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A Billionaire Stops Funding Charters and TFA, Starts Funding Public Schools!

By dianeravitch
October 23, 2018 //
46

The richest woman in Connecticut no longer gives to charter schools and Teach for America. Barbara Dalio has shifted her giving to public schools.

She fell in love with public education.

She fell in love with the schools that take everyone, even the least of them, the children that the charters reject.

She got woke.

In the past three years alone, the foundation, which Barbara co-founded with her husband, has donated $50 million to public education programs in Connecticut.

“I never thought I would get into education because it’s not my background, so I am learning as I go along,” she said. “I love it. I don’t play golf or tennis. This is my passion.”

Connecticut Adds Two More Billionaires To The Forbes 400 List. Here’s A Look At All Nine Members.
Dalio, 70, who is universally described as humble and hands-on, said in an interview last week that her shift toward traditional public school districts came about as she learned more about education and became concerned about the achievement gap and students who are disengaged from school.

Dalio said she observed that the kids who go to public charter schools have parents who are often more involved and have the initiative to seek out an alternative for their child.

But many parents, she said, don’t have the time to do that.

“It’s not that they don’t care about the kids,” Dalio said of those parents. “It’s that they are burdened in many instances with just one parent having two or three jobs. That really struck me.”

It’s a shift that some of the wealthy donors that have focused on charters and other reform efforts are also making in recent years, some experts say.

A few years ago, there was a feeling among some wealthy donors that giving to local neighborhood schools might be a waste of money, said Rick Hess, director of education policy studies with the American Enterprise Institute.

“Now the zeitgeist has changed,” said Hess. “TFA [Teach for America] and charter schooling are more controversial than they were eight or 10 years ago for various reasons and after the teacher strikes, teachers are more sympathetic. There’s a sense that if you’re a wealthy person and you’re trying to give away dollars in a way that you feel good about, you might make different choices in 2018 than you did in 2008.”

When Dalio arrived as an immigrant from Spain in her 20s, she knew very little about the American educational system except that she saw it is as inspiring.

“One of the things that struck me was all the people that succeeded or were able to have a very good education just through the public schools,” Dalio said. “I just admire that democratic side that the United States has. I don’t know if it still has it but I thought it was so amazing that anyone of any social class can just go to a public school and get a great education.”

Dalio, who lives in Greenwich, learned more about the public schools as she raised her four sons who attended both public and private schools and had very different needs and learning styles.

“I didn’t have a formula that would work for all of them, so I had to be very nimble and had to rely on teachers to help me help them,” Dalio said. “So that’s how my love for teachers started because they were always really there for me and for them. They were very caring.”

As the family’s foundation was expanding, Dalio said, “I really felt for the public schools and I really wanted to be helpful.”

But she realized she needed to be educated. So she began volunteering at an alternative high school in Norwalk where she started coming in once every two weeks and soon was up to two or three times a week.

“I learned really how many needs the kids have because they had kids with learning differences, kids that have had trauma in their lives, kids with emotional needs,” Dalio said, as well as kids who are hungry. “So it really is challenging for the school, the teachers to address all of those needs, especially with [budget] cuts” that eliminate social workers or mental health programs, she said.

Dalio said she learned through the alternative school and also with her own children, one of whom has bipolar disorder, that all children can succeed if given the right the services and help.

Her own son is in very good shape now, she said, “but it took a lot of resources and patience and time and you know if we didn’t succeed, he could have been just one of those kids.”

“So I always feel a bit for the underdog … or the kids that don’t have opportunities and I see that if you give them what they need, which is sometimes not that much, [with] just a little attention and love, you can really turn them around…”

David Callahan, editor of Inside Philanthropy, said he hopes “other philanthropists will pay attention to what (Dalio is) doing and the hands-on immersive approach she’s taken, which is how philanthropy should operate if it doesn’t want to alienate the people it needs to engage to succeed.”

“If Barbara ever gets focused on the national level,” Callahan said, “I think that could be a big deal, given her mindset and the sensibility she brings to this space.”
”

Public education should not have to depend on the goodwill of philanthropists. It is a civic duty to educate all children through taxation.

But billionaires have banded together to destroy education and to promote choice instead of raising taxes.

Thank you, Ms. Dalio, for putting your money where it does the most good for the most children.

Categories Billionaires, Charter Schools, Connecticut, Hope, Philanthropy

Mercedes Schneider: The Billionaires Behind TFA’s Drive for Power

By dianeravitch
September 23, 2018 //
11

Mercedes Schneider will lead a workshop at the Network for Public Education conference in Indianapolis on Oct 20-21 about how to be a financial sleuth. Find out who is funding the “rephormers” in your state or community.

In this post, she gives a lesson and unmasks TFA’s drive for political power.

Teach for America presents itself as a wholesome charity and raises money to send fresh-faced, inexperienced young college graduates into needy schools. At its inception, it was supposed to fill vacant positions, but now TFA will cheerfully replace experienced teachers for districts trying to save money. TFA is also the labor force for non-union charter schools (i.e. scabs), with the energy to work 70-hour Weeks and no family obligations.

TFA has a political arm, which is not so well known. It is called Leaders for Educational Equity (LEE),which is deceptively named, like all rephorm groups (which swear they are in this business “for the kids,” for “equity,” to ”close achievement gaps,” etc.).

Schneider investigated the funding behind LEE. You will not be surprised to learn it is the usual billionaires.

“According to the LEE site, LEE membership is free to all TFAers. And why not? The purpose of TFA and its related orgs is to catapult those who taught for five minutes into positions of power and authority over the American classroom.

“Such catapulting requires loads of money– which brings us to those financially-loaded, Leaders in Education PAC donors:

“The PAC is primarily funded by members of the Walton family (note that Carrie Penner is Carrie Walton Penner) and by Arthur Rock. Michael Bloomberg makes an appearance, as does Purdue Pharma-OxyContin first son and venture capitalist, Jonathan Sackler.”

Aren’t you relieved to know that the opioid billions of the Sackler family are being spent on helping TFA grads gain political power, in addition to the expansion of the charter industry?

Wherever you see the name Walton, you can be sure they are pushing non-union charters and a vision of corporate charter chains that reflect the Walmart ideals of cheap and fast and everywhere.

I am in the middle of reading “Winners Take All,” and hear the author’s words in my head. The elites like to destroy public institutions, then offer to step in and solve the problems they created by funding a new institution, under their control.

Teach for America is meant to undermine the teaching profession by offering up eager and idealistic young people who are happy to work for a meager salary that won’t support a family or a decent standard of living. They provide the workers for the charters beloved by billionaires, whose purpose is to drain resources and destroy the public schools.

