriculum where every class covered the same material at the same time, and where he could supervise classroom instruction by video, throughout the district, from his office. Afterwards, my students were blunt, saying that the superintendent had no idea of what he was rushing into.

I was later dismayed when the superintendent and his Broad Academy mentor became exceptionally inflammatory when speaking in a black church. The superintendent said that his advisor had intercepted a black high school student who had been sent to the office for discipline. She returned him to the teacher with instructions to “teach him.” The superintendent then roused the audience, “I can’t make teachers love our black boys. But I can make them do their job. … If you can’t teach our black boys, you have to go.” He then started a chant that culminated with “Do your job,” with the crowd calling back, “or you have to go!”

It was a testimony to the anger built up over the generations that an administrator seeking to blame teachers was able to  rile up a sanctuary full of middle aged and elderly citizens who sought no more than an education for their children and grandchildren. As usual in those situations, I was one of a very few white people in the crowd, but no resentment was directed towards me.

Later that night, as during most of those sorts of conversations, black parents (and I) expressed the same, contradictory feelings.  We all knew that order needed to be established in neighborhood schools, but we could not pretend that racism had ceased to exist. When the state built a huge prison industrial complex, it did not necessarily do so because of prejudice against individual blacks, but new jails were disproportionately filled with people of color. And the OKCPS – like so many other districts – did not have a record of inspiring confidence that educators would operate differently from the criminal justice system. But, we sought to collaboratively tackle the toughest task in urban education, and nurture respectful and supportive learning cultures in schools where too many children were sidetracked by the pain that so many of them brought to school.

And, that brings us back to the Oakland controversies. Urban schools face challenges that are maddeningly complex, and it does no good to throw gasoline on the resulting fires. Non-educators might not fully understand how a dispute over special education accommodations might spin out of control and become such a hateful battle. In my experience, most educators agree that special education students should be mainstreamed as much as possible. Many or most inner city teachers have seen, however, that rushed and underfunded efforts to do so can create huge unintended consequences. For that reason, we can understand the argument by a teacher protesting the Oakland superintendent’s policy on special education, saying that it could be “leading to the resegregation of public education — and it is an attack on the gains of the civil rights movement in its attempt to drive black and Latino students into second-class treatment on an institutional level through the privatization of public education.”

The Oakland superintendent said he understood some of the community criticism, “I think that is just, ‘Hey we’re really concerned this guy might really want to sell the farm.'” But, Wilson also claimed that “no Broad agenda has ever been shared with me.” That is impossible to believe unless he slept through all of his Broad Academy classes.

Words alone – whether they are sincere or whether they are just the Broad’s spin – won’t defuse the bitter and dangerous situations that corporate reformers have created. Across the nation, Broad and other market-driven reformers are stepping up the use of mass school closures to defeat teachers, unions, and parents who oppose them. Even as the Billionaires Boys Club proclaims that their goal is a 21st century civil rights crusade, they impose a brutal policy where the highest-challenge students are crammed into the schools that were already the most segregated, under-resourced and low-performing. In other words, they sabotage the highest-challenge neighborhood schools in order to discredit educators in them who seek win-win school improvement policies.

The Broad Academy and their allies are thus willing to sacrifice the welfare of the most vulnerable children and to inflame racial tensions in order to defeat educators who disagree with them. Whether they do so in Oakland or Oklahoma City – in Los Angeles, Dallas, Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit, Denver, Washington D.C. or New Orleans – they are playing with fire. Whether we are talking about race, poverty, or special education, we must recognize the complexity of these issues and the need for nuanced conversations. As long as corporate reformers continue to vilify educators, complicated and interconnected problems will get worse. If Broad-trained superintendents had the knowledge about education that is necessary to improve schools, they would also understand why inflaming racial tensions is so dangerous.