Posted on August 24, 2012

Broad Center Responds to Critics

In response to a recent Washington Post blog post which suggested that the Broad Foundation is looking to increase the number of leaders from outside the education field as a way to bolster its reform agenda, the Broad Center for the Management of School Systems has issued a statement saying that if it and the foundation have an agenda, it is to "help leaders nationwide learn about efforts to strengthen public school systems so that students and teachers can succeed."

According to the Post, the Broad Center has proposed instituting a number of changes to its education programs aimed at accelerating the "pace of 'disruptive' and 'transformational' change in big city school districts, and creat[ing] a 'go to group' of 'the most promising [Broad] Academy graduates and other education leaders who are poised to advance the highest-leverage education reform policies on the national landscape.'" The Post goes on to identify specific changes discussed in an internal memo that was released to the Education Law Center as part of New Jersey's Open Public Records Act, including merging the Broad Fellowship for Educational Leaders and the Broad Superintendents Academy to "reflect the wider range of positions graduates will seek to fill" and creating a new advocacy group that will work to 'change the national landscape to make it easier for superintendents to define policy agendas, influence public opinion, coalesce political forces, and advance bold reforms on the ground."

In a statement on the Broad Center Web site, executive director Becca Bracy Knight explained that the organization and its primary funder have no intention of privatizing public schools, encouraging leaders to run schools like businesses, or "corporatizing" school reform. "That is because these are not our goals," Knight says in the statement. "School districts are accountable to the public. The core problem is that teachers, parents, voters, and taxpayers have been given little information about the extent of the bureaucratic challenges facing their schools."

To that end, the Broad Center released a list of seventy-five examples of how bureaucracy hampers America's students and teachers. According to the foundation, by sharing these challenges, key stakeholders will have a clearer sense of what must be addressed in order to improve the nation's public schools.