Last fall, Bill Gates collected $10 million from his friends to push through approval of a referendum to permit privately managed charter schools in Washington State, which voters had turned down three times previously. Among the friends of Bill Gates who helped make charters possible was the Bezos family, the parents of Jeff Bezos.
Jeff Bezos is the founder of amazon.com. He is a billionaire many times over, one of the richest men on the planet.
Yesterday he bought the Washington Post.
An article in the Washington Post today describes his interest in education.
It says:
“Like Washington Post Co. Chairman Donald E. Graham, Bezos has shown support for efforts to change education policy, including the creation and expansion of public charter schools.
The Bezos Family Foundation — whose board includes Bezos, his parents and other family members — gave more than $11 million in 2011 to an array of national organizations such as Teach for America, Stand for Children and the KIPP Foundation, according to tax filings. The foundation also gave grants to scores of individual schools around the country as well as several charter school chains, including Uncommon Schools, which operates schools in New York and Massachusetts.
Bezos’s parents, Mike and Jackie, were active in a fierce battle last year to allow the creation of public charter schools in Washington state. Washington had been one of a handful of states that did not permit charters, which are publicly funded schools that are privately run and largely without unions. Teachers unions opposed the ballot measure, which narrowly passed with financial backing from Mike and Jackie Bezos as well as Microsoft founder Bill Gates and Netflix founder Reed Hastings.”
In short, Bezos is no friend of public education.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Off my shopping list: Walmart, Netflix, Microsoft, Amazon…the list keeps growing.
Don’t buy from the them. Find a local source for your purchases. These mega-businesses are very convenient but hugely destructive.
AGREE! They are basically thieves who should be in jail, not Manning. We have WEINERS in charge.
Exactly!
It’s true, but I really loved the convenience of Amazon. How can he be so hapless and misinformed?
What’s wrong with Netflix?
The owner of Netflix is Reed Hastings. He gives money to corporate reform candidates and supports charter chains.
The original Netflix series House of Cards wrote in anti public school story line. Coincidence? Also, the other new series about women in prison made references to how unions protect bad guards while another character makes a point of how a guard with a government job is set for life.
We are in a sick, undemocratic era where the wealthy can buy influence to rig the system for their own benefit. They want to eviscerate the public schools for profit. Any claims of altruism are mere smokescreen, because the “fixes” they push for schools have not been proven to help children (like the Gates small school initiative, charter schools, merit pay, and on and on.)
Lower teacher salaries and no pensions (since no one will teach for more than a few years) means more money for ebooks, technology, consultants, etc.
I have to wonder if Bezos’s interest in the Post is at least in part because the Washington Post Company owns Kaplan, Inc. Does this purchase herald Bezos’s entry in the virtual/digital schooling market? Is his plan to compete with Rupert Murdoch’s Amplify?
I agree with Linda. I’ve bought my last item from Amazon.
I wondered that myself, KenS, WHY Bezos was buying the paper. The only story I read on the matter said that Amazon, the company, was not buying the paper, but Bezos himself in his personal capacity. Cheap too. $215 million, I think.
Given Bezos’s slow careful creeping up on the market, I wouldn’t put it past him to be entering the market for virtual/digital schooling.
The article on Bezos in The Nation that Diane mentioned in another post reports that Kaplan is not part of the sale. According to that article, the Post relied on profits from the “predatory for-profit college” Kaplan U to stay in business.
Now my question is, without the profits from Kaplan, how will WaPo stay afloat? Will Bezos use Amazon money to prop up the paper? Is this just a vanity purchase, or does he want to use the Post as a way of promoting his business agenda, the way Murdoch has done with the Wall Street Journal?
Jeff will just be carrying on the WaPo school privatization tradition. Let us hope that Valerie, Jay, and Robert McCarthy survive.
Great point, Mark.
How embarrasing is it that the Washington Post has to push the same old tired line that “teachers unions” opposed the privatization law.
The thing lost 2 times before 3 wealthy individuals rammed it thru with a sophisticated campaign to attack public schools. In the World of the Washington Post, there are only teachers unions and wealthy privatizers.
I hope Bezos treats his new employees the same way he treats his warehouse workers. They think they’re “talent” and immune from the policies they promote, but Bezos business midel involves firing workers when they hit 50: very much like the school reform model.
The privatization model in Wa State should be interesting. They sold it as “non profits” only (a recognition I think that charters are seen as profit machines in states like mine, OH)
But what you find out when you’ve had privatization for a decade is, “non profit” doesn’t mean anything. It’s a legal fiction to get around state law. They simply set up a non profit “shell” with a creamy profit center, because they contract out all essential services.
I think Jeff Bezos should take a look at “Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman” http://amzn.to/19KDwHi.
