What do you think the Walton Family Foundation has in mind when they seek out “innovative” approaches to schooling? We know that they speak their mind when they hand out millions every year to charter schools, school choice organizations, privatization advocacy groups, and Teach for America. They usually drop a few dollars in the bucket of their Bentonville, Arkansas, public schools, peanuts compared to the money for privatization.
Media Contact: Vanessa Steinhoff, 240-432-1428, vsteinhoff@wffmail.com
Walton Family Foundation Announces
#SchoolsIN Campaign to Inspire, Spotlight
Innovative Educational Approaches During COVID-19
Families, Students and Educators Invited to Share Their Creative, Surprising
and All-Too-Real Moments This School Year on Social Media
BENTONVILLE, Ark. – Today the Walton Family Foundation launched #SchoolsIN, a national campaign to provide inspiration, spotlight innovation and build an inclusive community in support of student learning. With COVID-19 shifting how learning happens across the country, the campaign is an opportunity to build awareness about creative approaches and emphasize the importance of continuing learning amid adversity.
“At this pivotal moment, America’s students, families and educators are reinventing when, where and how learning happens,” said Marc Sternberg, K-12 Education Program Director at the Walton Family Foundation. “As challenging as this school year is and will be, I’m inspired and energized by families and educators channeling frustration into inspiration in all settings. From parents to policymakers, we all must do whatever it takes to ensure learning continues and #SchoolsIN for students.”
The four-week campaign encourages families, students and educators to share on social media the ups and downs of keeping school in session – with a focus on student success during a difficult school year. From brilliant ideas to flashes of inspiration, and occasional moments of chaos, the campaign will chronicle and celebrate the wide range of experiences people across the country are having in all different types of educational settings, linked by the hashtag #SchoolsIN.
The Walton Family Foundation has been supporting innovative approaches to teaching and learning for over 30 years, guided by the belief that a great education can put opportunity and a self-determined life in reach for every child, regardless of background. The foundation works alongside and sources ideas from families, educators, innovators and community leaders who have a bold vision for student success. This surfaces new ideas and practices that challenge traditional assumptions about where and how learning happens and what’s possible for children.
To learn more, visit www.schoolsin.org.
# # #
About the Walton Family Foundation
The Walton Family Foundation is, at its core, a family-led foundation. Three generations of the descendants of our founders, Sam and Helen Walton, and their spouses, work together to lead the foundation and create access to opportunity for people and communities. We work in three areas: improving K-12 education, protecting rivers and oceans and the communities they support, and investing in our home region of Northwest Arkansas and the Arkansas-Mississippi Delta. In 2019, the foundation awarded more than $525 million in grants in support of these initiatives. To learn more, visit waltonfamilyfoundation.org and follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram….
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Want innovation? Disrupt inequity! http://www.arthurcamins.com/?p=521
🙂
It’s an advertisement for the Walton family. I guess it’s good they pay for their own advertising and promotion, but what does it have to do with students?
I heard an ad for the Walton Family on NPR, touting their good works. They underwrite NPR.
The “shareables” all include a plug for the Walton Foundation.
The Waltons wants parents and students to create content to promote the Walton Foundation.
If you’re teaching your children remotely I would think promoting the Walton Foundation would be a very low priority, but maybe that’s just me.
What a blow to all things “public”!
“Innovation” is the buzz that’s hypnotized public school boards. They are saying books are no longer relevant. SCHOOL FUNDING is paying for enormous amounts of technology and data storage with minimal security and no tracking of who gets access to what data. Tech replacement costs increase with the plan to force districts to broker deals for data.
Orwellian.
Tighten the laws governing student data.
ELIMINATE edtech captures of all student work and metadata. If they don’t have access to the data, public education profit margins sink.
Want disruptive innovation? Flood the Walton’s new cutesy website with praise for real public schools, not charters, not Teach for America, not the boot camps for tots and other rip-offs in the charter industry funded by the Waltons.
It celebrates how we’ve all adjusted to the complete lack of competent (or even vaguely… interested government) and managed to cobble together something approaching “school”.
