Reform Selling Reform: Chiefs for Change Promoting Relay Graduate School of Education
Chiefs for Change (C4C) is a corporate-reform-promoting organization that began under the direction of Jeb Bush; as of March 2015, C4C is its own nonprofit. Under Bush, C4C’s membership of state ed superintendents was dwindling. (In February 2015, C4C had only four members.) Still, according to Bush’s nonprofit, Foundation for Excellence in Education (FEE), C4C received over $1.5 million in 2014 from FEE for “program support for Chiefs for Change, a coalition of reform-minded chief state-school officers.”
In March 2015, Louisiana state superintendent and corporate-reform class act, John White, took charge of C4C.
The rebirthed C4C has extended its membership to include local as well as state ed chiefs. It’s even willing to pick up as many former chiefs as possible to boost its appearance of a notable membership. As of this writing, C4C only includes five active state ed superintendents. The rest of its 24 members are local superintendents or former superintendents.
As of 2016, C4C is not a large organization. Still, it is trying to drum up new members to form a coalition behind its ideas. Thus, it has released this 38-page policy brief on Title II of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA). Title II essentially concerns “preparing, recruiting, and training high-quality teachers, principals, or other school leaders,” where *high-quality* involves raising the federally-mandated state test scores associated with the “challenging State academic standards.”
Discussion of Title II begins on page 113 of the ESSA doc linked above. On page 114 is the discussion of a “teacher, principal, or other school leader preparation academy” that can be a nonprofit and that has as its chief aim of boosting those federally-mandated test scores.
In its Title II policy brief, C4C features one organization for “innovative teacher and school leader preparation programs”
The Relay Graduate School of Education:
Relay Graduate School of Education was formed to revolutionize the way teacher education is delivered and to better prepare more high-quality teachers for urban schools. Varying by location, Relay, a non-profit, accredited Institution of Higher Education, offers an innovative program that includes teaching residency, master’s degree programs for novice and experienced teachers, alternative certification, special education credentials, programs for school leaders, and free online courses.
Relay Graduate School of Education is a New York-based nonprofit (EIN 27-5316628). It describes itself as follow on its 2014 tax form:
Relay Graduate School of Education (“Relay”) was organized under the education law of the State of New York in February 2011, to improve theReform Selling Reform: Chiefs for Change Promoting Relay Graduate School of Education | deutsch29:
