Study: Broad Academy Grads Help Privatize Public Schools

The Broad Academy has been around since 2002. Founded by Eli Broad, it's a demonstration of how the sheer force of will, when backed by a mountain of money, can cause qualifications to materialize out of nothing. The Broad Foundation ("entrepreneurship for the public good") set the Academy up with none of the features of a legitimate education leadership graduate program, and yet Broad grads kept getting hired to plum positions around the country. And now a new study shows what, exactly, all these faux graduates accomplished.

Give Eli Broad credit-- his personal story is not about being born into privilege. Working class parents. Public school. Working his way through college. Been married to the same woman for sixty years. Borrowed money from his in-laws for his first venture-- building little boxes made of ticky tacky. Read this story about how he used business success and big brass balls to make himself a major player in LA. He was a scrapper; Broad called himself a "sore winner."

Broad believed that education was in trouble, but he did not believe schools had an education problem. He believed they had a management problem--specifically, a management problem caused by not having enough managers who treated schools like businesses. The goal has been to create a pipeline for Broad-minded school leaders to move into and transform school systems from the inside, to more closely fit Broad’s vision of how a school system should work. 

Through a residency program, Broad often sweetens the pot by paying the salary of these managers, making them a free gift to the district. A 2012 memo indicated a desire to create a group of influential leaders who could “accelerate the pace of reform.” And Broad maintained some control over his stable of faux supers. In one notable example, John Covington quit his superintendent position in Kansas abruptly, leaving stunned school leaders. Not until five years later did they learn the truth; Eli Broad had called from Spain and told Covington to take a new job in Detroit.

Broad did not particularly believe that public schools could be reformed, with his vision of privatization becoming ever more explicit (leading to the 2015 plan to simply take over LAUSD schools). The Broad Academy offered an actual manual for how to close schools in order to trim budgets. The process was simple enough, and many folks will recognize it:

1) Starve school by shutting off resources
2) Declare that schools is failing (Try to look shocked/surprised)
3) Close school, shunt students to charterland

Anecdotally, the record for Broad Faux Supers is not great. Robert Bobb had a lackluster showing in Detroit. Jean-Claude Brizard received a 95% no-confidence vote from Rochester teachers, then went on to a disastrous term of office in Chicago. Oakland, CA, has seen a string of Broad superintendents, all with a short and unhappy tenure. Christopher Cerf created a steady drumbeat of controversy in New Jersey. Chris Barbic was put in charge of Tennessee’s Achievement School District, and resigned with all of his goals unfulfilled (and recommended another Broad grad as his replacement). John Deasy’s time at LA schools ended with a hugely expensive technology failure, and he's been bouncing from failure to failure ever since..

But now a trio of researchers takes us beyond the anecdotal record. Thomas Dee (Stanford), Susanna Loeb (Brown) and Ying Shi (Syracuse) have produced "Public Sector Leadership and Philanthropy: The Case of Broad Superintendents." 

The paper starts with some history of Broad Academy, and places it in the framework of venture philanthropy, the sort of philanthropy that doesn't just write a check, but stays engaged and demands to see data-defined results. The we start breaking down information about the Broad supers.

The Academy members themselves. They are way more diverse than the general pool of superintendents, so that's a good thing. Slightly more than half of academy participants and about two-thirds of the Broad-trained superintendents have some teaching experience. This is way lower than actual school superintendents, and probably even lower because I will bet you dollars to donuts that the bulk of that "teaching experience" is a couple of years as a Teach for America tourist passing through a classroom so that they can stamp "teacher" on their CV like an exotic country stamped on a passport. On the other hand, one in five Broadies has experience in the military.

Broadies started at an average age of 48, and their average tenure was a whopping 3.8 years, with more than half moving on to another super job. Fun fact: Broadies tended to be hired by districts that have shorter-than-average superintendent tenures. Over time, the placement of Broadies moved from large public districts to Charter Management Organizations; from 2013 to 2015, one third of the cohort took jobs with CMOs or EMOs. 

But what did these Broadies, with their intensive business management style training, actually accomplish?

The answer is, mostly nothing special. This is not surprising; less-than-four-years is not enough time to move the needle on much of anything in a school district, no matter how awesome your management skills may be. Broadies were found to have little effect on enrollment, spending and student completion. The last is, again, unsurprising--you're there for a small fraction of the students' academic career, so what affect are you going to have, particularly if you're just one more body speeding through the district's revolving door. 

But one effect the study did find-- "they initiated a trend toward increased charter school enrollment." So if the purpose of the Broadies was to nudge schools towards privatization, they apparently did that. 

Near the end of his life, Broad was able to arrange for the Academy to finally get a cloak of legitimacy by having the program housed by Yale (accompanied by a whopping $100 million contribution). The Broad Center is not, of course, anywhere near Yale's education department, but is instead parked in the School Of Management.

The Broad Center at Yale School of Management fosters the ideas, policies, and leadership to help all students – particularly those from underserved communities – to learn and thrive. Our work is bolstered and enriched by the Broad Network, a nationwide community of nearly 900 dedicated and diverse leaders who are alumni of TBC programs.

"Particularly those from underserved communities" makes sense, because wealthy families expect more education from their educational leaders. The Broad Center started its first cohort this year, who will now work for a Yale Masters Degree. 

These thirty education-flavored leaders include about three people with actual public school classroom experience, and a whole lot of Teach for America products who "began their career in teaching" before quickly moving on to leadership roles based on the deep education expertise they acquired from spending two whole years in a classroom. The charter sector is heavily represented (whole lot of KIPPsters in this group). They appear well aligned with the Broad philosophy that the best people to fix public education are those who have little direct knowledge of public education. Eli Broad may be gone, but his vision, now festooned in New Haven ivy, still chugs along.