Time for a friendly puff piece from Inside Philanthropy about one of the nation’s most malevolent foundations: The Walton Family Foundation.
Walton has two goals: privatizing education and eliminating teachers’ unions.
It pledged to spend $1 billion to achieve those aims.
It subsidizes many mainstream media, even NPR and Education Week, to make sure that it gets favorable coverage for its nefarious goals.
And now, Inside Philanthropy reports that the Waltons have decided to plunk a couple of million dollars down in New York City and spread the wealth so that some of it goes to traditional antagonists, like Teachers College, Columbia University.
Who funds Inside Philanthropy? I can’t tell from its website. I did notice an earlier article about the Waltons, which claimed that individual members of the Walton family were reaching out to what appear to be liberal organizations, like the Center for American Progress. The writer didn’t even think to ask whether the Walton family members were purchasing the voices and independence of those groups they subsidize.
The Waltons noticed the research about the importance of economic and social integration so they have decided to open seven new charter schools in New York City that will lure in middle-class kids. Thus, in the name of integration, they can both promote privatization of public dollars and do their union-busting at the same time. Why should only poor kids go to charters? Think of the possibilities as Walton millions open charters for middle-class kids too!
Give them points for cleverness.
The Waltons earned their place on this blog’s Wall of Shame, and there is no reason to see anything coming from a family of billionaires that fights unions in their own stores and fights paying a minimum wage and subsidizes the evil American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which is devoted to destroying democracy.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“Center for American Progress” would be more aptly called “Progress for American Center”
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Center Regarding American Progress makes for a nice acronym. Center for American Greed is also apt. Walmart should be renamed with the aforementioned acronym-mart. There we go, societal devalue added.
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The definition of an “integrated” charter school:
Go into a city where over 70% of the students are economically disadvantaged and only 15% are white and open a charter school where fewer than 30% of the students are economically disadvantaged and close to 50% are white.
Once you have opened your charter school that draws the white and affluent students away from the public schools in disproportionate very high numbers, attack those very same public schools for not matching your “diversity”.
The definition of a “diverse” charter school: when middle class and affluent Latino and African American students are educated in schools with lots of white students and very few poor students.
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I guess charters are not all about saving poor minority children from “failing” public schools. Ha! It is more about making public schools the schools of last resort for the most vulnerable and expensive to educate that will be rejected by the Walton family experiment. Of course, it will be impossible to provide adequate service to these students with a lot of the money gone. The government needs to take action to protect young people from being billionaires’ play things, and allowing them to use public money to do it.
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And endlessly beat up the students you have left behind by calling them out for their low test scores: Failure, Failure, Failure.
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Reblogged this on Lloyd Lofthouse and commented:
The Walmart, poverty-wage paying without benefits (they offer a medical plan but it will cost you your paycheck to buy medical through Walmart), labor union hating Walmart family continues to subvert the United States into their own deplorable fiefdom. Did you vote for Trump? It’s obvious that Walmart is the shopping choice for Nazis, Kluckers (KKK), racists of all types, fundamentalist Christians, and white supremacists.
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In this article, we focus on a statewide system of interdistrict open enrollment in Michigan, known as Schools of Choice. Our previous work indicated that students who take advantage of this program are disproportionately lower performing on state exams, come from lower-income families, and are more likely to be minority students. We estimated conditional bounds on these factors, as well as within-student variation in test scores, for the effect of participation in Schools of Choice, and find little evidence that student achievement is affected overall. We find little consistent evidence that subgroups of students based on race, gender or income benefit or lose disproportionately from the program, nor do students whose resident districts vary on key demographic or achievement characteristics.”
That’s awkward for Betsy DeVos.
If the US Department of Education doesn’t consider any data that conflicts with their beliefs about public schools, why should we accept anything else they say?
Please don’t take advice from these people. Bad idea. All information that conflicts with choice cheerleading is discarded or buried. I shudder to think how they’re misleading public schools. Look elsewhere for reliable information, is my advice.
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2332858417731555#articleShareContainer
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We have a Wal Mart here – they drove one of the two local supermarkets out of business and you have to drive 30 miles to get to a competitor, so it’s pretty much a captive market.
Every time I see public school families in there buying school supplies I can’t help but wonder if they know the company does everything in their power to harm their kids’ schools. It’s just sad. You feel like they’re really taking advantage of people- not the local employees, who of course make no decisions but the family.
How can they be located in all these rural communities and oppose public schools? Public schools are the CENTER of these places. They are the closest thing we have to a common purpose.
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The Walton Family and their foundation have a few clear goals: money. Power. Destruction of unions.
They drive small Mom and Pop businesses into bankruptcy, then hire Mom and Pop as greeters and pay them as little as possible.
They care about children–especially children of color–as much as they care about the flies that might accidentally get into their board room.
If they truly care about them, they would pay their workers $15 an hour.
They don’t.
They and ALEC will destroy our democracy, with the help of the Koch brothers and the DeVos family
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They’re evil!
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This is RAPE!
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This country needs a storm similar to the one in PR to tear down what is being erected by the so called billionaires. A storm so severe that it will put people like the Walton Family, the Koch bros and the Michael Bloombergs of the world to their knees.
We need a storm so severe it will blast every single idea the Waltons have about education as they will be forced to worry about their destruction. Right now the climate in this country is too dim, not enough serious things to worry about. A storm can revitalize this country and bring people together instead of the hate that currently exists.
Further, the United States should have never allowed people to acquire this much wealth because now these people want to shape the country to what they think is good and this is causing much harm to individuals. By allowing these people to acquire all this money is sad because now we have several governments running the country not just Washington DC.
Now we have people from Wisconsin – (Koch Bros) Michigan (Betsy Devos) Boston, (Michael Bloomberg) and several others making law and pushing agendas with cash. This country needs a revolution and if it does not come in the form of a natural storm then the people of this country will ultimately create the storm to rid people like the Koch bros and the ill willed ideas.
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Storm,
I don’t share that hope. Billionaires will be safe from any storm. They will be in one of their other houses, maybe in Aspen or Vail or Napa Valley or London. Everyone else will suffer.
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Yes. Even underground homes being built nowadays.
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As Walmart funds Teachers College, David Koch is the lead funder on Ken Burns’ Vietnam series.
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That’s interesting. I have been watching the Vietnam War and don’t see Koch influence, unless his goal is to make us all anti-war.
What I have learned, which I didn’t know when I lived through that war, was that we took up the burden of defending colonialism from the French, who wisely abandoned the fight. And I didn’t know that Ho Chi Minh offered repeatedly to be our ally before the hostilities. He thought that we were an anti-colonial nation, like Vietnam. He was wrong.
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There’s a buck to be made so the Walton’s are there!
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