AUSL Dead

The Corrupt Management Company AUSL is Gone

By Jim Vail

Multimillionaire venture capitalist Martin Koldyke's Academy of 
Urban School Leadership or AUSL is no more after years of
corrupt inside deals to close and 'turnaround' as many black schools
on the South Side, to complement the real estate plan of Chicago's 
elite to purge the poor working class and make it safe for the rich.

The darling of corporate education reform that was called upon by the big guns to help destroy then privately manage public schools in Chicago  - the Academy for Urban School Leadership or AUSL - is no more.

It was once called Turnaround - introduced during the Mayor Daley corporate reform years - where a public school was determined to be "failing" so the city had to fire everyone in the building, from teachers and administrators to janitors, cooks, heck even the guy who came in to check the water meter. They were all part of a culture of failure that Chicago's elite had to exterminate.

The Chicago reform model was to close as many public schools, mostly in poor black neighborhoods on the South Side, and hand over others to a private management company called AUSL run by a multimillionaire venture capitalist, Martin Koldyke.

George Schmidt, the late/great editor of Substance News, called out this scam from the beginning:

"The most prominent corporate booster of "turnaround" (which is not even a legal term in the State of Illinois; Marshall High School is about to be reconstituted, a policy which has been deemed a failure since the late 1990s by the reputable analysts of public education) in Chicago is the Academy of Urban School Leadership (AUSL). While AUSL's claims about its successes as a so-called 'turnaround' specialist are widespread (and have even been parroted by the President of the United States (Barack Obama) and the current U.S. Secretary of Education (Arne Duncan)), the factual basis for AUSL's marketing claims has never been established. AUSL is Martin Koldyke's baby. Everyone in Chicago knows it. Koldyke is not neutral in education policy circles in Chicago, but one of the bigger players on the side of the debate that claims a so-called "business model" is necessary to improve public education. "Turnaround", as your Business reporters know well, is a widely discredited term in corporate America, thanks in a large part to the fraudulent way it was practiced some time ago by charlatans like "Chainsaw" Al Dunlap, whose career as a media darling ended when he destroyed Sunbeam (once a major Chicago corporation) a decade ago... Koldyke is still trying to whitewash the history of "turnaround" - at least for the public schools."

Like so many well-meaning corporate frauds, AUSL originally started as a training program for teachers, but then was twisted into a vehicle to privatize the public schools. And its fraudulent ways eventually spelled its doom.

According to Chalkbeat Chicago, which covers the Chicago public schools and is under their control, the district stated that the Chicago Principals & Administrators Association aired grievances about the treatment of principals and said a managing director, Jarvis Sanford, at the nonprofit is under investigation by the district's Inspector General.

AUSL had privately managed 31 public schools that were "failing" on the South and West Sides of the city. Like many public schools, their enrollment had fallen 12 percent. And it cost a lot - CPS spent between $2 million to $5 million more on administration costs to oversee this privately managed public schools that needed help. This is part of the privatization scam in Chicago - paid higher management fees to corrupt charter schools while spending less on staff and materials for the students. Aspira and Acero charter school directors were making more than the CPS CEO. 

The Chicago Teachers Union pointed out that the AUSL method led to the purge of Black educators under the guise of "failing" schools, when in reality, mayoral control of CPS had long starved these schools of resources.

"Our mission remains to reverse the harm of racist policies like turnarounds, and move our bosses to provide school communities the resources required to support every student's needs," CTU President Jesse Sharkey said in an email statement.

The Chicago corporate education model went nationally during the President Barack Obama years when he installed turnaround lover and former CPS Chief Arne Duncan to wreck havoc on the public schools across the country. Suddenly every teachers was being threatened to be fired, purged for the unforgiveable sin of low test scores - no matter how great their lessons are to teach children more than filling in bubbles on test.

The late George Schmidt of Substance News called
out the bs of AUSL corporate reform nonsense.

George Schmidt called it out in Chicago when Mayor Richard Daley first tried the 'Small Schools' model funded by the Gates Foundation to improve the rough public high schools like Orr on the West Side. When the city suddenly switch course to the 'turnaround' policy, George asked Daley at a press conference if he would apologize to the teachers they would fire because his small schools program was a failure. The Mayor and his rainbow color of aides then abruptly ended the press conference. I guess the powers that be are not used to journalists asking questions on behalf of the teachers, and not the elite as Tribune and Sun-Times reporters are trained to do.

"Ironically, the announcement that Gates would henceforth be funding "turnaround" (instead of small schools) took place at a press conference, featuring then Mayor Richard M. Daley and the same AUSL honchoes, at the so-called "Sherman School of Excellence," Schmidt wrote in 2012. "One of the elementary schools AUSL touted (at the time) as an example of their successful turnaround "model".

"Sherman is still on probation in 2012, and even on the day Daley appeared at Sherman, only one of the two Sherman buildings was under control. When reporters tried to visit the south building (which contained the upper grades) security blocked the door, but not tightly enough to prevent two reporters, this reporter included, from hearing someone shout "Motherfucker" inside the building."

Schmidt further wrote that these fraudulent education scams engineered from the top were helped by some of Chicago's media who wrote about the successes of the turnaround (including Chalkbeat's predecessor Catalyst), "counting on the media to ignore the bigger picture."

"As early as the 2008 - 2009 school year, the Chicago Tribune dispatched reporter Stephanie Banchero (now with the Wall Street Journal) to do a series of stories about how things were going during the first year of the AUSL "turnaround" at Sherman. Banchero's stories, some of which were droll to any experienced inner city teacher. At one point, the Tribune reported on a "pajama party" for students at a teacher's apartment, complete with a Page One photograph of happy black girls jumping on a bed, without noting that a regular teacher who held a "pajama party" at home for kids would probably be investigated and fired. The upshot of the Tribune series was that the AUSL "superteacher" left at the end of the year to take a job in the suburbs. Although The Wall Street Journal continues to reflexively promote Chicago's corporate school reform model, anyone can ask their main education reform reporter (who was at the February 22, 2012 Chicago Board of Education meeting) about the ground level reality of the Chicago model, as opposed to the pre-packaaged corporate hype that AUSL is still feeding into the news stream."