PPS contract with Education Resource Strategies (ERS) to examine district spending: likely a fast-track to school privatization

Healthy skepticism exists among Portland teachers of private consultants and corporate presenters hired to train educators and evaluate district programs. It is no wonder such distrust persists, given the anti-teacher and anti-public education track record of many of these companies. One such organization currently on Portland educators' radar is Education Resource Strategies (ERS), which has been contracted by Portland Public Schools to--in the words of Portland Public Schools Chief Financial Officer, Nolberto Delgadillo, "lend their technical expertise . . . and sophistication," to "provide insights," become "a critical thought partner," and, to paraphrase Board Director, Michelle DePass, align the budget with the district's values and strategic plan.

The request to hire ERS in order to "develop a strategic resource analysis and plan," was brought before the School Board on April 19, 2022 by PPS Deputy Superintendent of Business and Operations, Claire Hertz. The Board approved the $743,000 contract, slated to start the following day, April 20th, and valid through March 31, 2023, with the option to renew through March 31, 2025.  

Who is ERS?

Founded in 2004, ERS describes itself as "a national non-profit that partners with district, school, and state leaders to transform how they use resources (people, time, and money) so that every school prepares every child for tomorrow, no matter their race or income." The non-profit's revenue is listed as $11.05 million on its 2020 income tax form. In the June 14, 2022 School Board meeting, Superintendent Guadalupe Guerrero noted that ERS is "used by a good majority of Council (of the Great City Schools) districts." The Council is a coalition of the 77 largest urban school districts across the nation, and PPS is one of its members. Superintendent Guerrero and PPS Board of Education member, Amy Kohnstamm, are both on the Council's Board of Directors. 

According to its website, ERS is funded by the following foundations: Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Carnegie Corporation of New York, Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation, Overdeck Family Foundation, Raikes Foundation, Stuart Foundation, William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, W.K. Kellogg Foundation, and Michael and Susan Dell Foundation. This blog has discussed several of these foundations, emphasizing that they are known to support charter schools as well as faux "grassroots" parent groups whose attacks on educators and public schools are part of a coordinated effort to demonize teachers, teachers unions and public education in general in order to neutralize dissent and accelerate the privatization of the public school system. 

Other "influential organizations" with whom ERS collaborates are: American Institutes For Research (AIR), The Aspen Institute, Center for American Progress, Council of the Great City Schools, The Council of Chief State School Officers, EducationCounsel, The Education Trust, Large Countywide and Suburban District Consortium, Leading Educators, New Leaders, NewSchools Venture Fund, Public Impact, Strategic Data Project, Student Achievement Partners, TNTP, The Policy Innovators in Education, (PIE) Network, The Urban Schools Human Capital Academy. Many of the "influential" groups listed above are staunch proponents of school reform leading to the turnover of public schools to for-profit or billionaire-funded entities.

The ERS Board of Directors reads as the Who is Who of the neoliberal school privatization movement. The Board includes:

• The Chief Executive Officer of the New Teacher Center (NTC), Dr. Desmond Blackburn, a Broad Academy Fellow with a career focused on school improvement and accountability. NTC has received funding from such pro-privatization entities as Goldman Sachs, Carnegie Foundation, as well as more than $20 million in funding from the pro-charter Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Broad Academy Fellows are notorious for working to privatize public education, as education researcher Thomas Ultican details in his article, "Broad’s Academy and Residencies Fuel the Destroy Public Education Agenda." 

• Jean-Claude Brizard, President and CEO of Digital Promise, "a global, nonpartisan, nonprofit organization focused on accelerating innovation in education." Brizard formerly held various leadership positions in a number of districts, including the posts of Chief Executive Officer at Chicago Public Schools, Superintendent of Rochester City Schools, and Brooklyn Regional Superintendent. He is also a Fellow at the Broad Center, a Fellow at the Pahara-Aspen Institute, and a member of the Aspen Institute Global Leadership Network. Pahara Institute was founded by Stanford graduate, Kim Smith. Ed Reform whistleblower and researcher, Mercedes Schneider, describes Pahara Institute as a "market-based-education-reform mill designed to proliferate corporate reformers." Smith is also the founder of New Schools Venture Fund (which has received $20+ mil. from Gates). In Smith's words, NSVF was founded in order to create a "great ecosystem for entrepreneurs in education." The organization finances the development of innovative, entrepreneurial ventures, especially charter school networks and leaders who promote them. Additionally, Smith is a founding team member of Teach for America, which education researcher Thomas Ultican describes as "the billionaire financed army for privatizing public education." Ultican identifies TFA as "the number one source of charter school teachers and its alumni (who) are carrying a neoliberal ideology into education leadership at all levels." According to Diane Ravitch's and Nancy E. Bailey's book, EdSpeak and Doubletalk: A Glossary to Decipher Hypocrisy and Save Public Schooling, NewSchools Venture Fund (NSVF): 

• "In 1998, the NewSchools Venture Fund began radically transforming public schools through entrepreneur-driven education using charitable funds. This involves the goal of making a profit while transforming public education into charter schools. They emphasize 'entrepreneurship' and invest in corporate organizations intent on privatizing public schools. Some of these groups include Education Reform Now, Families for Excellent Schools, Teach for America, KIPP, and the Khan Academy." 

• Advisor partner at Bain & Company, Marcia Blenko, co-founder Bain’s Global Organization Practice, former Goldman Sachs employee. Regarding Bain & Company, People's World's Sara Roos reports: 

• "The management consulting firm of Bain & Company is far from a politically neutral, hands-off advisory concern. Decades ago, Bain & Company distinguished itself from the competition through development of 'relationship consulting,' and a corporate culture to 'get their hands deep into the trousers of a company.' Bain & Company operates, explains founder Bill Bain euphemistically, so that 'its objectives will be more closely aligned with those of our clients.' Toward this end, Bain & Company has spun off entities 'to expand its direct investment in its clients,' including the infamous private equity firm led by Mitt Romney, Bain Capital, and the independent nonprofit focused exclusively on the social sector, Bridgespan. As 'curmudgicator' Peter Greene explained five years ago after a different management consultant group, BCG, appeared in the wake of the demise of Little Rock’s elected school board: 'This is worse than finding the slender man in the back of your family portrait. For a public school system, this is finding the grim reaper at your front door. And he’s not selling cookies.' Bain & Company does not hide its ideological support of business management solutions for schools seen through the lens of privatization."

ERS Chief Executive Officer and co-founder, Karen Hawley Miles, started out her career with Bain & Company as Associate Consultant, and from there was promoted to Consultant, Manager, and Senior Manager. She became National Center for Education Leadership Assistant Director and a Management Consultant for Boston Public Schools and Mayor’s Office, where she "conducted strategic overview of resource allocation." Before co-founding ERS, an independent consultant she advised Albuquerque Public Schools, Boston Public Schools, Cincinnati Public Schools, Harvard Graduate School of Education, New American Schools, New Leaders for New Schools, Rochester City School District, San Antonio Independent School District, and The Broad Institute.

ERS co-founder and former senior advisor, Stephen Frank, also got his start with Bain & Company.

PPS Chief of Finance: Chair of ERS CFO Network & Proponent of Neoliberal Budgeting

As this blog has previously reported, after spending over 12 years in the healthcare sector focusing on marketing, finance, and client and project management, PPS' own CFO Nolberto Delgadillo obtained his Masters in Education through The Broad Residency in Urban Education Reform, 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.”

Delgadillo is also one of ERS 2021-22 CFO Network chairs. The network focuses on "rethinking the use of resources and transforming schools and systems."

The ERS CFO Network holds strategy sessions for its members. According to the ERS website, these are some of the areas discussed during the retreats:

"Past strategy retreats have covered the role of the CFO in managing charter school funding impacts, flexibility in using federal funds, infusing ROI into district budgeting and investment decision making process and communicating about the budget effectively to drive or maintain change. Through our convenings we also foster peer-to-peer case studies of current challenges and host facilitated guest panels and speakers, such as staff from the U.S. Department of Education."

ERS and the Aspen Institute, which is expressly in favor of school choice and against labor protections, jointly strategize as part of the ERS-Aspen CFO/CSO Strategy Network, "which brings together school district finance leaders from across the country who are committed to transforming outcomes for students and maximizing the impact of their districts' resources (people, time, and money)." The network "aims to support CFOs and CSOs by equipping them with the knowledge and skills to enable them to act as strategic leaders within their districts and provides a venue for them to meaningfully collaborate and learn together."  PPS is part of the Aspen Institute K-12 Education CFO Network. 

The"Fun" of Cost-Cutting at the Expense of Workers 

ERS has even "gamefied" the process of shifting school district funding priorities by creating the Budget Hold'Em Game, a "fun" way for CFOs to play around with the budget in order to "help guide (their) district’s budget best practices."

In the same vein, ERS designed a tool called Strategic Snapshot Mini, "a quick self-assessment" which "helps school system leaders identify their strategic priorities that will lead to student success."

ERS has also developed a program titled DREAM, a tool to help leaders "make tough budget decisions for (their) district." Leaders are encouraged to use sliders to test out different scenarios and "model budget trade-offs." The DREAM website suggests the following cost-saving measures: 

• "While it can be politically difficult, sharing resources across schools, renegotiating contracts or outsourcing can yield savings" in the area of Operations and Facilities.
• "Changing program placement, school choice and assignment policies can reduce net transportation costs."
• As far as food services, ERS suggests that "while it can be politically difficult, sharing resources across schools, renegotiating contracts or outsourcing can yield savings in this area."
• "Employee benefits can account for over 20% of total district expenditures. Replacing expensive and unusually generous one-size-fits-all packages with a menu of benefit options and increasing the employee level of contribution can yield significant savings." 

