David Sirota, investigative journalist, former speechwriter for Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, and writer of the hit film “Don’t Look Up,” recently launched a blog called The Daily Poster. It’s well worth your time to read and to support The Daily Poster.
This important post by Walker Bragman and Alex Kotch documents the Koch money behind the campaign to get schools open, regardless of the risks, and to eliminate mask mandates. The goal of Charles Koch and others on the right was to get the economy back to normal.
Here is an excerpt:
The updated CDC guidance signals the Democratic party’s shift from beating the virus to surrendering to it as a fact of life — including in schools. The new approach was likely shaped by a number of factors, including declining COVID numbers, concerns about far-reaching public COVID fatigue, and the fact that many of those now most at risk of severe disease have refused to get vaccinated for non-medical reasons.
But the end of school masking is also in part due to a campaign by right-wing business interests, including the dark money network of oil billionaire Charles Koch, to keep the country open for the sake of maintaining corporate profits. These interests have been meddling in the education debate, first pushing to reopen schools and then fighting in-school safety measures, even as COVID case numbers were rising and children were ending up in hospitals. For nearly two years, these groups have been promoting questionable science and creating wedges between parents, teachers, and administrators in order to get America back to work — even at the risk of the nation’s children.
“Tapping Into The Full Productive Capacity Of The Workforce”
When the pandemic first hit the U.S. in the spring of 2020, Koch-affiliated groups saw an opportunity to reassess American education, moving away from public schools to private and homeschool alternatives. Koch and his brother David, who died in 2019, had spent decades fighting teachers’ unions, pushing school privatization, and attacking state education funding.
On March 13, 2020, Yes Every Kid — a front group founded by the Koch network in 2019 as part of a larger effort to shape K-12 education in the states — launched a #LearnEverywhere campaign promoting remote learning and homeschooling. Three days later, the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank co-founded and heavilysubsidized by Koch, published a commentary declaring that the U.S. could “tap into” charter, private, and homeschooling “if brick-and-mortar schooling is substantially disrupted.”
The Heritage Foundation, a right-wing nonprofit heavily funded by the Charles Koch Foundation and Charles Koch Institute, also published articles in March 2020 in favor of using public school funds to pay parents to homeschool their kids. Heritage senior policy analyst Jonathan Butcher wrote a policy brief for the Koch-founded-and-funded Mercatus Center, a free-market think tank based at George Mason University, calling to funnel state funds into for-profit charter school companiesproviding virtual learning.
The message was blasted out by other groups in Koch’s orbit, including his flagship political advocacy outfit, Americans For Prosperity (AFP); the Independent Women’s Forum, a dark money group bankrolled by Koch organizations and the heirs to the Walmart fortune; and the State Policy Network, a web of libertarian state-based policy organizations.
But within a few months, the school narrative out of Koch world began to shift, coinciding with growing concerns about labor shortages and changing workplace dynamics caused by nationwide school closures. According to Education Week, a staggering 55.1 million students were impacted by the closures at their peak.
The closures meant a loss of childcare for many parents, which contributed to plummeting labor force participation early in the pandemic. An April 2020 guide to school reopenings from the consultancy McKinsey & Co., whose clients include many of the world’s largest companies, estimated that 27 million Americans were dependent upon childcare in order to work.
“Where a significant proportion of workers rely on schools for childcare, reopening schools (at least for younger children) might be a prerequisite to tapping into the full productive capacity of the workforce,” the report noted.
The tight labor market changed the relationship between employers and their workers, who began demanding moreflexibility and better work-life balance. Companies were forced to respond by raising wages — albeit inadequately — in order to attract workers.
Enterprises like Koch’s were eager to force a return to the old paradigm. These interests had already begun employing the same think tanks and quasi-academic networks they had pioneered a decade before promoting the anti-government Tea Party movement to fuel and legitimize attacks on pandemic safety measures, so they could force a return to normalcy and boost corporate profits.
Now, these interests began to use the same playbook to try to force schools back to normal.
