The Legend of the Ledger: Portland Public School's Chief Financial Officer's past key to the district's future?

Unsure, skeptical or downright suspicious of the acceleration school model proposed by the Portland Public Schools district in the ongoing mini-bargaining round? Perhaps you should be. The direction PPS seems to be going can be better understood by going beyond what has been presented about acceleration schools in bargaining by Chief of Schools Shawn Bird, and by placing this information in the context of the history of school reforms which have utilized the very principles described by Bird in various parts of the country over the past two decades. Moreover, to gain deeper insight into the scheme, it is crucial to examine the backgrounds and affiliations of key district leaders who have likely been hired to accelerate the “deregulation,” charterization, and privatization of our district’s schools. 

This blog will delve into the background on several members of the Superintendent’s leadership team who seem to be the key players in the push for acceleration schools. First, let’s take a closer look at the newest hire, Chief Financial Officer, Nolberto Delgadillo, who came to work for PPS in January 2021. The Finance Department which he chairs "manages general financial operations of Portland Public Schools, including Accounting, Budget, Grant Development, Payroll, Publication Services, Purchasing and Contracting, Records Management, and Risk Management."

Delgadillo, a son of parents who immigrated from Mexico, grew up in Southern California. Before moving into public education, Delgadillo got his BA in Chemistry and Spanish from USC, and his MBA from Loyola Marymount. He spent over 12 years in the healthcare sector primarily in the fields of operations, marketing, finance, client and project management. He obtained his Masters in Education through The Broad Residency in Urban Education Reform (2012-14), a program at The Broad Center in Los Angeles. The Broad Center was started and financed by the Broad Foundation, a philanthropic entity founded by Eli Broad (who died in 2021), a billionaire who EdWeek describes as a man with a “legacy in reshaping how private money can influence policy” and who was behind the massive LA school privatization effort that started two decades ago. EdWeek credits Broad with generating “much national attention for his outsized influence on the charter sector, shaping hundreds of school district leaders through a training academy, some of whom continue to lead the biggest systems in the country.” In 2015, The Los Angeles Times obtained a con­fid­en­tial draft of a plan titled “The Great Public Schools Now Initiative.” The draft confirmed “that the Broad Found­a­tion is or was hop­ing to place half of the stu­dents in the Los Angeles Uni­fied School Dis­trict in­to charter schools over the next eight years.” Potential funders and charter partners listed in the document included such heavy weights as Bloomberg and Walmart’s Walton family. The largest potential funding sum was attributed to the Gates Foundation.

After receiving his M.Ed., Delgadillo then became chief operating officer of LA Promise Fund, a nonprofit, charter management organization that is part of the by the Bill & Melinda Gates Network for School Improvement (NSI) Initiative. LA Promise Fund is an organization that was created to turn around some of that city’s “troubled” schools. The NSI Initiative invests in partnerships between networks of schools and “school support organizations.” It was launched in 2016 with $92 million in grants for the new Networks of School Improvement initiative to be given to 19 organizations, collaboratives and districts. NSI’s emphasis on school improvement has been exposed for not being evidence-based. The Gates foundation has been criticized for pushing Common Core standards, dismantling and privatizing public schools, and replacing teachers with technology. In this role as Chief Operations Officer at LA Promise Fund, Delgadillo “planned and directed all aspects of LA Promise Fund’s operations including financial integrity, human resources, legal compliance, and information technology.”

Delgadillo also worked as Cluster Business Manager with Green Dot Public schools “collaborating directly with school administrators to improve their academic bandwidth as he focused on the operations and finances for their schools.” Green Dot Public Schools is a non-profit educational organization charter school district headquartered in Downtown Los Angeles, California that operates 20 public schools in Greater Los Angeles, five schools in Tennessee, and three in Washington. On its webpage, the organization boasts that “The U.S. Department of Education has featured Green Dot as a national leader in school turnarounds.”

Multiple sources identify diplomacy and ability to breakdown complex financial concepts in layman’s terms as Delgadillo's strenghts. These are precisely the skills which contributed to Tulsa Public Schools Superintendent Deborah Gist, a Broad Superintendents Academy alumn, selecting Delgadillo to become Chief Financial Officer in her district. Of Broad alumni, education historian, Diane Ravitch writes, “They are known for setting high goals and meeting none of them. They are devotees of high-stakes testing and charter schools. They love to disrupt schools and communities.” 