Good job, say the Walton Family! See? We told you no one had to pay taxes!
Your government collapsed in a heap of corruption and incompetence but look at the bright side! You innovated!
Capitalism, driven by the twin obsessions of maximizing profit and reducing the cost of production by slashing workers’ rights and wages, is antithetical to the Christian Gospel, as well as the Enlightenment ethic defined by Immanuel Kant. But capitalism, in the hands of the Christian fascists, has become sacralized in the form of the Prosperity Gospel, the belief that Jesus came to minister to our material needs, blessing believers with wealth and power. The Prosperity Gospel delights the corporations that have carried out the slow-motion corporate coup.
This is why large corporations such as Tyson Foods, which places Christian right chaplains in its plants, Purdue, Walmart, and Sam’s Warehouse, along with many other corporations, pour money into the movement and its institutions such as Liberty University and Patrick Henry Law School. This is why corporations have given millions to groups such as the Judicial Crisis Network and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to campaign for Barrett’s appointment to the court. Barrett has ruled consistently in favor of corporations to cheat gig workers out of overtime, greenlight fossil fuel extraction and pollution and strip consumers of protection from corporate fraud. The watchdog group Accountable.US found that as a circuit court judge, Barrett “faced at least 55 cases in which citizens took on corporate entities in front of her court and 76% of the time she sided with the corporations.”
https://www.salon.com/2020/10/08/trumps-nomination-of-amy-coney-barrett-another-step-toward-christian-fascism/
I wonder how John Boy feels about all of this.
First they stole “Reform”. Now they steal “Innovation” I am taking back those terms where they belong. Very few are innovative and most don’t even know what “innovation” loos like, not to mention refor,.
http://www.wholechildreform.com designed when reform meant something. Five minutes on my wewbsite and you, too, will know what it supposed to look like. Innovation and reform may not be bought and sold and will not be cheapened by a narrow standardized test.
Nor do I offer consultants to come to your school at great expense. I believe public schools have teachers who know what to do and can implement innovation that I talk about in my book. Of course if you want me to talk to teachers, I will only ask for expenses.
That’s the difference between real innovation and real reform. Mine isn’t about money, charter is all about money. It’s time to stop politically driven education.
The Walton Family Foundation is a domestic enemy of the U.S. Constitution and the United States. It has worked for decades to subvert the country to become what they think it should be, not what the Constitution says and what the majority of the population wants.
“The foundation works alongside and sources ideas from families, educators, innovators and community leaders who have a bold vision for student success.”
Really?
“This surfaces new ideas and practices that challenge traditional assumptions about where and how learning happens and what’s possible for children.”
Name one.
“Innovation” is the most Orwellian word of our times–and that’s saying something! It is the shorthand term corporate interests pull out of their collective wazoos to justify any protectionist scheme to secure protective profits. It’s the word of choice for pharma, education privatization, and fossil fuel frackers, just to name a few. If you see the words “innovation,” “innovative,” or “innovating,” run fast and run far. It means the distractive fix is in.
This from Edweek should make everyone’s day:
SNIPS: “. . . The pandemic has forced a rapid digital transformation in K-12 education, the likes of which no one has seen in the past, she noted. And Salesforce hopes to invest in companies addressing challenges brought on by the pandemic. It has recently made several splashes in the education sphere.
“Salesforce Ventures is currently considering investments in five or six companies out of its second venture fund, but will probably ultimately finance more than 20 companies total out of the fund, according to Emeott.
“Salesforce Ventures typically cuts its first checks to companies between the Series A and Series C investment stages, she said. Investors check in with portfolio companies quarterly to vet progress on financial, social impact-related, and strategic growth deliverables, Emeott said.
“But Salesforce also communicates periodically with companies to connect them with product and marketing partners, as well as to provide informal advice on things like pricing and succeeding in the software-as-a-service realm, she said, which is Salesforce’s main focus.” END Quote
https://marketbrief.edweek.org/marketplace-k-12/salesforce-launches-new-100-million-education-investment-fund/?cmp=eml-enl-eu-news3&M=59716642&U=&UUID=19a3bfa50e7c3500ca6359b823d96d69