“Keeping Children At Home Might Expose Them To Considerable Risks”
The very groups that had celebrated remote learning as an opportunity for public school alternatives began demanding that schools reopen, citing concerns about learning loss as well as student mental health. These groups downplayed the risks of the virus and slammed teachers’ unions for holding up the return to normalcy.
In May 2020, two months after the World Health Organization declared COVID a global pandemic, the Hoover Institution, a right-wing think tank based at Stanford University that has received substantial backing from Koch over the years, held a virtual conference at which senior fellow Eric Hanushek argued that remote learning was causing learning loss among low-resourced students and damaging “teacher accountability” through the elimination of standardized testing.
The Koch-backed reopening push kicked into high gear after President Donald Trump, facing reelection and a slowing labor market recovery, tweeted in early July 2020, “SCHOOLS MUST OPEN” in the fall.
The Koch-affiliated right-wing think tank American Enterprise Institute (AEI), meanwhile, published a “blueprint” for reopening schools, citing the need to get parents back to work. The State Policy Network and its affiliates also started pushing for school reopening.
Two days after Trump’s tweet, Yes Every Kid published a playbook for reopening schools. Soon after that, Hoover senior fellow Scott Atlas, a radiologist who Trump would soon tap as his senior COVID advisor, called for reopening schools in an interview published that same day. Atlas argued that schools were an “essential business” and that the risk COVID presented to anyone under the age of 18 was incredibly low.
A few days later, the Heritage Foundation joined in, claiming in an online article that in-person learning was possibly “one of the safest activities the nation can restart,” and that “keeping children at home might expose them to considerable risks to their educational progress, their mental health, their nutrition, and alarmingly, even their safety and welfare…”
The drumbeat to return to in-person schooling continued throughout the summer and into the fall. Koch’s flagship group, AFP, put out an online recruiting call for people to reach out to Kansas state legislators and urge them to give school districts and schools the “flexibility” to reopen. A week later, the Mercatus Center published a policy brief warning of “educational scarring” if schools remain closed. Mercatus would later start funding the work of Brown University economics professor and parenting blogger Emily Oster after she began publishing controversial research and articlessupporting school reopenings and downplaying concerns about children and COVID.
On August 12, 2020, the Independent Women’s Forum called on schools to reopen across the country, citing detrimental impacts on student learning and mental well-being. And in October 2020, Hoover’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes released a study estimating that in spring 2020, students lost 57 to 183 days of learning in reading and 136 to 232 days of learning in math.
Big industry groups also fought school closures, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the nation’s premier corporate lobby group. In September 2021, Chamber executive vice president and chief policy officer Neil Bradley said that “we have to have the schools fully reopen” in order to help solve the labor shortage.
“The Dangers Of Masks”
As schools started reopening under the new Democratic administration, Koch-affiliated groups adopted a harder line. In the lead-up to the 2021 state elections, the organizations began opposing in-school mask requirements for students and teachers in addition to closures…
Meanwhile, Koch groups and their affiliates have also quietly worked to support grassroots efforts to end mask mandates.
The Maine Policy Institute put up a petition on its website opposing mask mandates in schools, arguing that “many parents are uncomfortable with their children being required to wear masks in schools” and that “families deserve a choice.” The Federalisthelped promote a lawsuit against Indiana state officials over school mitigation measures brought by parents who erroneously claimed COVID wasn’t infectious in children.
The Koch network also has ties to the shadowy nonprofit Parents Defending Education (PDE). Founded in early 2021, PDE promotes private schooling and combats liberal “indoctrination” in public schools around the country, often by ginning up anger at school boards. The nonprofit’s vice president, Astra Nomani, as well as its director of outreach, Erika Sanzi, have been vocal critics of school mask mandates, and the organization keeps a directory of conservative parents groups that support ending such mandates and other conservative causes….
Please open the link and read the full article. Before reading it, I was unaware of this well-funded, well-coordinated campaign. I was also unaware that the work of Professor Emily Oster at Brown University was funded by the Koch-related Mercatus Institute as well as the Walton Family Foundation, and the Arnold Foundation.
It’s Walker Bragman. Not Walter.
Thank you. Fixed.
dienne77,
Do you think your and flerp’s strong opposition to school closures during the height of the pandemic and anti-masking/anti-vaccine positions could have been influenced by Koch right wing money?
My “anti-vaccine positions,” lol. You are a piece of work, my dear.
I am sorry.
flerp!, was your strong opposition to school mask mandates and anger when public schools weren’t open in-person during the worst of the pandemic influenced by Koch right wing money?
(Surely you aren’t going to gaslight us and tell us you were never critical of mask mandates or school closures during covid?)
No, I was not influenced by right-wing money. But I’m glad if right-wing money helped anyone understand that school closures were disastrous policy.
But I was referring to your comment about my alleged “anti-vaccine positions.” Care to elaborate with an example of that? Or do you just pull things out of your a$$ because you like how it feels?
FLERP!,
You didn’t mention your opposition to mask mandates and whether you are glad if right-wing money helped anyone understand that mask mandates were disastrous policy. Are you glad?
I said I was sorry. I readily acknowledge I was wrong about you being an anti-vaxxer and I am happy to hear that you are a strong supporter of vaccine mandates.
If I get something wrong, I apologize. I don’t understand why you don’t have the grace to accept it. But then again, I don’t understand why you also don’t have the grace to apologize yourself when you get something wrong.
Diane Ravitch’s post is all about dark money funding the campaign against school closings and campaign to eliminate mask mandates. I am glad you clarified that your view that school closings were “disastrous” and mask mandates are bad was not at all influenced by those dark money campaigns, and that you are glad there were dark money campaigns for the policies you wanted.
Ed reform is so overwhelmingly Right wing now – look at all the groups that have sprung up.
I don’t think they planned on turning it into a Right wing movement but it is now and I don’t see that direction changing as Right wing funders dominate more and more.
If past is predictive the liberal Ed reformers will capitulate more and more, like we saw in 2009-10. They’ve already embraced vouchers after insisting for 20 years they weren’t about privatizing. It just seems to move inexorably Right with each passing year. That will only accelerate as the funding pours in.
Very same money ideologically and look what they spend it on in Russia. Familiar, isn’t it?
Russian parents have received notices from schools, warning them to watch their children on social media, especially where they may be tempted to show anti-government sentiment.
In grades 7 to 11 in schools across Russia, children are receiving special sessions reinforcing the official government line on the Ukraine “special operation.” It happens as a great segment of the Russian people, observers say, have become willful participants in their own indoctrination.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/03/08/russian-media-state-television-ukraine/
The Russian people have been cut off from communication with the outside world. They have been told that the “special military operation” in Ukraine is going as planned. The state forbids the use of these three words: war, invasion, aggression. Anyone daring to tell the truth is subject to 15 years in prison.
Losing Ikea, vodka sales,…, denial of credit cards, having Russian airlines prohibited at major national airports, watching the fall of currency and the stock market and, watching the return of luxury yachts and private planes-
if I was Russian, it’d make me wonder what’s up.
Eric Adams has made masks NYC optional in NYC schools (except for children under 5, outrageously). Is anyone outraged? I remember a few weeks ago people were very upset when Gov. Youngkin did this.
You remember during the height of Omicron when the health care professionals were begging people to take care not to overtax an already overtaxed health care system that Gov. Youngkin banned mask mandates?
Are you being intentionally misleading? What is wrong with you?
Do you even have a clue about how many first generation students at specialized high schools continued to wear masks and you are angry that during the height of Omicron they didn’t have to stay home to protect their families because you wanted the mask mandate ended — even though you didn’t have a kid in the school system anymore?
It is amazing when STUDENTS have the empathy that their elders trying to score some political points don’t. But you do represent a group of entitled white parents who know their families will be in the front of the line when healthcare is strained and have no empathy for the far less affluent parents who tend to be much more pro-masking.
They cannot see beyond what they believe is best for their kids.
I find it very revealing that the anti-medical establishment anti-maskers’ concern for children’s welfare oddly stops at a concern for them having to wear masks. Paying for all the things that would make their life better isn’t on their agenda. Forcing them into class sizes of 35+ in poorly ventilated rooms while they pay for their own kid to attend a private school with small class sizes is the definition of really having empathy for their plight.
That’s a lot of words. as usual, but I do see you attack me for being white, also as usual. Thanks.
Your posts made it clear that you were pleased that Gov. Youngkin banned mask mandates, flerp! So your (Koch influenced?) position on mask mandates is very clear.
(Don’t bother with a non-response – either own your opposition to mask-mandates and school closures or don’t. I just wish you could stop attacking people who have a different opinion and instead be brave enough to defend your own opinion.)
I think it’s best to leave the decision up to individual districts, but I certainly shed no tears when Virginia made masks optional statewide three weeks ago. And I’m glad Eric Adams did it this week for NYC schools (with the indefensible exception of children under 5). It should have happened a lot sooner. And yes, I’ve been open about these views. And yes, I’m white — sorry!
The foundation for the Koch family industry and fortune started in Russia when the Koch brothers (There are four brothers and David was the first to die – from what I’ve read, the two younger brothers don’t have anything to do with the fishily business or the politics of David and Charles) father, Fred Koch, was hired by Stalin to help build Russia’s oil industry.
“Stalin, where — under Stalin’s first five-year plan — Fred Koch helped build up the Russian, the Soviet oil refineries and really gave huge muscle to the oil industry in the Soviet Union.”
https://www.npr.org/2016/01/19/463565987/hidden-history-of-koch-brothers-traces-their-childhood-and-political-rise
Now, Charles Koch is 86. Putin is 69. Charles would have been 17 when Putin was born.
“Unable to succeed at home, Koch found work in the Soviet Union”. Between 1929 and 1932 Winkler-Koch supported the Kremlin and “trained Bolshevik engineers to help Stalin’s regime set up fifteen modern oil refineries” in the Soviet Union during its first Five Year Plan.
Bear with me here: Fred Koch worked for Stalin. Stalin’s trusted and loyal cook was Putin’s father. Fred must have had dinner with Stalin at some point and met Putin’s father, the cook. From what I’ve read about Fred, he didn’t like Stalin and couldn’t get out of Russia fast enough, but he finished the job, took his pay with him (millions in $$$) and used that to build the Koch business empire in the U.S.
What if Charles Koch knew Putin as a child? What if they are friends? What if David and Charles somehow helped Putin rise to power?
Vlad has visited the US on several occasions:
https://www.ourmidland.com/news/slideshow/Vladimir-Putin-s-trips-to-the-US-183467.php
While Vlad was in the U.S. what if he met with David and Charles Koch?
Everything the David and Charles Koch has done is to subvert the U.S. Constitution and replace democracy with an autocratic kleptocracy. Who benefits the most from the Kochtopus’s efforts to destroy the U.S. Republic and its Construction? Putin’s goal is to become the most powerful world leader on the planet, and he can’t achieve that with the United States and the EU standing in his way.
I think that the Koch father worked for both Stalin and Hitler.
Yes, he did. He was just THISCLOSE to coming back to America on…the Hindenburg. &, of course, David was the only survivor in the first class section of a plane crash. Our bad luck.
If you hadn’t read the book Sons of Wichita, it is a must-read. I found it fascinating that the 2 brothers’ upbringing was very much like that of another familiar sociopath: it45 (for that read, of course, Mary Trump’s book).
Loyd’s description is it. Something far more sinister than Free Market ideology motivates the Koch Klan. They are funding the Upending of Democracy anyway they can have it and anywhere they can initiate it. They are the Equivalent of Putin’s War On Ukraine.
CRT, Book Censors, Combat Zone School Boards and Charters are simply the distractions they employ.
Both Charles and Vlad want to take it all down with them.
interesting news
The information in the article is interesting and revealing, however, it wasn’t just the Koch brothers pushing reopening schools and ending masking. It has been ALL corporations, but it has also been the AFT. Why is Randi Weingarten left off the hook? The AFT has been campaigning (according to their website) since April 2020 to get schools reopened. And the UFT in New York does not oppose the decision by the DOE to eliminate the mask mandate in schools.
These people don’t give a damn about children or education.
I’m glad someone was fighting to open schools.
Who is the “someone”?
Where is the evidence that the poorest students in Alabama and Mississippi and other places where the very poorest students were forced to attend in-person school are now ahead of students in NYC?
Your problem is that you have a very right wing definition of “fighting to re-open schools”.
The people fighting to re-open schools were those fighting to end the pandemic sooner. They weren’t the poseurs who sent their own kids to private schools with mask-mandates and social distancing in small class sizes who were demanding the most vulnerable students be in overcrowded and poorly ventilated public schools.
They were doing what Biden was doing and working to vaccinate as many people as possible instead of doing what others were doing and legitimizing the anti-science folks as people whose beliefs must be treated as if they might be just as true as science.
You confuse fighting to please the far right billionaires who fund them with fighting to re-open schools SAFELY. You seem to believe that “caring” is when the people who send their kids to private schools fight to ban mask mandates for public schools and lecture to first generation parents at specialized high schools that having their kid be exposed to COVID and bring it home to their family is a sign that the parents who send their own kids to private schools really “care” about the students at specialized high schools.
The height of hypocrisy — Emily Oster has been wrong so many times and yet I don’t see flerp! trying to discredit everything she has ever written because she just happened to publish a PHD thesis that was so wrong that she had to completely retract it years later because she ignored all the people offering real evidence that contradicted her certainty for years. After all, when a white scholar has to retract the entire dissertation because the truth was the exact opposite of their entire dissertation, that is admirable! But flerp! has stated that the entirety of a Black scholars’ work is worthless because he said something stupid in an op ed he write in college!
By flerp’s self-described “non-racist” standards, Emily Oster should be banned from academia permanently and flerp! will never believe a single thing she writes. Or not. When white scholars don’t have to meet the standard of perfection that flerp! invokes when he attacks and tries to cancel Black scholars, then saying that their race has nothing to do with it speaks for itself.
And “caring” about opening schools describes those fighting to end this pandemic, not those fighting to make it last as long as possible and kill as many people as possible.
Why are your comments always so personal—i.e., aggressively focusing on the commenter you’re attacking?
Have you considered, just as an exercise, trying to limit your comments to, say, 100 words?
I only focus on the commenter when the commenter has previously posted something that demonstrates their hypocrisy.
For example, if dienne77 attacks us over and over for believing the lie that Putin plans to attack Ukraine and then after Putin attacks Ukraine pivots to attacking us for not supporting Putin attacking Ukraine and getting rid of Nazis, I call out that hypocrisy because it proves how false the argument always was.
And when you attack a Black scholar for some stupid op ed he wrote as a college student and you cite that to justify why you want that scholar “cancelled”, but don’t want to cancel “all schools can safely open during the height of the pandemic” Emily Oster even though she wrote a PhD dissertation that she had to entirely retract years later, because she had totally ignored all the people explaining what was wrong with her thesis for years, that’s hypocrisy.
It isn’t “personal” to call out hypocrisy — but it is impossible to call it out if you believe the hypocrites themselves when they demand no one call out their hypocrisy because that is a personal attack.
Try to lighten up a bit now and then. I don’t even know what you’re talking about half of the time. We disagree on some things. It happens. Every comment of yours reads like you’re screaming.
A favor, FLERP. Please stop reading NYCPSP comments.
I’ll try. Sometimes it’s difficult when she’s constantly yelling about how I’m a racist.
Pretend she’s addressing someone else.
Diane Ravitch,
I don’t understand the motives of someone who posts here frequently making ugly innuendoes about how teachers who support perfectly reasonable COVID precautions in public schools don’t care about kids, and who posts a snarky anti-teacher remark like “I’m glad someone was fighting to open schools”. Teachers also wanted schools to be opened — and schools HAVE been opened for 7 months! — but not before it was safe.
If someone’s comment is nasty innuendo, they should expect a response. It is odd that they whine when someone responds. Isn’t it quite entitled to feel offended if someone replies when you intentionally post a comment that is clearly meant to be insulting to educators?
flerp! never addresses the points I make, but flerp! does constantly reply for the sole purpose of making insulting personal attacks directed at me and sometimes at others. There is nothing in my replies that was “screaming”. Hypocrites don’t make apologies so I won’t hold my breath I will get one.
NYCPSP, please stop responding to FLERP. Your exchanges clog the blog. Ignore what he writes. If the two of you want to have a personal exchange, take it offline. If you are both willing, I will send you your emails. Your back and forth is not interesting to others.
To the headline I say: Bullshit!
Yes, he did. He was just THISCLOSE to coming back to America on…the Hindenburg. &, of course, David was the only survivor in the first class section of a plane crash. Our bad luck.
If you hadn’t read the book Sons of Wichita, it is a must-read. I found it fascinating that the 2 brothers’ upbringing was very much like that of another familiar sociopath: it45 (for that read, of course, Mary Trump’s book).
The ‘United’ States of America…United?
Trump carried out Putin’s goal, dividing the U.S. by fomenting racial tensions.
Just curious -what’s the size of the end-of-times religious segments in the Catholic, orthodox and evangelical sects in Russia?
Yes, we are United against naked aggression in Ukraine.
We have disagreements. That’s what happens in a democracy. We’re not a nice, orderly place like Putin’s Russia where dissenters are imprisoned for holding up a sign or shot or poisoned.
And what to see United? Have a look at the UNGA vote against Putin’s criminal war–142 to 5.
But that’s a real vote, not like the ones that Russia holds under Putin, in which any viable opposition candidate is dead or in prison or living in exile.
Nah, Manchester United!
Can anyone point me to the substack blogger who wrote about the need for a paradigm shift in the way we define success. Right now it is based on economic power. The writer pushes for a paradigm of success defined by self realization that grew out of his terminal diagnosis a while back (that turned out to be non-terminal). That is a horribly incomplete analysis of the position. I remember the needs of the customer being considered more equitably rather than the push to maximize profits at any cost.
I have been thinking of our local vulture capitalists who bought the Chicago Tribune and are orchestrating its slow demise. They have slashed the newsroom and raised the costs/revenue any way they can. What passes for a newspaper is pitiful, but I’m sure the hedge fund is jumping for joy. I’m guessing they will move on not too far in the future once they have figured out how to strip any value that is left out. I’m hoping that the Sun Times is in for a resurgence now that it has been bought by a “true” nonprofit. I am so tired of soulless corporate machinations.
The 62,000 Russian employees of McDonald’s won’t be working – operations suspended. Starbucks also suspending operations. Next up to persuade Coca Cola and Pepsi.
The “Yes, he did” comment I wrote above was supposed to go under Diane’s comment that Koch Sr. worked for both Stalin AND Hitler.
WordPress is messing with my comments. One I made about Koch Sr. was supposed to go under Diane’s comment RE: his working for both Hitler & Stalin (it’s in the book I recommended).
Then, I attempted to reply to Duane RE: “The headline is bullshit!” Duane, are you referring to Dana (who knows EVERYTHING about Education) Goldstein’s NYT article? I agree! Of course, no one can easily read it because it’s, of course, behind a paywall, but I managed to read quickly (Evelyn Wood: look it up if you’re too young!). & saw the information RE: 2019 tests & comparisons & I also call B💩. &, as to speduktr’s comments: the NYT should only be as good as the Chicago ☀️-Times.
WHAT have you done w/Michael Winerup?
Yes, my comment was to the posting by FLERP! of the NYT headline.
So, again, I call bull💩 along with you!
“As the political and philanthropic network of billionaire libertarian Charles Koch employs its latest PR strategy, the Charles Koch Foundation (CKF) and the Charles Koch Institute (CKI) increased their giving to media organizations by roughly $1 million in 2018.”
“In 2018, CKF gave out $127.5 million in donations, mostly to fund Koch’s right-wing educational and political infrastructure.”
https://www.prwatch.org/news/2019/11/13509/koch-foundations-increased-media-investments-2018
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