This is a fascinating post by Mercedes Schneider. You could call her a “follow the money” expert. She began wondering who was funding Education Post, the blog run by Peter Cunningham that celebrates corporate reform. Cunningham was assistant secretary for communications in the U.S. Department of Education, when Arne Duncan was Secretary of Education. We know from reports in the press that Education Post received $12 million from the Walton Family Foundation, the Eli Broad Foundation, and Michael Bloomberg. The press also noted “an anonymous donor.” Mercedes wondered about that anonymous donor, and she did some digging and found out who it is.
I won’t spoil the pleasure of reading this post. It reads like a detective story. Suffice it to say that almost everyone involved is deeply embedded in corporate reform, and most of the links in the web lead to the Obama administration and to the U.S. Department of Education. It seems clear that the latter was taken over by the corporate reform movement. The question is why. Why would a Democratic president front for the corporate takeover of public education?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Q. Why?
A. Ka-Ching❢
USDE’ s policies we’re so odious under the Obama.Duncan regime that they had to hire an army of propagandists to sell them. I discovered part of the web of PR constructed to sell RTT, especially the SLO farce. The PR contactors had no research to cite, so they just drew together every PR trick they could think of to sell SLOs and related scams,complete with recommendations for local policy pushers to enlist teacher swat teams to kill off any sign of resistance or questioning of that absurd “alternative” to VAM for teachers of “untested subjects.” There may be some legacy links to the marketing schemes if you type in ” Reform Support Network.” Some of the marketers of RTT were new LLCs set up by people who had worked for the Gates Foundation.
SLO [SGO] farce – indeed!
Without SLOs there could be no VAM.
Using test scores to evaluate teachers continues to be the most potent toxin in the toxic mix of ed reform.
If teachers do their job, students should learn, and learning can be measured using tests. This made sense to most low information adults, including politicians and journalists who tend to be very low-information people.
Yet the devil was in the details. And no matter which concoction of voodoo math they dreamt up, they could never remove the devil.
Obama working in concert with Gates has been the puppet master of reform for the last seven years. While Obama may have stood behind the curtain, he is indeed responsible. He has always maintained he supports strong public schools. However, his definition of public would include charters, not the democratic public schools that serve the 90% that Obama has chosen to offer nothing more than test and punish.
Since Hillary is Obama 2.0, we’ll likely see this undermining of schools and teachers for profit continuing well into the next decade.
“In the last two weeks, more than a half million Ohio students have taken nearly 1.3 million state achievement tests online. These tests are in math, English language arts, science and social studies. The testing has gone smoothly, with only a few districts having minor technical issues that were easily fixed. Ohio’s spring test period began April 4 and will end May 13. Each district has chosen 15 consecutive days during this time to give all of its online tests. Parent reports on student test results will reach districts in July.”
Remember though- it isn’t “all about the tests”- just ignore the fact that the only time they turn their attention to public schools is for data collection and scoring.
I think it’s good the Obama Administration now admits “ed reform” consists of tests and “choice”.
Truth in advertising. Finally. The President should have run on it, but that probably wasn’t smart politics.
Again, Jane Meyer’s “Dark Money” is an excellent blueprint for dark money linking all of these groups together in the name of the “children” but it’s called “weaponized philanthropy”, the idea that these billionaire wealthy people are “helping” children and society by donating and providing enormous sums and funding as a generous and kind gesture as “giving back”. BULL!!! These billionaires would rather donate these sums of money as tax write-offs to these 501c3s and c4s as nonprofits, social welfare groups, and educational organizations as a way to avoid paying enormous taxes on their fortunes. In return, these nonprofits, et al such as DFER, StudentsFirst, Partnership for Educational Justice, etc. receive these funds in exchange for advancing their political agenda of privatization and neoliberalism. Hence, “weaponized philanthropy”. It’s all a joke.
If DC is intent on privatizing public schools I insist they privatize the US Department of Ed.
Start at the top. They can all go work for a “department managing organization”.
“Neither Bernie Sanders nor Hillary Clinton is defending one of President Barack Obama’s most important legacies: education reform. Instead of taking on the teachers’ unions, as the president did, both candidates offer an agenda that amounts to spending more and demanding less. It’s not a winning combination.”
Just ignore the giant ed reform lobby that is now embedded in DC and every state legislature.
Some lobbyists are just…better than others, I suppose. Ohio’s charter lobby are as pure as the driven snow while those icky, low class labor unions are “self interested”.
What’s it called when government and media start to believe their own PR?
