This article was co-authored by a group of educators who oppose privatization. They have identified the primary driver of privatization in their different communities: The City Fund, subsidized primarily by corporate “reformers” Reed Hastings and John Arnold. The City Fund is led by experienced privatizers who have tried their hand in places like Tennessee and New Orleans, where the PR was great but the results were not. It opened its operations with $200 million in hand from its funders. Lots of money, no members, and a charge to go out into the nation and find cities where they could disrupt the local school board elections by underwriting advocates of privatization. They are undermining public schools and democracy at the same time. They should hang their heads in shame. They won’t.
The authors of the following are: Dr. Tracee Miller was an elected member of the St. Louis Board of Education. Dr. Keith Benson is president of the Camden Education Association. Christina Smith is Secretary of Indianapolis Public Schools Community Coalition. Dawn Chanet Collins, East Baton Rouge Parish School System Board Member and Candidate for Metro-Council 6. Bobby Blount is a San Antonio Northside ISD Trustee. Don Macleay is a member of Oakland Public Schools Action 2020.
They wrote the following article:
Education Privatization: Eerie Similarities in Stories from 15 Major US Cities
A new education reform movement has made its way across the country whose goal is not reform, but privatization. That coalition is led by billionaires forcing their extreme market bias onto our school system. Its framework steers tax dollars away from the public schools and toward their chosen consultants, partner groups, curricula, and other products and services without oversight from elected officials. The movement manifests in the expansion of charter schools and their enrollment, division of public districts into factions, incubation of community advocacy groups, promotion of anti-public school legislation, and influencing of state and local campaigns.
To say that the proponents of this model engage in deceptive tactics would be a gross understatement. Aside from disguising their approach with buzzwords like innovation, transformation, and social justice, they funnel money through PACs, then through individuals and groups, to make their funding difficult to trace. This shroud of financial and ideological secrecy also makes the money, desperately needed in public education, easier for schools and organizations to accept.
One major national funder of this reactionary education philosophy is The City Fund. The City Fund distributes money from corporate school reform philanthropists, such as John Arnold and Reed Hastings, to local city organizations to accomplish the goals listed above. Its political organization, Public School Allies, makes campaign contributions to local school board candidates who are likely to adopt the same philosophy. “Reform” money has changed what used to be $1,500 local campaigns into $20,000 races for school board.The model being promoted by The City Fund and its affiliated organizations has been seen nearly to fruition in New Orleans and Indianapolis, and the stories being played out in other cities where The City Fund operates are eerily similar.
We are education experts and advocates who represent cities and schools across the country that are being impacted by this movement and we refuse to be complicit. Our stories from Camden, Oakland, Indianapolis, San Antonio, Baton Rouge, and St. Louis account for only a fraction of the cities where these movements are underway, and we hope that sharing our experiences will help others recognize the tactics wherever they appear.
Recent articles about The City Fund and its influence in St. Louis and in local school board races inspired us to contact each other. What we discovered is unsettling. The organizations funded by The City Fund present themselves as local grassroots organizations when nothing could be further from the truth. While propping up these local organizations with millions of dollars, The City Fund also places its own supporters on the organizations’ boards to influence their ideology and decision-making. These groups and their partner community advocacy groups have equivalents in at least 15 cities. A few examples of umbrella groups sponsored by The City Fund include The Mind Trust in Indianapolis, the Camden Education Fund in Camden, City Education Partners in San Antonio, redefinED in Atlanta, RootED in Denver, The Opportunity Trust in St. Louis, San Joaquin A+ in Stockton, REACH in Oakland, and New Schools in Baton Rouge.
Naming more equivalent organizations here would be unhelpful, but recognizing their actions is critical to identifying their influence. In addition to the strategies listed earlier, organizations affiliated with The City Fund have engaged in a variety of similar behaviors. In most locations they have created a school-finder tool and promoted a common application for traditional and charter schools. These groups host community events or support the publishing of reports where skewed data imply the deterioration of public education, and often push the idea that charters are the only solution. They make similar demands of school boards and of individual board members to conform with their ideals, and react with similar misinformation when confronted by the public or the media. The uniformity across cities is so striking that on several of our joint calls there was audible relief when one of us realized we weren’t the sole target of this deception.
These organizations are not home-grown local groups established to solve local problems, but are experts at pretending to be. While they employ well-meaning advocates who are energized by words like equity or opportunity and promote themselves as organizations who seek to understand community sentiment, these groups are the local arms of The City Fund, whose model seeks to, and has experienced frightening success in, advancing the privatization of public education. With privatization comes the loss of local control and democratic ideals.
