A teacher in Connecticut, signing in as Linda, wrote the following comment:
Brace yourself Rhode Island…it is worse than you think. Hide your children and warn the teachers. He is coming to charterize, privatize, monetize your schools. See Pelto research here:
Gina Raimondo’s husband Andy Moffitt was Cory Booker’s roommate.
Moffitt is a member of Stand for Children Board of Directors
Moffit is a Senior Practice Expert and member of core leadership team for McKinsey & Company’s Global Education Practice.
“Since co-founding the Global Education Practice in 2005, Andy has worked with multiple large urban districts, state education departments and charter management organizations to markedly improve system performance and close achievement gaps.
He co-authored a recent book, Deliverology 101: A Field Guide for School System Leaders (Corwin Press, 2010), which describes key success factors and steps in driving results in global school system reforms.
Before joining McKinsey, Andy was an elementary school teacher in an inner-city school in Houston, Texas as a corps member of Teach For America.”
From my recent article in the Progressive:
The Corporate Education Reform Industry effort to buy control of Public Education
This year’s election season provided a series of textbook examples of how corporate education reformers used their personal fortunes to contaminate the democratic process.
Let’s begin with the little state of Rhode Island, where former hedge fund owner and charter school champion, Democrat Gina Raimondo was elected governor with 40 percent of the vote in a three-way race—one in which there was an unprecedented level of campaign spending.
Raimondo, who as Rhode Island’s state treasurer won national acclaim from conservatives for successfully dismantling the state employee pension fund, raised hundreds of thousands of dollars from donors associated with funding the education reform movement and profiting from the charter school industry. Her running mate, Cumberland Mayor Daniel McKee, one of the state’s most vocal supporters of charter schools, was elected lieutenant governor with help from many of the same donors.
Over the course of her gubernatorial campaign, Raimondo collected checks from many of the major players in the charter school and “education reform” movement, including donations from billionaires Eli Broad and members of the Walton Family. (The Broad Foundation and Walton Foundation, along with Gates Foundation, are the primary funders behind the overall education reform movement.)
Another billionaire, former Enron executive John Arnold along with his wife, not only donated directly to Raimondo’s campaign and her political action committee, called Gina PAC, but the couple’s $100,000 check made them the largest donors to the American LeadHERship Council, a Super PAC affiliated with Raimondo. The second largest donor to the Super PAC was Eli Broad with $15,000.
A proponent of doing away with public employee pensions, Arnold also donated as much as $500,000 to an advocacy group called Engage Rhode Island, which spent approximately $740,000 lobbying for Raimondo’s successful assault on public employee pensions. Over the past three years, the John and Laura Arnold Foundation has donated more than $100 million in support of charter schools and entities involved in the corporate education reform industry, including being one of the largest contributors to Jeb Bush’s Foundation for Educational Excellence.
Raimondo’s success in raising funds from the charter school industry includes at least $50,000 from the members of the board of directors of Achievement First, Inc., the large charter chain that recently opened a school in Rhode Island, adding to their existing schools in Connecticut and New York.
Jonathan Sackler, an investment manager and heir to the Purdue Pharma fortune, is not only a founding member of Achievement First, Inc, but a founder of a national charter school advocacy group called 50CAN. One of 50CAN’s related entities, 50CAN Action Fund, dumped $90,000 to run TV commercials to help Raimondo’s running mate win his primary race.
Yeah, we know!
and she will still elected..
Glad one RI teacher knows, but thanks to Diane more will. I “bow down” to LINDA, whoever that CT person is. She knows her stuff. I am Bridgeport and fairly savvy. And a Jon Pelto follower here in CT. I would like Linda to get in touch with me. Gail Janensch. Find me on Linked In, Twitter or FB. I am on email 365.
Reblogged this on Kmareka.com and commented:
Be prepared, Rhode Island. We will need to look long and hard at any big pushes to charterize Rhode Island public schools. And the pressure is going to be on.
