Jonathan Pelto reports on the latest chapter in the corporate reform movement in Connecticut. Bear in mind that Connecticut has one of the best school systems in the nation.
But reformers are unhappy. They want more charters. They know they won’t get them by appealing to the public. So, they are entering political campaigns to try to oust the elected officials who don’t like charters. The hedge fund managers have moved in with their political operation, DFER. And other groups have been created to give the veneer of grassroots support, which the charter industry never has, unless they pay for it.
Pelto explains the background:
Change Course CT, a front-group for Democrats for Education Reform, was formed on July 18, 2016.
Charters Care, a new appendage of the Northeast Charter School Network, was formed a few days earlier on July 13, 2016.
Both Democrats for Education Reform and the Northeast Charter School Network are corporate-funded charter school advocacy groups based in New York City and both receive the bulk of their money from the billionaires and millionaires who are trying to privatize public education in the United States.
According to forms filed with the Connecticut State Elections Enforcement Commission, all the funds collected by Change Course CT come from Education Reform Now Advocacy, a non-profit 501 (c) 4 corporation that is operated in conjunction with New York City based Democrats for Education Reform Now and Education Reform Now.
Signing the official documents on behalf of Change Course CT has been Jenna A. Klaus, who appears to be the daughter of Jeff Klaus and Dacia Toll. Toll is the CEO of Achievement First, Inc., the large charter school management company that owns and operates charter schools in New York, Connecticut and Rhode Island. In addition to collecting the bulk of the $110 million in Connecticut taxpayer funds paid to charter schools, Achievement First, Inc. earned its infamy from suspending record numbers of kindergarteners in an apparent attempt to push out children who don’t fit the company’s limited definition of appropriate students. Jeff Klaus is a regional president for Webster Bank and can often be found, throughout the day, attacking education advocates and posting pro-charter school comments on various Connecticut media websites.
The Charters Care election documents are being signed by Christopher Harrington, the Connecticut Policy Manager for the Northeast Charter School Network and the PACs money has come from OxyContin’s Jonathan Sackler and from yet another New York based corporate education front group called Real Reform Now.
Not surprisingly, Jonathan Sackler, a Greenwich, Connecticut multi-millionaire is one of Governor Dannel Malloy’s biggest campaign contributors and is on the Board of both the Northeast Charter Schools Network and Achievement First, Inc., as well as, being the founder and board member of ConnCAN, Connecticut’s leading pro-charter school lobbying group.
The charter school industry has spent in excess of $9 million lobbying on behalf of Governor Malloy’s charter school and education reform agenda.
As reported in the local press, Connecticut will hold Democratic primaries for its General Assembly next week, and corporate reformers plan to take out critics of charter schools and privatization.
Pelto has been warning about the big money forces and their alliance with Governor Dannell Malloy.
As we are seeing in states across the nation, such as Washington, Tennessee, and Massachusetts, corporate reformers are now using their money to knock out those who get in their way.
They failed abjectly in Tennessee, where every one of their school board candidates in Nashville lost. If the public is informed, they can be defeated everywhere. But it requires a strong grassroots effort to explain that the word “reform” is a synonym for privatization, budget cuts, union-busting, and driving out experienced teachers.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The United States needs an amendment to the U.S. Constitution that separates all links between the private sector an government — i.e. Not only separation of church and state but corporations/billionaires and the state. The wealthy should only be allowed to vote and nothing else when it comes to how the government functions. Not one penny should go to super pacs and lobbyists.
For instance, if Bill Gates wants to have a voice in government, then let him run for public office and that goes for all the other autocratic, psychopathic billionaires and multi millionaires out there.
What you describe is how democracy should work! What we have is an oligarchy. People like Gates buy our representatives that spend more time fund raising in our current system than working for the citizenry. The wealthy people and foundations that front for them continue to work against the will of the people by buying access to policymakers. It is a corrupt system designed to quash the democratic process.
How do we get there?
The journey might takes decades and never arrive.
Agreed . Or one morning you could awaken to an American Spring.
Far more viable than the Arab Spring.
I’d like to be there for that American Spring, but alas, I think there are too many fat and drugged Americans who are spending far too many hours texting, playing video games and watching TV to be interested in saving the republic, keeping justice honest, and the American dream alive, whatever that is.
I know how to get there, and so do all of you. We sure as hell won’t get anywhere supporting Hillary Clinton. And shut up about Trump. I’m sick of it. I got a chance, this year and last, to harness the power of political revolution just by saying or writing Go Bernie. That’s it. That’s all there is to it. Millions of mostly young people believing in something for once. DAM, I miss Poet. He knew how to get there too, but got fed up with all the Hillary mainstreaming. Damn. Damn!
Go Bernie.
Lloyd
The Black Swan that initiates an event will never be seen (IMHO), 2008 was such a moment . To seize that moment required courage,which for a multitude of reasons Obama did not display. I sympathize with his situation and understand his actions . That does not mean that a tremendous opportunity was not squandered.
Three years later the Occupy movement as disorganized as it was,managed to change a Tea Party narrative of austerity and budget cuts, to income inequality. Inequality a code word for economic fairness.
