Five Minority School Districts In Running for Broad Prize

[tonysam]

All but one of them in the southern part of the country, unless of course you call Maryland a "southern" state, which I don't:

Five school districts—all in predominantly Southern states—were announced today by the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation as being finalists for the 2010 Broad Prize for Urban Education, an annual $2 million award that honors low-income school districts of at least 100,000 students that are making the greatest progress toward raising student achievement.

The five finalists are Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools in North Carolina; Gwinnett County Public Schools outside Atlanta (which was a finalist last year); Montgomery County Public Schools in Maryland; Socorro Independent School District in El Paso, Texas (also a finalist last year); and Ysleta Independent School District, also in El Paso.

Since 2002, when the award was first established by the Broad Foundation, whose education work is focused on improving K-12 urban public education, three winners have been districts in Texas.

The winner of the prize, which will be announced on October 19 in New York, will receive $1 million in college scholarships for high school seniors who will graduate in 2011. The four finalist districts will each receive $250,000 in college scholarships.

"Basically, we've already won the prize—the $250,000," says Jerry Weast, superintendent of Montgomery County Public Schools, just outside of Washington. Currently, about 86 percent of the district's seniors graduate and go on to college, but Weast says the scholarships will give hope to price-weary students amid rising higher education costs.

US News & World Report

[JuniperLea]

1. Good for Broad...

And congratulations to those schools who worked so hard to achieve their goals!

"... the scholarships will give hope to price-weary students amid rising higher education costs... "

I'm happy whenever that pressure is taken off... even if only a little.

Giving hope is a good thing. So is donating money to public schools.

[Hannah Bell]

2. so is stealing from the public purse, something mr. broad is an expert at.

Buried toward the end of an article in Business Week about the unraveling of AIG, the insurance giant, is the name Eli Broad.

Over the course of the spring, the stock fell, and by June criticism was getting closer to home. That’s when former AIG director Eli Broad, and two prominent investors—Shelby Davis of Davis Selected Advisers and Bill Miller of Legg Mason (LM)—sent a letter asking the board to name an interim CEO to replace Martin Sullivan, while a search committee found a new leader for New York-based AIG.

Broad has been mentioned on this blog frequently. He is the money behind the Broad Prize for schools who follow a so-called business model. Eli is the money (Bill Gates is also a funder) behind ED ‘08, an organization which wanted to push the corporate education agenda in the presidential campaign.

A more pointed description of how Eli Broad fits into the current Wall Street collapse and AIG can be found at my brother’s blog Small Talk.

And I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention another AIG director, Eli Broad, who’s been pushing his business model on public education. Maybe AIG could win the Broad Prize for management.

When my colleagues gathered around the table in the teachers’ lounge for lunch today, not many were familiar with Eli Broad or AIG. But when they discovered that VALIC is a subsidiary of the floundering AIG, their eyes opened wide. VALIC is one of the 10 annuity companies approved for payroll deduction by our district. Many teachers have their entire pensions in VALIC.

http://preaprez.wordpress.com/2008/09/16/aig-valic-and-eli-wall-street-is-not-so-far-away/


Broad = up to his ears in the AIG mess:


Teacher retirement funds being crushed

Eli Broad, as in Ed in '08, the Broad Foundation, and the Broad Prize, played a big role in the collapse of AIG. But he, along with venture philanthropist Bill Gates, might still be the most powerful force currently pushing the so-called business model on public schools.

Broad helped negotiate some of the biggest pay and severance packages for failed AIG CEOs, in history. This should give educators plenty of food for thought about the hypocrisy of the Broad/Gates push for merit pay as part of business-model reform. If merit pay is so great, why didn't it begin with AIG?

Broad co-founded Kaufman & Broad and later acquired Sun Life Insurance (renamed SunAmerica) in 1971 and sold the company to investment bank AIG in 1998 for $18 billion. Instead of retiring on his billions, Broad saw an opportunity to make billions more in the retirement business as millions of the baby-boom generation approached retirement age. As a director of AIG Retirement (VALIC), he was able to keep one foot in real estate and one foot in retirement—two legs planted deep into the sub-prime mortgage scandal.

To give you an example of what the AIG collapse will mean for teachers, in California alone, teacher retirement funds held more than 20 million shares of tumbling AIG stock. Teachers in Louisiana, California and other states, have settled suits against AIG trying to recover a portion of their losses. But many teachers are now going to have to rethink their retirement plans...


http://michaelklonsky.blogspot.com/2008/09/eli-broad-stick-to-golf.html

[mzteris]

3. makes you wonder, doesn't it?

What the REAL "problem" is here, eh?

[Hannah Bell]

4. yes, it certainly does. you of course miss the irony. as per usual.