The Mind Trust’s Neo-colonial War on Parents: Part One

I am busy finishing my new book--a follow-up to Hoosier School Heist that will be released next year--and will be blogging again this summer. Please read John Harris Loflin's new and significant piece posted below. Thanks! Doug Martin

The Mind Trust’s Neo-colonial War on Parents: Part One

By John Harris Loflin 

Due to the Mind Trust’s (MT) view that urban schools are broken and need fixing, this January the non-profit began looking for someone to launch “an independent parent advocacy organization” with emphasis on social justice and closing the Achievement Gap for communities of color in high poverty areas.  

However, this commentary argues urban schools are not broken. As concluded in The White Architects of Black Education by Watkins, America’s public schools never meant to educate all children, especially children of color. We can’t call schools broken that were designed to fail.  

Because America’s school system was designed to fail and/or mis-educate certain children, it was colonial. That is, its purpose was to colonize Native Americans and other non-whites, “fitting” them and settlers/immigrants into America’s “melting pot.”  

“Education’s indoctrination if you're white--subjugation if you're black.” -- James Baldwin 

Thus, initial (and current) public schooling confused education with conformity via assimilation/acculturation, making coloniality (kuh-loh-nee-al-i-tee) the main characteristic of US public education.  

Coloniality is based on a Euro-centric world view. It’s the continued existence of colonialism (assimilation/acculturation) even after anti-Jim Crow and Civil Rights legislation.
   
MT’s concern for neighborhoods of color comes from its “Othering” mentality. “Othering” is inherent in MT’s “settler-minded” DNA because without this “other” there would be no reason for MT to exist.  

So, intentional or not, this positions MT as purveyors of coloniality and “whiteness” as normative, presupposing difference from “the norm” as somehow inherently “damaged” and needing assistance. Such deficit models of these neighborhoods misconstrue social justice by emphasizing the Achievement Gap and its creator, standardized testing. Both perpetuate the assimilationist/missionary logic of coloniality.  

Failing to challenge MT’s colonality means the onus of change is forever on the “colonized.” Success for people of color will endlessly revolve around finding ways to conform and succeed on another’s terms, rather than around nurturing their own criteria for achievement.  

“Urban students quickly receive the message that they can only be smart when they are not who they are. This in many cases is classroom colonialism.” ~ Prof. Chris Emdin 
   
From the perspective of this commentary, under MT’s parent advocacy scheme, the value of parents will depend upon how they’re able to get working-class students of color to assimilate towards the cultural normative dogma of whiteness.

 
What to do? De-colonize the Mind Trust

 
To push back against this parent advocacy enterprise requires the un-settling of MT’s anti-democratic ideology. Alternatives such as Transformational Community Schools and Local School Councils will begin a process of hope, rooted in resistance, leading Indy towards education for liberation.  

Ultimately we need to de-colonizing parent advocacy efforts: center on the humanity and possibility of students of color, and dismantle the prevailing discourses of coloniality that only highlight their “otherness”/difference from whites.  

But, will the Mind Trust and its elite-class board members allow their parent advocate to disrupt coloniality, playing transformative roles of cultural, economic, and political liberators of their communities of color?  

Please read Part Two here: http://vorcreatex.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/The-Mind-Trusts-Neo-colonial-War-on-Parents-Part-Two.pdf. 


John Harris Loflin 
Parent Power--Indianapolis 
Education-Community Action Team (E-CAT)  
johnharrisloflin@yahoo.com  
www.vorcreatex.com 
March 10, 2019

Billionaire Fave, Matchbook Learning, Coming to Indy

By Doug Martin 

UPDATE:  The Mind Trust has now posted its press release on its website.  Here is what it says about Matchbook Learning's proposed Indy school: 

• They propose to launch a new school in Indianapolis, which would be the seventh prototype of a school turnaround model that has been tested and refined in Detroit and Newark, NJ.  The proposed K-8 Innovation charter school would launch in Fall 2018, with Swann as school leader. 

Along with several other outside people and groups, Matchbook Learning’s Sajan George and his chief school officer, Amy Swann, have been picked as 2017 fellows for the Mind Trust Innovation Schools program. IPS’ supt. Lewis Ferebee and the IPS board helped choose these Mind Trust fellows, and two of them are planning new high schools (KIPP and the Purdue Polytech High School), even as the district is closing its own high schools.  Mind Trust fellows can launch new charter schools, take over IPS schools, and partner with IPS itself.  

According to Chalkbeat Indiana’s Dylan Peers McCoy, Matchbook Learning will open a K-8 school in Indy.  But a Matchbook Learning job posting states that “We want a Principal ready for the challenge and opportunity of a five year mission to turnaround a failing school and to do say [sic] in such a way that it can impact the entire city of Indianapolis by sharing their success with other failing schools via our Accelerator.”