That message resonates with “we the people”. Those low information voters you describe on the right, described by Dylan 50 + years ago as “pawns in their game” and economic progressives on the left are two sides of the same coin . Occupy was abandoned,allowed to be crushed partly because it was difficult for Labor and other Progressives to find some one to plan with,work with,no defined leadership, and partly to ensure the election of a lessor of two evils candidate.
Here we are 4 years later, where will be be 4 years from now.?
Our only consolation is we are mortal and the future will be what it will be without us once we are gone. If history is our guide, what is happening now has happened before many times. We are victims and witnesses to the corruption of the rich and powerful and how they destroy everything because they allow their power to corrupt them.
Lord Acton was right about power corrupting. The Bible is also right about greed and the destruction and suffering caused by that greed when it is in the hands of a few.
Once we have left this life, we will not be around to care if our species destroys itself thanks to the corruption of the psycho autocrats.
Take heart, Diane. Here in Washington last week, voters crushed the pro-privatization candidate for the state Supreme Court, who challenged the terrific incumbent, Chief Justice Barbara Madsen, whipping him by roughly 40 percentage points despite the mendaciously named “Stand For Children” spending (wasting) over $116,000 on his behalf in a major humiliating defeat for their ersatz organization.
Voters are beginning to catch on and our narrative is beginning to take hold in every part of our nation.
We’ve got a lot more to do and a long road ahead but it is demonstrably better than it was and I know that in time, we who strongly support public education will defeat those who are committed to its ultimate destruction.
And more than anyone else, we have you to thank for the progress we’ve made and will continue to make.
The new and dangerous pitch from fans of market-based educational choice is that “governance doesn’t matter,” which means any operator of schools is fine, and any kind of provider or operator is fine as long as public dollars are invested in education and “customers” are satisfied.
The pitch can easily be morphed to become a “dollars follow the child” policy, or a market-based policy so that education can be delivered in public or private venues whether place-based or virtual (online). Educational service providers can be organized as for-profit or non-profit operations, offer secular or religious instruction, or a hybrid.
This is the pitch being made in Connecticut and it is being used by community foundations, by promoters of “pay for success contracts” with investors fronting loans for education services (also called social impact bonds), and by local “accelerators” formed to treat education as a business with a CEO in charge, no need for the messiness of democratic governance, with parents and informed professionals in education engaged in policies put in place by elected officials.
Big money is flowing into state and local political campaigns for candidates who will construct a policy environment that legitimates the taking of public funds for education with little or no public voice and oversight. Free-market candidates and their friends will raid the public treasury claiming that deregulated market-based education will be more efficient, effective, and customer friendly. This is the pitch from billionaires: Let us do the job on our terms, no need for citizen engagement and least of all elected school boards.
See this for a refresher on why the charter school movement is, by design, anti-democratic. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REs0S0kqkMM&feature=youtu.be
Labels do matter in a war of words. How many teachers have been forced to listen to the false assertion that “public schools are failures” repeatedly. Our side needs to get the message out to the public that charters and pay for success schemes are “corporate welfare.” Most Americans will bristle at this term. In fact, if charters get meager results, they are not worth the disruption and are a form of corporate welfare.
“If the public is informed” about the money they will vote against the money. Correct. Becoming more correct every year, every day.
I am a great admirer of your work and agree with your critiques of charters and privatization, Ms. Ravitch. However, as a native of Bridgeport, Conn., I wish you had not begun this post with the caveat, “Bear in mind that Connecticut has one of the best school systems in the nation.” A number of Connecticut’s biggest public school districts enroll large numbers of minority and poor students. Only 10% of Bridgeport’s public school students are white, 99.9% qualify for free or reduced-price free lunch, and 67% graduate from high school in four years compared with 86% statewide, according to the 2013-14 district profile and performance report by the Connecticut state education department, the most recent available. The neediest students in the state are taught by underpaid teachers with limited resources. It makes no sense to talk about a single school system in Connecticut, where income inequality and disparities in school funding have been stark for decades. Charters are not the answer, but it is not helpful to begin this discussion without acknowledging needs.
Marcia,
What you write is accurate. Connecticut should fund all its schools equitably, but it does not.
Nonetheless, if you use performance on NAEP as a measure (no high-stakes, no consequences, no one knows who will take the test), Connecticut is one of the top three states in the nation and has been for many years. The other two are Massachusetts and New Jersey.
In addition, if Connecticut was compared to the world on the PISA test results, it would rank 9th in the world in math proficiency tied with Hong Kong and not far behind third ranked Finland.
In fact, “According to a separate international test, Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) — which tests 8th-graders, instead of PISA’s 15-year-olds– Massachusetts ranks second only to top-ranked Singapore in global measures of science competency.”
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesmarshallcrotty/2014/09/29/if-massachusetts-were-a-country-its-students-would-rank-9th-in-the-world/#5f5e249921b1
Click to access connecticut_students_out_perform_international_peers.pdf
The fact that the frauds, liars and bullies running the corporate raid on community based, democratic, transparent, non profit schools in Connecticut is all the proof any open minded person needs that it is all about money and not children.