A friend share this link about a program in which the United Negro College Fund is funded by the far-right Walton Family Foundation to give summer internships to young African Americans to work in organizations that undermine public education, unions, and the teaching profession. The purpose of the program is to build a “robust pipeline of African Americans engaged in education reform in America.”
All of the summer interns will serve with trusted arms of the ultra-conservative movement.
Summer Internship – One of the principal elements of the paid summer internship program that exposes fellows to professional careers at leading K-12 education organizations and schools focused on education reform. Specifically, fellows are deployed as interns to organizations and schools located in such cities as Boston, New York, Washington, DC, Atlanta, New Orleans, Chicago, Indianapolis, Memphis and Nashville. Examples of internship host organizations include Teach for America, New Schools Venture Fund, Paul Public Charter School, BUILD, Black Alliance for Educational Options, Thomas B. Fordham Research Institute and Stand for Children. During their internships, fellows apply what they have learned, acquire new skills, gain an understanding of the professional needs of education reform organizations and make meaningful contributions.
You can be certain that none of these bright young people will be assigned as interns at the NAACP, which called for a moratorium on charter schools in 2016.
Nor will any be detailed to work for Journey for Justice, a grassroots civil rights group that fights for democratically controlled community public schools.
Nor do I expect that any will have a chance to learn about the Walton assault on public education by spending a summer as an intern for the Network for Public Education.
They are not likely to have the chance to offer their services at any of the scores of local and state organizations that are fighting the power of billionaires like the Waltons and could really use their help.
Instead they will be trained up by the faithful servants of the privatizers and the oligarchy.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
These young people will be pawns in the Waltons’ assault on public education. The Waltons will use them to legitimize their mission to destroy public schools in African American communities. They will be ambassadors of privatization.
This sounds just like Relay Graduate School of Education.
“Trained” really means having their brains hacked.
“Brain hacking is also used by external parties such as marketers and product designers to influence individual behavior.”
The product, in this case, is publicly funded private sector schools that the few (the Waltons, et al) control … instead of the public.
“Four new human rights proposed to protect us from mind reading and brain hacking”
The human brain is an enigma wrapped in a skull, but the field of neuroscience is beginning to unravel its secrets. What we learn could be used for good … or for bad.
https://newatlas.com/neuroscience-human-rights/49235/
Don’t you wish that someone –perhaps the NAACP–would reach out and warn these earnest young people that they are being sucked into an evil regime?
Yes, but would they listen?
Remember, the recruits are between the ages of 18 and 25 so their ability to listen to a logically reasoned warning means many will follow the false promises and misinformation because it sounds so good.
The recruiters working for the Waltons (probably paid a bonus based on the number of recruits they trick to sign up) offer great-sounding [false] promises and misinformation to these young people to lure then in until it is too late.
The ones that wake up (probably the same ratio of TFA recruits that drop out before finishing their first two years as a teacher) after they signed on the dotted line will be dumped and cast aside. They probably were all required to sign nondisclosure forms so they risk being dragged into court if they go public with what they discovered after it was too late.
Wouldn’t it be nice if the United Negro College Fund didn’t allow white-power billionaires to infiltrate the organization.
Gates has given many millions to UNCF. Someone mentioned the amount in an earlier comment. It was large.
This is the 2019 modern day version of the American colonists bribing chiefs in Africa to give up their people in exchange for gold, or else the chiefs themselves would be captured, enslaved, or executed.
The Waltons are a VILE clan.
Say it again. The Waltons are greedy, unscrupulousness, unprincipled, inhumane, evil.
Diane,
Reach out to the NAACP and use your celebrity to start a conversation with them!
Walmart and the Chinese Red Army on Frontline:
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/walmart/secrets/wmchina.html
I’m nitpicking. There is no Chinese Red Army. China has always called its army the PLA, the People’s Liberation Army.
Walmart and China: A Joint Venture … the link is posted in my last comment.
Here’s more:
https://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-walmart-china-20160601-story.html
https://corporate.walmart.com/newsroom/2018/08/09/walmart-increases-investment-in-dada-jd-daojia-to-strengthen-omni-channel-approach-in-china
This investment in the United Negro College Fund differs from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation gifts to the Fund to date– $1,392,513,031–some for the Fund’s operating expenses, but most for a scholarship/mentoring program “Gates Millennium Scholars” (until 2016), and the newer Gates Scholarships https://www.thegatesscholarship.org/scholarship
The model for the Walton Foundation seems to be a short-term (and on the cheap) variant of the ” Leadership for Educational Equity” program. LEE is available to TFA alums. LEE trains Teach for America alums to become founders of charter schools, or staff to elected officials, or candidates for elective office, where they can shape policies and design alternative schemes for governing schools.
All of the host organizations for the Walton summer internships are hell-bent on undermining public education. They also play a role in increasing racial segregation, not only through propagating charter schools but also with false promises about educational choice. Choice means that schools and education service providers choose their students.
I doubt that students who take the bait for the Walton summer internship will encounter any information about the role of charter schools in increasing segregation, recently documented in this research: “Socioeconomic Segregation and School Choice in American Public Schools,” by Dave E. Marcotte, Kari Dalane First Published October 23, 2019, in Educational Researcher https://doi.org/10.3102/0013189X19879714
Abstract (partial)
“We examine the effect of the expansion of charter schools on socioeconomic segregation in American public education. Using a district-level panel data set from 1998 to 2015, we describe and model changes in within-district segregation of low-income students, proxied by free-lunch eligibility (FLE). We show that the segregation of FLE students from non-FLE students increased by about 15% in large school districts and find that charter school penetration and growth played a role in increasing socioeconomic segregation within districts.” … From the conclusion: “In sum our results provide clear evidence that at the national level, charter school growth had increased socioeconomic segregation”…and “that in the largest school districts in the country, socioeconomic segregation grew faster in the charter sector that in traditional public schools.”
There ought to be a warning sign on the application.
You are a seeking an internship sponsored by groups and people who favor segregated schools. They will pay you for a summer internship where you will learn tricks of the trade in expanding charter schools, many of these designed to demean black and Hispanic children and nullify the efforts of people who have died to nurture a Civil Rights movement on behalf of de-segregated schools.
Here’s another article that you won’t find on the syllabus at the Walton summer internship.
https://southernspaces.org/2019/segregationists-libertarians-and-modern-school-choice-movement/?fbclid=IwAR2M4-XxDt9isuO5G388pwDbwvYk_bRuUbe9EIm1OBsTMgLhUUgR-HxCkQ8
How did segregationist vouchers become a new civil right? How did Milton Friedman, libertarians, and evangelical Christians bolster and legitimize the goals, strategies, and tactics of school segregationists? How are public schools threatened by “school choice”? Steve Suitts examines the history of efforts to publicly fund private schools and the implications of resistance to desegregation for the current “school choice” movement.
Suitts’ article is very important. I posted it here about a month ago.
So disgusting! Reminds me of the strange interest billionaire privatizers have recently shown in aligning with black churches – in spite of the NAACP moratorium on charters….