Flak hits Jerry Brown over fundraising for his charter school projects
The July 29 San Francisco Chronicle reports:
“Democrat Jerry Brown, who wrote the landmark 1974 state law to curb special interests' power in politics, has raised nearly $10 million in gift contributions to his pet charities from some of the interests - utilities, casino operators and health care organizations - that he oversees as [California] state attorney general, state records show.”
Brown’s “pet charities”? Those would be the Oakland Military Institute (OMI) and Oakland School for the Arts (OSA), two charter schools that he founded (in defiance of Oakland school district administration) amid a flurry of publicity during his terms as Oakland mayor, 1999-2007.
Brown, by the way, is a likely candidate for California governor, a position he previously held from 1975-1983.
The point of the Chronicle’s front-page story is the ethical concern involved in Brown’s requesting donations to a cause from interests over which he has power. In my opinion, since Brown isn’t benefiting personally from those donations, it’s not the worst breach of ethics I’ve ever seen (the Newsweek high school rankings are a greater ethical sin – that story is complicated; click here to read more).
But there’s an interesting story all the same. I heard Brown speak at an event promoting charter schools in December 2001, while plans for OMI and OSA were under way. His attitude, as I interpreted it, was that those stoopid educators who have so much trouble running inner-city schools should get out of the way and let him show them how it’s done.
Well, after the initial publicity about both schools, they largely fell out of the limelight – probably to Brown’s relief, because from the reports that have trickled out, both have struggled badly. (Yes, OSA has pretty good test scores, but it’s a school with an audition selection process, which inherently means it loses the right to crow about the scores – more about that below.)
OSA, for example, has suffered from near-fatal student, teacher and principal turnover.
I have better information on OSA than on OMI, and I know that at least in the case of OSA, Brown has worked his tush off raising money (as we see from the Chronicle story) and remaining otherwise hands-on in running the school. Some of this I know personally because after struggling to find a stable, effective principal, he wooed away Donn Harris, the very popular principal of my own kids’ school, San Francisco School of the Arts, to run OSA. My strong impression is that Brown personally recruited Harris, whose mission includes bringing stability to the school.
In 2007 the Chronicle reported on another income stream Brown created for OSA – an electronic billboard at the Bay Bridge toll plaza that generated controversy mostly over its brightness, which was blamed for impairing drivers’ night vision and also blighting nighttime bay views from as far away as Sausalito. The lighting was eventually dimmed somewhat. The income generated by renting space on the billboard went to OSA.
According to press reports, Brown legitimately channeled money from the mayor’s discretionary fund to the two charter schools, and also had city staff working on various tasks for the two schools. An August 2006 column in the Berkeley Daily Planet charged that Brown himself and city underlings devoted themselves to OSA and OMI while neglecting the Oakland school district:
Voters … believed that [Brown] would follow through on his promise for “dramatic public school improvement in Oakland,” expecting that Mr. Brown would spend considerable time and energy in reforming the public school system.
Instead, Mr. Brown appeared to lose interest in the public school system … focusing instead on trying to get his two charter schools approved. No one knows the amount of staff hours the City Manager’s office put into the approval process, but it was massive.
The diversion of city staff members to Jerry Brown charter school duty did not end with the approval process. Once the OMI was approved and opened, City Manager’s office employee Simon Bryce moved his offices from City Hall to the OMI headquarters at the Oakland Army Base, working on the city payroll but spending much of his time coordinating OMI activities. Imagine if Mr. Brown’s office had put as much effort trying to help OUSD get out of state receivership? The City of Emeryville did, ending up in an innovative—and perfect legal—transfer of money to Emery Unified that allowed the school district to pay off their state loan.
But [Robert Bobb, then Oakland city manager*] and Mr. Bryce were not the only city employees working extensively on Mr. Brown’s private charter school on city time. So was Mr. Brown himself.
