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.

ICYMI: Welcome My New Granddaughter Edition (9/11)

Yesterday my daughter and son-in-law welcomed their first daughter, my second granddaughter. So all in all, it's a good weekend. In the meantime, I've got a particularly good collection of worthwhile reading for you. And remember--sharing and boosting the stuff that connects with you is important. 

Let Teachers Fix this. They Know How

Cheryl Gibbs Binkley doesn't post at Third Millenium Teacher very often, but when she does, she makes it count. Her point is simple. If you're worried about "learning loss," teachers already know what to do. If ever there was a time to get out of the way and let teachers teach, this is it. 

It's time to stop calling for schools to implement actions that are not going to happen.

While we're on the subject, here's a little quick realism from Larry Ferlazzo

Florida ranked No. 1 for "education freedom" — by right-wing group that wants to privatize it all

Kathryn Joyce reports for Salon on Heritage Foundation's new education freedom report card, and the state that came in first. Great piece. 

It's time to put woke schools myth to bed

In a guest op-ed in The Oklahoman, Dan Vincent argues that the plague of woke schools isn't really a thing. 

Daring to speak about race in a divided school

Thoughtful and even-handed piece in the New York Times by Daniel Bergner, focusing on a small community in Michigan and its wrestling with issues of race. 

With Don't Say Gay Laws and Abortion Bans, Student Surveillance Raises New Risks

The 74 has one of the scarier stories out there. The surveillance state plus restrictive laws equals bad news for students. 

A Texas Eighth Grader Was Pulled From Class And Grilled About His Gender-Identity

Greg Abbott told the state to start treating trans youth cases like cases of child abuse, and they are by God doing it. This is a chilling story of what happened to one 13 year old boy. 

Tennessee school library law's expanded scope puts burden on teachers

All you have to do is just check through every single book in your room for every single thing that some parent might object to. Super easy. Barely an inconvenience. Chalkbeat has the story.

Cyber charters see enrollments rise

Carol Burris guests at Valerie Strauss' Washington Post space, providing more detail and insight on the pandemic explosion in virtual charter biz-- and what that means for educating students and making money.

And To Think I Thought I Had Nothing To Say

Dad Gone Wild, school, funding, and the reformers making a bundle.

As pandemic aid runs out, America is set to return to a broken school funding system

Matt Barnum looks at school funding and the problems set to re-emerge as the pandemic aid runs out. Some god breakdowns of the problems of poverty and schools.

A tiny Christian college in Michigan is infiltrating Florida's schools

Yes, it's Hillsdale. And it turns out they've had even more control of Florida schools than you thought. Mary Harris reports at Slate. 

Hackers infiltrate LAUSD in growing trend

One more damn thing to worry about. The nation's second largest school district had to postpone the first day of school because they were hacked. 

A modest proposal for police reform 

From a few months ago, but I only just encountered this cleveland.com piece from Benjamin Helton. What if we used vouchers for other things? 

High school senior wins Boise school district board position

In fact, he beat an incumbent to do it. Kids these days. An encouraging story from KTVB7.

The Grove City class of 1967 had a request for its 55th reunion: One more class with its 99-year-old science teacher, Homer Christie

Heck of a story, from just up the road. In 1960, high school science teacher Homer Christie started teaching a free, optional Saturday morning extra science class. He retired from teaching in 1986, but he kept teaching the class until four years ago--at age 95. Now he'll be a featured part of a class reunion. 

FL: Endgame In Sight; Heritage Foundation Says Yay

Governor Ron DeSantis just announced his intention for the next step in dismantling public education in Florida; he wants to expand the education savings accounts, the super-vouchers that hand parents a chunk of money on a debit card that they can spend on pretty much anything educational or education-adjacent. 

Not that this is remotely a surprise. Type Florida in the search bar at the top of this blog and look at all the many, many ways Florida's leaders have worked to dismantle public education and sell off the parts, and every step brings them closer to the far right ideal of not just privatizing education, but privatizing it in the setting of an unregulated market, removing government from any involvement in education at all. 

DeSantis made his little speech as part of a victory lap. The Heritage Foundation, a right wing organization with strong ties to every right wing operation you can think of. They've decided to start doing an annual Education Freedom Report Card, organized around the search for a state that has most perfectly realized Milton Friedman's vision of education completely managed by an unregulated free market with government providing zero public education. Friedman also imagined that such a system would be free of discrimination of any sort because, when it came to education and society in general, Friedman was a dope. But his vision has always provided a cover for all sorts of people who want to dismantle public education for all sorts of reasons. "I'm just following the natural laws of economic reality," sounds so much better than, "I don't to pay taxes to fund schools for all those poor kids."

Anyway. The first year of the Heritage Report Card produced a clear winner-- Florida. And the explanation of the report card produces a clear picture of what these folks want in general and what Florida has accomplished in particular. 

We're well into the next phase. Don't call them "reformers" or even "disruptors." Now they're just plain old dismantlers.

The Heritage crew lays out four categories of public ed dismantling.

1) Education choice. This asks how much a centrally accountable public ed system has been replaced with an open market in which parents have to pick and choose an educational program on their own. Arizona, with its universal ESAs, wins the category.

2) Regulatory freedom. How well has the government shredded any kind of accountability measures? No Common Core tests is a winner, but beyond, we're looking for no regulations at all, including the new frontier in unregulated teaching certification. The foundation calls requirements for professional certification "barriers to teaching," much like FDA regulations are barriers to selling whatever kind of cut of whatever kind of meat in whatever kind of state. Accountability is bad.

3) Transparency. This appears to refer to the degree to which anti-education groups like Moms for Liberty and Parents Defending Education have gotten ahold of the levers of power, and how well the state has done at passing various teacher gag laws. 2 and 3 really capture the true spirit of the dismantlers, who argue that private education-flavored options should operate with complete opacity, accountable to nobody, but that the public education system should operate in a fishbowl, the easier to attack it for anything and everything.

4) Return on Investment. This is some top grade bullshit here, literally computing NAEP points per dollar spent, as well as factoring unfunded teacher pension liabilities (because pensions for teachers are bad and show you haven't properly de-powered your unions). 

The Heritage Foundation has embraced the culture war because it's a useful tool for creating distrust in public education. Leading dismantlist Chris Rufo said they would. Jay Greene of the Foundation said they should.  It's a tool; they'll be pro-parent just as long as it's not parents who are pro-public education.

But in the meantime, Florida is the dream. It is approaching the final form of dismantlism.

Defund public education. Undermine it financially, while also sowing distrust and undermining taxpayer support.

End the state's responsibility for providing or overseeing a decent education for every child.

Zero accountability to taxpayers.

Parents just DIY their way through an unregulated marketplace ripe for fraud and failure.

"We gave you a couple thou on a debit card. You're not our problem now. Voucher money ran out? Not our problem. Got bilked by some fraudster? Not our problem. Got left high and dry when some edu-biz closed its doors? Not our problem. Don't have the time or expertise to navigate this mess? We're sure someone has started a business that you can pay to do it for you. Are we certifying that business as qualified and legit? Ha! Now go away."

Two quotes from Kathryn Joyce's most excellent piece about the report card capture things well. First, from Andrew Spar, who has the thankless task of being president of the Florida Education association:

This amounts, Spar continued, to "the Heritage Foundation celebrating the rankings of how well you underfund public schools, how well you dismantle public schools. I don't think we should celebrate the fact that we're shortchanging kids."

And from Carol Burris, head of the Network for Public Education:

"With this report," added Burris, "the Heritage Foundation puts its values front and forward — that schooling should be a free-for-all marketplace where states spend the least possible on educating the future generation of Americans, with no regulations to preserve quality."

Florida and Arizona lead in dismantlism--that's how they ended up at the top of the Public Education Hostility Index last year. It is now easier than ever to imagine a future in which some states have an actual public education system, and others do not. 

The Free Market Is Wrong For Education (Part #1,277,652)

You may have noticed lately that the streaming industry is going through meltdown challenging transition. It's a reminder that, particularly in late stage capitalism, the free market is fundamentally incompatible with public education.

Just as cable disrupted broadcast television, streaming has disrupted cable. The less obvious part of the transition was a transition in what the business was actually about. Broadcast television are in the business of collecting eyeballs and then renting those eyeballs out to advertisers. Streaming services are in the business of selling subscriptions to customers. Except that, in this stage of the game, neither is actually in those businesses primarily--all are in the business of "creating" money for shareholders. Specifically, the business of creating ever-increasing piles of money.

But there's a problem--there is a finite number of customers in the pool, and streaming services have about reached that limit, particularly as they have proliferated. You are now an Old Fart if you can sit and regale the youngs of the days when a subscription to Netflix would let you watch pretty much everything.

The most obvious issue at the moment (other than your steadily increasing subscription costs) is the mess at Warner/HBO Max/Discovery, in which the newly combined streaming services are obliterating a ton of material. Not just canceled as in "don't make any more" but canceled as in "we have removed this material entirely from the servers." There are plenty of reasons behind this move, but this sentence pretty well sums it up:

Discovery is cutting shows from its archives and unfinished movies from HBO Max as it prepares to merge it with its sister streaming service Discovery Plus, having promised its shareholders a $3 billion cut in costs.

Meanwhile, as Washington Post reports,

Faced with a plunging stock price and worrisome subscriber loss, Netflix plans to add an advertising-supported model for a lower price and may crack down on password sharing. Disney Plus, Hulu and ESPN Plus, which can all be subscribed to in a cable-esque bundle, are raising prices after taking a more than $1 billion hit in the fiscal third quarter.

This all makes sense as long as you understand that the business of these services is not what you think it is. It is not to produce and distribute quality viewing experiences, and certainly not to provide for support to the creative people who produce all this content. The business of these businesses is to make money, and if they have to slice off pieces of their supposed primary mission, they'll do that. Sell advertising space? Cut what they pay for content to the bone? Use algorithms and data to determine what is profitable rather than what is quality? They will do all of that because--

1) You've got to keep making not just money, but more money and

2) Once the market is saturated, there's no way to do that except by playing bean counting games, cutting costs, and finding more sources of revenue.

I've repeated my law in the past: the free market does not foster superior quality; the free market fosters superior marketing. But that's probably incomplete, because the free market also, eventually, fosters creative corner cutting, even if the corners cut affect the pursuit of what is supposed to be the business's actual mission. 

We've already heard these kinds of noise from reformsters for years. There's a whole range of initiatives that are all really directed at just one question-- isn't there a way to have a "school" without paying so much for teachers? Maybe super-sardinemasters could teach a few hundred kids at a time. Maybe replace teachers with coaches or facilitators-- even call it something fancy, like microschool. Maybe lower the requirements so that any warm body can do the job and we don't have to pay for qualifications. 

And that's before we get to the lowering of expectations. How often are we hearing the message that a school should just teach students reading and math and maybe a little history, but only enough to make them employable.

The worst tendency for the free market is to look for that sweet spot where you spend the least you can get away with without losing too much of your market share, because your real purpose is to get money to shareholders. Is this what anyone wants for the schools their child attends? Do you want to hear from a building principal at orientation, "Rest assured that we have cut every corner in our attempt to provide your child with the bare minimum required."

The free market can, and has, accomplished some great things. But its values are incompatible with a system that promises to provide a full, rich, rounded education for every single student in the country. 

Moms for Liberty Are Primed For Elections

Moms for Liberty have not been shy about their intentions. Here's co-founder Tiffany Justice on Steve Bannon's show: 

BANNON: Are we going to start taking over the school boards?

JUSTICE: Absolutely. We're going to take over the school boards, but that's not enough. Once we replace the school boards, what we need to do is we need to have search firms, that are conservative search firms, that help us to find new educational leaders, because parents are going to get in there and they're going to want to fire everyone. What else needs to happen? We need good school board training. We need lawyers to stand up in their communities and be advocates for parents and be advocates for school board members who are bucking the system. Right now, parents have no recourse within any public education district.

This is not new. It's worth remembering that there was a third co-founder, Bridget Ziegler, who has since quietly stepped back, perhaps because her husband Christian is an obvious tie to the GOP political machinery. Back in October of 2021, Christian Ziegler told the Washington Post

I have been trying for a dozen years to get 20- and 30-year-old females involved with the Republican Party, and it was a heavy lift to get that demographic. But now Moms for Liberty has done it for me.

So there's no secret here. 

M4L has a different structure from traditional astro-turf groups like Parents Defending Education, which is a group of seasoned professional operatives with no real presence on the ground. M4L is more reminiscent of the Tea Party's early days--a combination of deep pockets and savvy leaders and a web of local groups of aggrieved moms. Traditional astro-turf is some folks in an office somewhere with a little has flame on a desk and the assertion that the flame is burning everywhere. The M4L/Tea Party model is about finding the places where there are sparks smoldering, and getting gasoline to those folks. 

So M4L is unloading some more election time gasoline. For example, on September 24, in Des Plaines, IL, they'll be presenting a Campaign Management Workshop to teach attendees (who will pay a nominal fee of $25) how to develop campaign strategy, research the district, conduct voter outreach, create a campaign organization and (my fave) hire and fire staff and consultants.

The workshop is being run by the Leadership Institute, an organization founded in 1979 by Morton Blackwell, a professional conservative activist.  How conservative? In 1964 he was the youngest Goldwater delegate at the GOP convention. He was a special assistant to Reagan. In 2016, he won the second Phyllis Schlafly Award for Excellence in Leadership. He's held all manner of GOP party office. The Leadership Institute has been recruiting and training conservative activists, politicians, and journalists for over 40 years. They are connected to the State Policy Network. 

M4L is feeling its oats after some victories in Florida's school board elections and they clearly have no intention of stopping there. 

Thay're advocating for their position, which is what advocacy groups do. But let this post serve as a reminder; if these folks are active in your area, they will be active in your school board elections. You may be used to quiet, sleepy school board elections in which candidates spend $50 and do little campaigning. But these are not ordinary times. These kind of conservative drives can be defeated, and have been in many places, but it takes hard work and selling your message. 

If you're looking to elect supporters of public education, be prepared. It will not be easy this time. 

TX: In God We Trust--No! Not Like That!

The problem with dumb rules is that they are hard to enforce and an invitation for people to mess with you.

Every teacher who has spent more than a year in the classroom knows that if you tell a class "I don't want to hear one more peep out of you," the next thing you will hear is "peep." And the next thing that will happen after that is you will find yourself wasting time in an argument about whether saying "meep" or "fleep" or "booger" violates the dumb rule that you just pulled out of your butt. Before you formulate a rule, make sure you've thought it through.

If there is one thing that has been consistent about people who want to get religion back into the classroom, it's that they never, ever think things through. And so we have the current time-wasting silliness in Texas.

Senator Bryan Hughes is an East Texas Republican who came up with Texas's anti-abortion bill with the clever workaround of having the public rather than law enforcement enforce it. Hughes cleverly worked that into his bill attempting to get God back in the classroom, which declared that if somebody donated an "In God We Trust" poster to a school, the school must display it in a conspicuous place. It became law, and Hughes, who had definitely not thought things through, expressed his happiness on the Twitter.

The national motto, In God We Trust, asserts our collective trust in a sovereign God. I’m encouraged to see groups like the Northwest [Austin] Republican Women and many individuals coming forward to donate these framed prints to remind future generations of the national motto.

The Christian cell phone company and election financier Patriot Mobile also chipped in some signs, saying "We are honored to be part of bringing God back into our public schools." The Yellow Rose of Texas Republican Women chipped in, and of course Moms for Liberty did, too. But then things took a turn...

Activist and artist Chaz Stevens sent along some posters with "In God We Trust"--written in Arabic. He set up a GoFundMe (you can still contribute) on which he says of the SB-797, "The law seemingly presumes these signs are written in English. Oopsie."

Others donated "In God We Trust" posters with rainbow colors. Some districts rejected the signs, immediately finding themselves in stupid meep arguments. For example, Carroll ISD rejected the not-what-we-wanted-here posters and argued that "the statute does not contemplate requiring the district to display more than one copy at a time." In this case "does not contemplate" means "does not actually say anything one way or another." Ditto for their argument that the law "does not contemplate" any language other than English.

The Carroll ISD donor, Sravan Krishna, replied, "It doesn’t say you have to stop at one, so that is your decision to stop at one. Why is more God not good? And are you saying you don’t have, like, one square feet of space in our buildings?”

The law does say that the poster must include an American flag and a state flag, and no other images or words. 

The argument that the school only has to display one poster rests on the use of "a" as in the school must display "a durable poster or framed copy." I'm not saying that Carroll ISD School Board President Cam Bryan is grasping at straws, but his argument includes calling "a" the "singular tense." Oddly enough, none of the run-up to all this donating activity included anyone saying, "Remember, we just need one poster per school."

Meanwhile, because it's Texas, someone else is threatening lawsuits against districts that put up the naughty signs, arguing "the legislature passed this law to set a good example for schoolchildren, so we are taking action to ensure schools do just that, and conspicuously display compliant posters that everyone is sure to love, equally.” So Arabic and pride flaggish posters are out because somebody will hate them? 

Even if Texas wins its dumb argument about the singular determiner, that simply opens up another dumb argument about who decides which single poster goes up, and how they decide. Is it first come, first served? Does the spot open up anew every school year? Or will school districts form a committee to select which "In God We Trust" poster is the acceptable one, and what criteria will they use, and will this then put the school in the position of deciding which God is the one allowed to be perched on their walls and does anybody on any side of this dumb argument really want that?

Conservative christianists agitating for "religious freedom" and "putting God back in the schools" always seem to forget that there is more than one faith. You can try to open up schools to access by those faiths, but access will always, by the very nature of schools, be limited, and therefor somebody will have to decide, somehow, which faiths get to have that access. The wall between church and state is meant to protect the church; break it down and you are a few short steps away from a government agency deciding which religion gets to enjoy certain privileges (and which do not). That is not good for anyone. 

We could try to have an honest conversation about that, or folks could pass dumb laws instead. Texas has made its choice. Unfortunately for them, the principle holds--make dumb rules, end up in dumb arguments. 

OK: Ryan Walters Is Bad News For Public Education

Ryan Walters may be interested in something, but it sure doesn't seem to be public education. And yet, he is poised to be Oklahoma's top education honcho. His latest egregious harassment of an educator in order to score political points should be a disqualifier all by itself, but it's only the latest rung on his ladder.

Getting started

Ryan Walters graduated from Harding University ("Faith, Learning, Living"), a private Christian university in Arkansas that didn't accept Black students until 1963. Walters graduated in 2010 with a degree in history. 

He returned to his home town of McAlester in 2011 to teach high school history, where he did well enough to be named McAlester Public Schools Teacher of the Year in 2015 and draw a finalist spot for Oklahoma's TOY award in 2016.That put him in touch with folks at the state level. In 2018 he was appointed to the Oklahoma Community Service Commission, and the next year, newly elected Governor Kevin Stitt to the Commission for Educational Quality and Accountability.

In 2019 he gave up his teaching gig to serve as the executive director of Oklahoma Achieves, the state Chamber of Commerce initiative that pulled big bucks from, among others, the Walton Family Foundation. Oklahoma Achieves would soon transform itself into Every Kid Counts Oklahoma, a "new education reform organization" that wants to give everyone "access to quality education." EKCO has been especially reluctant to provide their required IRS disclosure forms, but The Oklahoman did pry some info loose; donors include the Waltons, Yes Every Kid (a Charles Koch operation).

Walters was offered the top job for EKCO in March of 2020. In May of 2020 he went to work. March of 2020 was also the month in which President Trump signed the CARES Act, which included the Governor's Emergency Education Relief Fund (GEER). Oklahoma started pulling its money out in July of 2020, feeding a chunk of that money into a voucher program that would be handled by newly created Bridge the Gap, a program funded by GEER money but operated by Every Kid Counts Oklahoma, who in turn would hire ClassWallet, the Florida-based ed voucher management company. Turns out they didn't even have to bid. 

But Walters thought he had a winner. In fact, he made an appearance at Jeb Bush's Edu-palooza in a presentation about how to launch a voucher program in just four weeks; the spot was sponsored by ClassWallet. It was such a hit that ClassWallet had him do it again for their Youtube channel in February of 2021.

Relief Fund Follies

That turned out to be a bit of a fiasco. Of the $18 million that Oklahoma collected, $10 mill went straight to vouchers and the rest went... somewhere. Oklahoma Watch ("Impact journalism in the public interest") and The Frontier did some digging and found that GEER funds were used to buy things like Christmas trees, gaming consoles, electric fireplaces, and outdoor grills. About $191,000 in federal relief funds were used to buy 548 TVs. In all, about a half a million was spent on non-school related goods.

Walters had been plenty enthusiastic about privatizing the operation of the voucher program:

“We didn’t have the government agency personnel with the background experience to do this and, quite frankly, we felt like there could be a more efficient way to do this outside our government agencies,” Walters said.

But ClassWallet has been clear that they have no intention of seeing the undercarriage of this particular bus.

 
“As a software contractor, ClassWallet had neither responsibility for, nor authority to exercise programmatic decision making with respect to the program or its associated federal funds and did not have responsibility for grant compliance,” company spokesman Henry Feintuch said in a statement.

As the Norman Transcript Editorial Board reports:

While $8 million of the money was meant to fund education resources for individual students, Walters did not set any limits or guidelines on how families could use the money — when ClassWallet asked for his thoughts on limitations, Walters gave “blanket approval” to any item a family wanted to purchase through approved vendors.

And while Governor Stitt wouldn't agree to an interview with Oklahoma Watch, his spokeswoman Carly Atchison did offer this in a written statement:

During the COVID pandemic, Governor Stitt had a duty to get federal relief funds to students and families in Oklahoma as quickly as possible and he accomplished just that.

Well, yes. He could also have dumped the money in piles in various school parking lots. That would have been quick, too.

And he wasn't all that successful. The program shut down a day early "after federal investigators and attorneys for the state discovered the company was operating on an expired contract with almost no government supervision" and Oklahoma returned $2.9 million unspent relief dollars to the feds. A federal audit gave the program lowest marks all across the board.

Failing upward for many employers

While some called for Walters to resign, he had other goals in mind. In September of 2020, Governor Stitt had announced that Walters had been appointed to fill the spot of Secretary of Education, while also declaring that the post would be an individual cabinet position. In his mid-thirties, Walters is the youngest to ever serve in the post. Now he wants to be the state superintendent of public instruction.

Through it all, there remains some question about who Walters actually works for. He's still listed as the executive director of EKCO-- a group that's devoted to agitating for privatizing education, so this is like hiring the head of a private bus company to head your public transportation system. Especially if the private company is paying him triple what the public system is paying. According to The Oklahoman (Clifton Adcock, Reese Gorman, and Jennifer Palmer of Oklahoma Watch and The Frontier have been all over this story), Walters was hired for a $100,000 salary, with a requirement that he had to be paid at least 20% higher than the second-highest paid employee. His original contract called for an option of a minimum $20K raise after the first year. Governor Stitt vetoed a bill that would have required cabinet members to disclose finances.

His salary of secretary of education from the state of Oklahoma is $40,000. The state superintendent makes $125,000, so at least the state would be on even footing with Walters' other employer. 

Strutting his right wing bona fides

It's hard to tell whether Walters is a died-in-the-right-wing-wool conservative or just an opportunist riding the prevailing political hot air (though things like this AP teaching video where he observes that Joseph McCarthy "exaggerated" offers a hint). Either way, he's been putting on quite a show. 

On his Twitter page, he likes to post videos of himself in his car objecting to liberal naughtiness. He cranks out op-eds, like this one arguing that "if our kids are taught to hate this country we will no longer be the country that God has so richly blessed." He contributed a piece to Fox News: "Listen up, teachers: stop going woke." He warned textbook publishers not to put any of that nasty CRT stuff in their books (and took flak for it). He "urged" a school district to prohibit students who were born "biological males" from using female bathrooms, claiming they had misinterpreted Title IX. As reported in the Stillwater News Press: "The US Department of Education’s rules, that your school board claims ordered this travesty, simply allowed school districts to choose their own path – and Stillwater has chosen poorly,” Walters wrote. “You have chosen radicals over your students, ideology over biology, and ‘wokeness’ over safety.” He has accused Tulsa schools of "pushing pornography."

His primary opponent April Grace tried to call him out on his own teaching, saying that his lesson about the psychology of racial bias actually violated Oklahoma's Anti-CRT law. It didn't stick. Walters joined Governor Stitt in backing a massive neo-voucher bill that ultimately failed; Grace took position that the bill had too few safeguards for the use of taxpayer funds (a position that, once upon a time, conservatives would have held). Walters beat her. 

His latest target

His victory apparently has encouraged him to go negative hard right. Witness his latest activity.

Summer Boismier was a teacher at Norman High School who drew flak for covering some books in her classroom with the message "Books the state doesn't want you to read." Apparently even worse, she posted the QR code for the Brooklyn Public Libraries new eCard for teens program, which allows teens from all over the country to check out books, no matter how repressive or restrictive state or local rules they may live under.

She was suspended by the district, which said that this was about her "personal political statements" and a "political display" in the classroom. Boismier told The Gothamist 

I saw this as an opportunity for my kids who were seeing their stories hidden to skirt that directive. Nowhere in my directives did it say we can't put a QR code on a wall.

But Oklahoma school districts are on edge since the state Board of Education downgraded two districts' accreditations for allegedly violating the law. 

The district's suspension was brief, but rather than report back to work, Boismier resigned. As the Washington Post reported

She recognized the school district was in a tight spot and said she placed most of the blame on Oklahoma Republicans for fomenting what she described as a growing culture of fear, confusion and uncertainty in schools.

Amid that climate, Boismier said, she doesn’t feel like she has a place in an Oklahoma classroom.

None of that was enough for Walters. The events surrounding Boismier attracted plenty of attention, and so, Candidate Walters popped up to put his two cents in via a letter that he posted on Twitter. 

In the letter, he called for Summer Boismier (he called her out by name) to have her teaching license revoked. "Ms. Boismier's providing access to banned and pornographic material is unacceptable." Let's not get into the question of what qualifies as pornography, but let's do look at some of the books now restricted in Oklahoma. It's quite a list, but it includes I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Raisin in the Sun, Lord of the Flies, Brave New World, and The Outsiders. (Make special note of that last one. S. E. Hinton was born and lives in Oklahoma, and wrote that acclaimed novel in her teens, which means if she were a teen today, she would not be allowed to read the novel that she wrote herself). But I digress.

The letter also includes this line:

There is no place for a teacher with a liberal political agenda in the classroom.

Walters, who once wrote "I will continue to teach my students the United States is the greatest nation in the world," is at least honest in saying that it's the liberal view that must be prohibited. 

Meanwhile, after Walters tweeted out her name and his non-reality-based accusations, Boismier has endured a flood of vulgarity and death threats. 

“These teachers need to be taken out and shot,” “teachers like this should not only be fired but also should be swinging from a tree,” “If Summer tried this in Afghanistan, they’d cut out her tongue for starters,” are just a minuscule fraction of the threats pouring into Summer Boismier’s inbox.

Great game here. Draw a target on someone's back and just let your followers try to make her life hell. 

Bottom line

On top of all this, Walters wants to cut all federal money going to Oklahoma schools and replace that money (about $921 million) with--well, nothing. Just be be more efficient because "I want to move us away from federal funding and move us off of federal dollars." Because, after all, "the feds have no place in our education system." So much for support for school lunches and special ed. 

But it fits with the organizations that support him, like Americans for Prosperity, Oklahoma Conservative Political Action Committee, and the Oklahoma 2nd Amendment Association.

An Oklahoman who cares about public education should not vote for this guy. The state school superintendent has some hefty powers in Oklahoma, including control over staffing the department, along with oversight of teacher certification, curriculum standards, school accreditation, and regulatory compliance. The office has its hands on the $2.5 billion purse strings for school funding. The superintendent chairs the state board of education. And he needs to be able to work with many constituencies. Also, it would be nice if he weren't drawing a huge salary from a private organization focused on supplanting public schools.

We'll see what happens. Rural Oklahoma has already sent a message regarding how it feels about the idea of cutting funding to local schools so that folks operating private schools can make a buck--they are not in favor. Here's hoping they will also not be in favor of the guy who really likes the idea. Here's hoping that Ryan Walters can go back to doing his real job--and only his real job--soon.

P.S. Here's that QR code for the Brooklyn Banned Books program