The Walton Family Foundation has an overriding interest in school pro privatization. They commit about $160 million each year for charters, vouchers, Teach for America, think tanks, and media. Everything they do has the singular goal of dismantling public education and opening the schools to untrained, uncertified teachers.
Here is news from the Chicago Teachers Union about the role of Walton in the proposed closing of 54 public schools.
NEWS RELEASE
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE CONTACT: Stephanie Gadlin
April 17, 2013 312/329-6250
StephanieGadlin@ctulocal1.com
Walton family school “reform” initiatives in Chicago reveals true education agenda
CHICAGO – The Walton Family Foundation, led by heirs to the Walmart fortune, says it wants to improve education. But the public is increasingly asking whether the WFF’s corporate-style, privatization-oriented approach to reform, based on the mistaken premise that competitive market dynamics apply to K-12 education just like they apply to Walmart stores, is right for our schools. The family’s recent involvement in the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) school closing controversy is a prime example of the ways in which Walton family’s education agenda can actually harm schools, communities, and students, according to the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU).
Citing budget deficits and lower enrollments, CPS officials—led by the Broad Foundation’s Barbara Byrd-Bennett, who previously led mass school closures and teacher firings in Cleveland and Detroit—announced last month as Chicago’s new schools chief that the district would close 54 “underutilized” schools, mainly in majority black, low-income neighborhoods. (The mayor-appointed Board of Education is set to vote on approving the closures May 22.) Defenders of public schools say that CPS has sought to weaken and close public schools in order to open more charter schools, which are often under-regulated, lack adequate oversight, and cherry-pick top students while leaving behind others. In 2011, CPS’s Chief Operating Officer even admitted that the system was intentionally underinvesting in low-performing schools that it might close someday.
As CPS prepared its closure list, the Walton Family Foundation bankrolled a “community engagement process,” with meetings led by Walton-paid consultants, to provide the illusion that the school closure process was open and democratic. Meanwhile, the Waltons also paid $3.8 million in 2012 to open new charter schools in Chicago. Given the Waltons’ strong support of school vouchers and charter schools, public school supporters were deeply skeptical that public opinion was truly meant to be heard and fully considered at these meetings. Media were banned from attending, but Walton Family Foundation staff attended. Now the family is funding a series of ads and videos that the system is using to try to justify the closings.
“If the Waltons were serious about improving education or children’s’ lives, they would do anything possible to prevent disruptive, harmful school closures, rather than encourage them,” said CTU President Karen Lewis. “We continue to fight for a full moratorium on all school actions this year. It is imperative that we force the district to take time to study the impact of these closings and other failed experiments have had on our students.”
According to a University of Chicago study of recent Chicago school closures, only six percent of students whose neighborhood school closed moved to an academically sound school. In addition, the study found that school closures are a “substantial burden” on students, families, communities, and school staff: Students face difficult adjustments to new schools, neighborhoods lose a community anchor, and school staff becomes unemployed. Parents in Chicago are also acutely concerned about the safety of their children if they are sent to schools outside the neighborhood, possibly into gang territory.
The way the Walton family has interfered in Chicago, working to shutter public schools while simultaneously opening unproven, under-regulated alternatives, makes it clear that their primary interest is not better education for kids, but rather undermining public schools in order to promote an alternative, private-style school system, Lewis said. It’s even worse that they are interfering in a community they are not part of, where they can use their wealth to push their beliefs on other people’s children, avoid any of the impact or risks, and escape accountability. Corporate reformers insist that students and teachers have to be accountable, but apparently will give a pass to the nation’s wealthiest family.
Ironically, one of the things shown repeatedly to improve academic performance is improving the economic situation for children and their families. While the Walton family likes to talk about how they value all children, Walmart, which the family controls roughly half of, continues to keep many of its associates in poverty, with low wages, poor benefits and the kinds of unpredictable schedules that make parenting even more difficult. If the Waltons were truly concerned about lifting all boats, they could start with something directly under their control—living wages for 1.3 million Walmart workers in the United States alone.
In the ideal Walton world, schools would compete against each other for students, resources, and test scores. But there’s a problem: When there is a competition with winners and losers, there are inevitably losers. Chicago parents don’t want their children to be on the losing team in the Walton-engineered competition.
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The very fact that anyone would create a desire to designate schools as winners and losers flies in the face of seeking equality for all students. This idea that every aspect of life needs to be competitive fuels inequality. It is a bully mentality. Healthy competition should not unclude squashing others or basing success upon “winning” at all costs. The disenfranchising of children, leaving the most vulnerable by the wayside is one sure way to create unrest, anger, and violence. Where is the U S heading?
Walton’s make sure that their own employees will not even receive an interview in charter schools because of their low income, inability to be involved in the charter schools, and many employees’ children may qualify for ELL or SpEd services.
Given Walton’s history of mistreatment of their workers, their lack of support for the communities they build stores in, massive greed, MASSIVE GREED, and focus on dismantling public schools, I WILL NEVER SHOP AT WALMART – EVER AGAIN!
More should think about voting with their pocketbook.
No more dollars from me – they’ve edged out family stores and now they’re working to get end community schools. Quite the legacy for our country.