Be informed. Vote.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Education Reform, Teach for America, Teachers, Unions

Mercedes Schneider: TFA is Loaded with Nearly Half a Billion $, But Recruitment Falling

By dianeravitch
November 9, 2016 //
10

Mercedes Schneider reviews Teach for America’s finances, and the organization is awash in cash. It’s latest tax form shows that it has $445 million in assets. It spent $1 million lobbying federal and state officials to protect its interests. It created a political action arm called Leadership for Educational Excellence, to train its recruits for leadership positions in which they can push for privatization and undercut unions and real teacher education.

But what all that money can’t stop is the continuing and precipitous drop in recruits. What happens to TFA if no one wants to join and be a temp teacher? What will they do with all that money?

Categories Accountability, Teach for America TFA

Why Does TFA Need Nearly $1 Billion?

By dianeravitch
December 26, 2012 //
62

To be exact, why does TFA need $907 million?

That is the amount that TFA raised from 2006-2010.

EduShyster has done the numbers and explains it all here.

During that time, TFA groomed some 28,000 teachers.

But more important, it groomed leaders like Kevin Huffman, state commissioner of education in Tennessee, now planning for vouchers; and John White of Louisiana, now implementing vouchers; and Michelle Rhee, now raising millions to give to candidates who support vouchers. That’s what really matters.

Categories Teach for America TFA, Vouchers

Bob Braun Explains the Opposition to Billionaire-Funded “Reform”

By dianeravitch
April 10, 2021 //
14

Bob Braun was an education reporter for 50 years. After he retired from the New Jersey Star-Ledger, he began blogging and paid close and critical attention to the state takeover of Newark. This column, posted in 2014, is as timely now as it was when it first appeared.

Bob Braun: It’s Not Reform, It’s Hijacking

Let’s get this straight. Those of us opposed to the structural changes to public education embraced by crusaders ranging from the billionaire Koch brothers and the Walton Family Foundation to Bill Clinton and Barack Obama—along with Governor Chris Christie and Microsoft founder Bill Gates—are not opposed to the reform of public schools. We oppose their destruction.

We do not oppose making schools more accountable, equitable and effective—but we do oppose wrecking a 200-year-old institution—public education—that is still successful in New Jersey.

Public schools give students from all backgrounds a common heritage and a chance to compete against privileged kids from private schools. We don’t want schools replaced by the elitists’ dream of privately managed, publicly funded charter schools, which can be money makers for closely aligned for-profit entities.

We oppose eliminating tenure and find laughable the idea embodied in Teach for America (TFA), an organization that recruits new college graduates for short stays in urban schools, that effective classroom instructors can be trained in weeks if they’re eager and want breaks on student loans—breaks that come with TFA participation. We oppose breaking teacher unions, reducing education to the pursuit of better test scores and using test results to fire teachers. We want our teachers to be well trained, experienced, secure, supervised, supported and well paid. We want our kids to graduate from high school more than “college and career ready”—a favorite slogan of the reformers. We want them to graduate knowing garbage when they see it—to understand mortgages, for example, rather than just solving trigonometry problems.

Don’t call it reform, call it hijacking. A radical, top-down change in governance based on a business model championed by billionaires like Eli Broad, the entrepreneur whose foundation underwrites training programs for school leaders, including superintendents—among them, Christopher Cerf, New Jersey’s education commissioner from late 2010 until this past February. The Broad Foundation seeks to apply to public institutions, like schools, the notion of “creative destruction” popularized for businesses by economists Joseph Schumpeter and Clayton Christensen. In a memo forced into public view by New Jersey’s Education Law Center, leaders of the Broad Superintendents Academy wrote that they seek to train leaders willing to “challenge and disrupt the status quo.”

Sorry, but it’s neither clever nor wise to disrupt schools, especially urban schools. Irresponsible, distant billionaires cause unrest in communities like Newark, a place they’ll likely never get closer to than making a plane connection at its airport. These tycoons say they want to improve learning—to narrow the achievement gap between rich and poor, black and white. I don’t buy that. The gap is caused by poverty and racial isolation, not public schools. They want reform that doesn’t raise taxes and won’t end racial segregation. So they promote charter schools that segregate and pay for them with tax funds sucked from public schools. Bruce Baker, a professor at Rutgers Graduate School of Education, calls it “revenue neutral and nonintegrative” reform. What that means, Baker says, is “don’t raise our taxes and don’t let poor black and brown kids access better-resourced suburban schools.”

School reform once meant equity and integration. Now it’s called choice. Not the choice that would allow Newark kids to take a bus 15 minutes to Millburn. Not the choice that would allow the dispersion of disadvantage so the poorest attend the same schools as the most advantaged. It’s choice limited to a district. And choice limited to families who win a lottery for charter-school admission. “We’re letting poor parents fight it out among themselves for scrap—it’s Hunger Games,” says Baker.

Charters segregate. In Newark, where there are 13 charter schools, children with the greatest needs—special education kids, English-language learners, the poorest children—are stranded in asset-starved neighborhood schools. Disadvantage is concentrated, public schools close, and resources shift to charters. In Hoboken, three charter schools educate 31 percent of the city’s children, but enroll 51 percent of all white children and only 6 percent of youngsters eligible for free lunches.

Such skimming of the more able students lets proponents like Christie claim that charters outperform public schools. But charters serve a different population. In his devastating send-up of Newark’s North Star Schools, titled “Deconstructing the Cycle of Reformy Awesomeness,” Baker describes how charters achieve high test scores and graduation rates by shedding underperforming students. Half the kids—including 80 percent of African-American boys—dropped or were pushed out.

Charters are not the solution. “Overall, charters do not outperform comparable public schools and they serve a different population,” says Stan Karp, an editor at Rethinking Schools, an advocacy organization dedicated to sustaining and strengthening public education. He adds, “Nowhere have charters produced a template for district-wide equity and system-wide improvement.”

Many suburbs have resisted charters, but state-run urban districts like Newark cannot. In Newark, Christie joined with then Mayor Cory Booker, a devotee of privatization, to bring in Broad Academy graduates Chris Cerf to be state schools chief and Cami Anderson to be Newark superintendent. They were awarded a pledge of $100 million from Facebook cofounder Mark Zuckerberg to support school reform in Newark.

Suburbs cannot escape other reforms, including federal insistence on relentless, time-consuming annual testing to measure student achievement and teacher performance. While states can opt out of testing, the price in lost federal revenues can be high. Democrats for Education Reform (DFER), a national political action committee, applauds these changes as “bursting the dam” of resistance from unions to test-based evaluation and merit pay.

The coalition of foundations, non-governmental organizations and financial institutions promoting privatization is an opaque, multi-billion dollar, alternative governance structure. They include the Broad and Walton foundations; the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation; the Charter School Growth Fund and the NewSchools Venture Fund (a pair of nonprofit investment operations overseen largely by leaders of for-profit financial firms); the training and support organizations New Leaders for New Schools, the New Teacher Project and America Achieves; as well as the advocacy groups Stand for Children and Education Reform Now.

At its most recent summit of education reformers—including Newark’s Anderson—the NewSchools Venture offered workshops on “How Disruptive Can We Be?” and a seminar on charter schools that was advertised this way: “Charter schools are being brought into the center of reform strategies, not just to provide new options for some students, but to transform an entire public education system, based on a diverse portfolio of autonomous school operators.”

Why is school privatization such a draw for investors? Is it just philanthropy? No, there is also profit to be made from the $650 billion spent annually on public schools. Some charter school operations are profit making, including nearly two-thirds of charter school operators in Michigan and many in Florida—and Christie has been pressing to allow profit-making charters in New Jersey. Salaries for operators of charter school chains can run as high as $500,000 a year. The New Markets Tax Credit, pushed by charter supporter Bill Clinton when he was president, allows lenders to reap higher interest rates. Then there are rents paid by charter schools to charter-related profit-making companies like Newark’s Pink Hula Hoop (started by TEAM Academy board members); legal fees; and the sale of goods and services.

The costs of this movement: urban schools stratified. It’s an apartheid system, with the neediest warehoused in neglected public schools and a few lucky lottery winners in pampered charters. It is stratification on top of a system already stratified by all-white suburban districts and $35,000-plus private schools.

More costs: unconscionable amounts of time, energy and resources devoted to test preparation. The brightest young people, says Baker, will leave teaching to short-stay amateurs rather than endure the unpredictability of evaluations that rate a teacher “irreplaceable” one year and “ineffective” the next.

New Jersey ranks at the top nationwide in educational achievement, reports Education Week. We are second in “chance for success,” third in K-12 achievement and fifth in high school graduation. These statistics include urban schools; if properly funded, they succeed. Look at Elizabeth: good schools, no charters. Christie left it unmolested and provided millions in construction funds kept from other cities—perhaps because the school board endorsed him.

New Jersey is not the basket case Christie says it is. Urban schools are not failure factories. We don’t need a hostile takeover by Wall Street.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Democrats for Education Reform, Disruption, Failure, For-Profit, Fraud, Funding, Hoax, New Jersey, Newark, Segregation

New York: Billionaires Get Richer During Pandemic

By dianeravitch
July 21, 2020 //
19

A group called Americans for Tax Fairness has tracked the remarkable increase in the wealth of billionaires during the rise of the pandemic.

Shouldn’t billionaires pay higher taxes to help the children of their state? What profiteth a man to gain additional billions if the society he lives in is overrun with starving, unfed, uneducated children?

WASHINGTON—New York has 118 billionaires who collectively saw their wealth increase by $77.3 billion or 14.8% during the first three months of the COVID-19 pandemic even as the state’s economy was reeling from a huge spike in joblessness and a collapse in taxes collected, a new report by Americans for Tax Fairness (ATF) and Health Care for America Now (HCAN) shows. One new billionaire joined the list during the three-month period bringing the total to 119 billionaires, of whom 113 are U.S. citizens and 6 are foreigners with residences in the state.

New York State is projecting a $13.3 billion revenue shortfall in FY2021, or a 14% decline.

Between March 18—the rough start date of the pandemic shutdown, when most federal and state economic restrictions were in place—and June 17, the total net worth of the state’s 119 billionaires rose from $521.5 billion to $600.7 billion, based on an analysis of Forbes data. Forbes’ annual billionaires report was published March 18, 2020, and the most recent real-time data was collected June 17 from the Forbes website.

Three New York billionaires—Michael Bloomberg, Julia Koch and Stephen Schwarzman—saw their wealth grow by 25%, 26% and 27%, respectively. During about the same period of the pandemic, 2,594,000 of the state’s residents lost their jobs, 387,000 fell ill with the virus and 31,000 died from it.

Would it be too much to ask them to pay taxes to support our children and our schools?

 

 

 

 

 

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Equity

Educators of Color and Education Scholars of Color Speak Out Against Failed Billionaire-Backed “Reforms”

By dianeravitch
June 19, 2020 //
27

Over 600 educators of color and education scholars of color have signed a statement opposing failed billionaire-backed “reforms” intended to privatize public schools and deprofessionalize teaching.

The statement was drafted by Kevin Kumashiro and can be found on his website, along with the list of those who signed it. People continue to sign on to demonstrate to the public that their rightwing campaign is not fooling educators and scholars of color.

All Educators of Color and Educational Scholars of Color in the U.S. are invited to sign on (please scroll down to sign)

THIS MUST END NOW:

Educators & Scholars of Color Against Failed Educational “Reforms”

The public is being misled. Billionaire philanthropists are increasingly foisting so-called “reform” initiatives upon the schools that serve predominantly students of color and low-income students, and are using black and brown voices to echo claims of improving schools or advancing civil rights in order to rally community support. However, the evidence to the contrary is clear: these initiatives have not systematically improved student success, are faulty by design, and have already proven to widen racial and economic disparities. Therefore, we must heed the growing body of research and support communities and civil-rights organizations in their calls for a more accurate and nuanced understanding of the problems facing our schools, for a retreat from failed “reforms,” and for better solutions:

• Our school systems need more public investment, not philanthropic experimentation; more democratic governance, not disenfranchisement; more guidance from the profession, the community, and researchers, not from those looking to privatize and profiteer; and more attention to legacies of systemic injustice, racism, and poverty, not neoliberal, market-based initiatives that function merely to incentivize, blame, and punish.

• Our teachers and leaders need more, better, and ongoing preparation and support, more professional experience and community connections, and more involvement in shared governance and collective bargaining for the common good, not less.

• Our vision should be that every student receives the very best that our country has to offer as a fundamental right and a public good; not be forced to compete in a marketplace where some have and some have not, and where some win and many others lose.

The offer for “help” is alluring, and is reinforced by Hollywood’s long history of deficit-oriented films about white teachers saving poorer black and brown students from suffering, as if the solution consisted merely of uplifting and inspiring individuals, rather than of tackling the broader system of stratification that functions to fail them in the first place. Today, more than ever before, the “help” comes in the form of contingent financing for education, and the pressure to accept is intense: shrinking public resources, resounding claims of scarcity, and urgent calls for austerity make it seem negligent to turn down sizable financial incentives, even when such aid is tied to problematic reforms.