The City Fund does not make it clear when it is investing in a city; fortunately, we have the opportunity to learn from each other and to stop the corruption before it becomes so deeply embedded in our systems that it can’t be reversed. The individuals peddling their agenda under the guise of education equity will continue to steer public dollars toward their private programs and gain financial and political capital until we decide public education is too important to jeopardize for a scheme. We are all complicit in the perpetuation of inequity if we choose to let this continue now that we know the truth.
Co-authored by:
Dr. Tracee Miller, former member of the Board of Education for St. Louis Public Schools;
Dr. Keith Benson, President of the Camden Education Association and author of Reform and Gentrification in the Age of #CamdenRising: Public Education and Urban Redevelopment in Camden, NJ;
Christina Smith, Secretary of Indianapolis Public Schools Community Coalition;
Dawn Chanet Collins, East Baton Rouge Parish School System Board Member and Candidate for Metro-Council 6;
Bobby Blount, San Antonio Northside ISD Trustee;
Don Macleay, Oakland Public Schools Action 2020.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Its political organization, Public School Allies, ”
“Public school allies”.
I wonder which political consultant on the ed reform marketing team came up with that.
So incredibly cynical. They’re just right out front about tricking people.
If ed reform and privatization are so super-awesome, why do they always hide their groups behind names that sound like they support public schools?
Why not just proudly admit the goal is to eradicate and then privatize public schools? Then at least people would know who they’re hiring/electing.
I prefer Betsy DeVos to the “liberal” ed reformers. She opposed the existence public schools and she opposed the existence of labor unions and she didn’t hide behind “reforming” or “reinventing”.
If we’re going to adopt Barry Goldwater’s education agenda the least we could do is admit it and allow some kind of real debate over whether public, K-12 education should be privatized. We can’t have a real debate because no one in ed reform will admit this “movement” culminates with the eradication of public schools. They move closer to that goal every single year and there’s NO dissent in the ed reform ranks.
They discuss how to privatize or how quickly to privatize or whether to regulate the private contractors, but there is NO debate on the overall goal, which is to replace public schools.
Ed reformers should run on privatizing schools. It’s the only thing they do. They provide no benefits or support to students in traditional public schools. They do nothing for our schools or students.
I agree.
best way to say it: “hiding” anti-public-school rhetoric behind words like reforming and reinventing
Two national ed reformers wrote an editorial in a national newspaper- “We Know What Works”. Perfect. Describes the arrogance and closed mindedness of this “movement” perfectly.
All ed reform decisions have been made before they even land in the communities they parachute into. There’s no real debate. They Know What Works.
Yes, the Ed “reformers” know what works to extract more money from their billionaire patrons.
They have no clue about what works to educate children.
Do you know Jill Biden’s opinion of privatization? Could she be an influential voice warning against it? Vice-President Harris?
Or is Washington too far gone with money overpowering power?
Do City Fund providers support President Biden, the supposed loss of which would influence his opinion?
I am impressed with the all the efforts being made to instruct against privatization, but are those efforts falling on the right ears, being read by the right eyes.
Any move towards more virtual de-socialization of young students, thereby negating eons of evolution’s building the culture sharing brain, should be aware of the long term effect of too much screen time.
Larry Vandevert, a brain researcher writes:
“Further, this predictive, cerebellar mechanism of socialization toward the norms of culture is hypothesized to be diminished among children who experience excessive television viewing, which results in lower grades, poor socialization, and diminished executive control”
That’s just television.
.
Correction: millions of years. Scratch eons. Brain got lazy.
The portfolio model of privatization has nothing to do with providing better options for students. It has everything to do with wrestling agency and power away from local democratic control and transferring it to privatizers. This sick, twisted plan is possible because public schools have been starved for years, and our government has permitted our students to be monetized. Privatizers follow the easiest targets that are generally cities with the poorest Black and brown students. I do not understand how such racist policy is tolerated as the process largely creates separate and unequal schools for Black and brown students. It is a sad day in this country when the rich and powerful can target students of color for an anti-democratic takeover, and they can become a line item in a wealthy person’s “portfolio.” BLM seeks to bring attention to systemic racism, economic and social injustice. They should also protest the corrupt, exploitative process that City Fund employs to dismantle public education in various cities in order to move public assets into private pockets. This is a massive public school heist.
BTW, Tultican has posted an extraordinarily well researched article that describes the nefarious process of City Fund. This is not “school choice.” It is a hostile takeover. He shows how billionaires have joined together to dismantle public schools in various cities across the country.https://tultican.com/2020/03/02/the-city-fund-spending-prolifically-to-privatize-public-education/
The opposition to public schools in ed reform has REAL repercussions to students who attend public schools.
