KNOW YOUR ENEMIES: Tony Smith... What He Did to Oakland, What He’ll Try in Chicago
On April 4,, 2013, Oakland Unified School District (OUSD) Superintendent Tony Smith gave notice that he was resigning effective June 30 and relocating his family to Chicago to be near his ailing father-in-law. There is little doubt that Smith will soon be a visible presence in Chicago education — quite possibly the next CEO of Chicago Public Schools. It is important for Chicago teachers and community to know just who they are likely to be dealing with – and to those fighting back against the corporate education agenda elsewhere too, given the importance of the struggle in Chicago.
My guess is that Tony Smith’s job in Chicago will be to break or weaken the powerful alliance between teachers, students, parents and community so evident during and after last September’s teacher strike. There are few who can match him when it comes to talking about the importance of neighborhood schools providing wraparound services to combat the effects of poverty; to recruiting, rewarding, and retaining good teachers; to stimulate authentic learning based on concepts and creativity rather than skill-based rote learning; to provide all the resources that teachers need to teach and students need to learn; to acknowledge and work to overcome racism and its effects; to forge real authentic collaboration between faculty, staff, community, students, parents, and administration; to crack down on mismanagement, excess administrative overhead, and needless outsourcing; etc. For that is exactly what he did when he was appointed superintendent in Oakland four years ago. He talked so well, in fact, that even some skeptics were willing to suspend disbelief and give him a shot.
But in Oakland, it was just talk. Indeed, throughout his career, Smith has been a proponent of the corporate agenda for education and a practitioner of divide and conquer, of charter schools and privatization, of school closures, downsizing, and union busting. This goes back to his roots.
Tony Smith graduated from U. of California Berkeley in 1992, where he was captain of the football team. He went on to get masters and doctoral degrees in education from UC Berkeley, and from 1997 to 2004 was one of the leaders of the Oakland-based Bay Area Coalition of Equitable Schools (BAYCES – now the National Equity Project). At the time, BAYCES was the Oakland conduit for Gates Foundation money, and Gates was heavily promoting the “small school miracle”, engineering the breakup of thousands of comprehensive secondary schools nationally.
In Oakland, starting in about 2001, BAYCES “designed” the breakup of three of the city’s six comprehensive high schools – the three “lowest-achieving” schools, those serving the city’s highest poverty areas, with overwhelmingly black and Latino enrollments – Fremont, Castlemont, and McClymonds High Schools. I was a teacher at Castlemont, which was broken into three small schools in 2003. BAYCES “redesign” included permanently closing the school’s library and consolidating the librarian’s position; eliminating French and eliminating the French teacher position; closing all three vocational academies (construction, culinary, and fashion), although all three provided job training in an area of sky-high unemployment for blacks and Latinos under 25 years of age.
We said at the time that this under-resourced breakup of Fremont, Castlemont, and McClymonds would drive out students and teachers, encourage the growth of charter schools, and make already unstable neighborhoods still more unstable. And that is what happened: Castlemont’s enrollment went from 1,750 in 2003 to fewer than 600 last year. McClymonds went from 1,000 to 250; Fremont from 2,300 to 750. At the same time, charter school enrollment in Oakland quadrupled.
In 2003, in the midst of the BAYCES-led breakup of Oakland secondary schools, the state of California put OUSD in receivership, ostensibly because the district’s budget was $37 million in the red. For the first two years of the state takeover, BAYCES openly co-administered OUSD with Elli Broad’s handpicked State Administrator for OUSD, Randy Ward, and an army of other Broad Institute graduates. During this period, scores of custodians, nearly all maintenance workers and many food service workers and drivers were laid off; libraries in nearly every middle school and several high schools were closed; charter school enrollment soared. Randy Ward introduced Results Based Budgeting (RBB), in which school sites were told that they were responsible for nearly all expenses, including teacher salaries – pressuring principals to try to force out veteran teachers in favor of lower-paid and untrained Teach for America recruits, and to cut supplies and resources to the bone (at more than one school, teachers were told that they needed to pay for copier paper out of their own pockets).
Tony Smith was a BAYCES leader when these policies were put in place. He left BAYCES in 2004 -- not in protest, but to advance his career. From 2004 to 2007 he ran the Emeryville, California schools. From there, he went to San Francisco for a year and a half as Deputy Superintendent.
Fast forward to Spring 2012. Tony Smith has been OUSD superintendent for three years –- ever since the state takeover ended in 2009. Despite his passionate and eloquent rhetoric, Smith has continued — even deepened — the harmful policies put in place during the state takeover. He has maintained Ward’s Results Based Budgeting and, like Ward, has used RBB to target veteran teachers.
Now, in April 2012 Smith, who participated in the ill-conceived break-up of the three high schools while at BAYCES, announces that the position of classroom teacher will be abolished at Castlemont, Fremont, and McClymonds, where now all teachers will be “teachers on special assignment” and the small schools replaced by “Acceleration High Schools”. The reconsolidation was as ill-conceived and as poorly designed as the breakup had been: the libraries remained closed; custodial, food service and clerical staffing remained inadequate; support services were scarce; overall the schools remained terribly resource-starved. The elimination of the classroom teacher position was a transparent excuse for violating the due process and seniority provisions by forcing all teachers at the three high schools to reapply for their jobs every year.
School size isn’t the primary determinant of success. BAYCES breakup of the comprehensive high schools a decade ago was destructive. Smith’s reconsolidation has been destructive too. And Smith has gone a step beyond to overt union busting, by forcing teachers at these three schools to reapply for their jobs every year.
Indeed, Smith has trampled on virtually every hope he raised in his smooth but false talk of three years ago:
• Neighborhood schools? Smith closed several, including five elementary schools last June (scaling to adjust for the difference in size between Chicago and Oakland public school enrollments, those five closures alone would be equivalent to the 54 schools Rahm Emanuel et al plan to close). When a group of parents, teachers, and community staged a 17-day sit-in at Lakeview Elementary to protest the closure of the five schools, Smith sent in the cops to evict us.
• Wraparound services? Two years ago Smith gutted Adult Education — from 25,000 students when he arrived in 2009, the program now has been all but wiped out. He made cuts to Early Childhood Education. He eliminated counselors at the district’s largest high school. Etc. Those few services he did introduce were partial, and based on soft money from his friends and patrons in the corporate foundations.
• Combating racism? All of the schools Smith closed last year were majority minority enrollment — four black, one Latino. Many of the schools in the black and Latino communities that remain open have become more segregated under Smith.
• Recruiting, rewarding, and retaining good teachers? Establishing collaborative relations? Oakland teachers have been without a contract since 2008, and are paid 20% below the state and county averages for public school teachers. In 2010, when negotiations broke down over Smith’s demand that the teachers union accept no pay increase, larger class size, weakened seniority and academic freedom, Smith imposed his terms on the union — the first Superintendent in OUSD history to do so. Union-busting then in 2010, just as he did two years later by forcing the Castlemont, Fremont, and McClymonds teachers to reapply for their jobs.
• Providing the resources teachers need to teach and students need to learn? Several Oakland elementary schools were chosen by the state to receive supplementary funding for class size reduction, resources, and support under the Quality Education Improvement Act (QEIA) funding, a program aimed at helping the state’s lowest-achieving schools. For the past two years, OUSD has lost millions in QEIA funding because all but one or two of the QEIA-eligible schools failed to meet class size targets – clearly not a problem of poor site administrators, but rather of an inept and unsupportive district administration.
• Cracking down on mismanagement, excess administrative overhead, and needless outsourcing? Relative to its size, OUSD under Smith has double the administrative overhead and double the outsourced contracts compared to the average California school district.
Last year, Tony Smith said he wouldn’t care if all Oakland schools were charter schools. Oakland already had the state’s highest percentage of students enrolled in charter schools, and that percentage has increased under Smith (from about 17% to about 20%).
And when Tony enters the game, be prepared to ante up. Although Oakland teachers have not had a raise in five years and are among the lowest paid in the Bay Area, Smith demanded and got a 6% increase over his predecessor’s salary when he signed on as superintendent in 2009. Smith earns a base salary of $265,000 / year. His total annual compensation, including benefits, comes to more than $352,000.
A thread runs through Tony Smith’s career: to attempt to counterpose, in practice, what he asserts to be the interests of students and community to those of teachers and staff. This aligns him with the corporate agenda. And, in fact, he is one of their rising superstars: witness the "philanthropic" funding to OUSD, cited in Smith's resignation letter and in the school board's accompanying statement. (This goes back at least to his BAYCES days [1997 - 2004], where he managed BAYCES connections with the Hewlett Foundation.). But smooth though his tongue may be, Tony Smith’s divide and conquer strategy was beginning to backfire on him in Oakland — witness the widespread, if passive, support from the community for the sit-in at Lakeview Elementary, or the increasing heat he has been taking at board meetings from community in west and east Oakland.
So while Smith’s family health issues may well be real, I have to believe that he was looking to get out of town. And I have to believe that his corporate patrons want him in Chicago, where they think he’ll be able to win the community back to their side and break the teacher – community alliance. Prove them wrong.
Comments:
By: Pete Farruggio
Tony Smith & BayCES
BAYCES (Bay Area Coalition of Essential Schools) was originally a
"franchise" of the Ted Sizer reform movement, connected with Annenberg, and thus
with Debbie Meier. A few years after BayCES had been setting up pretty good,
community oriented small schools under well intentioned superintendent Dennis
Chaconas, the Democratic controlled state legislature dumped Chaconas with a
state manufactured "budget crisis" (he had given too much money to teachers,
etc), and appointed Randy Ward as a de facto dictator to run the school
district. The guy who ran BayCES was a slick talking shyster who quickly
converted BayCES from a center for innovation and progressive education into a
mouthpiece for Ward's teach to the test mandate. BayCES was used as a cover for
smashing the real grass roots charters and replacing them with the new corporate
model, for bringing in droves of TFA drones, and for bashing the union and
excoriating pro-union teachers and driving them out of their positions
By the way, under Chaconas, the small schools and some of the grass roots charters were trying to implement real bilingual education for the growing Latino immigrant population in Oakland. BayCES played a key role in helping dictator Ward to eliminate Spanish language teaching
Pete Farruggio
Associate Prof of Bilingual Education
Univ of TX Pan American
former Oakland teacher
By: John Whitfield
Bout dat translation
I'd be willing to do that, but will wait for the go ahead. That would take Substance into a new realm that could only be something good for it, that is given the many Substance readers who read as comfortably in Spanish as in English. But more so, for those that prefer to read in Spanish, because they aren't quite there yet. By the way don't forget to rear your own youngsters bilingually. The cognitive advantage they develop can be so advantageous, without mentioning potential job insurance. Just ask professor Dr. Stephen Krashen.
By: Jack Gerson
Reply to Pete Farrugio's comment
I’m sure that when Pete Farrugio says “The guy who ran BAYCES was a slick talking shyster who quickly converted BAYCES from a center for progressive and innovative education into a mouthpiece for Ward’s teach to the test mandate”,he's referring to Steve Jubb, who was the Executive Director of BAYCES throughout Ward’s reign as OUSD state administrator (2003 - 6). But how could one “slick talking shyster” overnight convert a “center for progressive and innovative education” to a “mouthpiece for Ward’s teach to the test mandate”? I think we need to put this in context of the tsunami that hit public education back then, especially: Broad, Gates, NCLB.
For one thing, Steve Jubb didn’t arrive with Ward in 2003. No, he became Executive Director of BAYCES in 1996. Tony Smith arrived at BAYCES a year later, and through Smith’s entire time as a BAYCES leader (1997 - 2004), he reported to Jubb. Also arriving on the scene in the late 1990s were new educational foundations dangling badly needed funding in exchange for signing on to their initiatives -- the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation and the Bill and Melissa Gates Foundation. In 2000, Gates launched its “small schools initiative”, pouring $2 billion nationally into trying to transform 2,600 comprehensive high schools into small schools. The BAYCES-Gates hookup began years prior to the state takeover of Oakland schools (which took effect on January 1, 2003), leave aside Randy Ward’s arrival (he was named OUSD’s state administrator several months later). The BAYCES leadership -- and not just Steve Jubb -- saw this as their chance to get funding and support to sustain and scale up their own already existing small schools project into a massive districtwide program. (One prominent BAYCES leader commented privately at the time, with a sheepish grin: “We’ve decided to go over to the dark side to fast-track our program”).
Small high schools are difficult to sustain because they require proportionately more funding than do larger schools to offer equivalent curricula. Diane Ravitch’s statement in Death and Life of the Great American School System pretty well summarizes what I found to be true in my years at an Oakland small high school: “Because of their size, they seldom have enough students or teachers to offer advanced courses in mathematics, electives, advanced placement courses, career and technical education, choir, band, sports teams, and other programs that many teenagers want. Nor can most offer adequate support for English-language learners or students with special needs.”
A relative few do succeed. Usually, they’re able to find additional money (by competing for and getting new foundation money or special district or state supplementary awards). But only the relative few can win at the grant marketplace. Alternatively, some small schools are flexible enough to interconnect and coordinate to share services like academic and arts electives, vocational programs, and special education. This closely resembles -- if it is not identical to -- comprehensive high schools that group students into academies or small learning communities that help create a sense of community and collaboration (a big positive of small schools).
Funding from Gates and Broad comes at a price. The Gates Foundation didn’t want interconnectedness in Oakland -- they wanted fully self-contained schools. And that’s what BAYCES delivered at Castlemont, where I taught. They espoused a rigid ideology of absolute autonomy, ruthlessly eliminating shared services -- the library and the librarian; French; even the self-funding vocational academies.
In the end, the vaunted funding that motivated BAYCES’s sellout wasmore often than not enough to do great harm, but not enough to provide the kind of resources and support that are needed, and especially not given the austerity cuts under the state takeover. Instead, it was frequently used as a bait-and-switch: providing teachers at a comprehensive school with more collaboration time and smaller classes in the year or two prior to the school’s breakup into small schools; after the breakup, for the most part, the soft money evaporated and teachers and staff were told it was up to each school to compete for funding in the soft money marketplace.
