Ann O’Leary is Chief of Staff to California Governor Gavin Newsom. Previously she was education advisor to Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. She is a lawyer and a very accomplished person, with a long history in Democratic politics. She was leading the Clinton transition team right before the election of 2016. For several years, she was a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, which strongly defends charter schools and Obama’s failed Race to the Top program.
During the 2016 campaign, when it was clear Hillary would be the nominee, Carol Burris of the Network for Public Education and I went to see O’Leary at the Clinton headquarters in Brooklyn. We tried to persuade her that Hillary should oppose charters. After all, school choice is a Republican priority. It is supported by the Waltons, the Koch brothers, ALEC, the DeVos family, and every Red State Governor. Democrats should support public schools, we argued, not privatization. We failed. We went back again, after the convention. O’Leary was unmovable. The best we could get from her was a promise that Hillary would oppose for-profit charters.
We knew that was a meaningless offer, because large numbers of nonprofit charters hire for-profit management companies.
We were thrilled when Gavin Newsom and Tony Thurmond were elected, because the charter industry placed its bets on Antonio Villaraigosa for Governor, who ran third, and on Marshall Tuck for Secretary of Education. Tuck’s campaign spent twice as much as Thurmond’s and vilified him with false advertising. Thurmond barely beat Tuck, the charter industry’s favorite and former leader of a charter chain.
Newsom promised to create a task force to advise on reforming the state’s notoriously weak charter law, which has enabled fraud, embezzlement, and grifters to cash in. Thurmond would chair the task force.
But then the task force was named, and it was clear that the charter industry was running the show. Of the 11 members, seven are connected to the charter industry. Two appointees are directly employed by the charter lobby.
Here are the members:
The task force members are:
- Cristina de Jesus, president and chief executive officer, Green Dot Public Schools California (charter chain);
- Dolores Duran, California School Employees Association;
- Margaret Fortune, California Charter Schools Association board chair; Fortune School of Education, president & CEO (charter lobby);
- Lester Garcia, political director, SEIU Local 99 (Local 99 took $100,000 from Eli Broad to oppose Jackie Goldberg, a critic of charters, and its former national president, Andy Stern, is CEO of the Eli Broad Center);
- Alia Griffing, political director, American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) Council 57;
- Beth Hunkapiller, educator and administrator, Aspire Public Schools (charter chain);
- Erika Jones, board of directors, California Teachers Association;
- Ed Manansala, superintendent, El Dorado County; the El Dorado County Office set up a Special Education Local Plan Area (SELPA) specifically to service students with disabilities in charter schools and wooed charter students away from their local districts, even students who live hundreds of miles away;
- Cindy Marten, superintendent, San Diego Unified School District;
- Gina Plate, vice president of special education, California Charter Schools Association (charter lobby);
- Edgar Zazueta, senior director, policy & governmental relations, Association of California School Administrators (ACSA endorsed Marshall Tuck against Tony Thurmond).
Only four members of the task force are not connected, politically or financially, to the charter industry: Cindy Marten; Dolores Duran; Alia Griffing; and Erika Jones.
Who selected this skewed task force?
A tip came from someone with a direct line to the Governor’s Office.
Ann O’Leary.
Ann, I hope you read this because I want you to know that you are protecting an industry that tolerates corruption and malfeasance.
Please read this report, “Charters and Consequences,” written by Carol Burris, which begins with a description of charter operators in California who hire family members, run multiple charters with appallingly low graduation rates and continues to describe a state law that is sorely in need of real reform.
Why does California have a law that ignores graft and corruption? The California Charter Schools Association fought any reform. Yet you put the chair of the board of this lobby on the task force to reform the charter law! And to make it worse, you added another employee of CCSA! This is the lobby that fought any reform of the law, that fought previous efforts to ban nepotism and conflicts of interest, that fought accountability and transparency.
And now the Network for Public Education has documented how charter operators in California have wasted millions of federal dollars.
Nationally, about one-third of federally-funded charter schools either never opened or closed soon after getting the money. In California alone, the state with the most charter schools, the failure rate for federally funded charters is 39%.
California charters won almost $326 million from the federal Charter School Program between 2006-2014. To be exact: $325,812,827. Of that amount, $108,518,463 went to 306 charter schools that either never opened or soon shut down. Of that 306, 75 never opened at all. But the charter operator kept the money.
In addition, the ACLU of Southern California in its 2016 report, ”Unequal Access,” identified 253 charters in the state that engage in discriminatory—often illegal—practices. That number, they said, was the tip of the iceberg, because these were the charters that put their discriminatory policies on their website! Thirty-four California charter schools that received federal CSP grants appear on the ACLU of Southern California’s updated list of charters that discriminate—in some cases illegally—in admissions.
One can only imagine how much the waste has grown since 2014, with the Obama and Trump administrations adding even more millions to expand charters that divert resources from public schools.
So, this is on you, Ann.
Will the task force protect the charter industry? Will it come up with meaningless “reforms” that do nothing to rein in waste, fraud, and abuse?
Will it protect the power of districts to authorize charters in other districts, far away, without the permission of the receiving district, so the authorizers gets a fee and the charter has no oversight?
Will it continue to allow charters to open with no consideration of the fiscal impact on the district where it chooses to open?
Will it continue to allow endless appeals when the host district rejects a new charter?
Will it continue to allow corporate chains to Walmartize what were once public schools? Will it continue to allow non-educators to open and operate charter schools?
Will it ignore the expansion of Gulen schools, schools run by a Turkish imam who lives in seclusion in Pennsylvania, schools which import Turkish teachers and relies on Turkish boards?
Is it possible for a task force to regulate an industry when industry insiders are a majority of the task force?
I know you are very busy, but I hope you will take the time to think about these questions and respond.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Thanks to the NPE, some are squirming. If I were O’leary, I would be really leery. Time for Ann to squirm. Where are the political leaders who can gain power by making her squirm? This is why politicians listen. It is about power. Threaten power, politicians listen. Fail in this attempt, and you get nothing. Nothing gained will one day lead to the crashing of a corrupt regime.
Keep up this good fight. It has seemed to me for some time that Democrats headed down the wrong path with their views on education and education reform. My hunch is that the choice of the path taken had to do with big-money and little else. I remain saddened that the direction of progressive education was abandoned (see Ira Shor’s important book, Culture Wars: School and Society in the Conservative Restoration, for good background) by the Democratic Party in favor of the hype and hypocrisy fueled initially by the Big Scare of A Nation At-Risk (a marketing coupe that Progressives could not reply to in an effective manner). Yes, we now need to keep up the attack on charters and charterism. But we also need the more proactive direction of emphasizing the importance of building civic literacy in relation to saving the heart and soul of a democratic society. Where should the Democratic Party be on this path? If it wants to lead the way, its leadership has to do its homework: for starters read John Dewey; read Henri Giroux; study up on Stephen M. Corey and the Horace Mann-Lincoln Institute for School Improvement; advocate for practitioner research in education (learn about the important work of the Madison Public Schools and action research). What I find so appalling at this crucial moment in our country’s history is the disinterest in doing the homework associated with building a movement. Yes, it is hard work and perhaps most people are just so damn discouraged about the state of the planet that they cannot see the value of going all in on reclaiming and rebuilding real democracy. I continue to hold on to some hope that this is not the case.
Her Wikipedia page says this: “After the 2016 election, O’Leary joined the Palo Alto office of an international law firm as a partner, where her practice focused on strategic consulting and crisis management.”
Interesting they don’t name the law firm, which was run by David Boies. This firm aggressively threatened reporters and other whistleblowers who helped uncover the massive Theranos fraud and the sexual abuses and assaults of Harvey Weinstein.
https://www.bsfllp.com/news-events/ann-oleary-to-join-boies-schiller-flexner.html
Boies Schiller Flexner is pleased to announce that Ann O’Leary will join the firm’s Palo Alto office as a partner. She will focus on providing legal counsel to leaders and organizations in the corporate, non-profit and philanthropic sectors, working at the intersection of policy, law, and politics to help them achieve their objectives. She will also assist clients in navigating high profile disputes, investigations, regulatory and compliance issues, and crisis management. For clients seeking to navigate policy and regulatory issues, her practice will serve as a bridge between Silicon Valley and Washington D.C.
…“I am very excited to join the go-to team of incredibly innovative and talented litigators who are called on to solve the toughest problems at the most critical times, and who also dedicate their legal talents to fighting for social justice in our country.” O’Leary said.
For more on this see: https://www.revolvy.com/page/Boies-Schiller-Flexner-LLP
Among other high-profile clients, Boies Schiller has long represented film producer Harvey Weinstein, against whom sexual abuse allegations were levied in October 2017. The New Yorker reported in November 2017 that Boies Schiller had, on Weinstein’s behalf, directed private intelligence companies, including Black Cube,[6] to spy on and orchestrate smear campaigns against alleged victims of Weinstein’s and on reporters who were investigating Weinstein’s actions.[7][8] The New York Times, which was at the same time a target of the reported espionage and a client of Boies Schiller’s, considered this “intolerable conduct”.[9] The New York Times announced a few days later it had “terminated its relationship” with Boies’ firm.[10]
Boies Schiller, and specifically David Boies himself, notably represented Theranos for several years, including against the fraud claims that toppled the blood-testing company. In Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by Wall Street Journal investigative reporter John Carreyrou, the firm is described as protecting the startup using surveillance of witnesses and journalists, weaponized use of non-disclosure agreements and affidavits, intimidation tactics, and other heavy-handed practices. Boies Schiller is portrayed by Carreyrou as acting as an extension of Theranos, including the use of the law firm’s New York offices for hosting promotional meetings such as a faked blood test administered to Fortune writer Roger Parloff. According to Carreyrou, the firm agreed to be paid in Theranos stock, and Boies himself served on the Theranos board of directors,[11] raising questions about conflicts of interest.[4] Boies Schiller ended its representation of Theranos in November 2016 due to disagreements about legal strategy.[12] Former Theranos general counsel Heather King was hired back by Boies Schiller after having served as the general counsel at Theranos.[13] King had previously been a lawyer at Boies Schiller during its representation of Theranos, and she, David Boies, and lawyer Michael Brille featured prominently in Bad Blood.[14]
“fighting for social justice” – who are Ann O’Leary and Neera Tanden deluding?
Amazing sleuthing. Not in California but these power plays are not unique to that state. Thank you for connecting so many dots.
The problem for progressives is that charters have been heavily marketed to black voters as “black control of black education” which they believe solves all problems. Black people often see the education gap naturally as a race gap which only exists due to white supremacy or benign neglect. They are irritated by social class and poverty explanations which they believe remove the centrality of race. Some leaders notably the NAACP see through this bull spit scam . They are well aware of the Wall St billionaire connections, the lack of certified teachers, the endless scams and failure and the data that shows no improvement. Still Democratic pols like Hillary are deeply afraid of offending a critical demographic in D politics – the black female primary voter. This will take time to unwind and to get black people to trust mainline public education. They have been burned too many times.
The Ravitch blog posted a paper written by Dr. Keith Benson on 2-16-2019, “To the Education Reform Establishment: Be Real with Who You Are and Who’s Interest You Represent”. Every American should read it.
Doug,
You are so right.
When Cynthia Nixon ran against Cuom in the Democratic primary last fall, she understated her opposition to charters because of her fear about alienating black mothers who pinned their hopes on charter promises.
Many Democrats are also afraid of alienating the deep pockets of the hedge funds on Wall St and Silicon Valley. They are all in on privatization as they have personally gained from the grand flawed experiments on mostly minority students.
Tech monopolists and the Koch’s govern the United States.
O’Leary knows that Tom Daschle, CAP’s current board chair, founded a bipartisan lobby shop? She’s smart enough to deduce that the legislation and policies desired, by paying clients, are easier to satisfy if there’s bipartisan support.
If she doesn’t know that the Bipartisan Policy Center just initiated an interest in higher education and Gates and Arnold sponsored one of the sessions, I would be surprised.
If she doesn’t know about PPIC’s recent proposal for the elimination of diverse representation and consensus decision making in state higher education, favoring an outside council, I would also be surprised.
Thank you Diane for naming the individuals and organizations that threaten democracy.
As Laura Chapman posted yesterday in a comment, the rightwing, anti-Union Walton Family is a major donor to CAP. The Waltons claim to have opened one of every four charters in the nation. I assume CAP does not want to jeopardize that funding.
Privatization enablers and apologists like O’Leary aren’t born; they are made. They are bought, to be specific. To be Aesopic, they are hatched — from shells of big finance and vulture capitalism. It’s impossible to change their minds because they are intoxicated by the scent of big money. O’Leary is reptilian in her support of charters.
Snakes do not evolve in a day. So, I hope not Ann O’Leary but Governor Newsom reads this post. He still has a chance to refrain from eating the forbidden fruit of greed his Snake of Staff is offering him. Newsom needs to get rid of O’Leary and support the teachers and parents who elected him, if he wants to stay in the garden of Sacramento, California.
If Newsom is a savvy politician that understands the pulse of the people, he will rid himself of O’Leary and work to fix California’s undemocratic and community crushing charter laws. People are tired of representatives failing to represent them.
Snakes on the take”
The Garden of Eden
Is fraught by a snake 🐍
When Apple 🍎 is eaten
The snake’s on the take
And the snake borrowed the apple with an IOU (that never gets paid) from the same source, the evil queen, that gave Snow White another poison apple.
“When Apple is eaten/ The snake’s on the take.” Same is true when eating Microsoft, Facebook and Netflix.
I sent an email to Newsom regarding Ann, but did not receive a response.
Leary of O’Leary
O’Leary
We’re leery
Of people you chose
Relieve us
Of Jesus
A wolf in sheep’s clothes
Good one!
The evidence strongly points out that Ann O’Leary is a corporate Democrat, or a (FAKE) Democrat in name only, and she is no different than a moderate Republicans that also belong to the Koch brothers or the Walton family.
Ann O’Leary is just another corrupted and deplorable elitist.
She won’t take the time to read or respond. If by chance she reads it she won’t comprehend it. Plain and simple.
I agree. Easy to ignore Diane. Not easy to ignore if there were some prominent progressives running for President who made it an issue.
Good thing for the DFERs she doesn’t have to worry about that.
She needs to be tested!
It will have to be an oral test because her hands will be tied behind her back and she will be tied to a stake while dry wood is piled around her feet and set on fire.
The first question: Do you feel the heat?
Again, as much as it pains me to write this, I’m glad Hillary Clinton didn’t get elected for this very reason. instead, we have a totally incompetent nincompoop as secretary of ed whose ignorance and billionaire-berthed background have drawn the necessary attention to the scam of ed reform.
Again, as much as it pains me to write this, I’m glad Hillary Clinton didn’t get elected for this very reason. instead, we have a totally incompetent nincompoop as secretary of ed whose ignorance and billionaire-berthed background have drawn the necessary attention to the scam of ed reform.
I don’t think Trump’s father was ever a billionaire. A multi-millionaire, yes.
Fred Trump, an alleged narcissist, psychopath and racist, appeared on the initial Forbes 400 list of richest Americans in 1982 with an estimated $200 million fortune shared with his son Donald.
Donald was the child who was another crook and con like his father but much worse. Donald is a malignant narcissist, psychopath, and racist (no alleged here).
