The City Fund Plans To Conquer The Market

What happens when a bunch of Reformsters decide to get the band back together to see if they can't privatize public ed more successfully this time around? You get The City Fund, a group that has just inadvertently leaked its plans for a hostile takeover of 5% of the US education system.

For a thorough back-ground on this hot new reform group, check out this piece by Thomas Ultican. I'll hit the highlights, and then we'll talk about the big scoop that Matt Barnum tossed out into a giant shitstorm of a new cycle this afternoon.

The City Fund is collecting a giant pot of money to help launch more "educational opportunity for all children." Specifically, they want to boost the portfolio model of ed reform on several cities. It's a bold choice, because not everybody thinks the portfolio model is a great idea, and that includes plenty of people in the reform camp. The portfolio model is basically an approach that throws together public, charter, and even private schools that want to play. All these schools get tossed into one super-district that is under the watchful eye of a centralized quality control system. Periodically the portfolio managers dump the losers and beef up the winners and let some more join the gamer. That's right- "portfolio" here is not borrowed from the world of art so much as the world of investment management.

Reformsters like the model because it replaces the locally elected school board with a Portfolio Manager, and it essentially puts the public schools on equal footing with charter schools. Free market fans think this is a great way to put everyone under the thumb of the invisible hand. But other Reformsters see the portfolio as working pretty much like a school district, which they already don't like. And centralizing all that oversight in a PM runs the risk of getting someone in that job who is not a big charter and choice fan. And, of course, the whole structure depends on the same old crappy test score system to identify good schools and bad schools.

Nevertheless, The City Fund is banking on that model. Who are the players making this bold choice? There are lots of familiar names here.

There's Neerav Kingsland, the Yale Law School grad who oversaw the conversion of New Orleans into a charter district (as you may have heard, there's some debate over just how successful that really was). Since then, he's become an education investment guru for various big money funds.

Kevin Huffman, who went straight from Teach For America to running the school system of Tennessee.

Chris Barbic (also TFA) was brought into Tennessee by Huffman to run the Achievement School District. The promise was that the bottom 5% of schools would become part of the top 25% in just five years. They did not even come close, and Barbic left the job having concluded that "achieving results in neighborhood schools is harder than in a choice environment."

David Harris previously led the Mind Trust in Indiana, a charter school incubator. And Ethan  Gray is the head of Education Cities, another choice promoter with affection for the portfolio model.

Kicking in some big bucks are one of Kingsland's current employers, the Arnold Fund. Reed Hastings has also kicked in. The Netflix mogul, like Kingsland, has argued that elected school boards need to be eliminated so that schools can be run more like a business. The Hastings Fund and the omnipresent Gates Foundation have also kicked in. All the sources have not yet been revealed, but City Fund has raised a whopping 200 million. And as of yesterday afternoon, we have a clearer picture of what they have in mind.

While the rest of the country was watching the latest episode of "That Darn President," Matt Barnum was revealing that he'd gotten his hands on a City Fund presentation for investors. You should read the whole thing, but here are the broad strokes.

They want to spread the Denver, DC and New Orleans model. This is problematic; DC and New Orleans are not exactly synonymous with unqualified reformster success.

They reject many reformy standard ideas. "Very little work in education reform," Barnum says is the first line of the presentation.

But most extraordinary is their goal. Remember when Eli Broad announced he was going to take over half the LA school system? City Fund wants to move its charterized system into forty cities over the next ten years, grabbing 30-50% of the students in each city. "Our goal," Barnum quotes the presentation, "is to make the model normal."

Barnum lays out their ambitious timeline:

Between 2018 and 2021, it hopes to have success in at least 20 cities, affecting around one million students. Specifically, their goal is for 10 cities to have fully adopted the model, and 10 more to be making progress.

From 2022 on, the group hopes to influence “every major city in America,” growing by a couple of cities each year, the presentation says. (“If I had to rewrite that slide I would say, ‘if evidence and demand follows,’” Kingsland said in an interview. “We really aren’t going to expand if the evidence isn’t there.”) 

How to do it? The City Fund plans to use speakers, blog posts, "partnering" with groups, and lots and lots of money-- as much as $15 to $20 million over the first three years.

The City Fund is a new organization (still without a web site) but they have the players and the money to become a major factor in ed erform in the forty targeted cities. Do you want your city's ed system remade in the image of New Orleans or DC?  Keep your eyes peeled.