Aaron Regunburg began his career as a leader of the Providence Student Union. He subsequently served in the legislature and ran in the Democratic primary for lieutenant governor, capturing 49% of the vote. He lost to Dan McKee, who is now Governor, after succeeding Gina Raimondo when Biden appointed her to his cabinet.
Regunberg wrote in the Providence Journal that McKee seems to be engaging in pay-for-play with his financial backers at Chiefs for Change (started by Jeb Bush).
He wrote:
Governor McKee’s string of recent scandals raises the question of whether he may be dragging our state back to the bad old days of pay-to-play governance.
Take the recent story of a $5-million “school reopening” contract given to Governor McKee’s longtime financial backers at the corporate education reform group Chiefs for Change (CFC). The head of CFC, Mike Magee, has directly contributed thousands of dollars to the governor, and his brother leads the Super PAC that spent hundreds of thousands supporting McKee during my primary challenge to him in 2018. As has been reported extensively by WPRI, just two days after Mr. McKee took office, the chief operating officer and director of operations of CFC incorporated a brand-new company, ILO Group, which almost immediately received a state contract to the tune of $5.2 million — an amount many millions of dollars more than the next-highest bid.
Disgustingly, it appears ILO felt comfortable enough with this scheme that they barely pretended to provide useful services to our schools. As WPRI reported, almost no districts in the state received school reopening assistance from the company. In fact, the day after Governor McKee pointed to ILO’s work with Westerly to justify the millions they received, the chair of the Westerly School Committee wrote, “ILO is not doing any work in Westerly. At all.” She went on to stress she was “still unclear on exactly how this company can support RI school districts.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
When I was in college, I got the impression that Rhode Island was an education utopia. The two people I knew there were strange and wonderful to me. They had been educated in the system there in ways I could only dream could be a part of any educational system. Artistic and brilliant, these ladies made me think Rhode Island must be a place of wonder.
Obviously I was deluded by a limited contact with people who had been educated there. Generalization is the most often used logical fallacy, and I used it to put Rhode Island on a pedestal. I now understand the variables that got these two, still friends of mine and now successful in their own way, such a good education were complex. It is this complexity that the foes of good public school exploit i order to enrich themselves at the expense of general society.
As the foes of good general education and the opponents of reason eat away at the foundations of representative government worldwide, we should take care not to lose the thing that brings us freedom: truth and attention to good policy.
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Neoliberals have more in common with the right than the left, and they are just a likely to be involved with crony capitalism as those on the right. Why are Democrats working with Jeb Bush? Privatizing essential public services should not a be on the Democrats’ agenda. Privatization is anti-union, anti-democratic, and it contributes more income inequality. These corporate Democrats are hypocrites. Why does the media continue to call corporate Democrats ” centrists.” There is nothing centrist about privatizing the public schools envisioned by our founding fathers in the Northwest Ordinance of 1787. Public schools built this nation, and they must be preserved so future generations can benefit from a real public education. Privatizing public education is vulture capitalism.
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“Why does the media continue to call corporate Democrats ” centrists.” ”
This is a great question. How does modern journalism discuss our political discourse today using the terms right left and center. Since Reagan, the country has moved further and further to the right. Now balanced journalists try to find a left, but it is gone. Years ago, the generation that gave us Woodstock morphed into the generation that defended gun stocks and barrels.
Evidence for the march to the right is obvious in many aspects of our public discourse. Personal freedom recently includes the right to own guns, control women’s reproduction from afar, and spread disease. Not so many years ago, advocating restricting voting rights of one group of the citizens was a death wish. It is now a policy of one party.
The center is now seen as the left
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I have also heard some in the so-called liberal media call the progressive Democrats the radical wing of the party, particularly when there were fewer progressives, namely Bernie and Warren. Now that there is a progressive caucus, they are less likely to call them “radical.”
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Brilliant, Roy.
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Yes, and the media call the corporatist Center for American Policy “liberal.”
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Thank you Diane. Your use of the word brilliant is a high compliment. However, I submit that the statement of the obvious is not so brilliant. Rather, the denial of the obvious is troubling.
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“Duffy’s comments contrasted with ILO’s Tuesday, when partner Cerena Parker cited helping schools reopen as one of the consulting firm’s biggest accomplishments so far.
ILO is “helping to coordinate between the Rhode Island Department of Education, the Rhode Island Department of Health, the Governor’s Office and our state’s 66 public Local Education Agencies to support reopening plans to ensure a safe return to in-person learning this fall and providing additional capacity and expertise that can support our students, families, and educators to mitigate learning disruption,” she said.”
Just shameless. They were caught red handed and they’re still insisting they are “coordinating” with 66 public agencies, even though the 66 school districts say it isn’t happening.
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Public schools need to break with the ed reform echo chamber, including (and especially) the ed reform aligned consultants.
Has hiring them paid off for public schools or public school students over the last twenty years? It’s been two decades that we’ve all been lockstep following the directives of this “movement”. Would it hurt to get some other opinions, bring in some new people who are not echo chamber members? What’s the worst that can happen? Public schools aren’t benefitting anyway- at worst it’s a wash and the state would still have 5.2 million to spend on something else that might actually benefit students.
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If we continue to hire people who are ideologically opposed to the existence of public schools we will continue to get no benefit for public school students.
The ed reform “mission” isn’t to improve public schools. It’s to replace them.
Public schools and ed reformers have two fundamentally different missions. It won’t work. It hasn’t worked. Would the world end if we tried something else? We have an entire generation of public school students who have never experienced anything else OTHER than the ed reform agenda. Are they better off for it?
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The answer to question 1: no. what would end is the flow of money into certain pockets.
The answer to question 2: No, but that is not the point (as you well know).
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Read the wpri.com coverage 9/7,8,14 for the nitty-gritty (google wpri.com McKee ILO). As a one-time procurement supervisor for an engrg co, I found it highly entertaining.
Summary: ILO was incorporated 2 days after McKee’s March 2 election, and invited by his office to submit a bid for the work March 23. 5 bids received in April: 3 bidders knocked out during tech evaluation.
The two remaining bids– $8million vs just under $1million, made it obvious that the scope of work was, shall we say, imprecise. Results of rebid (? Or perhaps just an arm-wrestling session—unclear): ILO $6million, other guy $3million. ILO was apparently given the nod due to its long work history of absolutely bupkis, sadly other guy’s 20-yr history as a state ed consultant just… didn’t measure up. But, no worries– West Ed gets to share the spoils: $5million for ILO [scope K12], $1million for WestEd [scope colleges, U’s]. “’The Review Team believes that no additional time should be wasted on this procurement or a rebid,’ the four-member panel’s final report said.”
“We’ve supported people who get the work done…” McKee said at his weekly news conference Tuesday. “So it didn’t matter who referred or who may have had a relationship. I just want good people who can figure out how to help the state of Rhode Island and education, and that’s what we got.” 😀 😀
“Magee [CFC boss & close McKee buddy/ donor via his brother’s 50CAN PAC] said Chiefs for Change isn’t working with ILO on the contract.” ROFL. Let’s just pretend we didn’t notice ILO was incorporated virtually yesterday, and its partners left Chiefs for Change to form ILO.
The state’s bid package put ILO in the catbird seat from the get-go. Although RI is paying for this work out of Covid-19 aid fed funding, the scope asked for expansion of “municipal education offices” outside the purview of traditional LEA’s. That’s a scheme realized in Cumberland by then-Mayor McKee and buddy Magee of CFS. McKee has 5 more such offices planned, to be run out of his office, for the [state-run] Providence school system. A full half of ILO’s proposed workhrs are devoted to that thinly veiled ed privatization; stated goal “to address lost learning and catch up and long-term learning programs.”
That leaves $2.5million for safe school reopening during covid. How is ILO doing 2 wks after students returned to bldgs? “…RI Assoc of School Committees exec dir Tim Duffy… surveyed all school supts and school chairs… ‘So far, there’s only one district that’s asked the ILO Group to review their school reopening plans, and that was Little Compton. The rest… haven’t been contacted and are not even aware of the services the consulting firm offers… reopening efforts this year have been guided by the U.S. CDC, the RI Dept of Health and RI Dept of Education.” He also noted the timing of the ILO news: ‘School reopening has already happened.’ Duffy’s comments contrasted with ILO’s Tuesday, when partner Cerena Parker cited helping schools reopen as one of the consulting firm’s biggest accomplishments so far.”
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