This morning, I got a Google alert about a story mentioning me that appeared in Chalkbeat Colorado (funded by Gates and other generous foundations). The story criticized a candidate running for school board because her questionnaire included phrases from me and other anti-corporate reform writers without attributing the quotations.

I thought it odd to single out one candidate for condemnation, when she is running against a well-funded corporate machine that finances its candidates with hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Denver currently has a school board in which all but one member (Arturo Jimenez) was elected to support corporate reform, i.e., high-stakes testing and charters. As Jeannie Kaplan has written on this blog (see here and here), ten years of these “reform” policies have not improved the performance of the District’s neediest students.

I sent a message to the reporter, and he advised me to post it as a comment on the Chalkbeat website. Every time I tried to post, the website said I had already signed up and couldn’t sign up again. No matter how I tried, having signed up without knowing about it, I could not post my comment. So I am sharing it here, and hope that it gets to readers in Denver.

Eric,

I saw your post about Kristi Butkovich this morning.

If she used my words in her campaign for school board, I am very pleased she did. Please tell your readers that I freely grant my permission to quote what I have written, so long as the purpose is to help the people of Denver regain control of their school board from the hedge fund managers and billionaires who have poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into recent school board elections. I condemn this attempt to smear Kristi Butkovich with flimsy accusations. She is not writing a book or a doctoral dissertation; if she used my words to explain the hoax that is called “reform,” I thank her and urge her to do it more often. That is the purpose of my blog.

Please quote my words here in full. This is written for publication.