Okay. So how many roomates are there in this education reformer fraternity? In Indianapolis, Mindtrust head David Harris and education entrpreneur Earl Phalen are said to have been college roommates. Phalen coincidentally received one of the first Mindtrust Fellowships to grow Summeradvantage and then received another fellowship to create, open and replicate the Phalen Leadership Academies charter school
chain in Indianapolis. How many other roommate business relationships are out there?
Small state, or so it seems from here in Ohio. That takeover will be hard to fight. I am glad that the money trail is becoming visiable and that some savvy people are alert to the scheme. May the force be with you.
See a great up-to-date report on the growth of charters nations wide at the website of Gene V. Glass
As a teacher in Rhode Island, this scares me as well as my fellow colleagues.
Really? Too many of MY fellow colleagues in RI either have their heads in the sand or are actively pushing the corporate reform agenda in hopes of climbing the ladder. What district are you in?
And, Gina’s new Secretary of Commerce, is Stefan Pryor who was a founder of an Achievement First charter school in CT, as well as CT’s former Commissioner of Education. Watch out RI, here they come!
What is more important than taxpayer funded pensions is the children. We need to get rid of common core first and foremost and if charter schools educate better than public schools so be it.
Mike, a good charter is a good charter, a good public school is a good public school. There are charters that are failures as well. However, charter schools can throw kids out, have a chance to farm the better students into their school, etc. Read Ms Ravitch’s book about it.
The one thing you said that makes me smile is get rid of common core. You’re right on that.
I work in a charter school and would like to clarify some things pertaining to charters in RI.
Charter schools in RI cannot throw students out unless the charter is private. Many charter schools in RI are public meaning that (1) they cannot just throw a student out (2) need to adhere to RIDE requirements as any other public school (including testing such as PARCC) and (3) cannot “hand select” who enters their school–it is all lottery based!!
I do agree, however that there are good charters just as there are public schools, and there are poor charters just as there are some poor public schools.
Carol, can you name some of the “public” charters in RI that you are talking about?
Even if they cannot throw out students outright, charters often have other means at their disposal to remove problem students, such as having policies that make it overly onerous for parents of such students to keep their kids in the school (for example, requiring frequent meetings about behaviors that pull the parents out of work). In such cases, parents will often find it easier to just remove their children from the school, which isn’t exactly expulsion but produces the same effect.
And we’re well past the point where anyone really believes that lotteries mean a truly random selection of children in a school’s student body. If you truly don’t know why this is, I’m sure one of the other good people here will explain it for you.
Many of us in RI are aware of the Andy Moffitt connection and are vigorously fighting back against the corporate education reform agenda. Here is my Op-Ed that was posted in the Providence Journal a few days ago: http://www.providencejournal.com/opinion/commentary/20150110-sheila-resseger-students-can-opt-out-of-new-tests-in-r.i..ece#slcgm_comments_anchor
I’ve been having trouble with the link. Try highlighting the entire address and then copying and pasting, or googling the title. Thanks
Has to be some kind of skulduggery behind this corporate push.Corps. don’t do nothing for nothing.needs to be delved into by the teachers and co.!
RI needs to organize against these attacks. RI is a state where urban centers are surrounded by suburbs that have little interest in what happens to their urban neighbors. It is an attitude of we have ours you and we are not interested in supporting urban education. So our poorer mostly minority urban schools have bee decimated by privateers. What most of these suburbans districts fail to see after they have finished with the urban centers they will come after them, and no one will be left to to defend them. This process has been going on for years.
Watch the Dept of Ed…rumor has it pro charter Supt Gallo of Central Falls is in the running for a high position…possibly commissioner
“Before joining McKinsey, Andy was an elementary school teacher in an inner-city school in Houston, Texas as a corps member of Teach For America.”
That’s what it takes to make an expert? Oh wait, we are installing so called “experts” into important positions in nearly every state.
Will there be anyone to stand up for public education during the coming presidential election? Today we seem to have Democrat reformers, and Republican reformers on steroids.
This isn’t just a warning for RI, this is coming to the school or state your in any day.
The Raimondos still owe our public pensions a bunch of lost money on hubby’s creative and risky investments to friendly Wall Street firms! Criminal!