On December 23, I posted an email exchange I had with Mike Petrilli of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, in which we disagreed about who was the Goliath and who was the David in the field of education.
Mike objected to my characterization of the billionaire-supported “Reform” movement as the Goliaths of American education, the behemoths making war on public schools. He insisted that his side–those supporting charter schools and vouchers–are the true Davids, and those who oppose them are the true Goliaths because we have the AFT and the NEA on our side.
I pointed out to him that the assets of the two big unions are not in the same league as the supporters of school choice, like the Waltons (at least $160 billion) and a long list of other multibillionaires, who avidly fund school choice, along with the U.S. Department of Education, which has shoveled billions into charter schools since 1994 (and will spend nearly $500 million on charters this year alone). You can’t be supported by billionaires, multiple foundations, the U.S. Department of Education, and call yourself the “David” of education.
My clincher, I thought, was to point out the Reformers’ absence from a Twitter campaign on #GivingTuesday sponsored by a website called #Benevity, which offered $10 for every retweet of its message (#BeTheGood) to the charity of your choice. Look at which groups were asking for $10 retweets. The Network for Public Education urged its followers to retweet the message so that we could be designated to receive $10 per tweet. We figured if we got 100 retweets, we could pull in $1,000. That amount of money means a lot to NPE. It means nothing, zero, nada, zilch to the well-funded “Reform” organizations. It means nothing to organization supported by the Waltons, Bill Gates, Eli Broad, etc.
I wrote:
On #GivingTuesday, I didn’t see a single Reformer group putting out a request for $10. Not one. Not TFA. Not Educators4Excellence. Not Stand for Children. Certainly not the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, which is sitting on tens of millions of dollars and gets huge grants from a long list of foundations.
No, they get gifts of hundreds of thousands and millions from foundations like Walton, Gates, Arnold, Broad, and about 50 other foundations who like to do whatever the big boys and girls do.
Ahem. We proudly claim the title of David to your Goliath. We know how that turned out.
I was surprised to get a response from Mike Petrilli.
He wrote a series of emails to demonstrate that several Reform organizations asked for money on #GivingTuesday. He must have skipped over what I wrote, because not a single one of them asked their followers to retweet #Benevity’s message and get $10 for each retweet. As I wrote, “Not one.” Not one of them cares about a gift of $10. That is not even a rounding error in their budgets.
So here are the Reformer groups that Petrilli sent me to prove that they asked for donations on #GivingTuesday and their annual revenues as of 2016, the last date the figures are available on their public tax reports (thanks to Darcie Cimarusti of the NPE staff for collecting the 990 information).
National Alliance for Public Charter Schools
Annual revenues: $9,582,733
Education Reform Now (nonprofit arm of Democrats for Education Reform, the hedge fund managers’ group)
Annual revenues: $12,379,392
GreatSchools.Org
Annual revenues: $10,774,696
Center for Education Reform (loves all choices, except for public schools)
Annual Revenues: $4,090,687
Rocketship Education:
Total annual revenues: $82,957,671
Net income: $6,761,892
(There are separate reports for local and state Rocketships, like Rocketship DC and Rocketship Wisconsin)
Expect More Arizona
Annual revenues: $3,729,325
Bricolage (the new charter school that will replace the last public school in New Orleans)
Since the school has not opened yet, there are no tax forms, but it is supported by the Walton Family Foundation, NewSchools Venture Fund, New Schools for New Orleans, and the Arnold Foundation.
Washington State Charter Schools. No 990 forms yet, but the charter schools in Washington State were funded entirely by Bill Gates and a small group of billionaires, including Alice Walton, Nick Hanauer, Alice Walton, the parents of Jeff Bezos, and a few others with very deep pockets.
Why in the world would any of these organizations ask you to retweet a message that would win $10 for them?
Ahem. The Reform and privatization industry is a hobby of the billionaires. It is not a “movement.” Its purpose is to destroy public education and eliminate unions. It is a substitute for funding public schools, which 85% of American children choose.
If the money dried up, the entire edifice of privatization would shrivel and blow away.