Clearly, the expert advice ERS offers districts consists of ideas directly from the neoliberal "playbook" for selling out public services. Outsourcing labor and slashing worker benefits while funneling tax dollars into "innovative" school choice opportunities seems to be a consistent common theme throughout ERS consulting contracts, especially in a climate of austerity and constrained budgets. The consequence is weakened labor power and a starved public school system primed for a corporate takeover. 

United Teachers Los Angeles Exposes ERS' Bias, Hidden Agenda

In 2018, the Los Angeles Unified School District Board of Education released a report produced by the LAUSD Advisory Task Force, based on an analysis by ERS whose services the district contracted. The objective of the analysis was to "mitigate threat of deficit by identifying key opportunities for reallocation and by naming and quantifying key structural challenges.” The report named educators, pensions, and healthcare as key structural challenges warranting cuts. The district's union, UTLA, challenged the report's methodologies as "fundamentally flawed." The union released its own report, "False Choices, Hidden Agendas: Unmasking the ERS Report," debunking ERS' findings and blasting ERS for releasing a biased study and incorporating "deliberately misleading charts, graphs, and conclusions about causality." 

UTLA wrote: 

"The report is riddled with numerous internal inconsistencies in its comparisons and its treatment and manipulation of various data points. Peer groups used for comparison were selected by questionable methods. Several data points used by the authors proved to be incorrect after undertaking basic verification procedures. . . (These) discrepancies, mistakes, and misreporting provide readers with an erroneous impression of LAUSD’s objective situation."

UTLA points out that in the same year, opponents in Wisconsin--including almost half the school board members-- protested Madison School Board's decision to hire ERS to improve services to students with disabilities, calling ERS "too corporate-minded and too focused on budget-cutting and caps to do a good job." ERS was called out as lacking integrity for analyzing budget issues for Oakland Unified School District while also doing paid consulting work for a charter school advocacy group.

Right after releasing the "Hard Choices" report, ERS was "forced to issue a correction of an analysis of teacher salaries." The analysts' "gross error stemmed from the incorrect application of a living wage calculator, and the conflation of data from different school years1 – mistakes that are prevalent throughout their LAUSD analysis."

UTLA insisted that ERS' report not be used as a basis for policy changes. The union concluded that the “Hard Choices” report is "deeply flawed, nakedly biased, and produced by parties with a vested interest in dismantling public education." However, the analysis UTLA provided is an important tool that advocates for students and educators can use for a "tactical advantage in the fight to save America’s" public schools.

Damage Caused by ERS in Other School Districts across the Country

To understand the scope of the expertise sold to districts by ERS, and the resulting damage, let us examine how the non-profit's consultation panned out in several other districts around the country.

ERS touts "Baltimore’s aggressive reform" as "an exciting model for school systems looking to jumpstart school turnaround and improvement." 

ERS partnered with Baltimore City Public Schools (BCPS) on numerous projects from 2004 to 2017 in order to "(assess) district data and practice to support strategic decision making in the areas of financial planning, teacher professional development (PD), school funding redesign, transition to Fair Student Funding and in redesigning central office support of schools."

In year 1 of the partnership, ERS immediately "provided an analytic framework for the 'Expanding Great Options' (EGO) team to use in defining their school turnaround strategy." Turnaround, of course, is a strategy which forces public schools to close and be handed over to charter operators, while most or all of the teachers are fired.

Additionally, based on advice from ERS, BCPS implemented a weighted formula, also called "Fair Student Funding," designed to save districts money and "convert staff allocations to flexible dollars." "Fair Student Funding," also known as "Student-Based Budgeting" (SBB), is often used by districts to transform schools into charters.

Here is an example discussing such a transformation in Cleveland: 

"Districts are interested in moving to SBB as part of an overall School Portfolio Strategy. For example, the Cleveland Metropolitan School District describes their strategy as follows: 'Cleveland wants to transition from a traditional, single-source school district to a new system of district and charter schools that are held to the highest standards of performance and work in partnership to create dramatic student achievement gains for every child. Our main premise is that excellent schools, led by exemplary principals and staffed by talented teachers, should have full autonomy over human and financial resources in exchange for high quality and accountability for performance.'"

The idea is that principals are empowered to decide how to spend the funding each school receives, but only if their schools have "earned it" based on student performance. Schools, and in many cases teachers, whose students have not met their growth goals are put on an improvement plan, often resulting in school closures and charter network takeovers and the displacement of unionized educators.

Memphis is used as an example of how SBB ties into student and teacher performance: 

"Districts are also sometimes interested in moving to SBB as a component of an overall district strategy, for example, incorporating SBB as part of a Managed Performance Empowerment Strategy where districts offer more flexibility to schools that have 'earned' the right to that flexibility because of the district’s accountability framework. For example, in Shelby County Schools (or SCS—the school district serving Memphis, Tennessee and environs), the district’s Managed Performance Empowerment model gives some schools more or less control over school operations and instruction based on student needs and school performance as measured by the state and district’s accountability system. SCS recognizes that 'individual school leaders are best equipped to understand the learning needs of their students, [therefore] schools will be given as much flexibility as practicable to implement effective teaching and operational methods within the standards established by the Board and Superintendent.'"

In a lesson of caution for Portland, the SCS Board of Education implemented an Aligned Instructional System (AIS), and gradually transitioned into a Managed Performance/Empowerment System (MPES) "with earned levels of autonomy as schools become high performing, demonstrated by student academic achievement, operational efficiency, and continuous improvement."

ERS partnered with SCS from 2017 to 2020. Ahead of this partnership, the district had undergone a complete transformation. In 2009, a group of philanthropists decided Memphis City Schools (now Shelby County Schools) would "become a national model of great teaching for all children." As Chalkbeat's Ruma Kumar reports, "between the philanthropists — including up to $90 million from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation — and a federal grant soon after from the Obama administration, the district poured $184 million into addressing the district’s chronic failure in recruiting, developing and retaining talent for its schools and classrooms," completely overhauling the school system in Memphis in just over the last six and a half years. Much of this happened under the leadership of the now-Chief Executive Officer of The New Teacher Project (TNTP), Dr. Tequilla Brownie, who, according to her LinkedIn account, "oversaw the district-wide, nationally-recognized, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation-funded effort to improve student outcomes by increasing teacher effectiveness." The $90 million project was a national case study in overhauling how districts hire, place, evaluate and pay teachers, with TNTP in charge of hiring the district's teachers. In 2013, Memphis City Schools merged with Shelby County Schools.

Since TNTP's involvement, the district has continued to increase its charter sector enrollment. As the Memphis-Shelby County School website states, SCS charter schools have managed to up their enrollment over the past ten years to, as of 2018-19, "serve approximately 16,000 students –just over 17 percent of all students enrolled in Memphis-Shelby County Schools."

As covered on this blog previously, the notoriously anti-union, anti-educator, pro-privatization organization, TNTP, was recently hired by PPS to design its new Instructional Framework. As part of its contract with PPS, TNTP staff have toured district schools, evaluating the pedagogy observed in PPS classrooms.

Since its partnership with ERS, Baltimore City has shuttered more than 80 schools due to "academic failure" and declining enrollment. As the Baltimore Sun reported in 2018 and 2019, most schools the School Board voted to shut down are in the city's poorest neighborhoods. According to the Baltimore Sun, the schools were closed despite school supporters rallying outside district headquarters, presenting hours of passionate testimony, and students delivering more than 1,000 letters and petitions to City Hall, appealing to the Mayor to keep "their beloved school open."

The Baltimore Sun discusses the fact that the schools targeted for closure tend to have large populations of students of color. In Baltimore, the shuttered schools were on average 95 percent Black: 

"Michelle Renée Valladares, associate director of the Colorado-based National Education Policy Center, said closures leave children feeling like they can’t be taught and blaming themselves for a school’s failure.

'This is the message cities are sending to kids: You’re not good enough for us,' she said. 'No matter how policymakers and leaders try to couch it, that’s how kids interpret it.'

Studies have determined that school systems disproportionately target schools with large shares of minority students for closure. Since 2013, the average student body at schools closed in Baltimore was 95 percent black. The district as a whole is about 80 percent African-American."

ERS: Bad News for the Future of Public Schools

As is apparent from the pattern above, ERS with its mission to usher in neoliberal reforms is clearly bad news for the future of public schooling and excellent news for those in the wings ready to profit off the transformation. Is it too late to put a stop to this contract? How do we preserve the democratic institution of public schooling with billionaire-funded machinations behind the scenes working overtime to shift the system into a market-based model during what Kim Smith, founder of the NewSchools Venture Fund, Pahara Institute, and Teach for America, calls "a moment of disruption?"

The billionaire-funded non-profits and foundations have co-opted the terms previously used by those demanding justice for our most underserved students. All the slick statements and reports repeating key terms such as equity, excellence, and students' needs must not be taken for face value. They are used to blind us to the real motivation behind many of these "innovations," which is to dismantle one of the last public goods left in this country--the public education system.