On five separate days in July and August of 2005, for example, Mr. Brown’s official schedule shows entries of between three and five hours of something called, simply, “OSA Phoning with Marianne,” all taking place in the middle of the work week. On July 28th and 29th he is listed as working at this OSA phoning business for two straight days, from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. on Thursday, and again from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. on Friday. I have no idea who Marianne is or why they needed to take up the bulk of the mayor’s working time, but you are free to make your own guesses. No other single activity took up as much of Mr. Brown’s time during the period of January 2005 through April 2006, the period in which UnderCurrents received copies of the mayor’s schedule.
… Could Mr. Brown have helped make “dramatic public school improvement”—as he promised in 2000’s Measure D—if he had put his full attention to solving Oakland’s school problems? It’s impossible to say. All we know is that while Mr. Brown was putting much of his time into his two charter schools, Oakland’s public schools were going into state receivership, with children sometimes vainly trying to learn amidst continuing chaos.
So what to make of all this? Obviously, Brown rapidly learned that it’s not so easy to run a school better than professional educators after all. (By the way, I’m told that there was disdain for the notion of hiring an experienced educator to lead OSA in its first years; the recruitment of veteran principal Harris signaled a change in that attitude.)
Turning to the governor’s race for a minute, I have to say that the M.O. of San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, Brown’s rival in the primary, would have been to forget all about both schools as soon as the going got rough, if not before. By contrast, Brown has demonstrated his dogged commitment, even as the schools floundered. It sounds like OSA, at least, would have collapsed without that – not to mention without the extra millions he has raised for it. (Brown was similarly dogged about working to get OSA into its permanent home in the restored Paramount Theater, where it moved a few months ago; he also recently made news for recruiting Sean Penn to do a fundraiser for the school.)
Commitment shows far more character than fickleness. However, the more righteous attitude for Brown to adopt would be one of repentance: He would apologize publicly for the disdain for educators he displayed while founding OSA and OMI – and for turning his back on Oakland’s public schools to support his two charter projects -- and publicly ask forgiveness. (If I were better informed about religion I could invoke Biblical terms here, given Brown’s Jesuit education and former interest in the priesthood.) He would publicly lay bare the challenges he has faced in working to keep those two schools afloat, and would vow to work to help all schools rise above those challenges. He would declare that it costs far more to run a school than our state provides, and would decisively refute those who claim otherwise. Then he’d go back to all those donors and ask them to support all of California’s underfunded schools, with both money and political support – including calling on them to work with him to repeal Prop. 13.
Now that would be the gubernatorial candidate of my dreams. As it is, at least I can say I admire his commitment and determination.
About the achievement scores for Oakland School for the Arts: Schools with selective admissions processes can’t be fairly compared to schools that admit by lottery – and I’m speaking as a parent at a school that has a selective admissions process. Even though the audition process for an arts school doesn’t take academic achievement into account, the fact that it takes a significant effort to get in still weeds out the unmotivated and low-functioning. So there should be an asterisk on achievement reports for OSA and for my kids’ school as well.
*By the way, former Oakland City Manager Robert Bobb, a non-educator, is now in a position as financial manager of the badly troubled Detroit school system. One of his strategies is bringing in private for-profit companies to run some Detroit schools – including Edison Schools, trying to rehabilitate its image after its previous failure as the great hope of privatization. I’ll be blogging more about that soon.
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12 Comments:
Starting schools is an odd way of showing disdain for educators.
Starting schools because you think educators are too stupid to do it right and you'll show them absolutely shows disdain for educators. And that was the attitude Brown displayed when I heard him speak in 2001 about his two planned charter schools.
If educators are not teaching in charter schools, whether started by Brown or not, who is?
Brown's clear point was that educators were not competent to be running schools and he would show them how it was done.
Is Brown running the charter schools? Does he pick curriculum, plan lessons, and teach the students? Or do educators do those things? What makes an educator in a charter school less an educator than those in other public schools?
