HANY is High Achievement New York. It has mounted a very costly campaign to oppose the opt out movement and to support high-stakes testing and the Common Core.
Who is funding their expensive campaign to maintain the status quo?
Fortunately, blogger and former teacher Deb Escobar has done the research and provides the answers. This will come as no surprise to readers of this blog. HANY is funded by the Billionaire Boys Club.
Who is the Man Behind the Curtain? Why, it is Bill Gates!
But he is not alone.
The purpose of this post is to pull back the curtain and let you know who is funding this massive campaign that aims to fix our “broken” system. Because, you know, it’s all for the children. Let’s start with their coalition members, beginning with Arva Rice, President and CEO of the New York Urban League, who previously was affiliated with Paul Tudor Jones (yes the hedge fund guy) and his Robin Hood Foundation.
Then there is New York Campaign for Achievement Now (NYCAN), part of the larger 50-state education reform group. The funding stream for 50CAN includes Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Bush Foundation, JP Morgan Chase, and the Walton Foundation, among others. A veritable who’s-who of big money in the education reform game. The NY chapter adds more money from Gates, along with Bloomberg Philanthrophies, Kenneth M. Hirsch and William E. Simon.
Include Association for a Better New York, founded by real estate tycoon Bill Rudin. Their self-stated goal is to “promote neighborhood revitalization.” AKA gentrification. AKA keeping their fingers on the real estate prize in NY.
Coalition member Parents for Excellence in Bethlehem has bought the Common Core Gates funded spin. Co-President Kim Namkoong is a parent, also a mathematician and computer programmer. She is a face for the “How is My Kid Doing?” campaign that is funded by – you guessed it – the Council for a Strong America folks and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The Bethlehem Parents for Excellence has a lackluster website (a surprise considering Namkoong’s stated occupation) that does not list its donors. They advocate for common core and testing.
Membership includes reformy groups Educators4Excellence and StudentsFirstNY. Educators4Excellence, also funded by the Gates Foundation, is comprised of anti-union young teachers, many of whom are alumni of Teach For America. See ed blogger Jonathan Pelto’s research on the group here. StudentsFirstNY is that pro-charter, pro-voucher group that shares its physical address with New York Charter queen Eva Moskowitz’ organization. NYS Families for Excellent Schools also shares that same address and is a hedge-funded PAC for education reforms.
The corporate reformers are a cozy group. There are not many of them, but they have so much money that they pop up again and again, singing the same tired old song. Test your children (not mine); put your children in “no excuses” charters (not mine); testing will make everyone smarter; the harder the tests, the smarter everyone will be and the more the achievement gap will close.
Evidence has nothing to do with their campaign. They do what the Man (or Men) Behind the Curtain want them to do.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Using charters to segregate urban schools will allow big money interests to profit twice, once on the school, and second on the gentrifying real estate bubble. Using the tool of selective charters, operators can ensure that a school will contain mostly white yuppie children while the cheap “no excuses” or cyber charters will be reserved for those that developers want out of the area. We have seen this practice repeated in many cities across the nation. Who cares about democracy when there is money to be made? Our government is allowing public funds to underwrite “legal” segregation. Shouldn’t this be against the law? Is separate and unequal allowable under civil rights laws? I know that red lining and real estate values as well as practices have contributed to inequities in public schools, but this is a blatant, government backed discrimination. Minorities need to challenge this practice in court.
The enrollment of charter schools in New York State is ~94% black and Latino and ~80% economically disadvantaged. The white yuppie’s children are in starkly non-integrated suburbs, selective examination schools, or, if they are especially wealthy, public-private NYC schools like PS 321.
You describe the sad truth of exactly what happened in our city’s lowest-income neighborhood where regentrfication has taken off like a rocket. It moves through the community so quickly, offering huge sums for old homes and pushing out small businesses — one day you have poor, non-White kids running around, the next you have yuppies pushing baby strollers, looking to the newer “good” schools they are now demanding for “their” neighborhood. I wrote about this when a principal brought in from the east coast to “fix” our low-income high school gave our faculty an introductory lecture on what White Mothers Moving Into Our Neighborhood wanted… http://www.ciedieaech.wordpress.com/2015/10/12/the-interests-of-children
How many of their kids take standardized tests?