The growing number of funders includes high-profile foundations and obscure new funders (including but not limited to the Arnold Foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropies, Bradley Foundation, Broad Foundation, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, City Fund, DeVos family foundations, Gates Foundation, Koch family foundations, and Walton Family Foundation), and for the most part, have converged on what counts as worthwhile and fundable, whether leaning conservative or liberal, Republican or Democrat (see, for example, the platform of Democrats for Education Reform). Such funders may be supporting some grassroots initiatives, but overall, mega-philanthropy in public education exemplifies the 21st-century shift from traditional donating that supported others’ initiatives with relatively smaller grants, to venture financing that offers funding pools of unprecedented size and scale but only to those who agree to implement the funders’ experiments. Belying the rhetoric of improving schools is the reality that such experiments are making struggling schools look less and less like the top performing schools for the elite, and do so by design, as with the following:

• The Portfolio Model. 



Exemplified in the early 2000s by the turnaround-school reforms in Chicago Public Schools and Race to the Top, and increasingly shaping urban districts across the country today, the “portfolio model” decentralizes decision making, expands school choice, holds schools accountable through performance measures like student testing, and sanctions failing schools with restructuring or closure, incentivizing their replacements in the form of charter schools. This model purports that marketizing school systems will lead to system improvement, and that student testing carries both validity and reliability for high-stakes decisions, neither of which is true.



Instead of improving struggling schools, what results are growing racial disparities that fuel gentrification for the richer alongside disinvestment from the poorer. The racially disparate outcomes should not be surprising, given the historical ties between mass standardized testing and eugenics, and even today, given the ways that “norm referencing” in test construction guarantees the perpetuation of a racialized achievement curve. Yet, the hallmarks of the portfolio model are taught in the Broad Superintendents Academy that prepares an increasingly steady flow of new leaders for urban districts, and not surprisingly, that has produced the leaders that have been ousted in some of the highest profile protests by parents and teachers in recent years. This is the model that propels the funding and incubation of school-choice expansion, particularly via charter schools, through such organizations as the NewSchools Venture Fund and various charter networks whose leaders are among the trainers in the Broad Academy. Imposing this model on poorer communities of color is nefarious, disingenuous, and must end.


• Choice, Vouchers, Charters. 



The expansion of school choice, including vouchers (and neo-voucher initiatives, like tax credits) and charter schools, purports to give children and parents the freedom to leave a “failing” school. However, the research on decades of such programs does not give any compelling evidence that such reforms lead to system improvement, instead showing increased racial segregation, diversion of public funding from the neediest of communities, neglect of students with disabilities and English-language learners, and more racial disparities in educational opportunity. This should not be surprising: choice emerged during the Civil Rights Movement as a way to resist desegregation; vouchers also emerged during this time, when the federal government was growing its investment into public education, as a way to privatize public school systems and divert funding to private schools for the elite; and charter schools emerged in the 1990s as laboratories for communities to shape their own schools, but have become the primary tool to privatize school systems.



Yes, choice and vouchers give some students a better education, but in many areas, students of color and low-income students are in the minority of those using vouchers. Yes, some charters are high performing, but overall, the under-regulation of and disproportionate funding for charter schools has resulted in hundreds of millions of dollars in waste (and even more in corporate profits) that could otherwise have gone to traditional public schools. The NAACP was right when it resolved that privatization is a threat to public education, and in particular, called for a moratorium on charter-school expansion; and the NAACP, MALDEF, ACLU, and other national civil-rights organizations have opposed voucher expansion. Diverting funds towards vouchers, neo-vouchers, and charters must end.


• Teacher Deprofessionalization. 



The deprofessionalization of teaching—including the undermining of collective bargaining and shared governance, and the preferential hiring of underprepared teachers—is foregrounded in charter schools (which often prohibit unionization and hire a disproportionate number of Teach for America teachers), but affects the teaching force in public schools, writ large. The mega-philanthropies are not only anti-union, having supported (sometimes rhetorically, sometimes resourcefully) the recent wave of anti-union bills across the states; but more broadly, are anti-shared governance, supporting the shift toward top-down management forms (including by for-profit management at the school level, and unelected, mayor-appointed boards at the district level). 



The weakening of the profession is also apparent in the philanthropies’ funding of fast-track routes to certification, not only for leaders (like with New Leaders for New Schools), but also for classroom teachers, like with the American Board for Certification of Teaching Excellence, and more notably, Teach for America (TFA). TFA accelerates the revolving door of teachers by turning teaching into a brief service obligation, justified by a redefining of quality teacher away from preparedness, experience, and community connectedness to merely being knowledgeable of subject matter (and notably, after the courts found that TFA teachers did not meet the definition of “highly qualified,” Congress would remove the requirement that every student have a “highly qualified” teacher in its 2015 reauthorization of ESEA, thus authorizing the placement of underprepared teachers in the neediest of schools). 



Parents are being lied to when told that these “reforms” of weakening unions and lessening professional preparation will raise the quality of teachers for their children. Yes, some teachers and leaders from alternative routes are effective and well-intended, but outliers should not drive policy. Students are being lied to when told that choosing such pathways is akin to joining the legacy of civil-rights struggles for poorer communities of color. Not surprisingly, the NAACP and the Movement for Black Lives have called out how initiatives like TFA appeal to our desire to serve and help, but shortchange the students who need and deserve more.

We, as a nationwide collective of educators of color and educational scholars of color, oppose the failed reforms that are being forced by wealthy philanthropists onto our communities with problematic and often devastating results. These must end now. We support reforms that better serve our students, particularly in poorer communities of color, and we will continue to work with lawmakers, leaders, school systems, and the public to make such goals a reality.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Common Core, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, For-Profit, Privatization, Racism, Testing, Vouchers

Gary Rubinstein Debunks TFA Claims of “Turnaround Schools” in Baltimore

By dianeravitch
March 11, 2020 //
16

For a few years, Gary Rubinstein was our nation’s leading debunker of “miracle school” claims. He found that the so-called miracle schools usually had high attrition rates but somehow forgot to mention them or some other manipulation of data.

Probably because of the power of Gary’s pen, corporate reformers stopped making claims about dramatic turnarounds, in which schools zoomed from the bottom 1% to the top 10%, or some such. The Tennessee Achievement District, which Gary covered closely, was an epic example of this kind of failure, on a large scale. Its leader, Chris Barbic, boldly predicted that he would take over the state’s lowest performing schools–those in the bottom 5%–turn them over to charter operators, and within five years, they would be in the top 20% of schools in the state. It didn’t happen. Not even close. After five years, the first cohort of ASD charters were still in the bottom 5%, although one made it to the bottom 6%. The ASD has since announced that it was returning the schools to their districts, but it has not said whether they would return as public schools or charter schools.

Now Gary turns his attention to an announcement by TFA about five schools in Baltimore that were “turned around” by the miracle of having inexperienced and enthusiastic TFA teachers.