In 1976, Fred Trump had set up trust funds of $1 million for each of his five children and three grandchildren ($4.4 million in 2018 dollars), that paid out yearly dividends. By 1993, the siblings’ anticipated shares of Trump’s estate amounted to $35 million each. Upon Trump’s death in 1999, his will divided $20 million after taxes among his surviving children.
And, I do not think Donald Trump has ever been a billionaire unless we can count his illegal profits from money laundering and the fact that he was the recipient of almost a billion in corporate welfare (tax breaks for building hotels and casinos that later went bankrupt) followed by his bankruptcies that cost US banks another billion in losses while Donald was paying himself more than $10 million annually while the failing businesses did not pay their bills or keep up with the payments on the bank loans.
Is there such a thing as an anti-billionaire who lost billions but never actually had a billion through property he owned and cash.
“whose ignorance and billionaire-berthed background have drawn the necessary attention to the scam of ed reform.”
What “attention” has DeVos drawn except continuing the worst policies of Arne Duncan and the DFERs and then adding even more terrible policies that are hurting so many kids?
If you were right, then you’d have at least one progressive candidate in the Democratic primary willing to call out ed reformers and DFERs. Instead, they embrace DFERs and support them in primaries running against pro-public education Democrats. They mouth the same platitudes about “good public charters” that DFERs do.
When you find one progressive politician running for President in 2020 who is drawing any attention to the “scam of ed reform”, please let me know, since I’d like to find one I can support. Maybe they don’t want as much “testing” because now that charters have cherry picked the highest testers, they just want to expand and attract affluent parents who don’t like testing. But testing or not testing is irrelevant when their bottom line is to expand charters and undermine public schools. If not supporting testing still gets the privatizers to increase “market share”, they will do it.
Until any Democrat actually says “no more charters, period”, they are part of the problem and no different than Duncan. And Betsy DeVos will keep doing harm and it won’t change one thing except hurt even more children.
It sure is easy for the ed reformers to oppose Betsy DeVos and still promote charters. Anyone who believes she is HELPING is ignoring the fact that the progressives and DFER Dems are entirely in agreement when they criticize her.
When I hear one progressive politician willing to criticize DFER and “public charters”, I will believe that having Betsy DeVos hurting so many children is a “good” thing.
It would have been much better to have a DFER in power so that the progressives could fight against that this time instead of having their leaders embrace the “good public charters”. But having progressives join with DFERs and mouth the very same pro-public charter platitudes is not a good thing. It just gives DFER more credibility when their viewpoint is repeated by progressives.
I am so glad that you are calling out O’Leary.
However, where are the progressive politicians on this? It is extremely easy for O’Leary to completely ignore everything you say because the major media is not pushing her on this. I am thrilled you aren’t letting this issue drop and keep posting about it, but I’m not seeing any real pressure on O’Leary or Newsom to respond.
If Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and other leaders whose criticisms are always reported by the media take this up, how fast would things change? At the very least, O’Leary and Newsom would have to publicly embrace the pro-charter movement and be seen for exactly what they are — people who enable privatizers and don’t care about public education. Tools of right wing billionaires. And the voters in the primary would see Kamala Harris and other candidates for what they are — either an enabler of charters or a supporter of public schools.
Bernie writes one letter to CAP and there are stories everywhere.
If he would speak out against charters with even 1/4 of the vigor he speaks out against CAP he could do a lot of good. I am concerned that Bernie’s vigorous defense of Corey Booker is a sign he will not stand up for public education. And if Bernie won’t, who will? Tim Kaine? Ralph Northam? Where are the progressives who should be criticizing O’Leary instead of refusing to take a stand? We don’t need any mealy mouth support of “teachers” or “public schools” by progressive politicians who want to pretend to be pro-public education but enable the worst practices of charters that undermine public schools. Ann O’Leary also mouths those some platitudes – they are useless.
Where are the progressives running for President who will endorse the NAACP’s moratorium on charters? Since those progressives aren’t enabling privatizers because their funders demand that they do so, then what is their reason? True believers?
I believe there is absolutely no way that the privatizers could withstand one prominent progressive politician with credibility calling them out. Because the groundswell in the public would force their hand. But fortunately for the privatizers, no progressive politicians seem to challenge them. Ann O’Leary can keep ignoring you as much as she wants knowing she will never be the object of any criticism from one of the Democratic primary candidates. When we figure out why none of those candidates — no matter how “progressive” they claim they are — will challenge these DFERs, then things might change.
I just don’t understand what is taking so long. How much more information do they need before they embrace the NAACP’s moratorium?
I feel really hopeful about AOC. But her elders in the progressive movement who are running for President are less than helpful. Their tacit support of “good public charters” gives the DFERs a progressive credibility they should not have.
The panel is pro-charter but it’s much LESS pro-charter than most ed reform panels.
Public schools aren’t even represented on most ed reform panels. They regularly hold entire discussions about public schools without a single public school supporter invited.
You’ll have the charter/voucher cheerleaders on one side and then the “agnostics” on the other. The “agnostics” will grudgingly allow that public schools may continue to exist, but certainly no one should support them or actually work on their behalf. That’s “both sides” in ed reform.
So, bad as it may seem, you’re making progress. One or two public school people managed to slip past the gatekeepers.
Excellent blogpost to O’Leary. Let’s keep the pressure on. More teacher strikes will do that.
Both the LA and Oakland strikers demanded a charter moratorium. The districts are being bled dry by charters.
Politicians are reneging on many parts of the strike agreements. There will be lawyers and formal grievances. Also ready to strike again. Still have my red shirts, sensible red shoes, and plenty of dry socks.
I’m trying to put myself in the shoes of an O’Leary: I think one non-cynical reason people like her might cling to charters is that we pro-public school advocates still don’t have a plausible plan for lifting up troubled schools. “More money” does not convince. “Cure poverty first” seems pie-in-the-sky. Some of “our” ideas are downright bad: e.g. restorative justice –a grand failure, from everything I’ve seen and heard. Shining a spotlight on charter mediocrity and corruption is good, but do we really have a pithy, positive case to make for a world without charters and testing? I think Step One is honestly and clearly looking at what’s actually happening in our schools –being truly scientific/empirical–something I’m not sure we’ve done. Only then will we be able to prescribe effective cures. Right now we have truthiness, but not the truth.
Charters are sucking money out of the system that enrolls 85-90% of all students, without producing better education, however it is defined. The burden is on O’Leary and her allies to explain why it makes sense to create a dual school system in which charters get preferential treatment, not on supporters of public education to explain why the principal institution supplying free public schools should not be undermined.
You’re right. However it seems to me that if we had something fresh and flashy to tout, we might have more success at dislodging reformer Dems from their entrenched positions.
By the way, Diane –returning to our discussion about the French film “The Class” –you said it was about disaffected Muslim kids in the Paris suburbs. I seemed to recall a scene in the movie where one of the newly hired teachers told the others was glad not to be teaching in the suburbs anymore –implying that he was now in a city school and that conditions were worse in the suburbs (as I’m sure you know, that’s how it is in France: the suburbs are notoriously rough, while the city proper is more gentrified). I just checked: the film was set in the 20th arrondissement. What you saw in that film was not the worst –by a long shot. That teacher actually had good rapport with the kids and got something out of them. In many classrooms it’s an ugly war and no learning occurs. Kids form a sort of wolf pack and destroy the teacher, at worst, or simply create mayhem all year and learn nothing (I think of This American Life’s Alex Bloomberg who taught science in Chicago for four years and thinks he didn’t manage to actually teach one thing in that time). These truths need to be faced honestly if we’re to make progress. It’s taboo to utter these truths. There’s a cult of the holy child that regards the truth as blasphemy. That’s why I loved the film –it’s a rare piece of honesty.
Carol Burris’ “Charters an Consequences,” report is a great resource describing the situation in California. Do you know of any similar work outlining the charter environment in my state, North Carolina?
I do not know of a similar description of NC charters.