Harvard’s Roland Fryer said urban kids should be tested every day, while his kids in suburban Boston, would benefit from Shakespeare (The Deutsch 29 blog posted the interview transcript.)
“The Gates Attractor”
Gates is at the center
Of Common Core and test
With all of those who enter
Attracted to his chest
Like deepest blackest hole
Whence light can not escape
The man is like a pole
Of magnet, or a tape
I’m wondering if there’s ever been any discussion of ranking teachers by student test scores in higher ed.
It would obviously be more difficult to do, but one could use the tests that are used for graduate schools, right? How much “value” did undergrad professors add?
If you back this approach in K-12 why wouldn’t you back it in higher ed?
Higher ed would never allow what is happening in k-12, which makes all those in higher ed who are silent on the matter enablers (at best) if not hypocrites.
This includes the folks at places like Harvard and Stanford (particularly in the statistics departments) who say nothing at all about the “flawed” work of people like Raj Chetty. They simply ignore it because it does not affect them. It’s actually a form of intellectual dishonesty — something that Harvard is gaining a reputation for.
Love the idea: VAM for Chetty, Rockoff, Friedman, and Kane!
Chiara’s suggestion is, no doubt, in the planning stages. The Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Ed.,have published articles about Gates-funded IHEP and the Gates’ data push, in universities.
The first people that Gates’ measurements should be applied to, are the 20 ish public university recipients, of the Aspen Faculty Pioneer Awards.
David Koch is on the Board of the Aspen Institute.
Faculty, at the University of Virginia, appear to dominate the “Pioneer” list. I recommend the University of Virginia, for the first position, among public universities that are privatized.
Diane it’s insane how many billionaires /hedge fund managers who truly only care about making money . Not about the kids . What’s worse the Main stream media won’t go against their masters , so the average every day , hard working American will never know the truth . Smh!!! Have a great weekend.
I know schools are lucrative business, but this absolute foaming at the mouth to undermine public education is unreal. The billionaires and hedge fund managers are coming at this a bunch at a time, from every angle, one acronym after another. I can’t help but to think that there is something more than simply money to this. Maybe it’s the need to take out every profession where one can make a living doing something decent and good that doesn’t involve kowtowing to them. Maybe it’s the need to get all children under one roof to control their minds and rig their lives from birth to death. Perhaps it’s both. Whatever it is, this whole thing is so malevolent and dystopian that it’s truly beyond words.
Mike,
I share your sense of bewilderment and horror
“Whatever it is, this whole thing is so malevolent and dystopian that it’s truly beyond words.”
Actually, there is a word for it (though most don’t know the word)Neoliberalism
from the Monbiot piece:
“Another paradox of neoliberalism is that universal competition relies upon universal quantification and comparison. The result is that workers, job-seekers and public services of every kind are subject to a pettifogging, stifling regime of assessment and monitoring, designed to identify the winners and punish the losers. ‘
Sound familiar?
“assessment”- dollars to be made on analytics and data mining.
Too bad, so many of the self-important, from the west coast, lack ideas that create value i.e. Laureen Jobs, Bill Gates…, . As philanthropic money manager, Craig Kennedy said, ” In the U.S., there is a shortage of good ideas to soak up philanthropic money.”
Kennedy- Fordham Institute Board Member-emeritus.
Let me guess: it is someone in this group. THE EDUCATIONAL INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX!
Click to access eic-oct_11.pdf
The remaining operational platform of the Democratic Party is limited to (1) abortions for women of means and (2) gay rights.
The Party abandoned labor and social justice for plutocratic funding. Some moneyed interests wanted to keep the “feel-good-helping people” vibe/image, of belonging to the Democratic Party, while they could still exploit workers, minorities, women, children, the elderly….so, they, instead, latched on to the “feel good-helping the environment” (partial movement) within the Democratic Party.
A number of foundations, carrying city names in their titles, are all about the image of a green concern, while funding charter schools, to undermine democracy.
Sometimes you see a crack in the facade.
Through a quirk in our state election laws, a jail bird from Texas made his way onto the Presidential Primary ballot in 2012 in WVa. Keith Judd obtained 41% against a sitting president, to the horror of the Lilly white polite white power structure. This is what you get when identity politics and the culture supersede the concerns of ordinary citizens.