Thank goodness for Laura Chapman. She has the patience to dig deep and find out who is behind the curtain.
She writes:
I looked at EducationCounsel. It is part of a very large corporation with legal and policy expertise, especially for federal and state policies in the South and among states on the East coast. The larger company is Nelson Mullins Riley & Scarborough LLP– Attorneys and Counselors at Law. (see whisper type at the Education Counsel website)
A brief look at staff at EducationCounsel shows that some have advanced degrees from the Relay Graduate (sic) School of Education. Some began with TFA. Some have worked for the National Council on Teacher Quality (phony ratings of teacher education programs, promoter of NCLB). Some have experience with Jeb Bush’s corporate friendly Foundation for Excellent Education (FEE) see https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Foundation_for_Excellence_in_Education
My impression is this: EducationCouncil is lobby shop. It has no principled approach to education other than serving clients who want policies shaped by the expertise of the staff.
Almost all of the senior people are former staffers and lawyers with experience in Congress or the Executive branch including the Obama and Trump administrations. The “current partners” (clients) dedicated to “closing the opportunity and achievement gap” include many who are not supporters of public schools but gifted at putting together punitive policies. Here are few.
America Achieves- orginal promoter of the Common Core now self described as an “accelerator that brings together exceptional educators and other leaders with game changing ideas, results-oriented funding, and strategic and operational support to drive success for students at scale.”https://achievethecore.org/author/23/america-achieves
Council of Chief State School Officers also big into promoting the Common Core and ESSA tests with several offspringalso clients of EducationCouncil: a) the National Network of State Teachers of the Year, a program of the Council of Chief State School Officers, and b) Partners for Each and Every Child –lobbyists for the Council of Chief State School Officers in seven states and funded by The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, The Carnegie Corporation of New York, The Ford Foundation, The National Education Association, The American Federation of Teachers, The Stuart Foundation, and The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.
These are are also clients of EducationCouncil: Laura and John Arnold Foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropies, the Leona M. and Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and others who are major supporters of charter schools and tech in schools including Turnaround for Children –lobbyists serving the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools.
Add Jeb Bush’s Foundation for Excellence in Education really hostile to public schools.
Center for American Progress, The College Board, Institute for Higher Education Policy (B&M Gates funded), Lumina Foundation, and more.
In any case this not the only LLC set up to provide ready to use legislation, policy ideas, and advocacy packages for anyone who can pay the fees.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Thank you, Laura. The one thing they fear the most is honest reporting of their activities. And you are one heck of a source of light!
Sorry for all of the typos. By now I should have learned to spell check and otherwise proof comments.
Thanks for the deep dive, Laura. These lobbyists are fronting for Gates and other wealthy individuals that want to to put public schools and educators on the defensive by using test score based so-called accountability as a weapon.
The more I learn, the more I’m convinced the 2nd Civil War has already started.
http://educationcounsel.com/
Recently, The Hill listed the big players they labeled as D.C. lobbyists. But, as Laura identifies, the lobbyist-type functioning bleeds over into think tanks and other hybrid organizations. In not registering as lobbyists, entities avoid unwanted scrutiny.
Aspen boasts, at its site, that it has steered education policy since Bill Clinton.
Journalists like those at The Hill fail Americans when they allow unidentified, pernicious, shuck democracy groups to operate under the radar.
Interesting … The Aspen Institute Web site went down yesterday. Don’t know if it will be ‘up” again.
I agree. Somewhere in memory is a report showing a decline in the number of registered lobbiests and primarily because the influencers are by-passing the ritual of becoming “registered.” Education Council is among 300 clients/supporters of the FrameWorks Institute, initially funded by the MacArthur Foundation and providing “messaging” services to non-profits. I will have more about this, but the Institute is diffrent from Frank Luntz who does focus group research to sell language to Republicans.
MacArthur Foundation- the group that promotes digital badges i.e. superficial, cheap education for the middle class and poor. No surprise, MacArthur’s recommendations enrich the donor class in Silicon Valley and Wall Street.
Dick Riley is the Riley in the law firm you mentioned. Dick Riley was the Secty of Ed under Bill Clinton and former Governor of SC.
See also The Riley Institute at Furman University, which houses the Center for Education Policy and Leadership.
Many so called journalists and the (Fox) news organizations they belong to have also become de facto lobbyists.
Witness the puff reporting by NPR on Common Core over the years.
Of course, NPR is underwritten by (ie, bought and owned) by the Gates Foundation so that is no surprise.
Lobbyists by another Name
Read between the radio waves
To fathom NPR
The Gates Foundation pays their ways
And keeps them in a jar
What an uphill battle for us to explain in plain language to friends and family what the reform crowd is all about. Their narrative is out there. Why would you be against school choice ? Vouchers ? My Republican sister keeps asking me. It is really not that simple to answer her. These groups with their innocent sounding names are really sophisticated public relations outfits and policy think tanks that put out information to direct the public’s thinking and opinions. The issue is not a simple one to explain to folks.
Ask your sister if she wants Walmart-caliber employees teaching her kids…if she wants her kids learning in a cavernous mega Walmart store. .. if she wants them at home learning with the Gates/Z-berg schools-in-a-box…
Ask her to speculate what will happen to her local property values when the community loses the education dollars to Silicon Valley or to the Walmart heirs in Arkansas. Ask her to envision what happens to retail services in her community when employment and money dries up because libertarians don’t believe in funding schools. Ask her to speculate about the quality of the workforce and the nation when education is arbitrarily given as a gift to the deserving few by the donor class.
Any woman voting Republican does it for four reasons- (1) to protect her wealth (2) as reinforcement for her prejudices (3) she finds comfort and reassurance in a patriarchal system or (4) she’s stupid
I think the general public are starting to catch on.
The fact that Deformers feel the need to distance themselves from the title Reformer is a good indication of this.
Diane (and Laura) and Go Lieth
The billionaire was beaten
By Lady with a blog
Who managed to defeat him
By dissipating fog
A lovely Xmas gift!
A good way to explain why I spend five hours a day, sometimes more, without pay because it’s exactly what I want to do. Regormersom the billionaires’ dole would never understand.
Sunlight is the best disinfectant, or so they say.
The most horrific, because it reflects such depravity, is right wing messaging that linked “love of country” to the Republican Party.
Demands like those made by the GOP today were made in the British isles more than 150 years ago. The outcome was one million Irish died of starvation. Their families moved to the U.S. for a better life. Where are Americans going to move?
Tell your sister that 6 heirs of the Walton fortune have wealth equivalent to 40% of Americans combined. Wealth’s growing concentration is strangling economic opportunity and it will worsen.
[…] in Mississippi. Dan Gordon runs a 30-person consulting firm, Education Counsel, which strategically partners with major players in U.S. education policy. The manager of the IMPACT teacher […]