An Oregon multimillionaire funded the creation of North Carolin’s “Innovation School District,” where low-scoring public schools will be handed over to charter operators. This experiment in privatization is modeled on Tennessee’s “Achievement School District,” which promised to turn the state’s lowest scoring schools into high scoring schools within five five years. It failed to meet its goal.
“A school network founded by a wealthy Oregon resident is expanding quickly in North Carolina.
“John Bryan founded the charter network TeamCFA, which has 13 schools in North Carolina – more than in any other state. Arizona has four TeamCFA schools, and Indiana has two.
“Bryan’s influence extends beyond support for the schools themselves and into education policy. He is a generous contributor to political campaigns and school-choice causes in North Carolina.
“In a letter posted to the network’s website in April, Bryan said his commitment of “significant economic resources” – contributions to politicians and nonprofit “social welfare” groups, and the engagement of investment advisers and others – helped win legislative approval of the controversial North Carolina law that will have charter operators take over up to five low-performing public schools…
“Bryan, 84, was vice president of operations at Georgia Gulf until his retirement in 1989. An August 2002 edition of Atlanta Business Chronicle attributed Bryan’s wealth to company stock.
“Bryan has been a contributor to conservative advocacy groups and Republican candidates. He gave the Fund for Growth, a conservative advocacy group, $210,000 in 2008, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. In 2014, he gave the conservative super PAC Opportunity Alliance $200,000 and Freedom Partners Action Fund, another conservative super PAC, $575,000.
“In a 2011 “founder’s letter” posted online, Bryan described his philosophy and goals for the CFA operating foundation. One goal, he wrote, was to “inculcate my belief in the libertarian, free market, early American Founder’s principles” into both the foundation and the individual schools.
“Long reliant on Bryan’s money, the TeamCFA board is attempting to expand its donor base. Last spring, TeamCFA announced a $1 million grant from the Charles Koch Foundation.
“Bryan has also contributed to North CarolinaCAN, a group that supports charter schools. Marcus Brandon, North CarolinaCAN executive director, spoke out in support of the law allowing charter managers to take over traditional public schools as legislators debated it in 2016.”
Read more here: http://www.newsobserver.com/news/local/education/article177836091.html#storylink=cpy
Oddly enough, the schools that the state is taking over are not F-rated:
“Three of the North Carolina schools opened this year. Student performance was mixed at the remaining schools. Five schools received Bs in the latest round of state grades, while four received Cs and one received a D.”
Communities are fighting the state takeovers.
It seems that conservatives no longer believe in local control.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“It seems that conservatives no longer believe in local control.”
They never have. That’s always been a convenient fiction. Even before and during the war that was allegedly fought over “state’s rights” (ahem), the Southern states fought viciously whenever other states did things they didn’t like.
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I don’t know about that. Local control was a mantra in my ’50’s-’60’s Republican upstate NYS upbringing & it was a core value of a party I no longer recognize. Not libertarianism à la Buckley tho we loved his erudite articulation. Not the rabid John Bircher anti-communism that proliferated in the boonies fringing our liberal collegetown [but we were townies]. Certainly not the neo-conservative cabal underwritten by decades of frustrated former robber-barons w/their long-term plan to overturn the New Deal: these were Gr Depression survivors who revered FDR’s rescue from the mortgage defaults & breadlines of the ’30’s. There was then in the Republican party of my parents’ generation a fiscal conservatism tempered with liberal ideals– an understanding that capitalism can only succeed if the market is reasonably regulated– that seems to have disappeared.
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Bryan not only intends for the takeover charters to STAY in control of these pilot public schools but he dreams of it spreading through all of North Carolina and across the country!
In his own words, from that same article:
“In his April letter, Bryan was enthusiastic about the law passed last year that created what is now known as the Innovative School District. He envisioned that those traditional public schools chosen for the district could be converted permanently to charters if student performance improves.
“I am excited about the new North Carolina law which allows knowledgeable and experienced entities the possibility of taking over failing traditional public schools,” he wrote. “By raising a school’s ‘F’ rating to a ‘C’ rating within two years, such entities could gain permanent ownership and control of that school. If our organizations can show how this works for the good of a community, this approach could expand to other states, hopefully across the country!! How exciting that would be! And our team could be of help to others who want to travel the same road.”