He begins:

As an ashamed TFA alum, I receive their quarterly alumni magazine, ‘One Day.’ In the most recent issue, which I also saw on their Twitter feed, was an article called ‘Undefeated: Inside Five Baltimore Turnaround Schools that Refuse to Fail.’

The article is about five Baltimore schools that are run by TFA alumni and were recipients of some of the Obama/Duncan $3 billion school turnaround grant. The most aggressive turnaround strategy is to replace the majority of the staff, which is what these five schools did. The school turnaround grants have generally been considered a failure across the country, even by staunch reformers.

(Actually it was a study sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education that declared that the $3 billion turnaround program was a failure; it was released quietly in the closing days of the Obama administration.)

Gary reported the boasting about miraculous turnarounds and then he reviewed the state data:

Maryland has the star system where schools can get from one to five stars, kind of like the A to F letter grades. The stars are based on test scores and also on ‘growth’ and other factors. There are 1,300 schools in Maryland and about 10% of them get either one or two stars. So 3 stars is like a ‘C’ and over 60% of the schools in the state are either 4 stars or 5 stars. Of the five schools that have been ‘turned around,’ three are still 2 stars, which is like a ‘D.’ But looking more closely at the data from these five schools, I found some pretty awful numbers.

The Commodore John Rogers Elementary/Middle School that has the test score increases got two different percentile ranks, one for the elementary and one for the middle school. While the middle school is the one bright spot of all the schools , or subschools, in the 100% project, having risen to the bottom 28% of schools the elementary school is ranked in the bottom 8%.

One school, The Academy For College And Career Exploration (ACCE) has a middle and a high school. The middle school is ranked in the bottom 2% while the high school is in the bottom 9%. In the high school they had 9.3% score proficient in math and 3.6% score proficient in ELA. In the middle school they had 2.7% score proficient in ELA and, no this isn’t a typo, 0% score proficient in math.

The lowest rated school of the five is James McHenry Elementary/Middle. While the middle school was ranked in the bottom 15%, the elementary school was only ranked in the bottom 1%. If not for the middle school, the elementary school would be one of the 35 schools out of 1,300 that would have gotten just one star and be slated for possible closure.

I’m not sure why TFA is clinging to a narrative that went out of style about five years ago, when Arne Duncan stepped down as Secretary of Education. These five schools, on average, do not prove that firing most of the teachers in a school is likely to cause an incredible turnaround at a school.

Categories Baltimore, Race to the Top, Teach for America

Jackie Goldberg: Lies the Billionaires Tell

By dianeravitch
February 13, 2020 //
11

Jackie Goldberg is running for re-election to the Los Angeles Unified School Board. She is an experienced public official who has supported public schools for decades as a school board member and state legislator. A rightwing billionaire dumped nearly half a million into her low-budget race to try to stop her in the March 3 election (early voting has already started.)

Jackie was endorsed by the UTLA along with Scott Schmerelson, George McKenna, and Patricia Castellanos. Vote for them if they are candidates in your district.

Jackie sets the record straight here:

Dear Friends, Families, and Board District 5 Voters,

By now, you may have received a number of mailings telling you to “Vote ‘No’ on Jackie Goldberg”, all of which are being sent by a man named Bill Bloomfield, who lives in Manhattan Beach, CA.

Bloomfield is extremely wealthy and was a Republican until 2011 when he became an “Independent.”  He avidly supports charter school candidates and opposes all progressive Democrats.  So far this election cycle, he has spent almost $130,000— on “hit” pieces against me.  But this is far from his first rodeo.  He was part of the $13 million worth of lies that were used in 2017 against then-Board President Steve Zimmer, and he helped bankroll part of the $10 million spent to spread lies about Board Member Bennett Kayser in 2015.

In 2019, Bloomfield’s contributions to the California Republican Party totaled $445,000.  He also spent $7,583,806 to try to elect Marshall Tuck to be State Superintendent of Public Instruction.  Tuck ran on a platform of increasing support for the state’s charter schools.  Bloomfield not only supports charter schools over district public schools, he also opposes raising taxes on the wealthy to increase funding for public schools.

This very, very rich financier has never met me, never interviewed me as to my views, and has repeatedly distorted the truth to send you bald-faced lies about me and my 22-year record of public service.  His goal is to defame me to stand in the way of my quest to raise taxes on the rich and to make charter schools more transparent, equitable, and accountable.

Let me respond specifically to some of the many lies Bloomfield has been peddling about me in his monstrously misleading mailers.

LIE:  Bloomfield’s mailers attempt to paint me as a racist.

TRUTH:  I have lived in Echo Park for the last 40 years.  My son went to LAUSD schools that were primarily composed of Latino students.  I taught high school in the Compton Unified School District for 17 years and was one of two teacher-leaders to define plans that raised the reading of our students from the bottom of state testing in reading to the State average.

Among my campaign endorsers are Dolores Huerta, co-founder of the United Farmer Workers, County Supervisor Hilda Solis, State Senator Maria Elena Durazo, La Opinion, Maywood City Councilmembers Elizabeth Alcantar and Eddie de la Riva, Bell City Councilmembers Fidencio Gallardo and Alicia Romero, Padres Unidos in South Gate, and Congressmembers Maxine Waters and Judy Chu, among others.

These leaders and community organizations, as well as La Opinion, do not endorse racists!

LIE:  Bloomfield claims my “agenda is too extreme and too dangerous for kids!”  He attacks me for removing funding for DARE, an anti-drug program for which the district paid millions of dollars to the Los Angeles Police Department.

TRUTH:  The LAUSD Board of Education discontinued funding for DARE after a study revealed that, in spite of great intentions, the program was a complete failure in reducing student drug use.

LIE:  Bloomfield, remarkably, suggests that the National Rifle Association (“NRA”) loves me.

TRUTH:  I have a lifetime “F” grade from the NRA because when I was on the Los Angeles City Council, I wrote and passed a measure that outlawed sales of cheap “Saturday Night Specials” in Los Angeles.  While on the Public Safety Committee in the State legislature, I helped kill major legislation that would have made gun ownership more protected, and thus increase the chance for all of us and our children to be victims of gun violence.  What I actually voted against that Bloomfield’s mailer attempts to misrepresent was a bill that would have automatically expelled a student for bringing to school a toy gun that may look like a real gun.  Though I do think this would be a dangerous and foolish thing for a student to do, I believe that all students should have a right to a hearing before being expelled.

LIE:  In one of his most insidious smears, Bloomfield claims that I support sexual predators.

TRUTH:  I voted against a bill that included so many limitations for where a convicted sex offender could live that there literally would be nowhere left for them to go.  And I did so because I knew that the California courts would overrule the bill and we would be left with noprotections on where sex offenders could live after being released from prison.  Sure enough, after its passage, the California Supreme Court did just that, ruling that the law was unconstitutional because the state could not have a law that left people with no place to live.  The following year, my Assembly colleagues and I passed a law preventing sex offenders from living near schools, parks, and other places where children might be.

LIE:  Bloomfield attacks me for the terrible crisis at Miramonte school.

TRUTH:  I was not even on the Board at that time of the Miramonte crisis.

LIE:  Bloomfield suggests voters have to choose between me and President Obama, claiming that I voted to shut down Teach for America.

TRUTH:  I did not vote to shut down Teach for America.  What I did do is raise the issue that a great many Teach for America teachers leave our District in two or three years.  I said that the District should recruit people who want to be teachers, not build their resumes—and I still believe that to be true.

LIE:  Bloomfield misleadingly claims that I cut programs for students of color.

TRUTH:  In the 2001-2002 school year, the state legislature was facing a huge budget shortfall.  The state was in a deep recession.  Yes, I voted for the budget.  In those days, it took a 2/3 vote to pass a budget, so allAssembly Democrats had to vote for the budget, or else the state’s services—including funds for schools—would be shut down.  Did I have to vote on a budget that took $9.8 billion from schools and public universities?  Sadly, I did.  But that was after fighting and winning the battle to avoid larger cuts of $14 billion.

LIE:  Bloomfield claims that I “forced Latino students to attend academically inferior and dangerous schools.”  He then points to a 1985 U.S. Department of Justice investigation of the District.  Notably, his source relates to issues in South Gate and Watts.

TRUTH:  The boundaries of the Board Districts that each School Board member represents were not the same in 1985 as they are today.  Though South Gate is currently in my Board District, I did not represent either South Gate or Watts during my first time on the Board when the Department of Justice’s investigation began, and I had nothing to do with the issues that brought upon the investigation.

LIE: Bloomfield claims that in my first tenure on the Board, student scores dropped.

TRUTH:  Student test scores were low in the 1980’s.  Why?  Because when Proposition 13 passed, the District literally lost 25% of its General Fund money due to big corporations and the wealthy no longer having to pay their fair share in property taxes.  Schools became overcrowded.  Most were on multi-track, year-round schedules, and funding to build new schools was rigged against the District.  It was because of my work and the leadership of then-Speaker of the State Assembly Robert Hertzberg, however, that the Assembly and Senate finally set aside several billion dollars for LAUSD and other severely overcrowded districts, which resulted in 131 new schools being built.

My record of support for public education is long, significant, and well-documented.  That is why UTLA, the teachers’ union, SEIU Local 99, the union representing teacher aides, cafeteria workers, CSEA Local 500, which represents library aides, the Teamsters AND the union representing school principals and administrators have all endorsed my campaign.

So, I urge you not to believe the vicious lies that this conservative, anti-public school millionaire is spreading about me in order to try to stop my work trying to tax the great wealth in this state and get our state legislators to invest in our children and youth again.  My mother taught in LAUSD for 40 years.  I grew up committed to public education, and I have never wavered in my support for full and adequate funding for public schools—from pre-school through college.  I was a youth activist in the civil rights movement, and I continue to spend my life working to improve the lives of the next generation.

I often remind people that our children are not part of the future—they are our entire future.  We must all work together to improve our state and federal governments’ investment in our children and youth.  California, if it were a separate nation, would be the fifth richest nation in the entire world.  While New York spends $29,000 per student in their schools, California only spends $16,500 per student.  Great change is needed.  I ask you to join me in this fight for FULL FUNDING for our public schools.  The time is NOW!  Please honor me with your vote on or before March 3.

Thank you,

Jackie Goldberg
Board Member, LAUSD Board of Education, Board District 5
Estimados amigos, familias y votantes del Distrito 5 de LAUSD,

Les escribo porque seguramente ya  han recibido en su correo uno de varios anuncios que les han enviado pidiéndoles que “Voten No por Jackie Goldberg”,  de parte de alguien llamado Bill Bloomfield, que vive en Manhattan Beach, CA.

Bloomfield es alguien extremadamente rico quien había sido Republicano hasta el año 2011, cuando cambió a ser “Independiente”.   El apoya firmemente a los candidatos que cuentan con el apoyo de las escuelas charter y se opone a todos los candidatos Demócratas progresistas.  Hasta la fecha ha gastado casi $130,000 atacandome en anuncios como éste. Pero no es la primera vez que hace esto.  En el 2017 fue uno de los que pagó por los anuncios llenos de mentiras sobre Steve Zimmer, presidente de la Junta Escolar. Y en 2015 ayudó a financiar los $10 millones de dólares que se gastaron para esparcir mentiras en contra de Bennett Kayser.

En el 2019, contribuyó $445,000 al Partido Republicano de California.  También gastó $7,583,806 para tratar de elegir a Marshall Tuck como Superintendente de Instrucción Pública. La postura de Tuck fue de apoyar el apoyo para las escuelas chárter. Bloomfield no sólo apoya a las escuelas chárter en vez de las escuelas públicas del distrito, además se opone a alzar los impuestos a los ricos para aumentar los fondos para las escuelas públicas.

Este hombre de finanzas tan pero tan rico, no me conoce, nunca me ha entrevistado para conocer mis puntos de vista, sin embargo se ha dedicado a distorsionar repetidamente la verdad con terribles mentiras sobre mí y mis 22 años de servicio al público. Su objetivo es difamarme por el hecho que yo busco aumentarle los impuestos a los ricos y lograr que las escuelas charter se comporten de forma más transparente, equitativa y responsable.

Permítame responder, de manera específica, a algunas de las muchas monstruosas  mentiras que Bloomfield ha estado diciendo sobre mí.

LA MENTIRA: Los anuncios intentan decir que yo soy racista.

LA VERDAD:  He vivido en Echo Park durante los últimos 40 años. Mi hijo fue a una escuela de LAUSD, cuyos estudiantes en su mayoría eran Latinos.  Fui maestra de preparatoria en el Distrito Escolar Unificado de Compton durante 17 años y junto con otra maestra líder, preparé un plan que logró mejorar la lectura de nuestros estudiantes, y subir nuestros resultados de los más bajos en el estado a el nivel promedio.

Entre las personas que apoyan mi campaña cuento con Dolores Huerta, co-fundadora de la Unión de Campesinos, Hilda Solís, Supervisora del Condado de Los Angeles, la Senadora María Elena Durazo, La Opinión, los Consejales Elizabeth Alcantar y Eddie de la Riva de Maywood, Fidencio Gallardo y Alicia Romero de Bell, el grupo Padres Unidos de South Gate y la Congresista Maxine Waters y Judy Chu, entre otros.

Ninguno de estos líderes, ni de estas organizaciones de la comunidad, ni el diario La Opinión apoyan a candidatos racistas.

LA MENTIRA: Bloomfield afirma que “¡mis propuestas son muy extremas y muy peligrosas para lo estudiantes! Me ataca por haberle quitado fondos al programa DARE, “ un programa contra drogas en el que el Distrito pagó millones de dólares al Departamento de Policía de Los Angeles.

LA VERDAD:  La Junta Escolar de Los Angeles descontinuó los fondos para el programa DARE después de que un estudio demostró que a pesar de tener buenas intenciones, el programa fue un verdadero fracaso en reducir el uso de drogas entre los estudiantes.

LA MENTIRA:  De manera muy extraña, Bloomfield sugiere que la Asociación Nacional de Rifles (NRA por sus siglas en inglés), me adora.

LA VERDAD:  La NRA, me dió una calificación de “F” de por vida cuando era Consejal de la Ciudad de Los Angeles, debido a que logré que se aprobara una medida que prohibía la venta de las armas baratas llamadas “Saturday Night Specials” en Los Angeles.  Cuando fui miembro del Comité de Seguridad Pública en la Legislatura, ayudé a darle fin a una ley que protegía aún más la compra de armas, pues esto aumentaba la posibilidad de que cualquiera de nosotros, incluyendo a nuestros hijos, fueran víctimas de la violencia armada. A lo que se refiere Bloomfield es que voté en contra de que un joven se le expulsara por traer un arma de juguete que parece de verdad. Aunque creo que esto es algo peligroso y tonto, creo que todos los estudiantes merecen una audiencia antes de que se les expulse.

LA MENTIRA:   En una de sus ataques más engañosos, Bloomfield alega que yo apoyo a los depredadores sexuales.

LA VERDAD:  Yo voté en contra de una ley sobre dónde puede vivir un depredador sexual, que resultaría en que no pudieran vivir en ningún lado.  Voté de esta forma porque sabía que las cortes de California iban a revocar esta ley y que entonces no tendríamos ninguna protección para determinar donde los depredadores pueden vivir al salir de la prisión. Como lo predije, la Suprema Corte de California revocó la ley, dictando que la ley no cumple con los requisitos de la Constitución puesto que la ley no permite un lugar en donde vivir. El año siguiente, mis colegas en la Asamblea y yo pasamos una ley que evitaba que los depredadores vivieran cerca de escuelas, parques y otros lugares cerca de dónde hay niños.

LA MENTIRA: Bloomfield me ataca por la terrible crisis que sucedió en la escuela Miramonte.

LA VERDAD:  Yo ni siquiera era miembro de la Junta Escolar cuando sucedió la crisis de Miramonte.

LA MENTIRA:  Bloomfield sugiere que votar conmigo es votar contra Obama, porque voté para que se cerrara el programa Teach for America.

LA VERDAD: Yo no voté para cerrar el programa Teach for America.  Lo que sí hice fue expresar preocupación por el hecho de que una gran mayoría de los maestros de Teach for America se van del Distrito en dos o tres años. Dije que el Distrito debe reclutar a personas que realmente quieren ser maestros a largo plazo en lugar de hacerlo solamente para mejorar su currículum – y aún mantengo esta opinión.

LA MENTIRA:  Bloomfield dice, de manera engañosa, que yo recorté programas para estudiantes de color.

LA VERDAD:  En el año escolar 2001-2002, la legislatura estatal se enfrentaba a un tremendo déficit.  El estado se enfrentaba a una profunda recesión.  Sí, vote a favor de presupuesto.  En ese tiempo, se requería que ⅔ de los representantes en la Asamblea votarán a favor, y por lo tanto todos los Demócratas tenían que votar a favor, o de otra forma los servicios que provee el estado, tendrían que recortarse. ¿Fue necesario que votara por un presupuesto que le quitó $9 mil millones de dólares a las escuelas y a las universidades públicas? Tristemente, lo fue.  Pero esto fue después de luchar y de ganar la batalla para evitar mayores recortes, de $14 mil millones.

LA MENTIRA: Bloomfield alega que yo forcé a “estudiantes Latinos a que asistieran a escuelas académicamente inferiores y peligrosas”. Para demostrarlo, presenta una investigación del Distrito que llevó a cabo el Departamento de Justicia en 1985. De forma notable, ésta investigación se refiere a los temas de las escuelas en South Gate y Watts.

LA VERDAD: Los límites de los Distritos que cada miembro de la Junta Escolar representa no eran iguales a los límites de hoy.  Aunque South actualmente está en mi Distrito, yo no representaba a South Gate ni a Watts cuando yo fui miembro de la Junta Escolar y cuando la investigación del Departamento de Justicia se inició y yo no tuve nada que ver con los asuntos que resultaron en esa investigación.

LA MENTIRA:  Bloomfield alega que durante mi primer término en la Junta Escolar, los resultados de los exámenes de los estudiantes disminuyeron.

LA VERDAD: Los resultados de los exámenes eran muy bajos en los años 80. ¿Por qué? Porque cuando se aprobó la Proposición 13, el Distrito perdió literalmente el 25% de los fondos generales debido a que las grandes corporaciones y los ricos no querían seguir pagando lo que les correspondía en los impuestos sobre la propiedad.  Aumentó la sobrepoblación en las escuelas.  Muchas de ellas estaban en calendarios de todo el año y el financiamiento para construir nuevas escuelas estaba diseñado en contra de las necesidades del Distrito.  Fue debido a mi esfuerzo y el de Robert Hertzberg, entonces líder de la Asamblea que la Asamblea y el Senado finalmente destinaron varios miles de millones de dólares para LAUSD y otros distritos que sufrían de sobrepoblación, lo cual resultó en la construcción de 131 nuevas escuelas.

Mi record de apoyo por la educación pública es largo, importante y bien documentado.  Es por esto que UTLA, la unión de maestros, el Local 99 SEIU que representa a los asistentes de maestros y trabajadores de cafetería, el Local 500 de CSEA que representa a bibliotecarios, el sindicato de los Teamsters y el sindicato que representa a los directores y administradores, todos apoyan mi campaña.

Por todo esto, les pido que no crean las mentiras que dice este millonario conservador quien se opone a las escuelas públicas. El quiere evitar que yo pueda seguir trabajando para poder lograr que la gente que cuenta con tantos recursos, tenga que pagar más en impuestos para lograr que nuestros legisladores puedan invertir en nuestros niños y nuestra juventud.  Mi madre trabajó en LAUSD durante 40 años.  Yo crecí comprometida a la educación pública y mi compromiso por un financiamiento completo y adecuado para los escuelas públicas – desde la pre-escuela hasta la universidad – nunca ha disminuído.  En mi juventud fui activista del movimiento de los derechos civiles y cada día de mi vida trabajo para mejorar la vida de las generaciones futuras.

A veces le recuerdo a la gente que nuestros hijos no son parte del futuro — ellos son el futuro entero.  Debemos trabajar juntos para mejorar la inversión que hace el gobierno en nuestros hijos y en la juventud. California, si fuera una nación separada, sería la quinta nación más rica del mundo entero.  Mientras que en Nueva York se gastan $29,000 por cada estudiante en las escuelas, California gasta $16,500 por estudiantes.  Se necesita un gran cambio.  Te pido que te unas a mi en esta lucha por lograr que nuestras escuelas tengan un FINANCIAMIENTO COMPLETO.  ¡Este es el momento!  Espero contar con el honor de tu voto el día 3 de marzo, o antes, si votas por correo.

Gracias,

Jackie Goldberg
Miembro, Junta Escolar de LAUSD, Distrito 5
Contribute
Paid for By Jackie Goldberg for School Board 2020
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419 N. Larchmont Blvd., #37, Los Angeles, CA 90004
Jackie Goldberg for School Board 2020 · 419 N Larchmont Blvd # 37 · Los Angeles, CA 90004 · USA

Categories Billionaires, Education Reform, Ethics, Los Angeles

Sackler Family Transferred $10 Billion Out of Purdue as Opioid Crisis Worsened

By dianeravitch
December 17, 2019 //
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The New York Times reports that the Sackler family, one of the nation’s wealthiest families, busily transferred assets to themselves as the opioid crisis worsened

The Sacklers derived most of their billions from Purdue Pharma, prominent manufacturer and marketer of Oxycontin.

Jonathan Sackler is a major supporter of charter schools. He underwrote charter schools in Connecticut, created ConnCAN, then 50CAN, and the many state affiliates of that group. At this very moment, GeorgiaCAN is pushing charters on the receptive Atlanta school board (whose president is ex-TFA).

The Times reports:

As scrutiny of Purdue Pharma’s role in the opioid epidemic intensified during the past dozen years, its owners, members of the Sackler family, withdrew more than $10 billion from the company, distributing it among trusts and overseas holding companies, according to a new audit commissioned by Purdue.

The amount is more than eight times what the family took out of the company in the 13 years after OxyContin, its signature product, was approved in 1995. The audit is likely to renew questions about how much the Sacklers should pay to resolve more than 2,800 lawsuits that seek to hold Purdue accountable for the opioid crisis.

The family has offered to contribute at least $3 billion in cash as part of a settlement to resolve thousands of lawsuits brought by state and local governments against Purdue. But 24 states, led by Massachusetts and New York, have refused to sign onto the agreement, arguing that the Sacklers should pay more.

The new report, a 350-page forensic accounting prepared by Alix Partners, a consulting firm that Purdue has hired to help guide the company through Chapter 11 restructuring, was filed in bankruptcy court in White Plains, N.Y., Monday evening.

Sarah Darer Littman wrote about Jonathan Sackler’s long involvement in the charter school movement.

She says he brought his knowledge of marketing opioids to the charter school industry.

He is on the Board of Directors of the Achievement First charter school network. Until recently, Sackler served on the board of the New Schools Venture Fund, which invests in charter schools and advocates for their expansion. He was also on the board of the pro-charter advocacy group Students for Education Reform.

Through his personal charity, the Bouncer Foundation, Sackler donates to the abovementioned organizations, and an ecosystem of other charter school promoting entities, such as Families for Excellent Schools ($1,083,333 in 2014, $300,000 in 2015according to the Foundation’s Form 990s) Northeast Charter School Network ($150,000 per year in 2013, 2014 and 2015) and $275,000 to Education Reform Now (2015) and $200,000 (2015) to the Partnership for Educational Justice, the group founded by Campbell Brown which uses “impact litigation” to go after teacher tenure laws. Earlier this year, the Partnership for Educational Justice joined 50CAN, which Sackler also funds ($300,000 in 2014 and 2015), giving him a leadership role in the controversial—and so far failing cause—of weakening worker protections for teachers via the courts.

Just as Arthur Sackler founded the weekly Medical Tribune, to promote Purdue products to the medical professional who would prescribe them, Jon Sackler helps to fund the74million.org, the “nonpartisan” education news website founded by Campbell Brown. The site, which received startup funding from Betsy DeVos, decries the fact that “the education debate is dominated by misinformation and political spin,” yet is uniformly upbeat about charter schools while remarkably devoid of anything positive to say about district schools or teachers unions.

Charter chains are known for their lavish rallies, paid organizers, and “swag.”

These are techniques learned from the Sacklers and Purdue, writes Littman.

The description of “lavish swag” will sound familiar to anyone who has witnessed one of the no-expenses-spared charter school rallies that are a specialty of Sackler-funded organizations like Families for Excellent schools. Then there is the dizzying array of astroturf front groups all created for the purpose of demanding more charter schools. Just in Connecticut, we’ve had the Coalition for Every Child, A Better Connecticut, Fight for Fairness CT, Excel Bridgeport, and the Real Reform Now Network. All of these groups ostensibly claim to be fighting for better public schools for all children. In reality, they have been lobbying to promote charter schools, often running afoul of ethics laws in the process.

Take Families for Excellent Schools, a “grassroots” group that claims to be about parent engagement, yet was founded by major Wall Street players. In Connecticut, the group failed to register its Coalition for Every Child as a lobbying entity and report a multimillion-dollar ad buy expenditure and the costs of a rally in New Haven. 

In Massachusetts, Families for Excellent Schools-Advocacy (FESA) recently had to cough up more than $425,000 to the Massachusetts general fund as part of a legal settlement with the Office of Campaign and Political Finance, the largest civil forfeiture in the agency’s 44-year history. Massachusetts officials concluded that FESA violated the campaign finance law by receiving contributions from individuals and then contributing those funds to the Great Schools Massachusetts Ballot Question Committee, which sought to lift the cap on the number of charter schools in the state, in a manner intended to disguise the true source of the money. As part of the settlement, the group was ordered to reveal the names of its secret donors. Jonathan Sackler was one of them.

In addition, Purdue heiress Madeleine Sackler directed the pro-charter film “The Lottery” about Eva Moskowitz and her Success Academy charter chain.

The Sacklers have used their vast wealth, derived from the opioid crisis, to burnish their family reputation and to destroy public schools.

As the Times reports, they are doing their best to get their money out of the company before it is bankrupted by lawsuits.

 

 

 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, ConnCAN, Connecticut, Corporate Reform, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization
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