Hirschman’s argument against private schools and vouchers is contained in this passage from Gladwell http://nyr.kr/19Hj0e7 (paraphrased; my CAPS):
“Hirschman quoted the conservative economist Milton Friedman who argued that SCHOOL VOUCHERS SHOULD REPLACE THE CURRENT PUBLIC-SCHOOL SYSTEM, writing ‘Parents could express their views about schools directly, by withdrawing their children from one school and sending them to another.’ Hirschman commented: ‘a near perfect example of the ECONOMIST’S BIAS IN FAVOR OF EXIT AND AGAINST VOICE: In the first place, Friedman considers withdrawal or exit as the ‘direct’ way of expressing one’s unfavorable views of an organization. A person less well trained in economics might naively suggest that the direct way of expressing views is to express them! Secondly, the decision to voice one’s views and efforts to make them prevail are contemptuously referred to by Friedman as a resort to ‘cumbrous political channels.’ But what else is the political, and indeed the democratic, process than the digging, the use, and hopefully the slow improvement of these very channels?”
Oh, please….and I have even been reading with interest the articles Washington Post publishes about Common Core. I guess this source of information is now gone. As for the bit about money being used to push through the Charter School referendum in Washington…it just goes to show that money can buy anything and everything. Scary indeed.
Does Ben & Jerry’s sell books?
We buy our all books through small, independent, local booksellers.
Here’s one of the reasons:
http://www.motherjones.com/rights-stuff/2011/09/amazon-warehouse-heat-shipping
This is going to put a huge dent in my online shopping…my husband will be THRILLED. Hasta la vista, Amazon.
And we wonder why the media won’t share John Merrow’s article about the real michelle rhee?? This is getting ridiculous…it’s a democracy-turned-modern-day-oligarchy right in front of our faces, & it’s the democratic society that elects those ultimate oligarchs! In this era of technology, we may be in more of a position to wage this war than our ancestors would have been without the power of social media, but it’s not happening fast enough.
I just posted on my own blog (theindignantteacher.wordpress.com) a link I received in an email this morning to a petition to remove David Koch from the Boston-based WGBH channel’s PBS Board of Trustees.
I don’t know if this is more maddening or more terrifying.
Surprise, suprise…
Jeff Bezos’ Other Endeavor: Charter Schools, Neoliberal Education Reforms
http://www.thenation.com/blog/175627/jeff-bezos-other-endeavor-charter-schools-neoliberal-education-reforms#axzz2bEjrQbCE
“Notably, the sale of the Post to Bezos did not include Kaplan.” So says Lee Fang in THE NATION article.
After thinking, way too much, about Besos buying the Washington Post, I suddenly realized how scared I was. I was even more scared about what is happening with this attack on democracy right here in my own country by my own countrymen, than what is happening in Yemen. I shall not sleep peacefully tonight or for many nights to come.
I have Diane’s new book on my pre order list from amazon.
What a sad time when parents turn over control of their children with hardly a question…
easy to caricature, “profiteers” wants to privatize everything.
This is exactly what happened in Massachusetts
Former superintendent calls himself a CEO, appoints his own board and gets them to vote up his salary because he works for a non-profit in education;(He wanted to be commissioner when his family was in the Governor’s office but he was not elected)
Now a big time CEO he collects the wires and pliers (owns the big computer donated by a defunct computer firm) and starts selling to the schools…. Then he buys up the buildings where the school classrooms are located and rents the space back to the schools. (Prior to that time school districts loaned out space to be used jointly by the districts ). Then (now Bigtime) CEO convinces the board (he selected) to up his salary because he has “saved money” for the schools. Ex-CIA member /board member goes along with the others who are just too $%@$# (I could say inexperienced but I won’t ) to know the difference. One gets fined for conflict of interest when he takes job with CEO/Ex superintendent.
Where did they learn all these tricks?
Oh, yes, from business world. As teachers, curriculum adminstrators, supervisors, we were yelled and screamed at “Don’t think like teachers you have to think like a business man.” (Visions of Kruschev’s shoe go here)
So all of this started in 1992.
Suzanne Bump (disclosure I voted for her in MA )in 2010-11 sent in auditing teams who found the huge
amounts of money siphoned off from education (public /federal dollars) but only DiMasi
went to jail .
Up to 30 million so the CEO /Former superintendent could own four houses, buy gifts for his children (smells of Virginia Governor’s bathroom, doesn’t it)???
We need to get the parents together to expose corruption and fraud.
quote: “governance structure that gives rise to all manner of sweetheart deals for vested interests. Just look at school construction in Los Angeles, for instance….he wants to privatize everything ”
Look to see what states it is coming from, which Governors and Commissioners are destroying public education and get the parents together to expose corruption and fraud. There was almost a marriage in MA of Governor Celluci (deceased) and this CEO/Ex Superintendent who left a tornado through Massachusetts before being removed/fired.
The articles that Andy writes for Fordham are mediocre at best ; I will not be buying his book.