Meanwhile, the Network for Public Education, whose annual revenues are not in the same league with the Reformers, would be delighted to receive your gift of $5, $10, $20, $50, $100. If 100 people give $10 each, that’s $1,000. That means a lot to us. Unlike the Reformer groups mentioned above, we don’t have office space. We have a Post Office Box. Not a penny of your donation will be wasted on exorbitant salaries or lavish facilities. We have no facilities! We have 1.5 staff members, and none of them is paid a six-figure salary. We are a lean, keen organization. Every dollar you give will support our work to protect, support, and improve public schools.
Make the Network for Public Education your charity of choice this year. We need the money. Don’t be fooled. We are the Davids of education. And you know how that turned out!
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Don’t mess with Dr. D.
D, as in David.
Amen to that!
I think someone has a poor grasp of symbolism, in particular, metonymy.
Reform actually is a movement. A bowel movement.
Now you have gone from “Sone” to “Sane”.
What next: insane?
The pen may be mightier than the sword, but is it mightier than billionaires with a bottomless supply of cash? The problem with “reform” is that it is a house of cards built on lies. People are starting to see through all the marketing and self promotion, and that is what is needed. We need large numbers of people to resist “reform,” as well as those that will fight for their right to attend an authentic public school. We need to unite unions, social justice and parent groups to work together for this common cause. We also need to remove complicit politicians. With gerrymandering this is a difficult task. We need new policies that stop incentivizing the destruction of our public schools through tax credits and write-offs. We must stop inviting the fox into the hen house to feast on our common goods.
Tony Thurmond won in CA by a slim margin, but he won nevertheless despite $50-60 million spent to spin lies about him.
His team had half as much money and they didn’t lie about Tuck’s record as a charter school leader.
The billionaires can be beaten.
Amy Frogge proved it in Tennessee, where she was outspent 5-1.
The teachers and parents proved it in Massachusetts, where the billionaires threw money into a 2016 referendum to expand the number of charters by 12 a year forever, and they were beaten 2-1.
The Reform Movement
Reform is a movement
Of stomach and bowels
Intestine infusement
That belches and growls
Are you calling rephorm a piece of sh–? Snigger.
The same blarney goes on in NJ. The NJEA is portrayed as the big satan, the behemoth, goliath, this huge menacing King Kong ready to take down politicians and whole cities with one fell swoop. As for the power of the billionaire reformers, NOTHING, just crickets. “Journalist” Tom Moran of the Star Ledger has major NJEA obsession syndrome and constantly bashes the NJEA as a monstrous ape with too much power. I don’t recall him ever even mentioning the power of the billionaire reformers and all their myriad front groups.
Happens in Utah, too, which is really strange, because UEA has almost no power, and often aligns with the legislature on issues. And only about 55% of teachers are members. Yet, when there’s some educational issue, everyone blames the “power” of the powerless UEA. Go figure.
And Mike Petrilli was well paid to say all this, right? Anyone here being paid to make the comments we’re making?
I predict Petrilli’s end will be similar to Lee Atwater’s…distinguished by the absence of the power brokers who paid him. Atwater is remembered by both the public and his employers, as synonymous with something foul.
Although Lee Atwater was widely known, and was once admired by his fellow conservatives and feared by liberals. Petrilli is none of those things.
Casting opponents of the privatization of K-12 educations as defenders of the status quo is a fraud. The status quo in American education is inequity, supported by the inherent inequality of funding schools through widely divergent local property taxes, neighborhood segregation, growing income inequality, low and stagnant wages, and lack of adequate health and childcare for all. More charter schools and vouchers for private schools exacerbate rather than ameliorate those conditions.
A primary goal of privatization is to undermine unions, one of the remaining economic and political bulwarks against the unfettered march of inequality and its supporting partners, segregation and deregulation.
The status quo that privatizers want to disrupt– public, democratically governed schools– is one of the few remaining arenas of public life that has not been thoroughly monetized and plundered for maximum profit for wealthy investors.
Privatizers know the most folks value their local schools and want to keep them public, so they cynically lie and wrap their real goals in obfuscating rhetoric. Or, they are so blinded by their market ideology that they believe their own, bs.
