Monday, April 29, 2019

The Forgotten Disaster of America’s First Standardized Test by Steven Singer

Originally posted at: https://gadflyonthewallblog.com/2019/04/23/the-forgotten-disaster-of-americas-first-standardized-test/?fbclid=IwAR2oB0mwoAM8SlEkeY9lLhU6iUI2uLPM4tcZfNPxHbY-SmfTbYmT_4ZEm3Q


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“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
George Santayana (1905)

The merry-go-round of history continues to spin because the riders forget they are free to get off at any time.

But we rarely do it. We keep to our seats and commit the same stupid mistakes over and over again.


It was a disaster the very first time it was attempted in America – in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1845.

Yet we continue to prescribe the same error to students in schools today.

Judging learners, schools and teachers based on standardized assessments has the same problems now as it did 174 years ago. Yet we act as if it’s the only accurate way to assess knowledge, the only fair and equitable way to assign resources and judge the professionalism of our schools and teachers.


If we simply remembered our history, we’d know that. But our collective amnesia allows this bad policy to reappear every generation despite any criticisms or protests.

So let me take you back to Boston in the middle of the 19th Century and show you exactly where things first went wrong and how they still go wrong in nearly the same way.

BOSTON SCHOOLS


Even back then Boston had a history of excellent schools.

One of the country’s most prestigious institutions – the city Latin School – was founded in 1635 and had a list of alumni that reads like a who’s who of American history up through modern times. This includes Cotton Mather, Sam Adams, John Hancock, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Leonard Bernstein and even Santayana, himself!

But Boston wasn’t known just for educating the elite. The city’s school committee had opened the nation’s first public high school in 1821. This wasn’t a charity. The community funded its public schools relatively well and took pride in its students’ accomplishments.


At the local English Grammar Schools, most examinations were strictly oral. Students were questioned in person about the various subjects in which they had received instruction. Teachers tested students’ memory in a recitation to find out whether or not they were proficient in the subject at hand.

The purpose behind such an assessment wasn’t to assign a grade like children were eggs or melons. It was to give the teacher information about how much his students had learned and where the students’ teacher should begin instruction next year.

However, critics complained that such assessments weren’t impartial and that a written exam might be better. Unfortunately, having every student complete one was impractical before the pencil and steel pen came into common usage in the late 1800s. Besides, teachers – then called School Masters – were trusted to use their judgment measuring student achievement and ability based on empirical observation of students’ day-to-day work.

It should also be noted that many more teachers were men at this time. This changed by the 1920s, when the majority of educators were women while most men had fled to the administrative offices. As this transformation took place, it accompanied greater trust in administrators and decreasing confidence in classroom teachers. And if you don’t see the sexism in that, you aren’t paying attention.

HORACE MANN’S TEST


To this day Mann remains a somewhat controversial figure. To some he was a reformer seeking to modernize education. To others he was a self-serving politician looking to increase his own power and that of his party no matter what the cost.

In 1837, Mann was appointed secretary of the newly created State Board of Education. As a member of the Whig Party, he wanted to centralize authority. To do that, he needed to discredit the history of excellence in Boston.

Mann had traveled abroad to see the innovations of European schools and concluded that Prussia’s schools, in particular, were far superior to America’s. His remarks were included in a highly publicized 1844 report that demanded action lest our country’s children be left behind. (Sound familiar?)

When other prominent Whigs including his friend Samuel Gridley Howe were elected to the School Committee and later the examining committee, Mann had everything he needed to make a change.

Howe dispensed with the oral exams in favor of written tests, what today we’d call short-answer exams. Without any warning to teachers or students, this new committee came to Boston’s grammar schools with preprinted questions. Teachers and administrators were furious. Students were terrified.

The examiners picked 530 out of the city’s approximately 7,000 students — allegedly the best below high school age – and made them take the new exams. This was about 20 or 30 children from each school. Students had an hour to write their responses on each subject to questions taken from assigned textbooks -geography, grammar, history, rhetoric, and philosophy.

Most failed.

contemporary report on the exams concluded that the results “show beyond all doubt, that a large proportion of the scholars in our first classes, boys and girls of 14 or 15 years of age, when called upon to write simple sentences, to express their thoughts on common subjects, without the aid of a dictionary or a master, cannot write, without such errors in grammar, in spelling, and in punctuation.”

Examiners explained in a subsequent report that they had been looking for “positive information, in black and white,” exactly what students had learned. Teachers took no offense at that goal, but complained that the test questions had not pertained to what students had been taught.