Known for blended learning turnaround models and cashing in on disaster capitalism, or as Matt Tully pleasantly puts it, “running a nonprofit that helps turn around profoundly failing schools,” Sajan George is the CEO of Matchbook Learning and a billionaire favorite of many involved in school privatization in Indiana and across the country.   

THE CLAN

Sajan George visited Indianapolis earlier this year, giving the closing address at the DeVos/Walton American Federation for Children conference back in March, where so-called personalized learning was the buzzword, as it was a few weeks earlier at the NewSchools Venture Fund Summit.

Silicon Valley’s NewSchools Venture Fund, in fact, backs Matchbook Learning’s blended learning schools,.  NewSchools Venture Fund, if you remember, gave Phalen Academy $200,000 in October 2015 to help take over IPS’ Francis Scott Key School 103.  That same year, NewSchools’ New Schools Fund gave Matchbook Learning $840.000 (page 41), adding to its $250,000  investment  in Matchbook in 2011. 

Two months after Sajan George spoke at the DeVos/Walton event, IPS’ Lewis Ferebee joined a panel discussion on “ESSA opportunity” at the NewSchools Venture Fund Summit. 

 

In 2012, when Sajan George was awarded the NewSchools’ Growth Mindset Award, Deborah McGriff, now a partner at NewSchools, said George “has a long-term view of change and he and his students frequently think about what they want to be when they grow up.” As I mention in Hoosier School Heist, McGriff is a former Edison Schools leader and the wife of Howard Fuller, the Black Alliance for Educational Option’s founder.  Both Edison Schools (now Edison Learning) and BAEO have played their part in Indiana school privatization.  

In 2015, when the now Mind Trust-supported Arnold Foundation gave over $16 million, the Dell Foundation $2.5 million, the Walton Foundation $2.2 million, and the Bloomberg Family Foundation $1 million (see pages 44-45) to the Charter School Growth Fund, the Charter School Growth Fund, in its 990, stated that Matchbook Learning received $250,000 for loan forgiveness implementation (page 19).  It is unclear if this was forgiveness for a loan from the Charter School Growth Fund or if the money was used to help Matchbook pay off a loan from somewhere else. 

NEXT GEN TIME AGAIN 

Another Matchbook Learning funder is Next Generation Learning Challenges (NGLC), the edtech initiative supported by many in the corporate school movement in Indiana.  The Next Generation Learning Challenge’s $150,000 to Matchbook Learning in late 2012 went to the company’s plans to “reinvent a middle school in Tennessee’s Achievement School District with its teacher-centric, blended turnaround school model.” 

The Next Generation Learning Challenges initiative, ran by Educause, has received funding from the Gates Foundation and the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation, both supporting the technology takeover of public schools and Indiana school reform.

Billionaire Eli Broad’s Foundation, whose Academy just named Lewis Ferebee a fellow, handed $2.4 million to the Next Generation Learning Challenges in 2014 to hold a contest in which “at least four major cities across the United States will compete to win funds to redesign or build new schools that personalize instruction for their students.”

SWALLOWING THE BIG APPLE

On his bio page, Matchbook Learning’s Sajan George boasts of working in New York City when it received the 2007 Broad Foundation Prize for a turnaround school system.  He was paid quite handsomely.  

The New York Times notes that George was outrageously making $450 an hour working as the managing operator of Alvarez & Marsal, the consulting firm Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein hired, “without competitive bidding,” for $15.8 million to restructure the NYC school system, finding “cuts in regional superintendent offices, janitorial services and school building repairs,” and to revamp the student busing.  George’s other job title was “the chancellor’s chief adviser on restructuring.” At the time, Alvarez & Marsal specialized “in rescuing bankrupt companies.” 

Alvarez & Marsal’s busing plan with the city schools’ Office of Pupil Transportation fell apart in early 2007, “leaving shivering students waiting for buses in the cold and thousands of parents hollering about disrupted routines,” and “the complaints threatened to morph into a renewed attack on Mr. Klein’s reliance on outside consultants.”  

In 2010, George and Alvarez & Marshal advertised its school turnaround plan with partners Connections Academy, Florida Virtual Schools, and Wireless Generation. Joel Klein went on to work for Wireless Generation, after NewsCorp’s Rupert Murdoch bought the edtech outfit in November 2010. 

THEIR NATION

There’s much more to say about Sajan George and Matchbook Learning, but I will leave that for my new book-in-progress and now let the man speak for himself, this time to the billionaire crowd in Indy during the American Federation for Children conference: “I think the root cause (in the classroom) is a design problem.  “(Students) lack personalization. I believe the personalized learning model can change the structure of our nation.”  The nation George refers to is not my nation, your nation, or your children’s nation; it is a nation which belongs to the billionaires and those like Sajan George who are paid well to do the billionaires’ work.