According to Edweek’s Daarel Burnette II, when hired by Gist, Delgadillo “had never served as the CFO of a traditional school district. In fact, after receiving degrees in chemistry and Spanish from the University of Southern California, he spent the majority of his career working for United Healthcare, the insurance company, and helping to run a California sperm bank.” Delgadillo was picked because “Gist was impressed with his extensive business background and uncanny ability to boil down complex concepts for the general public,” but also with his charm and ability to sell the types of reforms she was after to the public. Delgadillo worked for Gist for two years just prior to landing in PPS. Burnette further discusses Gist’s “national reputation as a hard-charging school reformer willing to shake up the status quo.” Prior to Tulsa, she was a ruthless reformer in Rhode Island where Shawn Bird’s boss, Deputy Superintendent of Instruction and School Communities, Kregg A. Cuellar, also put in a year as Executive Director of School Transformation (Regional Superintendent) in the 2012-13 school year.

According to the National Center for Fair and Open Testing’s Examiner Newsletter, during that year under Gist’s and Cuellar’s leadership, “45 Providence high school students rallied at the Rhode Island State House in opposition to a new requirement that students pass the New England Common Assessment Program (NECAP) tests to graduate high school. The class of 2014 would be the first to have to meet this requirement. ‘Punishing students—particularly those who haven’t had the opportunity to receive the great education we deserve—is neither effective nor just,’ said Kelvis Hernandez, a Providence Student Union member. In February 2013, members of the Providence Student Union staged a die-in to dramatize how using NECAP as a graduation test could snuff out opportunities for as many as 40% of Rhode Island and 60% of Providence high schoolers.”

As you read the following excerpt, understand that it was this leader completely devoted to hardcore accountability-based reform who selected Delgadillo to oversee the district’s finances. According to Amadou Diallo of the The Hechinger Report: 

“Gist spearheaded controversial teacher evaluations during her last gig, as commissioner of the Rhode Island Department of Education (RIDE). From 2009 to 2015, Gist embarked on an ambitious mission to reform education in a state tiny enough to make it a perfect petri dish for quick and dramatic change. Along with her strong support for charter schools and the Common Core curriculum, Gist was convinced that great student outcomes could be directly tied to teaching excellence. She made educator effectiveness the centerpiece of her agenda. . .  Gist’s debut on the national education stage began with her decision in 2010 to authorize the firing of the entire school staff at low-performing Central Falls High School. . .   Although most of those who lost their jobs were eventually rehired, the episode set the tone for what would be a rocky relationship between Gist and teachers throughout her tenure. 

Inheriting a system based largely on seniority, she ushered in a new set of standards for the teacher evaluation process, one that would use measurable data to determine teacher tenure and compensation on an annual basis. That data would come, in large part, from student performance on standardized tests. This was met with immediate opposition from teachers, who felt they were being made scapegoats for poor student results.”

Gist was pushed out of Rhode Island by teacher activism after doing much damage. In 2015, she went on to do damage in her native Tulsa. But this time, her tactics had to be subtler. In sharp contrast to her style in Rhode Island, in Tulsa Gist walked with the striking teachers and collaborated with union leadership, as covered in the The Hechinger Report, she “used her platform to talk not about grand ideas of reimagining education, as she used to do in Rhode Island, but about the need to pay teachers a living wage. In Rhode Island, with infusions of federal cash and stable state funding, a reformer like Gist could afford an adversarial relationship with the teachers’ union. In Tulsa, she needs all the bodies in her classrooms she can get.”

This is the type of wolf in sheep's clothing takeover we are seeing in Portland. Diallo warns, “This shift of emphasis from disruption to funding coincides with a nationwide retreat from the my-way-or-the-highway approach to reform that sought big change as fast as possible. In the past decade, in large urban school systems, even those with stable funding, a roster of outside reformers like Joel Klein in New York, Michelle Rhee in Washington and John Deasy in Los Angeles gave way to more consensus-driven successors. . . Gist now considers widespread buy-in a prerequisite for any type of significant change.”

Delgadillo to the rescue. His approach was to convene meetings and discuss the budget with the community. However, the mission all along was still to “strategically align district resources to support instructional outcomes” which, as can be seen from all the evidence above, were to designate schools for improvement and eventually a charter manager takeover. If this is what he was hired to support financially in Tulsa before Portland, and if he was explicitly trained and in charge of charter school chain finances, why do you think he was hired in Portland if not for his expertise to be used in this backdoor takeover?