Democrats for Education Reform (DFER) is an organization of faux Democrats. Some are Democrats, some are Republicans, all of them give generously to undermine public schools and the teaching profession.
D.C. parent blogger Valerie Jablow gives an overview of how DFER in pouring obscene sums of money into education races in D.C.
DFER was denounced formally by the Democratic party conventions in Colorado and California; both called on DFER to stop corrupting the term “Democrat” by using it in their title, since they are a front for Wall Street and corporate America.
She writes:
How much money have you–as a parent, teacher, or student in DC’s publicly funded schools–given to political causes around public education in 2018: $5? $50? $500? $5000?
How much money did your spouse/parents/children/relatives give?
How much money did any union at your public school give?
It is not easy to know all these answers–but chances are good the total is less than $522,393.74.
That amount–$522,393.74–is what I calculated was given between January 1, 2018 and October 26 to the independent expenditure committee (IEC) of the DC chapter of the education advocacy organization Democrats for Education Reform (DFER). If you add in what was given to DFER DC’s political action committee (PAC) in the same time–about $7,400–you get almost $530,000 donated in just 10 months in the name of education reform in DC. Most of those 2018 donors appear to be outside DC.
Some familiar names appear, like the Waltons (of course) and Reed Hastings’ wife, who lives in California. The Waltons were the single biggest funder of charter schools in D.C. The Waltons own Walmart, which does not pay its workers a living wage. I seriously doubt that they are Democrats.
After listing the donors and recipients of DFER money (which does not add up to over $500,000), Jablow writes:
If wealthy people giving to a cause to tilt public education away from the public seems deeply undemocratic, it’s helpful to recall two recent, undemocratic, actions in our public schools:
–No DC citizen voted to have charter schools in our city. While many DC families are happy with their charter school(s) and appreciate the horizons these schools have opened, it is well worth recalling that we did not get charter schools because of popular will or votes. We got them because Congress–a body in which no DC citizen has representation equal to that of the rest of the country–said we had to. (And charmingly decreed that we had to pay for them, too.)
–No unelected DC citizen voted for mayoral control of DCPS. (In fact, there were only 9 people in the entire world who voted for mayoral control of DCPS. They were all members of the city council.)
Through this lens, one could construe DFER DC’s 2018 wealth gathering and deployment not merely as success, but custom!
Too bad for taxpayers and democracy.
Here is CA the DFER endorsed candidate for Superintendent of Public Education Marshall Tuck insists at every opportunity that he is a “progressive Democrat,” – despite the fact that over 80% of the delegates at the state convention voted to endorse his opponent, Tony Thurmond. Tuck does not need DFER dollars in that he has reaped over $30 Million form IEC’s – the most of any candidate for any office, including Senator and Governor.
The Republican Candidate for Governor of California endorsed Marshall Tuck today on Twitter
DFERS = Horrors!
When the courts and our public schools aren’t treated as SACRED GEMS, trouble lies ahead. Same for this planet.
Great research. These interlocking DINOs (Democrats In Name Only) are infecting almost every effort to install market-based schooling as if a panacea. This is happening on a national scale. This report is a model for other to follow. Thank you.
I’m including a link to today’s Denver Post story showing campaign contributions so far. It shows several million donated to Sen. Michael Johnston’s unsuccessful primary run for governor. I guess he couldn’t compete with another charter-loving guy Rep. Jared Polis & his mostly self-funded campaign. https://www.denverpost.com/2018/11/02/top-donors-to-colorado-campaigns-2018/
Polis is one of the richest people in Congress. Even with Bloomberg’s help, Johnston couldn’t compete.
An interesting view –
How Progressive Elite Control of Education Embitters Americans
By DAVID FRENCH
November 2, 2018 4:54 PM
Harvard University President Drew Faust congratulates students at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, May 25, 2017. (Brian Snyder/REUTERS)
Does the educational establishment give students a fair chance to succeed?
Let me share two seemingly disconnected items. The first comes from the New York Times. Yesterday it profiled five Harvard College freshmen as they discussed how they gained admission into one of the nation’s most selective universities. It was striking how keenly aware they were of the admissions committee’s quirks and biases. It was as if they knew the stew the committee was trying to create, and their challenge was to market themselves as the right kind of ingredient.
There was the Asian-American student who joined the Air Force ROTC in part because she didn’t want to be seen as the “typical Asian.” There was another Asian composer from London who says she wouldn’t have “ticked the Asian box” if she had been a STEM student. Another student, a white man, believes he gained admission in part because he was from the Midwest and his family was low-income.
If you’ve ever served on an elite university’s admissions committee, you can see that the students are keenly aware of the game. They highlight their quirks, downplay their privileges, and exaggerate the adversity they had to overcome. (I’ll never forget the young woman who described herself as “formerly homeless” when her wealthy family had merely decided to travel the country in an RV for a year.) Heavily ideological institutions have decided how they want to socially engineer the American elite, and ambitious young Americans must bend to their will.
The second item is a bit strange. This spring we moved from our beloved home in Columbia, Tenn., to Franklin, a Nashville suburb. We were going through boxes as we packed and came across some schoolbooks from my wife’s early elementary-school education. It looked like they were written in a foreign language. You could decipher the words with some difficulty, but they clearly weren’t written in English.
“That’s ITA,” my wife said. “It stands for initial teaching alphabet.” It looks like this:
It turns out that for a time, some American schools initially taught reading through a 45-character alphabet invented by a British man named James Pitman. After learning reading through ITA, students would transition into standard English. It was never that popular. It’s now virtually extinct — just another education-reform idea that’s relegated to the dustbin of history.
Modern America is characterized by an intense grassroots distrust of American elites — with red America especially disdainful of progressive elite institutions. Much ink has been spilled explaining the reasons for this distrust, and I don’t intend for a single short piece to encompass the whole of the argument, but I do think we underestimate the extent to which prolonged exposure to a flawed and biased elite-ordered and elite-controlled education system is profoundly dispiriting and embittering for millions of Americans.
Public education has been marked by diminished local control, top-down reform driven by ideological and educational fads, and failed experiment after failed experiment. For example, the intense opposition to the Common Core in the recent past was driven in part by the too-fresh memory of other grand ideas and technocratic national movements.
As for higher education, its gatekeepers are often explicit ideological radicals. At their worst, they attempt to micromanage a freshman class’s racial and socioeconomic background (and sometimes its political composition) based on theories about privilege that are utterly at odds with the lived experience of the American families at their mercy.
Let’s put it this way: Especially in elite higher education, highly privileged (mainly white) administrators are quite often rejecting less privileged (mainly white and Asian) applicants in part because even that lesser privilege is too much. They deny students’ dreams in the fixed belief that their particular brand of mixing by race, class, and quirk is best for their institutions and best for their students.
Of course, education by its very nature will be considerably elitist — involving the transmission of knowledge from the better-educated to those who know less — but it becomes particularly difficult to swallow that elitism when it is so often distant, ideologically hostile, and (in so many areas) clearly unsuccessful.
And that frustration is magnified when you understand that the broken dreams and manifest failures impact the people most precious to all parents — their own children. Time and again, you see the frustration. These people, parents say, are messing with my kids.
Yes, there are countless good schools in the United States — and parents will pay immense housing premiums to attend those schools — but all too many parents have felt helpless in the face of decisions that directly affect their children and that sometimes seem arbitrary, misguided, or even heartless. In secondary education, “local control” isn’t just a political slogan, it’s an act of civic reform and shared civic responsibility that can decrease that sense of alienation and helplessness.
COMMENTS
In higher education, true racial nondiscrimination and actual intellectual diversity can decrease the sense that kids are mere ingredients in someone else’s diversity stew. Of course higher-education admissions decisions have to be made on some basis, but must it always be true that the deciders will come from largely from a highly specific, highly privileged slice of progressive American life? Must it always be true that these admissions decisions are so highly dependent on factors that are completely out of the applicants’ control?
As with any system of immense size and complexity, there is no easy fix, and even the best-laid plans would require perhaps decades of implementation before a culture is changed. You can’t diversify a college administration overnight. Conservative academics will not come springing from the woodwork even if hiring committees remove their ideological blinders. But it’s still important to identify the cost of the status quo. And that cost is clear — embittered Americans who can often rightly feel as if their presumed “betters” never gave their children a truly fair chance to succeed.
MAKE IT A GREAT DAY!
The case against Harvard is absurd on its face. A white conservative filed the lawsuit, the third time he has tried to overturn affirmative action. As it happens, Asian Americans are 6% of the population, and they are 23% of the students admitted to Harvard. That doesn’t look unfair, does it?
As a conservative, you should oppose government interference in the decisions of private institutions. Or are you just eager to make sure that black and Hispanic kids don’t get into selective universities?
bingo
Interesting read.
Although I smell a rat in sheep’s clothing trying to get a nose under the tent.
“Public education has been marked by diminished local control, top-down reform driven by ideological and educational fads, and failed experiment after failed experiment. For example, the intense opposition to the Common Core in the recent past was driven in part by the too-fresh memory of other grand ideas and technocratic national movements.”
I can certainly agree with the first sentence. But what the author intends the word to mean and what meaning I ascribe to the words are probably two different things.
As far as the second sentence: It doesn’t make a lot of sense without having delineated what those “other grand ideas and technocratic national movements” are. Again, what I might read into those words and what the author intends could very well be polar opposites.
Can you please explain what is meant by “other grand ideas and technocratic national movements”? Gracias