Is Portland Public Schools Deputy Superintendent a School Choice Proponent?

In June, it was announced that former Portland Public Schools (PPS) Chief Financial Officer, Nolberto Delgadillo, and PPS Deputy Superintendent of Instruction and Communities, Dr. Cheryl Proctor, have become 2023-24 Broad Center Fellows at Yale School of Management. What could this mean for the future of PPS?

As the LA Times reported, the Broad Center's mission is twofold: "to attract and train talented leaders from outside education — including business executives and senior military officers — and to provide needed skills to career educators who rose through the ranks, often starting as teachers." The Center moved to Yale in 2019 along with a $100-million gift from the founder, Eli Broad, then an 86-year-old billionaire who EdWeek described 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, who died in 2021, 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.” The LA Times adds, "Broad (had) been a major funder of privately operated, taxpayer-funded charter schools,. . . (and) a major political donor in campaigns against school board candidates endorsed by the teachers unions and supported limiting teacher job protections."

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.

The Broad Center's website touts its current location at Yale as exciting, because "New Haven is a hub for innovation, not only in business, but also in education." The program's website points out with enthusiasm that "the New Haven Public School District has a student population of over 20,000 and remains one of the largest School Choice Programs in the State of Connecticut."

For Delgadillo, who spent months on sick leave before taking off from Portland this summer to become Deputy Chief Business Officer at the Los Angeles Unified School District, this fellowship is not his first rodeo with the Broad Center. A decade ago, Delgadillo obtained his Masters in Education through The Broad Residency in Urban Education Reform, a program at The Broad Center, then based in Los Angeles. Delgadillo's past is checkered with charter chain leadership positions, including Chief Operating officer of LA Promise Fund, and Cluster Business Manager with Green Dot Public schools.

Dr. Proctor is still with PPS, so it is curious that she would apply for this 10-month tuition-free program for "cabinet-level leaders" at an institution well-known for pushing for the "charterization" of public schools. Proctor came to Portland in 2021 from Philadelphia, a city with a long history of school privatization schemes amidst robust community resistance. There, she worked in various leadership roles, including Executive Director of School Improvement Planning and Evidence-based Supports. 

A key area of Dr. Proctor's professional focus is on school "improvement," the kind which equates standardized test scores with academic gains or failures. Low standardized scores are often used as a reason to "turnaround" "underachieving" pubic schools, and reconstitute them under new management as charter schools. In her 2017 Florida Atlantic University dissertation, Proctor lauds education reform built on a foundation of standardized tests without interrogating their validity. Of Ronald Reagan’s National Commission on Excellence in Education 1983 report, The Nation at Risk, Proctor writes that its findings “evoked a movement to better the curriculum taught to the nation’s pupils by raising the standards and revisiting practices past practices [sic].” The report, she claims, “opined the path to improve education in America.” Proctor also speaks positively of school vouchers in her doctoral thesis, entirely ignoring their origin in the brain of a radical right economist, Milton Friedman. She seems unaware of their use as a tool that white Southern racists used to flee and simultaneously defund newly integrated public schools, with the goal of ultimate demise of the public school system. Proctor says this about school vouchers:

"In 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court decision in the landmark case, Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas altered the face and philosophy of education once more, and education became a constitutional right. . .Vouchers offered parents and students the opportunity to make choices and take responsibility for their education, while also encouraging more competition and innovation within the school system."

Is Proctor planning to transform PPS into a district full of non-unionized charter schools? Proctor has already instituted major changes in the district by leading the adoption of its new Instructional Framework, which is centered around curriculum-based professional development, and positions textbook publishers, ed tech companies, and private educational consultants as the bearers of high quality educational experiences for students, and of "improved teacher practice."

The guiding document for the Instructional Framework shared with staff by Dr. Proctor, is a "Challenge Paper" from the Carnegie Corporation of New York called "The Elements: Transforming Teaching through Curriculum-Based Professional Learning." The paper is coauthored by Jim Short, a program director at Carnegie Corporation of New York, and Stephanie Hirsh, Strategic Advisor/Consultant to Carnegie Corporation's National Education Program Teaching and Leadership Division, and Managing Director with Hirsh Holdings LLC, a company providing consulting for "start ups primarily focused on preK-20 education and other related services." Carnegie Corporation is one of Hirsh Holdings LLC's clients.

The conservative think tank, The Fordham Institute, which promotes and authorizes charter schools, supports curriculum-based professional learning as a tool to hasten privatization. The institute lauds the Carnegie Corporation's ideas in "The Elements," and argues that curriculum reform is a cost-effective way to bring about school reform.

This blog has argued that the shift to curriculum mandates and curriculum-based professional development is designed to control, demoralize, and push out teachers in order to clear the way for the privatization of public schools.

Last year, PPS raised the pass through funding for the district's six public charter schools--which with the exception of Kairos PDX are known for being whiter than "regular" PPS schools--from 80 to 90 percent.

Investigative blogger, Thomas Ultican, who focuses on public education argues that Broad's residencies fuel the "Destroy Public Education Agenda." Ultican urges: 

"No school district trying to improve and provide high quality education should even consider hiring a candidate with Broad training on their resume. Neither the Residency nor the academy are legitimate institutions working to improve public education. Their primary agenda has always been privatizing schools and ending democratic control by local communities. That is why the founding billionaire, Eli Broad, is one of America’s most prolific financers of Charter Schools and organizations like Teach For America. He believes in markets and thinks schools should be privately run businesses."

Considering the new intiatives and focus of district leadership on business management strategies and "school innovation," a common euphemism for school privatization, should Portland worry that a transformation is underway in PPS that will convert our public schools to charter schools managed by a billionaire-funded non-profit or foundation? Only time will tell.