Peter Ellertsen. Jeanne Allen and the corporate assault on public schools.

Jeanne Allen is is founder of the Center for Education Reform and the vice president for business development of Hot Chalk Inc., a digital technology firm.

– Peter Ellertsen is retired. He taught in a small Catholic liberal arts college, where he worked with standardized testing and accreditation issues. Peter writes: 

Fred,

I think you might be interested in an op-ed piece published recently in Illinois Times, the alternative weekly in Springfield. It sounds like a generic piece of teacher-bashing — low standards, lack of accountability, Johnny doesn’t read, etc., etc., etc. — but it’s by a shill for charter schools named Jeanne Allen, and the timing seems kind of suspicious coming at the end of the school year. I wasn’t familiar with Allen, but I didn’t want this kind of stuff to go unanswered. So I looked her up, and apparently she’s a notorious shill for corporate school “reform.” 

The same op-ed has run in the Rock River Times, in Rockford, and the Hillsdale Daily News, in Hillsdale, Mich., at least that I can find online. And an outfit called PublicSchoolOptions.org. posted it May 21 to their website and their Facebook page. It’s apparently a nationwide advocacy group headquartered in Arlington, Va., promotes Allen’s charter school and distance education agenda.

If I had to guess, I’d say the op-ed piece probably went out as a national blast email enclosing a standard end-of-school-year press release, since it was picked up by a paper in Michigan as well as the two in Illinois.

Details about her operation and agenda in my reply, which ran today:

Did anyone else find it odd that Jeanne Allen of the Center for Education Reform didn’t spell out what she means when she says she wants parents to “take 20 years of lessons learned and move them into every community?” (“What parents need to know about schools,” May 22.) Allen says when kids fail, the problem isn’t with their parents, it’s with the “standards set by the school and its staff (often low and fuzzy), the low quality of instruction, the lack of accountability, and, for children of color, what was once called the ‘soft bigotry of low expectations’.” The parentheses are hers. But there’s something we can do, she says.

But wait, what are those “20 years of lessons learned?” And what, exactly, is it we can do in Springfield so the kids will sit up straight and pay attention? Allen doesn’t say. So I got curious and looked her up.

Allen is founder of CER and the vice president for business development of Hot Chalk Inc., a digital technology firm that hosts “education-focused websites and helps advertisers reach a targeted audience.” According to its 2013 annual report, CER seeks to “increase the number and quality of appointments available among charter, digital, and other schools of choice.” On its website, CER also advocates: 1. Rigorous learning standards and strict accountability for public schools and teachers by means of “tests, developed at the state level and correlated directly to the standards.” 2. Increased reliance on technology, including “digital learning” and “a myriad of delivery mechanisms via online tools” for students wherever they are. 3. “Strong, data-driven, performance-based accountability systems.

In advocating these policies and products, CER and Allen say they’re opposed not only by teacher unions, but also “the associations of administrators, principals, school boards and hybrids of all (e.g., ‘The Blob’).” In newspaper op ed pieces, Allen likes to refer to brick-and-mortar public schools and professional educators’ advocacy groups collectively as “the Blob.” It’s a “special interest,” she says, and it’s outlived its usefulness.

Allen sees her advocacy of charter schools as a struggle for “excellence in education, through promoting choice and accountability.” But others see it as part of a nationwide assault on the public schools in the interest of school privatization.

Certainly if you read between the lines, CER’s rhetoric parrots the talking points of corporate school reform, school privatization and partisan right-wingers like the American Legislative Exchange Council and the Walton Family Foundation, which in 2013 contributed $541,856 to CER, along with grants to charter schools from Arizona to Wisconsin including the Chicago Collegiate Charter School and the Illinois Network of Charter Schools.

Charter schools have a legitimate place, if they’re held accountable to the communities they serve and they’re staffed by professional teachers who have more than the five weeks of training typical of many charter school faculty, but they’re highly controversial. In Chicago, New York and other major metro areas nationwide, they’re blamed for a corporate school reform agenda that closed 50 neighborhood public schools in Chicago, for example, during the past year alone.

So Allen may sound like she’s got a cure-all for parents who are left “scratching their heads” but what she’s really got is a hidden agenda. It’s a corporate political agenda, it leads to school privatization and there’s no evidence whatsoever it would help parents – or students – in Springfield.

Peter Ellertsen
Springfield