Ever wonder who is the supplying the money behind the privatization of public schools?
It is a long list, and it starts with the U.S. Department of Education. Every year since 1994, your taxpayer dollars have been used to open schools that drain resources from your public schools while selecting the students they want. If your state has charters, you can expect that they will lobby the legislature for more charters. They will close their schools, hire buses, and send students, teachers, and parents to the State Capitol, all dressed in matching T-shirts, to demand more charters. Since the children are already enrolled in a charter and can’t attend more than one, they are being used to advance the financial interests of charter chains, which want to expand.
The big foundations support the growth of the charter industry: the Walton Family Foundation has put more than $1 billion into charters and vouchers; the Gates Foundation and the Eli Broad Foundation also put millions into charters, often partnering with the Far-right Walton Foundation.
There is a long list of other foundations that fund the assault on public education, including the John Arnold Foundation (ex-Enron trader), the Dell Foundation, the Helmsley Foundation, the Fisher Family Foundation (Gap and Old Navy), the Michael Bloomberg Foundation, and many more.
Here is a list of the funders of 50CAN, which started in Connecticut as ConnCAN, created by billionaires, corporate executives, and hedge fund managers, led by Jonathan Sackler, uber-rich Big Pharma.
Here is an example of a foundation that is very active in support of privatization. Check out where their money goes.
ALEC uses its clout with far-right legislators to promote charters and vouchers, as well as to negate local control over charters.
To see where the Walton Family Foundation spread over $202 million to advance privatization, look here.
The money trail is so large, that it is hard to know where to begin. Certain recipients do collect large sums with frequency, including KIPP, Teach for America, Education Trust, to name just a few.
As we say at the Network for Public Education, we are many, they are few. They have money, we have votes. Out ideas for children and education are sound, their ideas fail every time, everywhere.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Question with shorter answer: who ISN’T funding the charter industry?
We’re voters, and we’re also shoppers. How many teachers spent part of Black Friday in a WalMart? We need to boycott the businesses that are working to destroy public education.
Deb, you are right. The billionaire Waltons are an enemy of public education and of teachers. They are the major supporters of charters, vouchers, and TFA. They hate unions and fight paying minimum wage to their own workers. How can they sleep at night?
Deb wrote “We need to boycott the businesses that are working to destroy public education.”
Such as boycotting Microsoft. How many are writing their comments here on a Windows computer?
Yes, I’m writing this comment on a Windows system.
Back in the 1980s I started with an Apple system and then in the early 90s, the district where I taught switched to Windows systems (because IBM offered the district grants to switch) and that included the grading programs we were required to use.
For that reason, I gave up my Macintosh and switched to a Windows System and to switch back now to a matching system would cost me several thouasnd dollars.
There are other possibilities than Windows or Apple and they are free. Like Linux.
I have made it a point of complaining to my kids’ teachers if they assigned a home work or project requiring specific windows or mac programs.
At my university, every now and then some admins want to switch all computers to run Windows. So far, resistance has been effective.
But I do understand that if you have been using windows for decades, switching may seem (or be) difficult.
It’s equally difficult to switching from walmart to something else. After all, Walmart does have some great quality products at low price. (Not sure about Microsoft having some great quality products, though.)
:o)
I started using Windows several decades ago. I wonder how easy it would be to switch to Linux and convert all my World documents? I have a lot of documents. For instance, I have four Blogs and just one of them has more than 2,000 posts that I’ve written. Then there are all my book manuscripts.
You don’t need to convert your word documents. You can edit them there in a free version of MS Office called libreoffice, or you can create new ones. You can try running Linux just from a “live” CD to try it out. Or you can install it alongside Windows in such a way that all your windows docs are accessible from Linux as well.
Great information. Thank you. As soon as the dust settles from the Holidays, I’ll look into it. Does it mean I won’t have to upgrade to Windows 10?
In case you need more info, my username on gmail is wierdlmate.