Howe and his examiners countered that they had ensured their new assessment was valid with field testing – a practice that modern day corporations like Pearson and Data Recognition Corp. still do today.

Howe’s committee gave the same test in towns outside of Boston, including Roxbury, then a prosperous suburb. In all, the committee tested 31,159 students the previous summer. The result – an average score of 30 percent correct.

However, the wealthy Roxbury students outscored all the other schools. Therefore, they were made the standard of excellence that all other schools were expected to reach.

So when Boston students – all of whom did not have the privileges of Roxbury students – didn’t achieve the same scores, they were deemed failing, inadequate, losers.

Thus Mann could justify criticizing the district, firing teachers and administrators and consolidating control over the city’s schools.

BACKLASH


The result was pandemonium. Howe issued a scathing report lambasting the schools and even naming individual teachers who should be fired. Mann published the results in his influential Common School Journal and these kinds of tests started to appear at urban schools across the country.

However, Bostonians were not all convinced. Editorials were published both for and against the tests.

Every aspect of the exam was disputed – and in similar ways to the testing controversies we still see today.

To start, raising the stakes of the exams invited cheating. One teacher was caught leaking questions to his students before the testing session began.

The assessments also showed a racial achievement gap that far from helping diagnose structural inequalities was instead weaponized against the very people working hardest to help minority students learn. Examiners criticized the head teacher of the segregated Smith School because his African American students had scored particularly low. He was accused of not seeing the potential in black children. Never mind that these students were the most different from the Roxbury standard in terms of culture and privilege.

The tests also began the endless failing schools narrative that has been used by ambitious policymakers and disaster capitalists to get support for risky and unproven policies. Rivalries began between city and suburban schools with Bostonians wondering why their schools had been allowed to get so much worse.

Much of the criticism came back on Mann and Howe who reacted by throwing it back on the teachers for doing such a bad job.

In the end, a few educators were let go, but the voters had had enough of Mann.

Parents accused him of deliberately embarrassing students and in 1848 he was not re-elected to office.


The experiment deeply disturbed many people. No one could explain why there was a discrepancy between scores of rich vs. poor students. The original justification of these exams was that they would eliminate partiality and treat students fairly and equally. Yet the results showed a racial and economic bias that didn’t escape contemporaries. In 1850 as the tests were being discontinued, the chairman of the examination committee wrote:
“Comparison of schools cannot be just while the subjects of instruction are so differently situated as to fire-side influence, and subjected to the draw-backs inseparable from place of birth, of age, of residence, and many other adverse circumstances.”

And that’s how standardized testing began.

It was a political power play justified by so-called universal testing.

Numbers, charts and graphs were used to mesmerize people into going along with policies that were never meant to help children learn, but instead to gain power for certain policymakers while taking it away from others.

HISTORY OF STANDARDIZED TESTING


In the years that followed, standardized testing became much more efficient. In 1915, the first test was given with multiple-choice questions – Frederick J. Kelly’s Kansas Silent Reading Test. It was roundly criticized and eventually disowned by Kelly for focusing almost exclusively on lower order thinking skills.

Then in the 1920s eugenicists like Robert Yerkes and Carl Brigham went a step further with similar IQ tests to justify privileging upper class whites from lower class immigrants, blacks and Hispanics. Their work was even used to justify the forced sterilization of 60,000 to 70,000 people from groups with low test scores, thus preventing them from “polluting” the gene pool. Ultimately this lead Brigham to create the Scholastic Assessment Test (SAT) to keep such undesirables out of higher education. It is still in wide use today.

It wasn’t until 1938 that Kaplan Inc. was founded to tutor students in these same tests. Stanley Kaplan, son of Jewish immigrants, showed that far from assessing learning, these tests merely assessed students’ ability to take the tests. Thus he was able to provide a gateway to higher education for many Jews and other minoritieswho had been unfairly excluded because of testing.

In the 1960s black plaintiffs began winning innumerable lawsuits against the testing industry. Perhaps the most famous case is Hobson v. Hansen in 1967, which was filed on behalf of a group of Black students in Washington, DC. The court ruled that the policy of using tests to assign students to tracks was racially biased because the tests were standardized to a White, middle class group.

And then in 2001, President George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind legislation revved the whole thing up into overdrive. With bipartisan support, he tied federal funding of schools to standardized test performance and annual academic progress – a policy that was only intensified under President Barack Obama who added competitive grants for additional funding based on test performance under Race to the Top.

Since then, standardized testing has grown from a $423 million industry before 2001 to a multi-billion dollar one decades later. If we add in test prep, new text books, software, and consultancy, that figure easily tops the trillion dollar mark.


Yet the problems today are almost the same as those in Boston nearly two centuries ago.

LEGACY


These tests are political smokescreens used to stop policymakers from having to enact real reforms like equitable funding, wraparound services and addressing the trauma our most impoverished students deal with everyday. Instead, we push a school privatization and testing industry that makes trillions of dollars for corporations at the expense of our children.

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

Here’s hoping that one day we remember and get the heck off this runaway merry-go-round.

Like this post? I’ve written a book, “Gadfly on the Wall: A Public School Teacher Speaks Out on Racism and Reform,” now available from Garn Press. Ten percent of the proceeds go to theBadass Teachers Association. Check it out!
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Philanthropy and Control Part II: Give Us Personalized Learning without the Algorithms. by Renegade Teacher

Originally posted at: https://renegadeteacher.blog/2019/04/21/philanthropy-and-control-part-ii-give-us-personalized-learning-without-the-algorithms/?fbclid=IwAR1eRlm1rKzSUaqwWogQoib1q8k9ewLfHEEZTPwKbIBg74yFUvylRQnHROs

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Think of a teachable moment in school that changed your life. Go ahead, actually do it!
What did that lesson consist of? Who taught you the lesson, or who facilitated your learning? Who was there? What did it feel like? What did the room look like?
For me, it was my 7th grade English teacher who challenged my assumption of what is “normal.” I will never forget that moment that I compared a divorced family to a normal family. He asked me what a “normal” family was, and I said two parents, a mom and a dad. He questioned if that was normal, given how many families either have a divorced family or one parent. I learned that day not to assume that your “normal” is everyone else’s “normal.” (Ironically, my own parents are divorced).
For most of us, a teachable moment did not necessitate fancy equipment or technological gimmicks. This is unsurprising- our power as a species comes from human connection. Technology can aid us in our power, but it must be a tool rather than our focus. With perseverance and concentration, we can achieve great things, but we have shown repeatedly that shiny, flashy objects can often distract us more than help us. Increasingly, tech entrepreneurs have used our students as experiments for new technology.

Personalized Learning: The Newest Education Reform Gimmick

Personalized learning is a tech-based reform effort promulgated by the wealth of Facebook Founder Mark Zuckerberg. Vague and magic-bullety as all other corporate reform efforts, personalized learning appears to be some mix of “using digital content and tools in a purposeful way,” “incorporating personalized (learning) playlists”, flexible seating, and “involving students in grading conversations” (while other students work on technology)[1]. It is pretty clear that personalized learning uses some type of algorithm-driven/adaptive software in order to provide personalization to students.
But wait, I’m sorry. I’m rushing to define this “revolutionary” movement. According to ed-tech CEO Larry Berger of Amplify, “in the same way that Inuits have lots of words for snow,” personalized learning could mean a lot of different things [2]. The Principal at Chicago International Charter School West Belden says, “We don’t believe that personalized learning is any one thing. It’s a mindset” [3]. The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative defines personalized learning as “social-emotional and interpersonal skills, mental and physical health, and a child’s confident progress toward a sense of purpose” [4].
So, basically, personalized learning is any combination of edu-buzz words and corporate branding cliches. Its definition is as adaptive as the software it wants to numb our students’ minds with.
As a teacher, I wouldn’t touch a gimmicky philosophy like this with a ten-foot pole. Of course there are some half-truths within the philosophy that are useful- what teacher (in theory) does not want students to pursue their interests in the classroom or to gain social-emotional and interpersonal skills, mental and physical health, as the Zuckerberg Initiative claims that personalized learning does?
I contend that the Zuckerberg-funded theory of personalized learning will not help students to gain social-emotional and interpersonal skills, mental and physical health, and a child’s confident progress toward a sense of purpose. Instead, personalized learning will go the way of other overly prescriptive edtech philosophies: it will be used to further the standardized testing regime, it will seek to replace teacher instructional power with technological instructional power, and it will isolate students from their peers.

