A Chicago Teacher Questions Martin Koldyke’s “Golden Apples” Program
A few days ago, a Chicago teacher contacted me to make me aware of a program in Chicago, the “Golden Apple” program, one that supposedly rewards good teachers yet seems more like a front to supply a temporary teaching staff in schools that businessman Martin Koldyke has taken control of in the all-too-common corporate reform name of “turning them around.”
This teacher read my book, A Chronicle of Echoes, which has three chapters focused on the history of mayoral control in Chicago. She noted that I did not mention Koldyke, which is true. My book is a 24-chapter survey of corporate reform, and I had to cut information in order to limit its size. (Even with small font, the book is over 500 pages.) Plus, I ran out of both energy and summer vacation. (I wrote the body of the book in a single summer. It needed to be done before the fall and my return to teaching full time.)
In February 2013, I had written about Koldyke as part of my 17-post NCTQ series. In my post, I concluded that Golden Apple looked like a legitimate program but that Koldyke’s connections definitely put him in the category of “corporate reformer”:
Koldyke is also founder and chair of the Academy for Urban School Leadership(AUSL). It is here that I read Koldyke’s name in association with Arne Duncan. I read that this group “manages” 25 Chicago public schools and that AUSL’s partners include the Dell and Gates Foundations; the Walmart Foundation; theALEC-connected Boeing Corporation, and– yep– McGriff’s NewSchools Venture Fund.Koldyke is a corporate reformer.If only Koldyke’s AUSL could deliver. Alas, they cannot:Since the latest Chicago Public Schools “reform” efforts began in 1996, Orr Academy High School in the West Side’s Garfield Park neighborhood has beensubjected to nearly every faddish attempt the corporate reformistsA Chicago Teacher Questions Martin Koldyke’s “Golden Apples” Program | deutsch29: