Paul Bowers was the education reporter at the Charleston Post and Courier. He wrote this post at my request. A reader alerted me to the billionaire-driven attack on public schools in Charleston, and I had the good fortune to find the journalist who knew the story.
Paul Bowers writes:
Every few years, South Carolina becomes a battleground for school privatization. It looks like 2022 is going to be one of those years.
Back in the 2000s, the New York real estate investor Howard Rich backed a series of South Carolina candidates pushing school vouchers, which would funnel public education funds into private schools. More recently, we have seen efforts by Gov. Henry McMaster and the state legislature to create a Tennessee-style “turnaround district,” to deregulate for-profit online charter schools via authorizer shopping, and to divert federal COVID-19 relief funds from public schools to private schools. Teachers and parents have had to fight these advances tooth and nail and have so far kept most of the damage at bay.
Lately it seems like the tip of the spear for privatization efforts in South Carolina is the Charleston County School District, a starkly segregated and unequal district anchored by a world-renowned tourist destination. The Charleston County School Board is scheduled to vote Jan. 10 on a proposal called “Reimagine Schools” that would allow a private third party to make decisions at 23 predominantly Black schools. I thought now would be a good moment to revisit the history of school board power struggles and dark-money campaigns in Charleston County.
The pressure to privatize the governance of public schools often comes from two of South Carolina’s billionaires, the chemical manufacturer CEO Anita Zucker and the debt collection agency CEO Ben Navarro. Sometimes working in tandem, sometimes independently, Zucker and Navarro tend to promote more charter schools and private takeovers of public schools.
Zucker and her advocacy organization, the Tri-County Cradle to Career Collaborative, were involved in a 2015-2016 effort to create a “turnaround district” at the state level, modeled after failed efforts in Tennessee, Louisiana, and Michigan. The proposal involved lumping the state’s lowest-performing schools into a new district and bringing in third-party operators to manage them. Similar bills were introduced in Georgia and North Carolina around the same time, but the idea never received serious discussion in the South Carolina Statehouse.
Navarro is best known nationally for his failed 2018 bid to buy the Carolina Panthers NFL team. In the financial world, he is known for his Sherman Financial Group, a privately owned firm that filed more lawsuits against defaulted credit-card debtors than others in the industry during COVID-19 lockdowns, according to a recent Wall Street Journal investigation.
In the arena of education, Navarro is known for his private Meeting Street Schools, which are sometimes lauded as a model for improving the test scores of low-income students from at-risk communities. Since 2014, Meeting Street Schools has entered unique public-private partnerships with South Carolina public school districts, starting with the takeover of two elementary schools in North Charleston.
With a boost of private funding, the schools invest in wraparound services for students and their families, offer additional psychological support, place two teachers in each classroom, and operate on an extended school day and academic calendar. Those practices have a proven track record of success, but most schools in South Carolina lack the funding to carry them out.
Meeting Street Schools also heavily recruit staff from Teach for America and KIPP, and they preach the trendy mid-2010s gospel of “grit” – in fact, the disciplinary model is so gritty that one Meeting Street-run elementary school suspended one-quarter of its students in a single school year. Before opening the schools under new management, Navarro sought and received a special exemption from the state’s employment protections for teachers. As a result, Meeting Street principals can hire and fire teachers at will.
Navarro is also closely associated with the Charleston Coalition for Kids, a dark-money group that emerged in 2018 and immediately outspent all other donors combined on advertising for a slate of school board candidates. Much of the Coalition’s funding and spending is hidden from public view thanks to state election law and the group’s nonprofit status, but FCC records reveal it spent at least $235,000 on TV commercials alone in the run-up to the 2018 school board election – four-and-a-half times what all of the candidates combined raised for their own campaigns. (Local activists estimated the Coalition’s spending on Facebook ads, billboards, and other media might have cost additional hundreds of thousands of dollars.)
The Coalition spent big on the school board election again in 2020, investing $306,000 on TV commercials, including attack ads against two Black incumbents. Today 6 of the 9 sitting Charleston County School Board members have received backing from the Coalition.
A number of national organizations have taken an interest in Charleston school politics as well, including 50CAN (formerly StudentsFirst) and the Broad Foundation.
After failing to create a statewide turnaround district in 2016, the 50CAN affiliate SouthCarolinaCAN shifted its focus to the local level – specifically to Charleston County. When I interviewed then-Executive Director Bradford Swann in December 2016, he said his organization would be focused on “grassroots organizing” via a 5-month fellowship program for parents.
The result was Charleston RISE, a parent advocacy group that also operates a parent help hotline. Billboards advertising its services have appeared all over the county, particularly in low-income neighborhoods. Charleston RISE trainees were among the founding members of the Charleston Coalition for Kids when it launched in 2018. Some RISE members said they helped vet school board candidates for the Coalition.
Currently the Charleston County School Board is deciding how to spend its share of the COVID-19 recovery funds provided under the American Recovery Act’s ESSER III program. Multiple local nonprofits submitted proposals on how to spend the money, but only one has gotten a public hearing.
On Monday January 10, the school board will vote on a proposal called Reimagine Schools that would target 23 low-performing schools in low-income and majority-Black parts of the county. Leaning on a “Schools of Innovation” law recently expanded by the state legislature, the proposal would authorize a takeover of individual schools by an unidentified “Innovation Management Organization.” The Schools of Innovation law also allows a school to hire up to 25% of its teachers in certain subject areas without a state teaching license.
The organization that proposed the Reimagine Schools plan is the Coastal Community Foundation, a relative newcomer to school board lobbying. The foundation and its CEO, Darrin Goss Sr., have promoted the Meeting Street Schools public-private partnership model as a way of getting around “bureaucratic” regulations. (Complicating matters further, the Coastal Community Foundation also administers an investigative fund and Education Lab for the local daily newspaper, The Post and Courier.)
The 9-member school board gave the Reimagine Schools proposal initial approval by a 6-3 vote in December without holding any community input sessions about it. All 6 members who voted to approve for the proposal had been endorsed by the Charleston Coalition for Kids.
Whatever the Charleston County School Board decides, the privatization push will continue in parallel at the state level. The state superintendent of education post is up for grabs this fall, and the first candidate to announce her run was Ellen Weaver, a charter school advocate with the conservative Palmetto Promise Institute. A central proposal in her platform is the creation of an Education Scholarship Account, a modified private school voucher program.
Sound familiar? If at first they don’t succeed, they give it a new name and try again.
***
Paul Bowers is a parent of 3 public school children in North Charleston, South Carolina. He was The Post and Courier’s education reporter from 2016-2019 and was part of a team that won the 2018 Eddie Prize from the Education Writers Association. Find him on Twitter at @Paul_Bowers and read his work at brutalsouth.substack.com.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Diocese of Charleston (Oct. 2020), “School Choice: what every Catholic needs to know and share” – the scheduled event at 5:30 was for legislators. The speaker had “a particular competence …in the cause of parental freedom of choice in education.”
As a taxpayer, I deserve the freedom of choice to not violate separation of church and state.
Ellen Weaver, Palmetto Promise Institute- education- Bob Jones University
When I lived in North Carolina, I remember an incident ( albeit foggily given the intervening years) in which a prominent civil rights personality was invited to speak at Bob Jones but had to make his address just across the street because there were school rules against black people coming on campus. I wonder
If I recall all that correctly.
Linda, that says it all.
John Deasy, graduate of Providence College, a private Catholic University, later became principal at LaSalle Military Academy, a Catholic school.
“The organization that proposed the Reimagine Schools plan is the Coastal Community Fund, a relative newcomer to school board lobbying. The fund and its CEO, Darrin Goss Sr., have promoted the Meeting Street Schools public-private partnership model as a way of getting around “bureaucratic” regulations. (Complicating matters further, the Coastal Community Fund also administers an investigative fund and Education Lab for the local daily newspaper, The Post and Courier.)”
The school privatization organization ALSO administers an “investigative fund and Education Lab” for the local newspaper?
So they lobby to privatize the schools and then use the local newspaper to promote the privatization plans/schools under the guise of “investigations”?
Just one big happy family of overlapping ed reform orgs with no real analysis or nuetral evaluations at any level. They bought the local newspaper too, just to insure all of the news about the privatized schools is good.
An internet search shows Darrin Goss is a 2018 Fellow and Mentor at Liberty Fellowship which self describes as modeled after the Aspen Institute (school privatizer, Bill Gates, funds the self-appointed organization for school “reform”, Aspen Pahara Institute). John Deasy’s photo is at the Liberty Fellowship site as a “moderator.” Liberty Fellowship self-identifies as in partnership with Wofford College in Spartanburg. The city of Spartanburg is about 50% Black or African American. Wofford’s student population is described as 80% White.
Goss is listed as a Harvard bus. grad and as having a masters from a different college in Christian ministries.
Chiara, you can guess why this excellent reporter is no longer working for the newspaper after reporting on dark money. And the same dark money is subsidizing education reporting at the newspaper. Bill Gates and Eli Broad did the same thing. Gates underwrote an “education lab” at his local newspaper, and Broad gave $800,000 annually to the LA Times to pay for education coverage.
time for journalists to think “where is the funding coming from” every time they decide to do a story: we keep getting mostly surface information even from the “trusted” news outlets
The largest gift ever given to Wofford College was from Jerry Richardson (former owner of the Panthers). The Sports Illustrated archives for Dec. 2017 provide an understanding about the culture of Jerry Richardson.
After 30 years I no longer reside in the US. Among Western ‘civilized’ nations I have yet to encounter a country that is so at odds with its people, so filled with hatred, so violent, so extreme in actions, so divided, so discriminatory and so arrogant.
I envy you. I now know more of what it feels like to be hopelessly trapped in a nation that is hurdling toward a kinder, gentler totalitarianism. Wish I had gotten out when I had the chance. I bet you have a lot of common feelings as this woman:
https://scoop.upworthy.com/american-mom-living-germany-lists-reasons-never-move-back
Due to our income gap there is more dark money around than ever. Dark money slinks around in the shadows looking for ways to monetize anything and everything including the common good. This trend will continue unless people get tired of being abused by predatory privatization so that the public will pressure federal and state governments to stop or regulate it. Privatization serves the interests of the wealthy, not the public.
Melinda Gates’ answer to a question could shed light on the advancement of the self-appointed ed “reform” campaign.
The goal that is shared by her foundation and Christian nationalists to privatize public education, are there any conflicts between the two?
A unified group of community members including parents, teachers and students from across the political and demographic spectrum are fighting this tooth and nail without any secret billionaire backing. We have small but significant victories every day. I was personally inspired after reading Daine’s books especially Goliath. Please join us.
Frank Beylotte,
Thanks for fighting for Charleston’s public schools. Don’t let two billionaires destroy them. They belong to the public.
Thank you, Diane and Paul, for exposing the key players in this privatization push. The dark money and constant re-packing of the same scheme is often difficult to relay to families and educators who are justifiably more focused on their health and livelihoods at this time. You have done an incredible job on this post, and I will share it widely.
Donald Trump is not the only billionaire that lies and is a grifter. Many billionaires apparently are liars and grifters. The only difference between Traitor Trump and the other billionaire grifters is Trump loves to stir up the media to get the spotlight on him and they pay someone else to do that and stay out of the spotlight as much as possible.
The Traitor politicized the pandemic but he wasn’t alone. The other billionaire grifters are also taking advantage of the pandemic to push their agendas to destroy the public education system and all other public services at the public’s expense.
Donald Trump was the only person in the Plaza Hotel’s 114 year history to bankrupt it.
Trump’s Atlantic City casino went bankrupt, too. He never invested any of his own money yet walked away with millions. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/12/nyregion/donald-trump-atlantic-city.html
“But even as his companies did poorly, Mr. Trump did well. He put up little of his own money, shifted personal debts to the casinos and collected millions of dollars in salary, bonuses and other payments. The burden of his failures fell on investors and others who had bet on his business acumen.”
“He repeatedly emphasized that what really mattered about his time in Atlantic City was that he had made a lot of money there.”
For those who are fighting for public education, if you need inspiration to continue the fight, go to the photo at the home page of Augustine Academy in Wisconsin.
The picture shows the future with schools of the Christian state. A Wis. Supreme Court justice was involved in founding Augustine Academy.
I thought the article subtly acknowledges the shortcomings or wrongs about this program (1. Full autonomy to principals 2. over 1/4 of students dismissed for not following rules 3.
hiring not fully certified teachers). Our children (children of color) have been taught to fully stand for what they believe in, be it many times they believe in the negative, which is going to get many students of color expelled from school…I also took away that this is why Garrett Academy closed – for them to erect another Meeting Street Academy (High School level). This is also political and racially motivated.
Just for the record, it’s the Coastal Community Foundation, not Fund.
Paul Bowers asked me to change the name from “Coastal Community Fund” to “Coastal Community Foundation.” I did.
Thank you to Paul Bowers for getting on this beat and staying on it for years, even after your dedication to ferreting out the truth behind the dark money cost you your job… despite what Zucker/Navarro/Coastal Community Foundation/the Post & Courier want people to believe, those of us who live in Charleston and are witnessing these moneyed arms working in concert to decimate and replace our public schools know that what happened to Paul was 100% a result of him being a true investigative reporter who refused to stop poking his nose into what was really happening behind the scenes at his newspaper and in his city. And a massive thank you to Diane, too, for publishing this on your blog and sharing Paul’s tireless work with a wider audience—I highly recommend subscribing to his newsletter, Brutal South, to enjoy and learn from his intelligent, refreshing, and steely-eyed perspective on life in the South in the 2020s.
Meeting Street Academy’s is improving student performance because they have the luxury of suspending and expelling students from their schools. They have strict guidelines and if those guidelines aren’t met that student is booted out. It artificially improves their student performances. Where do the ill behaving or non compliant students end up? Back at their local Charleston County school.
If I can only have successes and move my failures somewhere else and then compare myself to those failures, I’ll always be successful.
Typical charter success story. “School Choice” means “Schools Choose.”
That plus the extra money that the billionaire Ben Navarro gives to Meeting Street Academy while impoverishing the local public schools.
Meeting Street test scores are underwhelming.
There are also a number of issues with financial transparency.
Navarro has likely drawn too much attention to himself, however, it not obvious that he’s doing anything illegal. Buying politicians—in this case the school board—is legal. So is a charter school using public funds to buy goods or services from a “choice” provider. His only fault is saying “it’s all for the kids”. It’s all about profits and property values.
Thank you all for the continued attention to what is obviously a national crisis.
Locals (like myself) have for too long assumed that those in positions of authority and influence were respectful of experts in real educational philosophy intended towards closing educational gaps resulting from centuries of paternalistic, white supremacist, elitist practices. Not prone to learning from other cities’ mistakes and failings, Charleston needs outside eyes and voices to help us learn who to trust and why.