Billionaire charter school advocates have found a new target for their political contributions: cities where the mayor controls the schools.
The oligarchs poured millions of dollars into the New York City mayoral race. They bet on the early leaders, Andrew Yang and Eric Adams. Their goal: more charter schools. As Yang slipped in the polls, they concentrated their gifts to Adams. Adams placed first but did not win a majority so we will wait to see who won the city’s first ranked-choice election.
Now the oligarchs are giving generously in the Boston mayoral race. Boston has mayoral control of the schools, and the 1% want more charter schools. Their current favorite is Andrea Campbell. But that could change if she polls poorly.
Political science Professor Maurice Cunningham, an expert on following the money, shows that the oligarchs are mostly the same as those who contributed to the 2016 referendum on charter expansion. The oligarchs lost that one, which was financed largely by the Waltons.
It is curious to find that billionaire Reed Hastings of California is so deeply concerned about the next mayor of Boston. Hastings has said that all local school boards should be eliminated and replaced by private management. Massachusetts is a state that prizes its school committees.
Cunningham begins and ends his post with a quote from Louis Brandeis:
Brandeis once said “We must make our choice. We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Charter Schools are subject to NYS law and there is currently a cap on charter schools in NYC, the legislature would have to amend the law, unlikely, the progressives in the Senate are strongly anti-charter. Mayors have a bully pulpit and can advocate …. outside NYS charter schools are eroding public schools … Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse ….
Same in Boston. Charters are controlled at the state level in Massachusetts as well.
The number of Charter schools is determined by the state in NY and Mass., but the mayor’s wishes have a large impact.
True – especially since the mayor essentially picks superintendents and BPS superintendents tend to only have a shelf life of 3-5 years. The governor’s race next year will be huge. Charlie Baker’s two terms will be up and I’m sure many candidates from both parties will be running. Current AG Maura Healy is a front runner in my mind and I’m not even sure where she stands on ed privatization. Also, the 5 year moratorium on state referendum to raise the charter cap is expiring, so I’m sure we’ll face another attempt there too.
I’ll further add that I believe that the major flashpoint issue that will play big in the Boston Mayor race is the debate over admission criteria for the BPS exam schools. This has been ongoing since the pandemic and recently there has been a task force that has been working on it. It has been very contentious and has resulted in lawsuits, school committee resignations and, most recently, a mysterious threat from unnamed powers that could derail the whole process. I think it is really worth keeping an eye on this topic as the race progresses.
Yes, Mayoral candidate Kathryn Garcia promises to use her bully pulpit to advocate strongly not just to have more charters, but for the cap to be lifted entirely so that she can take her marching orders from Cuomo’s handpicked charter board of mostly lawyers. Garcia promises to work hard so that those handpicked charter promoters can decide how many charters Kathryn Garcia’s DOE will fund — 100? 1000? Garcia’s position is that any number no matter how large is fine with her. Even Eric Adams didn’t go that far, which would be wholesale turnover of the public school system to those who promote charters.
“charter board” — there it is
I love to read ed reform “analysis” of public education. It’s amazing how consistently public schools are simply NOT included:
https://www.federationforchildren.org/ohio-expands-educational-opportunity-through-passage-of-state-budget/
I don’t mind that the echo chamber are all employed full time promoting charters and vouchers. But can we please drop the pretense that any of these people do anything for public schools or the students and families who use public schools?
It is 100% about promoting the ed reform ideology of privatized systems. They simply perform no productive work of any kind that is beneficial or a value-add to public schools.
People should know if you’re hiring or electing these folks you’re hiring people who don’t contribute anything to public schools. Now maybe that’s fine with the public! Maybe ed reformers are correct and the entire country is on board with the idea that all K-12 education should be contracted out and privatized, but I don’t think they are, mostly because tens of millions of them have children in the public schools ed reformers oppose and seek to eradicate.
Is it fair for ed reformers to present themselves as “advocates for public education” when in fact they do no advocacy or work of any kind for public school students? Is that fair to public school students? Shouldn’t they have people who value their schools?
Here’s the Ohio education budget the echo chamber lobbied for – they got all of their demands because in Ohio they always get all of their demands, our state legislature is utterly captured by them:
EdChoice and Cleveland Scholarships increase to $5,500 per pupil in grades K-8 and $7,500 per pupil in grades 9-12
Expands scholarship eligibility to include siblings of current scholarship students, students in foster and kinship care, and students entering 9th grade
Increases the value of special needs scholarships
Eliminates deductions from districts’ state aid and instead directly funds EdChoice and Cleveland scholarship programs and charter schools
Doubles facility funding to brick and mortar charter schools to $500 per pupil
Invests $54 million in high-quality charter schools through the Quality Community School Support
Creates a $750 state tax credit for individual contributions made to Scholarship Granting Organizations (SGO). Existing or newly formed SGOs may make contributions to tuition accounts for students enrolled at a private school
Creates the ACE Education Savings Account program to provide $500 for education expenses for students with income levels below 300% FPL
Eliminates geographic restrictions on the location of charter schools, essentially moving to direct funding of scholarship programs and charter schools
Notice anything missing? You guessed it- students in public schools. NINETY PER CENT.
That is a heck of a strong and closed off echo chamber, one that somehow manages to miss the vast, vast majority of students. “Public education” my foot. This is charter and voucher promotion, and that’s ALL it is.
Subtract “testing” and the ridiculous critical race theory panic and the echo chamber has returned no value to any public school student in Ohio this year. Nothing.
If Joe Biden and the Democrats in Congress hadn’t passed additional funding for public schools this year public school students would have gone yet another year with none of the people they hire and pay in government actually doing anything for their schools.
Go look at the ed reform “victories” state level. It’s all vouchers.
The last ten years are essentially a “lost decade” for public schools and public school students and without Biden that would have continued.
Should public school students have advocates? Why not? Are we really bound by the ideological predilection of the “ed reform movement” which disfavors public schools? Why would we adopt their approach? It doesn’t benefit our students.
I would just like public school leaders to take a hard look at whether “ed reform” serves their students.
If you’re hiring people who are ideologically opposed to the existence of public schools to direct how public schools operate, is that likely to benefit public school students? HAS it benefited them? How, specifically?
Ed reformers spend a lot of time demanding “results” from public schools. Fine. But that’s a two way street. Have public schools been served well by ed reformers, and if they haven’t should they look elsewhere for advice/direction/ideas?
If this is actually about public school students shouldn’t the measure be whether or not they have benefited from the last 20 years of following these folks?
If your consultant comes out of this echo chamber aren’t you likely to get the same “market centered” approach we’ve been following the last 20 years? Did it work out well for the students in public schools? Are they better off?
“Now the oligarchs are giving generously in the Boston mayoral race. Boston has mayoral control of the schools, and the 1% want more charter schools. Their current favorite is Andrea Campbell. But that could change if she polls poorly.”
I wish there could be a real dialogue between politicians like Andrea Campbell (a favorite of anti-public school oligarchs?) and those who support public schools. I don’t follow Boston politics, but when I just read a few articles about Andrea Campbell she seemed like a politician who genuinely cared about making the situation for all people better, not just one looking to do the bidding of oligarchs for her own personal advantage. I concede those articles could be one-sided, but I wondered if she was someone more like Bernie and Warren who at one point did not understand why “public” (i.e. non-profit charters) were so destructive.
I see Mayors who want unlimited charters as basically giving up — saying “Okay, let’s fund private entities to offer schools for the “good” students and abandon the rest”. I never understood why – if that is what a Mayor believes is good policy — they could not just establish and lavishly fund public magnet schools for all students who were good enough to be in those schools — maybe it’s 25%, maybe it’s 50%, maybe it’s 75% — while warehousing the rest.
There is no logic to the idea of “let’s establish hundreds or thousands more privately operated charter schools for the cheapest to teach disadvantaged students and let public schools teach the ones those privately operated charter schools don’t want to teach”. It is as absurd as a Mayor saying “I want to spend a huge portion of my healthcare budget to pay private hospitals lots of money to take care of the poor families motivated to stay as healthy as possible, and if any of those poor families still have a very sick child, those poor families will be sent to the public hospitals which will be funded with whatever money remains.” Even more absurd would be if the Mayor enacted that policy and the private hospitals then went on a huge PR blitz bragging that they had developed a special sauce that kept 99% of poor families incredibly healthy, and the idiotic media said “we don’t need to look at attrition because it’s obvious to us that this private hospital is working miracles keeping poor families healthy and we must take even more money from the public hospitals and give it to private hospitals to reward them for doing such a good job!”
Any legit science reporter would not do a story about a miracle cure without looking very closely at attrition rates. Whereas almost all education reporters write every story with the underlying (and implicitly racist) view that there is no reason to look closely at the disproportionately high number of poor families who leave the most successful urban charters because education reporters are certain if a family leaves, it’s because those families don’t care about their kids’ education very much. Good thing science reporters aren’t as racist and would likely not assume that all the patients who disappear from a study of new miracle cure left because their families didn’t want their kid to get better. Or would science reporters be like implicitly racist education reporters and only question why an unusually high number of families didn’t want their children to partake of this miracle cure if those disappearing patients were white?
It is so apparent to anyone paying attention that successful urban charters ruthlessly shed students (after already discouraging lottery winners who aren’t extremely motivated from even enrolling). And if they don’t ruthlessly shed students, their students are similar to students in public schools. So why would any Mayor want to privatize the least expensive part of education? There needs to be a real discussion about establishing an unlimited number of public magnet schools (not charters) that also ruthlessly shed students if that is the “new idea” that the public wants. But that discussion won’t happen as long as dishonest charter CEOs push false narratives about how they have an inexpensive secret sauce that works for all kids and will save tons of taxpayer money.
Brandeis left out a couple of words. He should have said “We must make our choice. We may have democracy, or we may have wealth AND POWER concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.”
I think this is what ended the Roman Republic when Julius Cesar became the first dictator. But Cesar wasn’t the only wealthy and powerful Roman competing to take over the Republic. That’s why he was assassinated, to get rid of him and replace him with one of the other Trumpish like autocrats. Some of those Emperors were good and many were horrible just like Traitor Trump.