The Wrong Questions

When it comes to education reform, I am tired. I am tired of magic bullet solutions funded by billionaires that claim to provide better “outcomes” for students but seem to ask the wrong questions; they seem to have the wrong schema and premises.
In his speech outlining his support of personalized learning, Mark Zuckerberg cited test score data from the Gates Foundation stating that personalized learning has improved “student outcomes” by 100%. The problem with this methodology, of course, is that focusing on student test scores is proven to have an inverse relationship with student happiness and academic engagement. The love of learning and feeling of belonging to a community that drive success in the real world are stripped away from teaching that fixates on ‘passing the test.’
Even if we accept the premise that personalized learning can effectively raise math and reading test scores, so what? It is time to re-focus on humanizing the classroom, and it is time to emphasize happiness, engagement, and empathy as values to achieve.

How to Personalize Learning without Personalized Learning

As of 2015, the average American tween (8-12) consumes 4 hours and 36 minutes of screen media per day; the average American teen (13-18) consumes 6 hours and 40 minutes of screen media per day [5].
This does not include screen time in school.
If you have spent time around an American tween or teen in recent years, you understand that these numbers have only gone up with the ubiquity of Fortnite, Snapchat, YouTube, phones, and tablets.
Rather than have algorithm-driven instruction for our students that furthers their social isolation and unhealthy screen addiction, we should be seeking to inspire balanced students who have empathy, social awareness, self awareness, and imagination. 
I have been trying to be more positive in my life, so how can we fight against the one-size-fits-all complaint about school without employing Zuckerberg and Gates’ vision for personalized learning?
How about looking at the alma mater of Mark Zuckerberg, Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire?
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I don’t see any iPads, Smart Boards, or even computers! BOOKS!!!! CHALKBOARDS!!!! Heresy!!!
In fact, they regularly employ the Harkness educational method, in which 12 students and 1 teacher “democratically” discuss the subject at hand. They are co-creators of knowledge, they collaborate to create knowledge even when they disagree, they listen, and they understand. They solve problems, they innovate, and they have independent projects. Here’s more if you’re curious: https://www.exeter.edu/exeter-difference/how-youll-learn .
It’s awesome! It’s no wonder that a place like this produced Mark Zuckerberg and so many other successful people. It’s also $49,880 to send your child there…ok, this is not the exact scalable model to innovate our public schools.
Still, I think there are some important lessons from Phillips Exeter Academy that can inform us how to better personalize learning.
  1. Class size matters. Phillips Exeter Academy has 12 students per class. Personally, I have 30+ students per class- how can I properly form relationships with students and create a humanizing, personal, educational experience with my students under those conditions? It’s not just me: 80% of 16,000 recently surveyed Michigan teachers said that reducing class size would have a big impact on learning. Algorithm-based personalized learning will further justify cost-cutting (de-professionalizing of the teaching profession) and the “teacher-proofing” of American classrooms.
  2. Ditch the high-stakes tests. Phillips Exeter Academy’s website really exudes a feeling that learning is promoted as not just a means to an end, but as a virtue itself. I didn’t see a single reference to standardized tests mentioned on the website. Have you ever heard of Campbell’s Law? It states: “The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.” So basically…Zuckerberg’s personalized learning is being used to help students pass tests- not for any long-term sense of learning or mission.
  3. Good lessons don’t need technology, but good lessons that use technology have a good reason to use the technology. At Phillips Exeter Academy, technology is used in order to facilitate design-based projects that have students grappling with real world projects. Here’s a great example: a student who designed and created an actual “tiny house.” However, the school also has teacher-facilitated discussions, and teacher-guided mentorship that serves as primary instructional leadership. Technology can be a valuable tool! But once it becomes the primary means of instruction, this de-professionalizes the creativity of teachers and the imagination of students.
So a final word to Mark Zuckerberg: if you INSIST on continuing to push your billionaire education reform, at least think back to your own high school experience. Think of your most memorable educational experiences, think of what provided you the creativity and imagination to create a successful business, and try to think of the human connections you made at school. How can our schools move in that direction instead of an Orwellian, robotic direction? While you’re at it, maybe think deeply about what your effect your products Facebook and Instagram have on society and how that coincides with the values that Phillips Exeter Academy taught you.

3. [3]Ibid

Destroying Public Education in St. Louis by Thomas Ultican

Originally posted at: https://tultican.com/2019/04/18/destroying-public-education-in-st-louis/?fbclid=IwAR1zbv2d_We4K00zEdgxcMVTMnmSHlCIwyJK9YTkftT10leh7HYuouLqZWM

On April 2nd, St. Louis city voters picked Adam Layne and Tracee Miller to serve on their seven-member Public School Board. They appear to be the two least likely candidates out of the seven to protect public schools. With the state endingtwelve years of control over the city’s schools on April 16, this election result is not a happy one for public education advocates.

