I received this letter a few years back, before I started this blog. It has haunted me. I responded offline. I wondered what it feels like to be part of this world. I will never know.
I manage money and I’m black. I am distressed by the barrage of mail I’ve been getting from fellow money managers who somehow think there is a fairly easy solution to educating the “underclass” by using charter schools. I’d like to share with you a few points from my experience which may help you contextualize my concern.
1. Hedge fund managers typically don’t add value to society.
2. Hedge fund managers often have very little practical real world experience. Many have not worked for anyone else. Yet activist managers are very comfortable giving advice to operating managers of companies in which they take a stake.
3. Hedge fund managers virtually never hire minorities outside of Asians
4. Hedge fund managers have attended exclusive private schools and almost always send their kids to the same.
5. Hedge fund managers know virtually nothing of incentive systems and largely supported the Wall Street incentives which nearly created the demise of our society as we know it.
6. Hedge fund managers and private equity managers typically don’t pay their share of Federal taxes. (I personally elect to pay my carried interest as regular income)
With my experiences as a backdrop, I’m somewhat concerned that groups such as DFER (Democrats for education reform) are receiving so much positive press.
As I have begun to research education I wonder if you can point me in the right direction?
1. Has there been a study on the effect of educational lotteries (like the kind that are run to select students for some charter schools) on the students who aren’t picked? It seems a bit demoralizing to me…
2. Has there been a study of teachers who would work for incentives? In other words I’m not sure free market incentives work for professionals like all the teachers I know?.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Thank you for saving this letter. This gentleman’s insights were somewhat prescient. Now that we have witnessed a decade of widespread charter expansion, we know that they offer no outstanding value. We also know that charters undermine public education. We know that incentives or bonuses do not work in education. Choice has not saved children. It has created greater inequities and more segregation. Privatization of public education is about transferring the value of a public asset into the grasp of private entities, many of which are owned by hedge fund managers. Hedge funds not only do not add value to our country, they rob the public of their public assets. Our inept and corrupt government representatives are aiding and abetting the vandalism.
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It IS a bit scarier considering when it was written and what has happened since.
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Diane, Thank you for posting. I know you don’t have time to do this but asking this person if they would do a confidential follow up interview on what they have learned since writing to you would help us all a great deal.
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Great idea.
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Who is this person?! Actually sounds sensible!
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I promised not to reveal his name. I sent the post to him.
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That probably means he works for someone else and his job would be at risk if they knew what he really thinks about what they are doing.
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Sensible, but a bit late in coming to some realizations: there have been so many great articles written about each of these subjects for more than a decade.
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I, too, would love to know who this person is. He sounds like a true fiduciary, but respect for his privacy far outweighs satisfaction of my curiosity.
I was just thinking today, “What will communities of color do when the charter schools have all shut down because they are no longer able to “turn a profit,” but the public schools are all gone because we turned our backs on them?”
Some of us still haven’t figured out that the shiny and new things presented to us aren’t necessarily valuable.
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The corporate Center for American Progress has chosen itself to change Puerto Rico. The Nation and Naomi Klein’s book show us what disaster capitalism looks like on the ground in PR. Trump said Puerto Rico shouldn’t get aid because they weren’t respectful enough of his authoritarian leadership.
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Will this movement by The corporate Center for American Progress lead to another vote in Puerto Rico for Independence from the United States?
Maybe Puerto Rico will decide to leave the U.S. and then petition England’s queen and Parliament for membership in the Commonwealth of Nations that was once part of the British Empire.
The Commonwealth of Nations is a voluntary association of 53 sovereign states. Nearly all of them are former British colonies or dependencies of those colonies.
I counted 10 on the list located on islands in the Caribbean.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Member_states_of_the_Commonwealth_of_Nations
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I don’t know how old you are and where you have been for the last twenty years. To pretend that you don’t know how hedge fund managers and rich people have ruined public education with the support of the politicians is beyond common sense.
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For you not to know and claim that you are black makes me wonder if this is just a troll letter. Parents have no patience for a black hedge fund manager who is pretending not to know the havoc that has been directed at minority parents.
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