Thank you.
I forgot to mention that I stopped shopping at Walmart back in the 1980s the first time I heard they were funding all the voucher campaigns and were badmouthing the public schools and public school teachers. Even when I did go to a Walmart, it was rare and I seldom found what I wanted.
I have not used a Windows computer for any serious work for decades. I use all open source software except for some apps on my Android phone which runs a fork of AOSP called Cyanogenmod. I have nearly zero compatibility issues with the rest of the world.
But it can be painful to switch to a new work environment which one is completely unfamiliar with. Once done, however, you are free forever. The greatest pleasure of using such tools comes from having control over them. Freedom from tyrants is gravy.
I know this has been posted before, but as with many things, readers/I could use a refresher…
Besides taking school tax money away from the local public school in order to run the charter school, how exactly do charters become profit-makers?
It may help to have a “How Charters Work 101” fact sheet for readers to use when confronted with questions by well-meaning relatives at holiday meals…
Alice,
Some charters are for-profits. In Ohio, the two biggest charter operators collect millions of dollars every year from low-performing schools. In Michigan, for-profit charters are 80% of all charters. In Pennsylvania, the biggest charter school has bankrupted the local school district while making millions for the founder (a lawyer).
Some charters are nonprofit but pay outrageous salaries to their CEO, in the range of $400,000-600,000.
Then there is the virtual charter industry, where the top executives are paid in the millions for running a shabby educational program.
Don’t forget the real estate wheeling and dealing where a company gets land/buildings for cheap and leases it back to its own subsidiary for outrageous rent (which is actually paid by the taxpayers).
And all the other contracting – supplies, furniture, cleaning, food service, all of which can be nice little kick-back deals.
And the reduced financial transparency as compared to the tight disclosure requirements of government institutions subject to open records laws.
Related questions: How many charter schools have been around long enough that their founding benefactors are no longer receiving a tax advantage for their original investment? Are those schools still economically viable?
It isn’t just the length of time a charter has been open that makes these charters “viable” or not. Sure, there’s start-up money to build facilities that can only be used for three years. A lot of the prime funding mechanisms, however, come from either private grants or state legislatures.
For example, in Utah, charters get preferential funding by the state legislature, where most of the funding for public schools comes. Charters are funded by how many students are enrolled on Count Day, October 1. Thereafter, charters often get rid of students and do not backfill. Meanwhile, public schools are funding by average attendance throughout the entire school year.
The legislative research people for the state of Utah estimate that if charters were funded using the same formula as is used for regular public schools, they would receive about eight million dollars a year less than they do now. Conversely, if public schools were funded as charters are, they would receive 65 million dollars a year in more funding.
The charter mechanism has been around for nearly 20 years now, and is due to sunset this coming year. Needless to say, the charter schools are freaking out. A lot of state legislators work for, or have immediate family working for, charter schools and/or charter management companies, so there’s good odds that this funding scheme will remain. Meanwhile, public schools get shortchanged in a state that ALREADY shortchanges education in general.
Alice asks “Are those schools still economically viable?”
I am a bit surprised by this question. Here, in Memphis, if a 500 student public school is taken over, the charter operator get $10K per student per year.
This means $5 million per year to the charter operator.
The charter operator fires all 20 teachers, and refills the positions with TFA products who get, say, $50K in salaries including benefits.
That’s a total of $1 million spent on teachers.
So the charter operator has
$5 million – $1 million = $4 million
per year left over money to play with. Do we know how much of this $4 million per year benefits initial investors?
It’s another matter that I think the main reason investors fund charters is because they then have a saying in what happens in education in those schools, and the transformed minds of those kids do benefit the economy—the investors playground—in the long run.
Reblogged this on Crazy Normal – the Classroom Exposé and commented:
Out ideas for children and education are sound, their ideas fail every time, everywhere.
Diane or Mercedes,
What we need next is a list of industries owned, controlled, or funded by these people. What are the products and services that they provide, sell, and profit from, and how can we use such a list to boycott these goods and services?
That is a pivotal question. I know the Koch brothers own many interests in toiletries and paper products . . . .
Diane, to think that those capitalists are so altruistic that they’d spend $100M’s of their hard-earned money to help advance public (charters are public of course) education in America. They must be your heroes!
Virginia, these are the guys like Imagine and Charter Schools USA. They are doing nothing philanthropic. They are privatizing what belongs to the community, taking away public space and handing it over to private entities. It is legal theft.
Virginia—this isn’t traditional philanthropy. What these billionaires are doing is meddling with the American Republic and its democracy and its called Venture Philanthropy where wealth is moved into non-profit foundations and used to make more money but without needing to pay taxes.
This is all part of the neo-conservative and neo-lbieral movement to shrink government to the point that there are no public services and government is a an empty shell with no power to reign in the abuses caused by corporations and oligarchs.
These venture philanthropists are not donating their money to a good cause. They are investing their money into a future they control totally.
Private prisons – all four of these are already happening
Private police – under attack
Private military – the military is deliberately being stretched to the breaking point and the feds now hire and pay much more for private military contractors
Private schools – under attack
If these venture philanthropists are success, eventually there will be no public prisons, police, military or schools.
No public labor unions
No private sector labor unions
No minimum Wage
No job security for the working people
No Social Security.
No Medicare.
No Obamacare
No paid vacations
No public land
No public parks
No national parks
No state parks
No public sewer system
No public water treatment plants
No public roads
No public bridges
No NASA
No Veterans Administration
No Environmental Protection agency
No CDC
No public fire fighters
No public forests
No FCC
No FDA to monitor drug companies and approve drugs
No public controlled FBI
No public controlled CIA
No public defense attornies
No public judges
No public courts – Instead, the public courts will be replaced with realty TV shows like Judge Judy.
Lloyd, you described most of Central and South America to a large enough extent.
Virginiasgp, you just described how much of a scary ghoul you really are. Wow! Who would have known that you are the equivalent of the National Inquirer of public education?
No wonder you are (happily!) banned from setting foot in your kid’s school. I can just picture you driving by the front entrance, and the school, equipped with special radar, goes into lockdown and lockout mode.
Well, Virginiasgp, at least you have an impact somewhere!
Robert, I have never been banned from any public school. I think you have just libeled me. My allegations have loads of proof that the country is headed down this highway away from the Republic that the Founders created with the US Constitution and Bill of Rights.
For instance, the growth of private for-profit prisons starting with the Reagan Administration. These for profit prisons s[end millions annually to lobby tougher laws and longer sentences.
http://www.propublica.org/article/by-the-numbers-the-u.s.s-growing-for-profit-detention-industry
The fast paced growth of corporate charters and the growing population of the public funded, for profit anyway you look at it private sector schools.
https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=30
The growth of private sector for profit police forces in the United States
“Private firms with outright police powers have been proliferating in some places — and trying to expand their terrain. The “company police agencies,” as businesses such as Capitol Special Police are called here, are lobbying the state legislature to broaden their jurisdiction, currently limited to the private property of those who hire them, to adjacent streets. Elsewhere — including wealthy gated communities in South Florida and the Tri-Rail commuter trains between Miami and West Palm Beach — private security patrols without police authority carry weapons, sometimes dress like SWAT teams and make citizen’s arrests.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/01/AR2007010100665.html
Why privately-financed public parks are a bad idea
“The exploitation of public parks by private interests is absolutely happening, and Alex Ulam has example after example, and doesn’t even mention the fiasco that was GoogaMooga, where a huge swathe of Prospect Park was effectively destroyed by a 2-day for-profit event, which paid the park a mere $75,000. He does mention this, though:”
http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2013/11/21/why-privately-financed-public-parks-are-a-bad-idea/
In 1995, California granted a private company the right to construct express toll lanes along the State Route 91 freeway in Orange County, a region inhabited by millions, with some of the heaviest traffic flows in the nation. This was the first modern privatized highway in the United States.
http://www.dollarsandsense.org/archives/2012/1112bondgraham.html
Who is Fighting America’s Wars?