The Seven Board Candidates

  1. Adam Layne is a former Teach for America (TFA) corps member assigned to a St. Louis charter school and is currently a board member of the Kairos Academy charter school.
  2. Tracee Miller was a TFA corps member and is currently running a math tutoring program in St. Louis for the Gates Foundation supported Khan Academy.
  3. Louis Cross boasts a long career with St. Louis Public Schools. He served as principal and interim superintendent of the now defunct Ethel Hedgemen charter school.
  4. Bill Haas served on the school board from 1997 to 2005, and again from 2010 to 2018. He was one of two board members that stood in opposition to contracting with Alvarez and Marsal to run St. Louis schools in 2003.
  5. David Merideth served on a special committee in 2017 that studied the school board’s role in future governance of the district when state control is relinquished.
  6. Barbara Anderson is a graduate of St. Louis Public Schools who taught on the elementary, middle and university levels throughout her career.
  7. Dan McCready is from Cincinnati, where he taught third and fifth grade math at a Cincinnati public school. He currently works at KIPP Victory Academy, a St. Louis charter school.
Dark Money Sways Election Results
Layne and Miller
Adam Layne and Tracee Miller
New board member Adam Layne appears to be a talented and idealistic young man. In 2011, he graduated with a bachelor’s degree in finance from George Washington University. Unfortunately, that youthful idealism was corrupted when he was enticed into the segrenomics business by TFA. [Professor Noliwe Rooks defines segrenomics as profiting off segregated poor communities by selling them education services.]
Layne’s report to the Missouri Ethics Commission (ID: A190713) shows him receiving only $155 in campaign contributions.  The first time I searched the Ethics Commission, I got a clue as to how with such meager experience and direct campaign support; Layne won a seat on the board. There was some sort of data base error and instead of displaying Adam Layne in the name field it put Public School Allies. The error will not repeat but the downloaded excel file displays it.
Public School Allies
An Error Showing Public School Allies in the Name Field Instead of Adam Layne
Chalkbeat reported that St. Louis is one of seven US cities The City Fund has targeted for implementation of the portfolio district governance model; which assures the privatization of schools. Public School Allies is a political action committee created by The City Fund staff. It supplies campaign financing under IRS Code 501 C4 rules making it a dark money fund.
City Fund lists The Opportunity Trust as their partner in St. Louis. Opportunity is a TFA related business. Founder and CEO, Eric Scroggins, worked in various leadership positions at TFA for 14 years starting as a TFA corps member in 2001-3.
Marie Ceselski of the St. Louis 7th Ward reported,
“Last week, St. Louis City-based Civil PAC sent out a targeted, glossy, multi-color mailing supporting Adam Layne. …
“At the time of the mailing, Civil PAC had $37.21 in its bank account per MEC records. On Wednesday, March 24th, Civil PAC reported to MEC that it had received a $20,000 donation on March 19th. The donation was from Public School Allies ….”
The other new board member Tracee Miller also appears to be dedicated and idealistic. However, like her fellow new board member, she too had her youthful idealism corrupted by TFA. Through TFA she was introduced to a group of “education reform” companies profiting off segregated poor communities.
Miller’s present employer the Khan Academy’s main purpose is promoting kids learning at computers – euphemistically known as “personalized learning.” She also lists Blueprint Education as a current employer. Blueprint is another TFA related business working in the segrenomics sector. Miller shares her responsibilities for Blueprint in Massachusetts,
“Supervise elementary math intervention program; hire, train, observe, coach, and evaluate high-quality full-time math intervention specialists; write lesson plans and provide instructional support for elementary teachers in math; serve as a liaison between school teams and Blueprint Fellows/Blueprint Program; track student data and use data to drive instruction via lesson planning and coaching; maintain a positive and professional atmosphere with clear and high expectations.”
At Dever Elementary school in Boston, the Blueprint experience was such a disaster that 45 of the original 47 teachers quit. Jennifer Berkshire of the Have You Heard blog started getting messages from upset teachers that did not know where else to turn. They told her, “We’ve lost faith because there’s absolutely no accountability here.” and “Blueprint has no idea how to run a school, and it’s maddening that there isn’t more oversight from the state.
The amount of dark money that went into supporting Miller through independent expenditures is unclear, however, it is known that a dark money fund created by the newly established Joseph Wingate Folk Society put $143,000 dollars into the political action committee Voters Organized Through Education StL (aka Vote-StL PAC). Complaints have been filed with Missouri’s Attorney General over the way this secretive new fund operates. Besides this fund and Public School Allies there were other dark money funds operating around this election.
Miller received a modest direct contribution total of $8330 (ID: A190747). A $1,000 contribution from Leadership for Educational Equity (LEE) is particularly note worthy. LEE was established in 2007 to elect TFA corps members into education leadership positions. Miller sent a $1000 back to LEE to purchase their campaign consulting services. Leadership for Educational Equity’s three member board is comprised of Emma Bloomberg (former NY mayor Michael Bloomberg’s daughter), Michael Park (a Partner in McKinsey & Company’s New York office) and Arthur Rock (Silicon Valley billionaire who contributes heavily to promote charter schools and TFA).
TFA is an industry leader in the business of segrenomics. It has been remarkably successful everywhere except in the classroom. These temporary teachers with virtually no training nor experience are not ready to run a class. Letting TFA corps members teach is akin to letting a college graduate with five-week training fly commercial airliners or perform medical diagnosis. They have no business being granted a teaching license and students in their classrooms are being cheated. It is money from Billionaires that is making the TFA outrage possible.

St. Louis Elites Have Led a Century of Public Education Malfeasance

In 1904, St. Louis held an exposition on the centennial of the Louisiana Purchase. At the time, the city was wealthy and boasted an amazing public education system. Particularly noteworthy were the schools designed and built by architect William Ittner. In an in-depth piece, Journalist Jeff Bryant observed, “More than a century ago, St. Louis embarked on a revolution in education that made the city’s schools the jewel of the Midwest and a model for urban school districts around the nation.
Unfortunately, segregation dominates the St. Louis story. Bryant cites the work of Richard Rothstein a Senior Fellow, emeritus, the Haas Institute at the University of California (Berkeley). “In an interview with a St. Louis reporter, Rothstein points to integrated neighborhoods in the city, such as Desoto-Carr, that were transformed into single race communities through federal housing programs.” This doomed many of the city’s schools to poor academic performance and anemic financial support plus the city itself stopped growing. The latest census shows that St. Louis has not grown in population since that 1904 exposition.
The schools in St. Louis receive 9% less revenue than the state of Missouri on average and next door in Ferguson they receive 13% less revenue. Rutgers University’s school finance wizard, Bruce Baker, put St. Louis schools into his “most screwed” category. The Normandy school system in Ferguson is where Michael Brown graduated just two months before being shot to death by Officer Darren Wilson. Brown was unarmed. In her book Cutting School, Cornell’s Professor Noliwe Rooks commented,
Racial and economic segregation, racially specific forms of educational instruction and testing, subpar facilities, undertrained teachers, and white parents determined to keep Blacks out of their more stable and functional school systems were all as much a part of Michael Brown’s life as they were for the students involved in the cases that formed the plaintiff group in Brown v. Board.”
In 2001, four of the seven seats on the school board were up for election. Mayor Francis Slay a Democrat did not want to run the schools directly but he put together a slate of candidates to dominate board. He made sure they could significantly outspend their opponents. A 2003 report in the River Front Timesstates,
Slay loaned $50,000 from his campaign fund to support the slate. Major area corporations kicked in with Anheuser-Busch, Ameren and Emerson Electric each giving $20,000. Energizer Eveready Battery Company gave $15,000. The coalition raised more than $235,000.
This led to a sixteen year crisis in St. Louis schools. The first action by Slay’s team was to hire Alvarez & Marsal (A&M), the corporate turnaround consultants. St. Louis paid A&M $4.8 million to run the district. A&M had never worked in a school system before. The River Front Times reported the team’s goal was to “make the district more efficient, save money and hopefully redirect those savings to boost academic performance somewhere down the road.
A&M selected Former Brookes Brothers CEO William V. Roberti to be superintendent of schools. His official title was changed to “Chief Restructuring Officer.” The clothing store leader had never worked in a school before.
Roberti commuted from his home in Connecticut using a $110,000 travel expense perk. His education advisor was former New York Superintendent, Rudy Crew, who was living on the West Coast and would not move to or spend much time in St. Louis.
Roberti closed more than 20 schools and “balanced” the school budgets by borrowing $49 million dollars from an existing desegregation program. The money had to be repaid. By the time it was recognized that the system’s $73 million dollar deficit had ballooned to $87.7 million, Roberti and A&M were long gone. The were consulting in the Detroit School System for the soon to be failed emergency manager Robert Bobb. In 2007, the state of Missouri took over St. Louis Public Schools citing its financial issues.
Democrat Slay responded by becoming a “cheerleader for charter schools” hoping that would turn the tide of people moving out of St. Louis. Slay’s effort to privatize public schools drew support from 110 miles away in Osage County where the billionaires Rex and Jeanne Sinquefield had made their new home. They also have a modest little 8300 square foot home in St. Louis but are registered to vote in Osage.
Libertarian Gospel Propagated in Missouri
Rex and Jeanne Sinqufield
Rex and Jeanne Sinquefield
Rex Sinquefield grew up in a St. Louis Catholic orphanage. Unlike other extremely wealthy libertarians such as David and Charles Koch or the entire Walton family, Rex did not inherit his wealth. Three years after graduating from high school, he left a Catholic seminary to pursue a more secular path. He eventually earned a Master of Business Administration (MBA) from Milton Friedman’s University of Chicago. At the school, he met and married his wife and business partner Jeanne Cairns. Jeanne also earned an MBA, plus she was awarded a PhD in demography.
In 1977, Rex co-Authored Stocks, Bonds, Bills and Inflation: The Past and the Future with Roger Ibbotson. The book is still considered a standard reference for those who seek valuable information on capital market returns. Ibbotson gained his PhD in finance from the University of Chicago.
In 1981, David Booth a fellow MBA student at the University of Chicago and Sinquefield formed the California based financial firm Dimensional Fund Advisor (DFA). Today the company oversees more than $350 billion in global assets. His wife Jeanne supervised the DFA Trading Department and served as executive vice president until her retirement in 2005. DFA pioneered index fund investing.
The Sinquefield’s lived in Santa Monica, California – which he called “Soviet Monica” – while running DFA. In 2005, Rex and Jeanne returned to Missouri ending his absence of more than 40 years.
The Center for Media and Democracy produced “A Reporter’s Guide to Rex Sinquefield and the Show-me Institute.” They demonstrated his attitude about public education by quoting Rex:
‘“There was a published column by a man named Ralph Voss who was a former judge in Missouri,’ Sinquefield continued, in response to a question about ending teacher tenure. [Voss] said, ‘A long time ago, decades ago, the Ku Klux Klan got together and said how can we really hurt the African-American children permanently? How can we ruin their lives? And what they designed was the public school system.’”
Rex Sinquefield’s primary policy interests are education, income tax reform and local control. He funds efforts for school vouchers, the elimination of teacher tenure and income tax reform. Ballotpedia stated, “Through the financial support of political committees and organizations, including Let Voters Decide, Teach Great and the Safer Missouri Citizen’s Coalition, Sinquefield has donated millions of dollars to support his policy priorities on the Missouri ballot.
Sinquefield Ballot Measures
Sinquefield wants Missouri to eliminate personal and corporate income taxes altogether, partially replacing the lost revenue with a broader sales tax that would be capped at 7 percent. He believes Sam Brownback was on the right path in Kansas and wants Missouri to follow.
Sinquefield is currently trying to privatize the St. Louis’s Lambert Airport as a way of eliminating the 1% earnings tax in the city. Rex started learning his anti-tax beliefs at his mother’s knee. When he was seven years old, she had to give him and his brother up to an orphanage after his father’s death. Alan Greenblatt reported,
In strained circumstances, his mother resented having to pay the 1 percent tax imposed on earnings of people who work or live in St. Louis. ‘I can’t afford this damned tax,’ he recalls her saying.

Two Observations

The great concentration of wealth in the hands of a very few individuals is destroying democracy. Rex’s anti-tax, anti-union and free market ideology might be a winning philosophy, but his ability to spend so liberally to sell his ideas makes anyone else’s opinion mute. Billionaires are warping the democratic process and driving us toward oligarchy. We need a significant wealth tax to end this kind of financial tyranny.
Privatizing public education is another attack on the foundations of democracy. Charter schools, vouchers and education technology are not solutions to poverty and under resourced schools. Today, there are some good things happening in Saint Louis Public Schools. Protect it from billionaires and their TFA staffed armies of “deformers.”