The Man from Gates navigates across the edu-corporate complex.

Shelton

One of the key players in the Gates Foundation's Common Core drive was Jim Shelton. It was Bill Gates who placed Shelton as Arne Duncan's deputy at the D.O.E. in 2009. He followed a well-trod path from the foundation to the Obama administration.

Duncan’s first chief of staff, Margot Rogers, came from Gates; her replacement as of June 2010, Joanne Weiss, came from a major Gates grantee, the New Schools Venture Fund; Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Russlynn Ali worked at Broad, LA Unified School District and the Gates-funded Education Trust; and general counsel Charles P. Rose was a founding board member of another major Gates grantee

But now Shelton's off to the corporate world, using his connections to sell technology to higher ed. He's been hired as 2U, Inc's (NASDAQ: TWOU) "chief impact officer" (whatever that is).

Pres.Obama had pledged to prohibit government employees from doing business with former employers. However, Shelton was granted a waiver to deal with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, for which he worked for more than five years prior to joining the Obama administration.

At the D.O.E., Shelton led the Investing in Innovation Fund and a number of other grant programs. Before that, he was education program director at the Gates Foundation where he oversaw a portfolio worth between $2 billion and $3 billion. He also previously worked for the NewSchools Venture Fund and co-founded LearnNow, a school management company that later was acquired by Edison Schools. Before entering the education world, he worked at McKinsey & Company advising corporate CEOs.

Shelton's departure is just the latest in a wave of high-profile exits from the department as the Obama administration takes its final lap. Weiss, Ann Whalen, Carmel Martin, all of whom had a significant impact on the administration's education agenda, have moved in within the last year.

Whalen is off to join another Duncan deputy, Peter Cunningham at the Broad-funded Education Post. Weiss, who also came out of the NewSchools Venture Fund, was Duncan's Chief of Staff and directed his Race to the Top program. Now she calls herself, "an independent consultant". And Martin now serves as Executive Vice President for Policy at American Progress.

New Schools Venture Fund creates new group for ed school deans pushing corp agenda

A small group of ed school deans are forming a new group called Deans for Impact, to push the corporate-reform agenda on new teacher training. The new group is being underwritten by the New Schools Venture Fund (see my January 26th post on NSVF).

Based in Austin, Texas, the group with about 18 members, launches this month with a $1 million grant from the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation. Edweek's Stephen Sawchuck describes the group this way:

The new group's embrace of data-informed changes to teacher-preparation curricula—even, potentially, based on "value added" information—is likely to generate waves in the insular world of teacher preparation. 

 The idea of Deans for Impact was generated through informal conversations over a two-year period led by Benjamin Riley, a former director of policy and advocacy at the Oakland, Calif.-based NewSchools Venture Fund; David Andrews, the education dean at Johns Hopkins University; and Tom Stritikus, a former education dean at the University of Washington. (Mr. Stritikus now works for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.)

Gee, what a surprise.

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 AERA 2015 Annual Meeting Theme "Toward Justice: Culture, Language, and Heritage in Education Research and Praxis"Chicago, Illinois Thursday, April 16 - Monday, April 20

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I'll be curious to see how the ed faculties as well as the students at these 18 schools respond to their dean's actions.

This might be a good time for a group of progressive college deans to get organized around promoting good teaching theory and practice (which doesn't include the discredited VAM or test-and-punish "accountability" models). Maybe something to think about for the upcoming AERA meeting in Chicago.

New Schools Venture Fund bankrolling Ownership Society education

Ted Mitchell, one of the founders and former  chief executive of the NewSchools Venture Fund, was named by President Obama to become the Under Secretary of the Department of Education.

The New Schools Venture Fund is one of the biggest backers of ownership society education, school privatization and corporate-style "reform." They were one of the conservative, anti-teacher groups that backed last year's Vergara suit against teacher tenure and collective-bargaining rights in California. The legal costs for Vergara were covered by  by Silicon Valley billionaire David Welch, a founder of the NCVF and a powerful force behind the growth of privately-run charter schools.

Milwaukee blogger, educator and long-time school activist, Larry Miller, has done his homework on the NSVF and its board of directors. His latest blog post reveals an organization which claims to be about school improvement and innovation but which is actually,

...seeking "public money to be diverted from public schools leading to investment gains in technology, real estate, curriculum, corporate charters, high paid “non-profit” charter managers and the growing education “consulting” industry.

Included in Miller's account of NSVF is a run-down of its "all-white, 10 member board of directors, whose combined portfolio reaches deep into U.S. corporate and entrepreneurial investment endeavors".

• Brook Byers, Partner, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers
• John Doerr, Partner, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers
• Chris Gabrieli, Co-Founder and Chairman, Massachusetts 2020
• Dave Goldberg, Chief Executive Officer, SurveyMonkey
• Laurene Powell Jobs, Founder and Chair of the Board, Emerson Collective
• Joanna Rees, Founder and Managing Partner, VSP Capital
• Jon Sackler, Managing Partner, North Bay Associates and Kokino LLC
• Kim Smith, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Pahara Institute
• Rob Stavis, Partner, Bessemer Venture Partners
• Dave Whorton, Managing Director, Tugboat Ventures

 Good post, Larry.

Vergara Ruling, Californication

Best Tweet this morning comes from Pedro Noguera ‏@PedroANoguera

California court ruling is a setback for public education. When teachers lose so do kids. Don't blame tenure for the flaws of the system.

Judge Rolf M. Treu's ruling was based on the notion that teachers and students have conflicting interests, ie. what's good for teachers, like bargaining rights, is bad for kids. Treu even had the nerve to cite Brown v. Board as a rationale for his anti-teacher ruling.

Welch (3rd from left) and legal team.

The case was filed by a front group for the corporate "reformers" in an attempt to undercut statewide collective-bargaining agreements and to make it easier to fire teachers without due process. The legal costs were covered by  by Silicon Valley billionaire David Welch. Welch is also a founder of the New Schools Venture Fund, a powerful force behind the growth of privately-run charter schools.

Backing Welch, according to the Washington Post, were

...some of the most incendiary players in the national argument over the future of public schools, including Michelle Rhee, the former D.C. schools chancellor who got rid of tenure in the District in 2009 and went on to form an advocacy group aimed at eliminating it across the country. Parent Revolution, the group behind the controversial “parent trigger” laws, is another supporter.

U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan called the ruling "a mandate" for lawmakers and education leaders. Other organizations behind the suit included: Alliance for a Better Community, California Charter Schools Association, Silcon Valley Leadership Group, GO Oakland Public Schools, and NewSchools Venture Fund. The suit is also supported by Superintendents John Deasy in L.A., former Oakland Supt.Tony Smith, and Jonathan Raymond of Sacramento City Unified.

On the teachers side were Gov. Jerry Brown, the CFT and the CTA. They will appeal the ruling.

James Ryan, dean of Harvard University's graduate school of education, said the verdict "will likely cause lawyers in other states to think about bringing similar suits." But he pointed out that the decision explicitly called on the state Legislature to fix the unconstitutional statues at issue. As a result, there will likely be "back-and-forth" between the Legislature and courts for many years to come.

"This has a long way before it's over in California and it hasn't even started yet in other states," Mr. Ryan said.

Big bucks to be made in K-12 ed

There's big money to be made in K-12 education, especially in the technology area. So says the New Schools Venture Fund which bankrolls much of what passes for school reform these days. According to the NSVF blog,

"Venture investment in K12 education technology was up 6% in 2013 totaling $452 million." 

But not everyone's playing the game, says WSJ. The main party-pooper is newly-elected N.Y. Mayor Bill de Blasio who has the privateers and charter operators worried sick. BdB is even threatening to make them pay rent.

Operators of New York City's publicly financed, privately run charter schools are bracing for changes promised by Mayor-elect Bill de Blasio — including the possibility of having to pay rent — that they worry could reverse 12 years of growth enjoyed under Mayor 

Moskowitz makes $475,244/year

Michael Bloomberg.

Bloomberg's charter patronage has meant windfalls for the operators including huge salaries. According to the Journal:

Critics note that more than a dozen New York City charter school executives are paid more than current New York City Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott's $212,614. Harlem Village Academies chief Deborah Kenny earns $499,146. Eva Moskowitz, a former City Council member and founder of Success Academies, earns $475,244.

K-12 ed market exploding, says Edweek

The flow of venture capital into the K-12 education market has exploded over the past year, reaching its highest transaction values in a decade in 2011, industry observers say. This according to Katie Ash, writing in the Jan. 31st online edition of EdWeek.

"[The common core] is breaking down some of those state-level barriers that made it challenging for folks [to achieve scale]," said Adam J. Newman, a founding and managing partner of Education Growth Advisors, an education business advisory firm in Stamford, Conn. Newman. (His firm's other founding and managing partner, Christopher L. Curran, is a trustee of Editorial Projects in Education, the nonprofit publisher of Education Week.)

Ash's piece offers little in the way of critical analysis of venture capital's surge into public ed. She relies mainly on the usual members of the edu-corporate complex as sources for this piece, including, former Gates ed chief Tom VanderArk who is now a managing partner of Learn-Capital; Kim Smith, the co-founder (with Andrew Rotherham) and chief executive officer of Bellwether Education Partners as well as  the NewSchools Venture Fund; and Robert Lytle, a head of the Boston-based Parthenon Group's Education Center of Excellence, which focuses on for-profit global markets. 

According to Ash, the hottest area for venture capitalists probling the public ed sector is "impact investing." That's where capital doesn't just buy a profitable return on investment, but also reshapes the structure and culture of public education to make it more receptive to their goals. 

"There's a small, emerging niche of 'impact' investors," says Smith, "who typically made their money in the corporate sector and now want to reinvest in a good company that will provide profitable returns, but will also have a positive social impact."

Not surprisingly, this Edweek piece is underwritten by the the biggest "impact investor" of them all, the Gates Foundation. 

Free-Market Think Tanks and the Marketing of Education Policy

Kevin Wellner, professor of education and director of the National Education Policy Center (NEPC),writing in Dissent Magazine:

The most engaged in this neoliberal education campaign are organizations focused on school choice: Democrats for Education Reform (and their 501(c)(4), Education Reform Now Advocacy), Education Sector, and the Progressive Policy Institute; as well as service-oriented groups like New Leaders for New Schools, the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) and Green Dot charter networks, Teach for America, The New Teacher Project, Stand for Children, the New Schools Venture Fund, and even the leadership of the Harlem Children’s Zone.