The President had a duty to tell voters he was outsourcing the US Department of Education to 5 billionaires. It’s the least he could have done. How will we hold DC accountable for privatizing public schools if none of them will admit that’s what they’re doing?
http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2016-04-25/clinton-and-sanders-give-up-on-education-reform
Bloomberg’s article about self-anointed reform is incomplete w/o discussing organizations like New Schools Venture Fund ($22 million in Gates funding) and the Aspen and Pahara Aspen Institutes. David Shipley at Bloomberg, should begin by explaining the content of the 2003 Kim Smith interview in Philanthropy Roundtable.
Crossposted at http://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/Mercedes-Schneider-Untangl-in-Best_Web_OpEds-Corporate_Corporate-Fraud_Diane-Ravitch_Education-160426-670.html#comment593915
with a link to Diane’s earlier post: Education in Crisis: The Threat of Privatization Around the World
https://dianeravitch.net/2016/03/29/education-in-crisis-the-threat-of-privatization-around-the-world/
Another state goes backward in public education under ed reform leadership:
http://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2016/04/26/475305022/kentuckys-unprecedented-success-in-school-funding-is-on-the-line?ft=nprml&f=
Is this 31 or 32 states that have gutted public school funding since 2008?
They’re worse off then they were in 1990. Are they just lousy advocates or is this deliberate?
“Self-Reformential”
Reform is a wine
In bottle of Klein
The fruit of a vine
With Möbius twine
I remember seeing the “KeepGreatTeachers.org” ads in 2009 appearing on the front page NYTimes every time I opened the digital edition of the paper. When I called their phone number I learned that it was actually the number of the Knickerbocker Public Relations firm cofounded by Anita Dunne, Obama’s campaign (2008) communications director. A little bit of investigation revealed that Obama was behind or at least supported the billionaire-boys-club destructive takeover of public education. Hopefully the next president will be less hostile to such a public good. I just cannot get over how duplicitous Obama was towards teachers seeking their support for his election in 2008. He comes across to me as a man espousing high principles but utterly lacking in the conviction of those principles.
If wishes were fishes….
Die with peace or die in pain is a choice to live with principle or to live with greed.
Educators need to educate parents and students the propaganda from the point of view of money minded corporate and its affiliated cronies.
Whenever people are money minded, they will talk and do everything to please your ears and eyes in order to ROB and LOOT your wealth, dignity, career and safety net. Back2basic
As I mentioned in an earlier comment, one of the latest “reformers” is Laurene Powell Jobs (Steve Jobs’ widow) who is offering up $50 million to five “winners” ($10 million each) for high school “reform.”
Powell Jobs is tied to the New America Foundation (funded by the Gates and Walton Foundations) and Teach for America (funded by a host of conservative foundations and big banks). She has helped to fund a “network of small private schools” that has extensive staff ties to Teach for America, and she helped to finance the purchase of Amplify from Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation. It appears that Powell Jobs’ conception of “reform” is really not very different from that of Whitney Tilson, or Wendy Kopp, or the other ed “reformers.”
The network of schools Powell Jobs is helping to fund seeks to apply a “reform” formula “… to private, public, and charter schools across the country. Of course, they’re also money-making operations.”
See, for example: http://www.wired.com/2015/05/altschool/
About 10.000 public schools have applied for the Powell Jobs’ XQ Super Schools grants.
The top executive at Powell Job’s “reform” entity is Russlyn Ali, a former top aide to Arne Duncan, who is also ensconced as a “senior partner” with Powell Jobs.
Ali formerly worked for the Education Trust and the Broad Foundation. She supported No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top. She wrote that California should not suspend Common Core assessments because “The Common Core provides the promise and the opportunity for California to again lead the country in education.” Otherwise, she asked, “Will America be ready to compete?”
It’s pure nonsense. But many in public education have responded enthusiastically to it. They respond even more enthusiastically – it seems – when the STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) bogeyman is invoked.
Powell Jobs also heads up College Track, which “provides tutoring, SAT and ACT preparation and college counseling” to low-income students, Interestingly, according to its tax filings, College Track “qualifies as a publicly supported organization.” It receives money from the Emerson Collective – another Powell Jobs education enterprise, which is organized as a LLC and does not have to publicly report its donations – and from JP Morgan Chase, venture capitalist John Doerr, and Summit 54, a Colorado organization conceived in the wake of ‘Waiting for Superman’ and dedicated to the proposition that “Our education system is not preparing our students for jobs of the future” and “this is having a detrimental effect on our economy.”
This is what education “reform” has shaped up to be.