My state legislature is captured by ed reform lobbies and lobbyists. They passed a huge voucher funding/expansion law. They passed yet another expansion of charters and increased funding for charters. You know what they DIDN’T get done? Anything to benefit or support the 90/85% of the students in the state who attend public schools.
If you hire or elect one of these folks at least know they return no value to students who attend public schools and do no advocacy on behalf of students who attend public schools.
If charters and vouchers are what you’re after, hire or elect an ed reformer. If you expect or demand support of students in existing public schools, don’t hire or elect one, because they don’t do that work.
I like the cherry picking ed reformers do on the “portfolio” systems, too.
Cleveland is a “portfolio” city. They privatized half the system a decade ago. The same people privatized it- Arnold designed and financed the whole thing.
Why don’t we ever hear about Cleveland anymore? When they privatized it they all promoted it. Why has it been buried in favor of promoting Indianapolis?
I thought this was about “data”? Why do the ed reform failures just disappear, never to be heard of again?
From
https://mailchi.mp/f8e06a22d998/breaking-re-open-letter-to-atlanta-faith-community-on-becoming-complicit-in-education-reform …
Worse yet, APS Leadership is involved with redefinED Atlanta, an organization known to be on a mission to promote sucking the blood-essence out of Atlanta Public Schools with ever increasing numbers of charter schools and privatization of public schools, by design.
As has been reported several times, redefinED Atlanta and its executive director, Ed Chang, are the local operatives of the The City Fund. The City Fund is an organization of hedge funders scheming to profit, initially, from investing in turning public schools in heavily Black urban school districts into charter schools and through social impact investing. Atlanta is one of seven heavily Black cities The City Fund initially targeted and is now working on. Chalkbeat has given the matter extensive coverage; for example, this.
Yet, here is the Atlanta Superintendent unabashedly presenting to the Atlanta Faith Community an example of Atlanta Public Schools involvement with redefinED Atlanta.
Without question, the APS Leadership have set about drawing the Atlanta Faith Community into being complicit in The City Fund’s and such others’ efforts to invest in profiting off of mostly children labeled “Black” at the expense of the children ever experiencing authentic education.
Thus the question for the Atlanta Faith Community is, will it be complicit?
Will the Atlanta Faith Community drink the Atlanta Board of Education and Superintendent’s Education Reform Kool-Aid, by whatever flavor?
These wealthy privatizers have a vast profiteering network that enlists local support in order to legitimize their democracy crushing policies. Some of the most insightful comments about how they operate come from the Ultican article. ” The portfolio model directs closing schools that score in the bottom 5% on standardized testing and reopening them as charter schools or Innovation schools. In either case, the local community loses their right to hold elected leaders accountable, because the schools are removed from the school board’s portfolio. It is a plan that guarantees school churn in poor neighborhoods, venerates disruption and dismisses the value of stability and community history.”
I had to read Hastings’s No Rules Rules for work and it was quite a fairy tale, especially knowing of his deformer bona fides. Everything he believes happens in his corporate culture is a direct refutation of everything he imposes on through his ignorant certainty about education. In his world, autonomy and self-direction in teams is king (a culture of freedom and responsibility). In ours, not so much. In his world, “high performers” get compensated at “rock star” wages (although he never does define what a “high performer” actually is), have no vacation policy (take it when you want it as long as you peform), and even encourage vacations to regenerate new ideas. In ours, not so much. Literally every he drives down people’s throats in education is theoretically frowned upon in his fairy tale where all his workers are happy and perform. Those who don’t get a very generous severance and become rock stars elsewhere. But when everyone on top is making tens of millions, it’s easy to be smug. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/10/working-at-netflix-sounds-absolutely-terrifying
As for Arnold, he’s taken a small chip of the Broad block and is trying to diversify in medical research and policy. A couple of years ago he bought a brash, young hematologist-oncologist, Vinay Prasad, who sees himself as something of a social media hipster, occasionally gets published in the NYT, and is sure he is an iconoclast. Arnold purchased him while he was at Oregon Health Sciences University and now he’s moved on to UCSF. He writes a blog that is published on MedPage Today and it has taken a particularly interesting turn in the past few months. His pieces downplay the risks of COVID, minimizes the need to vaccinate everyone, thinks social distancing is taken just a tad bit too far, and thinks the risks to teachers in schools is just overblown claptrap.
Hastings and Arnold believe one thing and one thing only: