Randy Ward's Agenda of Charterizing, Privatizing & Impoverishing Oakland Schools

The Broad/Ward Connection

Jack Gerson, Castlemont Leadership Prep and Steve Miller, Life Academy
Reprinted from the OEA Advocate, March 1, 2005

On February 9, State Appointee Randolph Ward announced his intention to reorganize eight Oakland elementary schools as charter schools. The leading contender to run these schools is a new entity, "Education for Change," whose funding will be provided in part by the New Schools Venture Fund. And therein lies a tale of Eli Broad and Randolph Ward.

The New Schools Venture Fund (NSVF) is a Silicon Valley-based "venture philanthropy firm" with a mission "to accelerate the pace and quality of charter school growth in the United States." The largest institutional supporter of the New Schools Venture Fund is the Eli Broad Foundation, which in April 2002 provided $10.5 million in seed money to help jumpstart NSVF. At the time Eli Broad said, "I believe that charters, choice, and competition create important forces that help us to better serve children in our nation's neediest communities. Our investment in New Schools Venture Fund will provide new, high quality schools for children and create maneuvering room for innovative school principals and superintendents who, in the current system, simply cannot get the kind of freedoms and flexibility they need to radically improve America's urban public schools."

Fast forward to 2005. Randolph Ward justifies his demands to close schools, eliminate programs (libraries, counselors, electives, Adult Education) and remove contractual protections with the self-same language: "charters... choice ... competition ... flexibility for innovative school principals and superintendents." Coincidence? Not exactly. Eli Broad handpicked Ward to run OUSD.

In 2003, Ward interned at the Broad Superintendents Academy, whose mission is to "recruit, prepare and support the greatest executive talent from across America to become the next generation of urban school district superintendents." Ward was trained by Broad and connected to all manner of corporate power-brokers (Tom Vander Ark, Executive Director of Education for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, spoke at Ward’s graduation from the Broad Center, held at the exclusive Loew’s Coronado Bay Resort in San Diego.)

When OUSD was put into state receivership in June 2003, Eli Broad advised State Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O’Connell and Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown on naming a state administrator. (The Oakland Tribune of August 11, 2003 said, "Brown and Broad are longtime allies, and O’Connell is a major recipient of Broad campaign contributions.") Broad said, "We will be observing from a distance. But we won’t be running the district in any way, shape, or form." But O’Connell and Brown picked Broad alumnus Ward to run OUSD. Ward promptly named another Broad Superintendents Academy alumnus, Arnold Carter, as his chief of staff. Carter is now Deputy Superintendent. Broad resident Monique Epps works in the OUSD finance office, 75% of her salary paid by Broad. Troy Christmas, another Broad resident working for OUSD, is a former consultant for McKinsey and Co., the management firm chosen to redesign OUSD central administration.

Broad alumni are top administrators in Boston, San Francisco, San Diego, and several other large cities. Broad conferences attract superintendents and board presidents from New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Seattle, to name a few. But, as Kathy Emery and Susan Ohanian write in Why is Corporate America Bashing Our Public Schools?, "by conflating high test scores with civil rights and co-opting those who raise alarms about the growing segregation of U.S. schools, [Broad] hides the fact that minority and poor students are being ghettoized into dead-end, under-financed, drill-and-kill, low-performing schools."

Broad is imposing a corporate downsizing model on urban school districts by training those superintendents who prove malleable and replacing those who don’t with his cadre of Broad Center graduates. As he told Fortune magazine, "These [urban school districts] are huge enterprises. You don't start at the bottom. You start at the top." Broad’s goals are to reduce overall funding for public education while using his foundation’s grants to promote high stakes standardized testing and widespread charterization. Such grants are selective and fall far short of cuts in public funding, leave aside what is really needed. At best, the Broad program will create a small number of adequate charter schools while leaving most students far worse off. We see this every day in Oakland, where Broad alumnus Ward cuts to the bone while holding out false hope that school reorganization can compensate for the librarians, custodians, janitors, clericals, food service workers, counselors, teachers, schools, and programs that he continues to eliminate. The young people of Oakland deserve better.

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