Don’t forget that it’s immaterial whether Petrilli and his folk believe what they’re saying or not. They’re actors mouthing lines from a script, as they’re paid to do. After years of that, they probably HAVE no actual beliefs. Arguing with them, or even pondering what their motivations are, is pointless — it would be like jumping onstage during a theater production and arguing with the actors playing their parts.
Great metaphor, CarolineSF.
Mr. Petrelli and his Movement are intellectually dishonest. He and they care more about perception than fairness or truth. Additionally he faces no accountability — other than on here — for his dishonesty. He’s a strong contender for the non-Billionaires wing of the Destroy American Education Hall of Fame.
And may I add that they are morally deficient.
To be sure. And self-important and patronizing. Oblivious to the damage they’ve done.
I live 20 mins away from Mike Petrilli and the public schools that his children attend. I would be pulled over and questioned for driving my 14 yo mini van in his area of town (LOL!). His children attend public school with “0” FARMS children and their PTA has coffers overflowing with money for fun activities and events. His area of town is secluded from the rest of Montgomery Co (MD) due to housing and rent costs in the area. What’s good for the goose is NOT good for the gander in Mike’s world. He is not oblivious to the damage that has been done…he knows what he (and his ilk) have done and he’s proud to flaunt it. He’s a “wanna be” and a “suck up” but he will NEVER be accepted into the Billionaire’s Club…..and that just eats away at him.
The wannabes like Mike Petrilli are the worst. Petrilli’s belief in charter schools is as deep as the pockets of his billionaire funders. If they decided to say the moon was made of green cheese and kids do better if they are taught that, and those billionaires funded faux researchers at a college to prove that charters that taught their students that the moon is made of green cheese have higher test scores than public schools who refuse to teach their students that the moon is made of green cheese, Petrilli would happily promote that study. He is an organization man with absolutely no soul.
The NPE ismy choice. WE the people and the teachers need to make it the VOICE of the COMMON GOOD…our Goliath!
Ask Petrilli to send you a list of pro-public education (anti-charter) voices who get paid to blog or otherwise write for the public education side, along with the assets those people command. Let’s compare that to The 74 and Education Next and Bellwether Education and DFER and all the other rephormer outlets.
Good idea. I know many of the pro-public school bloggers. I don’t know of any who are paid to write. Peter Greene, Steven Singer, Mercedes Schneider, Gary Rubinstein, me, Mitchell Robinson, Anthony Cody, on and on. No one is paid. But those who write for The 74 or EdNext or Education Post are paid. We believe in intrinsic motivation. The Reformers don’t. If they didn’t pay, no one would write for them.
Mike Petrilli is not Goliath. He is actually, figuratively speaking, a very small person. But billionaires built a Goliath of a Trojan horse and filled it with Petrilli, Rhee, and a whole army of small-minded, small-souled people. The Trojan horse is massive. It rolls into a city and wreaks destruction. To be honest, David and the supporters of public schools can’t kill the billionaires’ army with one stone. It will take collective resistance.
Well said, LCT.
A significant number of people are on the privatization gravy train. Some are paid $200,000, $300,000, or more to disrupt the lives of hard-working teachers who actually add social value, whereas the disrupters have no social value at all.
This is a suggestion to consider.
I know you are against running ads on your site, but if you ran ads on your site with the number of followers you have, all of the funds earned from those ads could also go toward the Network for Public Education.
If your followers were all aware of the purpose of running these ads, most of us — with the exception of a few trolls that hang around here in an attempt to cause confusion and discord — would probable support those ads by letting them run long enough to pay out.
I have no idea if you would have any control over the ads that would run. If you have no control, then this might not be a good idea, but if you could block ads that you do not agree with, then maybe it would work.
I like the freedom of no ads, no debts, no commercials. Barely have any graphics. Just the words and the ideas.
“Just the words and the ideas.”
Diane is a teacher.
Shorter Petrilli: We’re just a bunch of timecard punching Joe Six-packs doing our best to get by, I’m tellin’ ya! And don’t throw me into the briar patch!
Is Petrilli channeling Meghan McCain? She’s got the same schtick- “poor me, everybody is against me.” Petrilli’s other blather tactic is summed up as, there’s no point in trying to oppose deform, “the train has left the station”. Evidently, Petrilli isn’t paid for message consistency nor originality.