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” such entities could gain permanent ownership and control of that school. ”
Well! THAT sounds very “public” and “grass roots” for the “stakeholders”
What I love about ed reform is how they don’t even bother to hide it. All you have to do is read their own missives, which completely contradict what they tell the broader public.
I think it’s because it’s an echo chamber. They no longer hear how they sound to anyone outside the club.
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“. . . which allows knowledgeable and experienced entities the possibility. . . .”
I wonder where they are going to find those “entities”?
More obfuscation by an edudeformer. Why not just come out and say “which allows private charters organizations the possibilities”?
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Funny how these “Libertarians” want total control over everyone else.
Liberty for me and slavery for thee.
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You really have to read it to believe how cloistered it is.
This is charter promoters reluctantly realizing they probably have to deal with public schools, if only to find ways to cheaply and efficiently wind them down:
“Now that the charter market has grown, there are very few communities in which charter advocates can ignore the interests of the school system. Future conversations should reflect the full breadth of affected communities and schools.”
They find they MUST interact with public schools, now that they run everything at the federal level and most states. Apparently prior to this they could completely ignore the interests of 90% of families.
“Ignore the interests of the school system”. It’s as if there aren’t kids in public schools, that these schools somehow exist independent of students and families, that they have value only as “buildings” or “seats”.
https://www.crpe.org/thelens/reframing-district-charter-narrative?platform=hootsuite
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SCREAM!
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I don’t think it is a mere accident that Bryan admires the “Early American Founders.”
Early American Founders — eg, the folks who founded Massachusetts Bay Colony — were theocratic and put people to death for such heinous crimes as adultery and witchcraft.
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The current “liberal” ed reformers promise to turn the public school system INTO the health care system. Apparently they “reformed” healthcare so it’s time to move on to their next conquest.
The most inequitable and expensive and wasteful system in the developed world is THE GOAL. These are some people who are winners in the US health care system, I’ll tell ya. No one else would ever model anything on it.
That’s the argument. We have public payer/private provider health care so why not K-12 education? I don’t know- because the health care system doesn’t work for most people?
DC spent 30 years reforming health care, failed, and then decided to turn K-12 INTO the health care system. They should go back to health care. Start over.
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“Apparently they “reformed” healthcare”
And they supposedly already “reformed” education. And since that hasn’t been working they have to come up with “fixes” as in the May conference put on by the libertarian Show Me State Institute entitled “Failure to Fixes”.
What a gig! Propose, support, demand the many edudeformer malpractices then when those don’t work come up with “fixes”. Ay ay ay, the arrogance, hubris and chutzpah of these folks is outrageous.
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And some people still wonder why the Puritans were not well liked in England.
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Welp, I wasn’t gonna go back as far as the punitive Puritans, hey, they were just the arrivistes, not the “founders” (at least not the founders of the Decl of Indep/ Constitution). But I sure have an issue w/ this octogenerarian’s “belief in the libertarian, free market, early American Founder’s principles”, which sounds to me like a mouthful of oxymorons!
Just think, in another few yrs, this guy, & Adelson, & Broad & their whole blasted white-old-man generation will be just a faint memory 😉
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I don’t know how a public school principal managed to get past the US Marshals and write something for the USDOE, but this is a nice story about a public school system that apparently refused to go along with ed reform, and prospered.
https://blog.ed.gov/2017/10/path-begins-forest-kindergarten/
Maybe we have more power than we think we have. These people have been completely ignoring ed reformers for 25 years and it’s all upside.
Maybe public schools can do more than they think they can to control their own destiny, independent of experts and fads and consultants. Can’t hurt to try.
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It looks like a wonderful school. Even though they have a high number of free or reduced lunch students, most of the students are white. I wish the school were more diverse.
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Yes, it certainly would be nice, but over 90% of Walker County is white, and until that changes, you are simply not going to get many children of color attending that school.
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Far-right conservatives believe in the power of Capitalism (profits above all else) and not the U.S. Constitution, a document that was written to protect people from the viciousness and corruption of capitalism. The far-right want a country where the losers of capitalist competitions become homeless and die of starvation or are executed to get rid of them. In their world, there is no room for anyone they think is a loser.
Under the leadership of the far Trumpian right, the population of the world is going to shrink really fast since even in a horse race, only one horse wins most of the time and rarely is there a photo finish where two horses share the winning prize. The rested of the horses would be shot.
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Agreed. These wealthy capitalists are also trying to destroy public education which represents democracy in action. They are trying to stack the deck against the “little people.”
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