Brown HAS been very hands-on about running the schools, but obviously he's not actively acting as principals. My reference is to hearing him speak beforehand about the schools and hearing him voice disdain for educators. Then, at Oakland School for the Arts, he had people from the arts world with no experience in K-12 education running the school in its first years. As I posted, apparently he finally got that education experience isn't really so despicable after all, and hired a veteran principal. I don't know about the leadership at OMI, so I can't say whether there was a parallel situation or not.
In general, there's major disdain for veteran educators in the charter movement and the associated greater "school reform" movement.
For starters, there's the pervasive view that bright-eyed, energetic beginners doing a temporary stint as teachers on their way to lucrative high-powered careers in finance (treating it like a Peace Corps stint) are superior to experienced teachers who majored in education (college education majors are as sneered at as teachers' unions in those circles). On another level, there's the trend of hiring non-educators to run school districts -- often business and military leaders. It's all about disdain for educators.
"the pervasive view that bright-eyed, energetic beginners doing a temporary stint as teachers on their way to lucrative high-powered careers in finance (treating it like a Peace Corps stint) are superior to experienced teachers who majored in education ..."
If you're referring to TFA teachers, the fact is that young TFA teachers get results that rival or exceed the results from "experienced teachers who majored in education." TFA does not recruit young graduates who are just looking for someplace to park themselves before applying to the Harvard Business School. TFA looks for young people willing to work very hard in very challenging schools and willing to accept responsibility for the success of the children in those schools. Principals who have TFA teachers in their schools tend to think highly of them. I do not see disdain for educators there at all.
2:07 argues that TFA is successful and that thus, TFA is exonerated from charges that it's based in an anti-educator philosophy.
That argument doesn't make sense, though. TFA may or may not be successful -- the various studies produce the usual "mixed results" conclusion, standard for all "it's a miracle!" magical-thinking education insta-solutions.
But that has nothing to do with whether its concept is based in an anti-educator view.
My guess is that it didn't start out that way; that TFA was originally envisioned as an infusion of fresh blood and support for the veteran educators toiling in the classroom. But it has become an anti-educator bludgeon, with what is now a message that bright-eyed beginners coming from high-powered colleges are superior to that tired old deadwood who have devoted their lives to low-income children. TFA is perilously close to becoming a malevolent force.
There is a surreal quality to your claims that TFA is perilously close to a malevolent force or that the existence of a teaching program reflects an anti-educator view.
Following are remarks on the TFA site from a TFA kindergarten teacher. At the start of the year none of her kids knew the alphabet.
"My students finished the year at a second grade middle-of-the-year reading level and mastered eighty percent of the first grade objectives. I have become incredibly passionate about early education because I've seen my students flourish this year and know that whatever else happens, they will always know how to read. They have the foundational tools and a passion for learning that they will take with them after they leave my classroom. Most importantly, they know that hard work leads to achievement. "
There is certainly a bit of the bright-eyed beginner there, but I don't see anything malevolent at all.
Of course the individual TFA participants aren't malevolent; that's not what I mean. But the agenda of the organization and its close connections to the rest of the right-wing, anti-public-education "school reform" movement are, in my view, bordering on malevolent. USA Today had a Page 1 story a couple of weeks ago on districts that are laying off veteran educators and bringing in TFA beginners.
Veteran educators who are not doing their job should be laid off or fired, whether or not they are replaced by TFA teachers. That's not a left wing or right wing idea - that's just common sense.
Making TFA part of a conspiracy against the public schools seems pretty far out, particularly when you admit the young TFAers are admirable.
If TFA were starting their own schools and lobbying for public dollars for them I might buy an argument that they are anti public schools. But saying that challenging schools deserve highly motivated, highly accomplished graduates of prestigious colleges seems like it's placing a high value on public education instead of something malevolent.
Just the fact that Brown has founded two charter schools including OSA in Oakland, makes me like him that much more.
"Yes, OSA has pretty good test scores, but it’s a school with an audition selection process, which inherently means it loses the right to crow about the scores "
Doesn't SOTA also have an audition selection process similar to OSA? I think you're just angry that the SOTA principal chose to go over to "the dark side".
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