I agree that there needs to be a mass boycott of Walmart. I have not shopped there for 10 years due to their lack of ethics. Boycotts are one of the few tools we have to create change.
All teachers should boycott Walmart…they won’t get one penny of my earnings.
AGREE!!!
It isn’t competitive market dynamics, it’s monopolistic. For many small towns here in Arkansas, Wal-Mart is the only place to shop, they’ve driven out all the competition. Living in the shadow of the Evil Empire, we have a few more choices, and the money trickles down, but to prosper you have to join the cult (not sure what that involves).
Hoping for vouchers that enable “parent choice” to shop at somewhere other than Walmart!
We need to tell parents that “It’s time to stop supporting Walmart- shop anywhere but there!!!
Amen!
Walton needs more indentured servants for its business. They forgot that they also need customers and they only come with “Disposable Income.” Very schizophrenic.
All teachers, parents and grandparents, NATION wide, should boycott Walmart!
Interestingly enough, I just watched the documentary, “WalMart:Low Prices, High Costs” (I may have that title mixed up)on Current TV. They may have it on again, soon. Of course, the chicanery is disgusting. This makes it even more obvious that the Waltons are doing this because they want to continue to employ below minimum wage workers who lack the ability to question authority because they have graduated from schools without thought. But–you MUST all see the documentary.
It makes everything chillingly crystal clear.
Am I the only one that finds it incredibly hypocritical for Wal-Mart Foundation to assist in the closing of schools to which their employees send their children in order to create a greater market for vouchers to pay for the private school education the Foundation owners utilize for their children and charter schools from which Foundation members and friend have an opportunity to make millions in profit?
To me, that the operative definition of cold hearted!
Cold hearted for cold, hard cash, Ken!
Sidney Clare and Richard A. Whitling:
“On the good ship Lollipop, it’s a sweet trip to a candy shop, where bonbons play on the sunny beach of Peppermint Bay.”
I have absolutely no idea what this is about.
Joanne, what’s with the songs? You did this on another post, too.
Like Ken, I am puzzled!
This is getting out of hand. We have a complete corporatocracy going on in America. Enough is Enough. It’s time to simply say no to these fools. If we can’t stand up for our children what will we stand up for. Chicago it’s up to you to put your foot down on these lies, rhetoric and racist actions. No school closures. Stop the Madness.
Yes, Kid, &–believe me–if anyone is doing anything, it’s Chicago–
CTU, parents, community organizers & groups, older students–EVERYONE. Yes, we WILL stop this!
What is Tech for America? Did you mean Teach For America? If so, huh?
Fixed, thank you.
“If the Waltons were truly concerned about lifting all boats, they could start with something directly under their control—living wages for 1.3 million Walmart workers in the United States alone.”
“If” is one of the most profound words in our language. “If” they could change, “If” they would do such-and-such, and we all know that it may happen “IF” hell freezes over.
One thing I know with certainty is that it is obvious the Waltons have only their own corporate interests at heart, and the rest of us can go straight to hell.
The battle over the schools is undoubtedly necessary composting in the consensus rebirthing process, but, for active young (or old) minds sensing the beauty and utility of a developed, critical intelligence, waiting for grown-ups to get education right is likely to be a free course offer in colorful child’s play for a very long time— ducks never want to get in order.
It’s strange how the education debate rages on without concern, or apparent interest in the learner’s point-of-view; the experience of growing intellectually is both gratifying and unnerving, and the moral compensation for coming to earth and providing oneself practical options in the web of collective existence is a counterbalancing, developed interior subjective space where a perspective and conscious action permit our experience to be retained by cultivation that comes from willing the constraints we impose upon ourselves in order to enjoy a bounded earthly form and escape the disembodied temptation to swim in the terrifying waters of formless eternity, the right we cleverly reserve to an imaginable, possibly imagined, god-like creature too different from us to be either Other, or perceptually real.
Being educated is the condition of being irrevocably changed as a conscious person. I recall having an abstraction short-circuit trying to understand how three hands on a clock represented time. Having tipped over a threshold of exasperation trying to provide me an explanation, using a paper-plate numbered like a clock with three hands for hours, minutes and seconds, my father suddenly just grabbed two more paper-plates off the stack, set all three side by side, ripped two hands off the first plate, and set them on the other two, saying, “Don’t you see?” My embarrassment was so thorough, I still recall it today in my nerve endings. Of course I saw what clock-time was: three clocks in one; three separate hands using the same number dial. In an instant I was no longer the same person. I knew how clocks ‘told’ time— an epiphany. Yes, now clocks even ‘talked’ to me. They’ve never stopped talking either, though I sometimes don’t listen.
Anyway, the point is, interior change is not a light matter, morally, and psychologically speaking. Consent should not be considered facultative. That doesn’t mean civilization and society, including school, do not offer us a host of best practices models to conform to, with stiff penalties to pay in rolled eyes, menacing frowns and display shunning in case of refusal, but whatever changes we accept or create we have to come to terms with, and consent to and take ownership of, or learn to resist intelligently, with measure and using selective framing to suit the weathers of changing moral atmospheres. Once I took over my education, deliberately and actively, I found I could jump over Wall-Marts with a single bound, but please don’t take me too literally on that!