Great Hearts Charter chain, based in Arizona, was rejected by the Texas state board of education. State Commissioner Michael Williams–not an educator–overturned the state board’s veto. It is not clear that Williams, a Bush family favorite, has this power.
But Great Hearts has the right connections.
As this story in the Texas Observer explains,
“In early June—weeks before Williams reversed the board’s veto—Great Hearts hired Rick Perry’s former chief of staff Ray Sullivan to lobby for them in Texas. And late last year, according to the Tribune, board member Ruben Cortez (D-Brownsville) said he’d been surprised to to get a call from the governor’s office wondering how he planned to vote on Great Hearts. In its expansion bids, the chain seems capable of calling in quite a bit of political firepower. Texas is no exception.
“In 2012, Republican leaders in Tennessee engaged in a nasty, drawn-out fight with Nashville’s school board. Although state leaders insisted the school be approved, the local board rejected Great Hearts’ bid to expand into the city, sticking to that decision even after the state withheld $3.4 million in transportation and utilities funding. In Nashville, as in Texas, critics had worried Great Hearts would locate in wealthy neighborhoods far from the city’s worst-off schools.
“And in Arizona, where the school began in 2004, Great Hearts expanded quickly under a board led by Jay Heiler, a well-connected operative in state politics and media who’s defended Senate Bill 1070—Arizona’s infamous immigration crackdown law—supported private school vouchers and agitated against proposals to boost public school funding. Heiler also did a stint on the board of the Goldwater Institute, a Phoenix think tank similar to the Texas Public Policy Foundation. Goldwater advances conservative political causes at the state level and is backed by well-known corporations and the Koch brothers.”
It helps to know the right people, or to hire them.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I’m sure that the Catholic high school that I went to has great SAT and ACT test scores. And it was 98% white (and still seems to be that close) with probably no free and reduced lunches. But IT’S NOT A PUBLIC SCHOOL as the lying bastard Gutierrez wrote of Great Hearts “these new public school offerings”.
Go ahead Great Hearts, open your private selective schools but do it without stealing public monies from the community public schools. Go ahead and stand free in the vaunted free market of private education, refuse to accept those “gubmint handouts”.
Funny—but not “ha ha” funny—how many people who decry allegedly “big gubmint handouts” to the vast majority (aka you, me, our neighbors and friends, our communities) applaud the self-styled “education reformers” that are in mad dog pursuit of $tudent $ucce$$. Those are the self-same leaders of the “new civil rights movement of our time” that buy off political enablers in “big gubmint,” those political insiders then rigging the system to relieve their patrons of “burdensome” accountability and responsibility including little or no fiscal oversight for taxpayer monies. No surprise then that they find ways to advantage the “big fish” of charters and privatization and vouchers over both their “smaller fish” brethern and public schools.
For example, want a federally-defined “highly qualified teacher”? TFA has got to be your BFF!
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“Hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue.” [François de la Rochefoucauld]
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Anyone have Great Hearts compensation figures handy???
Wonder how much they spent on the lobbyist?
Lobbyists in Texas only have to report their pay within a range, so Sullivan’s pay is listed at $10,000 – $24,999.99 for a term covering the last half of 2014.
Swacker-
“They” or the taxpayers spent?
How about taxpayers through the Charters = they.