And then there was accountability and the alliance with Eli Broad. Gates wanted results. Broad grants were contingent on meeting formal mileposts. They were both huge proponents of No Child Left Behind (signed into law on January 1, 2002), with its promotion of test-based accountability for students, teachers, and schools. BAYCES was willing to pay that price.
The state takeover of OUSD was formally authorized by the state legislature (in the form of bill SB 39). But this was merely a rubber stamp. The takeover was engineered by Eli Broad. In 2002, Eli Broad and two billionaire allies (Reed Hastings, founder of Aspire Charter Schools, CEO of Netflix, and then president of the state board of education; and John Doerr, Silicon Valley’s most prominent venture capitalist [he provided Google’s initial funding] and a New Schools Venture Fund director) contributed a combined $500,000 to Broad ally Jack O’Connell’s election campaign for state education secretary -- about ten times the typical amount spent by candidates for that office. A few months later, O’Connell returned the favor by turning OUSD over to Eli Broad. He asked Broad to advise him on who to appoint to run the state takeover of OUSD; Broad named Randy Ward, who was an intern in Broad’s Urban Superintendents Academy and had just completed a stint as dictator-in-charge of the state takeover of the Compton, California schools. Along with Ward, Broad sent in Broad interns and residents to run Human Resources, Labor Relations, the Budget Office, etc.
For the first few years of the takeover, BAYCES was the Gates designate, and Randy Ward was the Broad designate. They had a division of labor: Broad/Ward dealt primarily with central administration; Gates/BAYCES handled the academic side (small schools initiative; curricula; etc.). Together they ran OUSD, and ran it into the ground. The state debt, ostensibly the reason for the takeover, tripled under the state administration. And this despite severe austerity: an immediate across-the-board 4% wage cut to all district employees in 2003; large-scale layoffs of classified staff; closing of numerous school libraries; more than doubling counselors’ workload; elimination of academic and vocational electives; closing or “redesigning” well over half of the schools in the district; grossly increasing outsourcing; victimizing and trying to force out veteran teachers; quadrupling enrollment in charter schools. Consequently, enrollment in Oakland public schools fell from about 55,000 in 2003 to about 37,000 now.
As I wrote in the main posting, Tony Smith has, if anything, extended and deepened the destructive policies of the state takeover. Smith takes funding cuts for granted. He goes hat in hand to his corporate patrons to solicit marginal funding (in exchange for executing their policies), but does not go after corporate and individual wealth. So in the end he is a proponent of “do more with less” austerity, executing the cuts demanded by his corporate patrons. This goes back to his roots, continuing the path BAYCES set off on when it sold out to Gates and allied with Broad.
By: PJ Hallam
Tony Smith is Not Your Enemy
On the continuum of corporate conservatism/school privatization vs. liberalism, Tony Smith is far from Eli Broad and Randy Ward. I worked as a performance assessment consultant for OUSD during the Chaconas era, during the time when the small schools movement had widespread community support. As pointed out, this well-intentioned reform movement was quickly co-opted, and while Tony Smith had a front row seat when this happened, that doesn't mean he supported it. Rather, his work promoting equity in Emeryville and San Francisco school districts are more indicative of his nature, and match his words.
I worked as a special education consultant in OUSD at several elementary schools, including Lakeville, when he was first hired. Overall, it was rewarding to see conditions and attitudes improve, even though OUSD faced dire fiscal challenges. Tony Smith was actively involved in schools and his "golden words" played out in many instances. I worked with excellent OUSD teachers and heard general support for his policies. Even the school closings were grudgingly seen as fiscally sound, and time was taken for the public to air their concerns and discussions for other solutions were made.
Tony's actions were a far cry from when Randy Ward was in charge. I was co-sponsor of a dual-immersion school in East Oakland at that time, and experienced hostility from that administration for seeking equity for students from all levels. “Oh great, the students will be illiterate in two languages.” This kind of district administrative attitude and services completely changed under Tony Smith. His administration had its problems, but it was not nearly the evil alliance with corporations being portrayed above.
By: Barbara Lea
Charter Schools/Privatization
I was a charter school employee for almost EIGHT years in Chicago, and if Tony Smith believes that the answer to failing education is turning all the schools in our system into "college-prep" charter schools, he is gravely mistaken. It is very concerning to me that he closed or limited vocational programming. Not all high school students are college bound, and we should not force all of them to think that a 4-year university is their ONLY option. Our students need different options, programming, and pathways to success in various ways. Thank you for reading.
By: Irene Krull Vitullo
Spanish translation of above article
This is an excellent overview of what Chicago can expect if and when Tony Smith has a leadership role with the Chicago Board of Education. Since many of the Latino schools will be affected, their leaders need to have this information. Could you have it translated?
Thank you!