The privatization of defense and security has grown over the course of maybe 35 years, [moving] beyond weapons to defense and security services. That happened slowly [following] the end of World War II. Companies now assist U.S. forces in [tasks like] contingency operations and remain long after the military withdraws from combat zones. It has gone from a few companies and a few subsidiaries to a bona fide industry.
http://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2014/09/11/private-military-contractors-are-helping-fight-americas-wars
Do you think this will stop with just these public services?
About charter schools being public schools: the U. S. Census http://goo.gl/2WyXKv and Washington state Supreme Court http://goo.gl/7DTiHZ say otherwise.
And the philanthropists “hard earned” money. Most of them, like Walmart, make their billions by exploiting low wage workers.
But villainthropists could never ever in a million years be as big a hero as Michelle Rhee is to all the fanboys and fangirls of self-styled “education reform” that aspirationally claim to take “their” [forgot those pesky co-teachers!] students from the 13th to the 90th percentiles!
Evidently she was inspired retroactively [see Sherman and Mr. Peabody re time travel] by that data meister of all that is analytic:
“Am I gonna check every statistic?”
¿😳? Donald Trump. Of course.
How else can a 3DM[Data-DrivenDecisionMaker]ster wait almost 20 years before admitting that her diamantine hard data points were, uh, kind of squishy, as in, er, impossible to prove…
But never fear! While “ridin’ high in April” and before she was “shot down in May” [please google Frank Sinatra and THAT’S LIFE] she squeezed every ounce of ego and $tudent $ucce$$ out of her disruptively creative figures. To wit[less]:
[start]
As a Teach for America corps member in a Harlem Park Community School in Baltimore City, Michelle gained a tremendous respect for the hard work that teachers do every day. Over a two-year period she moved students scoring on average at the 13th percentile on national standardized tests to 90 percent of students scoring at the 90th percentile or higher. She also learned the lesson that would drive her mission for years to come: teachers are the most powerful driving force behind student achievement in our schools.
[end]
Link: https://econclubmemphis.com/2013/08/12/michelle-rhee/
Oh what the heck! Let’s hear it for the endless series of selfless personal sacrifices that Bill Gates and Eli Broad and the Waltons and the rest of the members of the BBBC [BoredBillionaireBoysClub] engage in on a daily basis to ensure rheephorm produces ginormous amounts of $tudent $ucce$$! It’s just a matter of time until they, like Saint Eva Moskowitz of the Underpaid CEOs, are canonized.
😏
To be fair, it’s admirable how worshipfully they imbibe wisdom from the elder Marxist authority on CCSS decontextualized informational texts:
“My favourite poem is the one that starts ‘Thirty days hath September’ because it actually tells you something.”
What oh what would they do without their Groucho?
😎
Lloyd-All of privatization is being accomplished with a complicit government. While politicians complain about income inequality, they are actively destroying middle class jobs. Once these jobs go to corporations, they become low paying jobs requiring more taxpayer funding to pay for the Obamacare subsidy and sometimes other benefits. The is the Walmart model.
Complicit yet, but who funded their election victories? For decades, billionaires have been getting their puppets elected to office from school boards all the way to the White House and those puppets appointed the five conservative justices in the Supreme Court who are ruling in favor of the oligarchs.
The elected members of our representative government who are complicit were not elected to serve the people. They were elected to serve their masters, ALEC, the oligarchs and corporations that got them elected through the traditional media they own and control.
Once the oligarchs have defeated and eradicated the people’s voice and vote, then they will turn against each other—-the neo-conservatives versus the neo-liberals.
For the most part, charters are not public schools. In Milwaukee we have a few instrumentality chaters, those are public schools. The majority are non-instrumentality, they are not public schools. As private schools, they are not subject to the same rules and regulations as public schools. They do not have to hire teachers to educate their students, do not have to educate all children, do not have to use the same discipline policy as public education, and do not have the same accountability. The other major difference, they don’t have to tell the truth about how their students are doing. So, comparing public schools to charters is like comparing apples and pickles.
Lloyd, no public courts indeed. Look at contract clauses to limit disputes to arbitration. They should be unenforceable.
I have no idea what you are talking about.
This is a war against neo-dogma that worships wealth and the power wealth brings. The neo-dogma movement, if successful, will destroy the U.S. Republic and its democracy, and I think it will lead to the collapse of Western civilization and possibly bring on World War III.
Nothing good ever comes out of an agenda based on the greed of wealth and power.
neo-dogma has two camps: neo-conservatives and neo-liberals, and both of them were birthed out of the University of Chicago.
Lloyd Lofthouse,
CDC is about as public as the Federal Reserve Bank! Questioning who really runs FBI and CIA and even our local police.
Are you saying that the CDC, the FBI and the CIA are already controlled by the private sector. The CIA maybe. I’m not so sure about the others—-yet.
I feel like the title of this fawning interview with Arne Duncan in the WSJ perfectly describes the DC/billionaire attitude towards public schools:
“Arne Duncan Pinpoints Where Schools Fail”
Got that? No leaders in government or the private sector are failing. Ever. The entire burden is on public schools. If we would all just take direction from these “thought leaders” we would all be sitting pretty in fat city.
The absolute arrogance combined with sanctimony takes my breath away. I would not accept this responsibility-dodging behavior from my 7th grader, and I’m supposed to admire this nonsense? Thanks but no thanks. Sounds like self-serving, CYA BS to me.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/arne-duncan-pinpoints-where-schools-fail-1448302773?tesla=y&alg=y
Amen, Chiara. That really says it all.
And from that bastion of pious conservatism, Hillsdale College, which refuse all federal and state funding, we have the Barney Charter School Initiative:
http://hillsdale.edu/outreach/charterschools
You mention Jonathan Sackler. His daughter, Madeline Sackler, “produced” The Lottery, the Eva Moscowitz commercial. Ms. Sackler wrote the only letter the New York Times published defending Eva after the Kate Taylor article. The letter’s wording followed the same script at the typical Eva PR. Why would the Times print a letter from someone who was paid (by her father) to make a commercial?
Stephen,
You Must Read this blog post by Diane Ravitch.
Love,
Tamara
Lloyd Lofthouse,
If you are reading this, please know that I was referring NOT to you, but to Virginiasgp, with regard to not being allowed to visit his daughter’s school. Please do a close reading of what I wrote. I just happened to address you and Virginia in the same comment.
Lloyd, you are the ally here, not the enemy. Can you email me at artwork88@aol.com?
Got ya :o)
“Every year since 1994, your taxpayer dollars have been used to open schools that drain resources from your public schools while selecting the students they want.” I teach at a charter and still pay union dues as a “reserve member” because I believe in the teacher’s union – our charter school does not get to choose anyone – we have a lottery system and we have to take in who applies and gets in through the lottery. We have a very diverse student body and many ELL, learning issue students with all kinds of academic challenges. We get many students from the public school system who are not prepared for their grade level and they can join us up to 9th grade so their scores are part of our MCAS testing just as everyone else’s are.
But you have a lottery system. My public school takes everyone who enters the doors, regardless of the time of year, no application necessary. Can yours say the same?
These 11 points could check the main charter abuses, while preserving the original idea of innovation labs. Charters are not going away, this seems a reasonable plan for people to rally around for their regulation.
Click to access 0215-Charter-School-Flyer.final_.pdf