Tom Ultican, retired teacher of advanced mathematics and physics, is an expert on the “Destroy Public Education” movement. In this post, he explores the oligarch money behind The City Fund and the cities it has targeted for privatization of their public schools.
He writes:
Born in 2018, The City Fund (TCF) is a concentration of oligarch wealth crushing democracy and privatizing the commons. John Arnold (infamous ENRON energy trader) and Reed Hastings (Netflix CEO and former California Charter Schools Association board member) claimed to be investing $100 million each to establish TCF. Their July 2018 announcement was delivered on Neerav Kingsland’s blog “Relinquishment” which recently started requiring approval to access.
The TCF goal is to implement the portfolio school management model into 40 cities by 2028. At present TCF says it is “serving” 14 cities: Oakland, Ca; Stockton, Ca; Denver, Co; Camden, NJ; Washington, DC: Memphis, Tenn; Nashville, Tenn; New Orleans, La; Indianapolis, Ind.; Atlanta, Ga; Fort Worth, Tx; San Antonio, Tx; Baton Rouge, La; and Newark, NJ.
The operating structure of the fund is modeled after a law firm. Six of the fourteen founding members are lawyers. They constitute the core of the team being paid to execute the oligarch financed attack on public education….
TCF has spent heavily to develop a local ground game in the communities of targeted cities. On their web site, they provide a list of major grants made by 12/31/2019; defining major grants as being more than $200,000. Many of these grants are to other privatization focused organizations like TFA and Chiefs for Change, but most of them are for developing local organizations like the $5,500,000 to Opportunity Trust in Saint Louis another TFA related business. The TFA developed asset, founder and CEO Eric Scroggins, worked in various leadership positions at TFA for 14 years. Table-1 below lists this nationwide spending.
In many ways, The Mind Trust in Indianapolis, Indiana was the model for this kind of development. A 2016 articlefrom the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) which is quite school privatization friendly covers its development from the 2006 founding by Democratic Mayor Bart Peterson and his right hand man David Harris until 2016. PPI noted,
“The Mind Trust convinced Teach For America (TFA), The New Teacher Project (now TNTP), and Stand for Children to come to Indianapolis, in part by raising money for them. Since then TFA has brought in more than 500 teachers and 39 school leaders (the latter through its Indianapolis Principal Fellowship); TNTP’s Indianapolis Teaching Fellows Program has trained 498 teachers; and Stand for Children has worked to engage the community, to educate parents about school reform, and to spearhead fundraising for school board candidates.”
The Mind Trust became a successful example of implementing all of the important strategies for privatizing public schools. As a result, the Indianapolis Public School system is the second most privatized system in America with over 60% of its students attending schools no longer controlled by the elected school board.
Stand for Children which the PPI referenced is almost entirely about funneling dark money into local school board races. These nationwide efforts are now being bolstered by the political action organization staffers at TCF created, Public School Allies. Public School Allies was founded as a 501 C4 organization meaning it can contribute to politicians; however contributions to it are not tax exempt.
Billionaire funded organizations like Public School Allies can overwhelm local elections. For example, in 2019 they provided $80,000 to the independent expenditure committeeCampaign for Great Camden Schools. In the first school board election since the 2013 state takeover of Camden’s public schools, the three oligarch supported candidates won with vote totals of 1208, 1283 and 1455 votes.
Gary Borden was the Executive Directorof the California Charter School Association 501 C4 organization before he became a Partner at TCF. Now he is the director of Public School Allies.
A TCF Partner sits on the board of many of the local political organizations they fund. Kevin Huffman is on the board of The Memphis Education Fundand Atlanta’s RedefinED. Partner Ken Bubp is on the board of New Schools for Baton Rouge. Gary Borden is on the board of The Mind Trust. He replaced David Harris who appears to have resigned from TCF. Harris was also on the board of San Antonio’s City Education Partners. Unfortunately, their new web page no longer lists the board members.
Ultican goes on to describe the philosophy of The City Fund and its spin-offs: “…democracy is bad and privatization is good.”
Modern “school choice” ideology promoted by many white billionaires is little different from the strategies of southern segregationist in the 1950s and 60s. It still increases segregation and creates an “inherently unequal”and racist education system…
Ultican concludes:
The giant quantities of money concentrated in such few hands are destroying democracy. How is a citizen of an impoverished neighborhood who is opposed to having her public schools privatized going to politically compete with oligarchs from San Francisco or Seattle or Bentonville? Organizations like Public School Allies regularly come in and monetarily swamp any political opposition. That is not democracy.
I am convinced that John Arnold who is opposed to people receiving pensions sincerely believes charter schools are better than public schools. Likewise his partner, Reed Hastings, truly believes that elected school boards are bad. And Alice Walton really does think that vouchers are a good idea. However, I believe they are wrong and that the idea of offloading some of their tax burden is much more important to their beliefs than they will admit.
Witnessing the oligarch fueled attacks on the commons; I am convinced that billionaires need to be taxed out of existence if we are to have a healthy democracy of the people, by the people and for the people.
It may seem easy to criticize billionaires because of the First Amendment. It’s not. Several years ago, I wrote a post about John Arnold, mentioning the fact that he had been a high-flying energy trader at Enron. A few days later, I got notice from an Arnold spokesperson that he would sue me if I didn’t delete the post. Not wanting to fight a billionaire in court, I backed down. Good luck to Tom Ultican.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
And now we get right down to the REAL nitty-gritty. The nuts & bolts of it. The blueprint, the bankrolling, the blackmailing, the bums storming the barricades of Democracy. A template enacted over and over with deliberately disastrous results.
and you caught the exactly right word here: deliberate
“The giant quantities of money concentrated in such few hands are destroying democracy.”
That is the crux of the matter. The idea that money exists in such quantity that it can sway local political operations threatens democracy more than Putin himself. The right wing tries to buy school boards to advocate for a conservative social agenda. So-called “liberals” who take advantage of the public perception of the words describing the poles of political thought also support conservative monetary policy and seek to disrupt schools to get their snout into the public trough of the almost one trillion dollars spent on public education.
God help us.
“from the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) which is quite school privatization friendly”
That’s an understatement. They are a charter school cheerleading organization, like many, many ed reform groups. 100% negative towards public schools and 100% positive towards charter schools.
There’s no public school input or voice at all. A typical “debate” will consist of a reform-friendly moderator and three representatives either from charter schools or employed for the purpose of promoting and expanding charter schools.
Unsurprisingly, they always reach the same conclusion- all charter schools are awesome and all public schools are terrible. I think they all believe this- I’m not questioning their sincerity- but to portray ed reform as having any kind of “debate” over privatization is just not reflected in their work. The privatization decision has been made. Lockstep agreement on that. The only differences they have is how quickly they should complete the privatization project and whether it should be regulated when it’s complete.
The anti-regulatory ed reformers utterly dominate, so we’ll not only have completely privatized sytems, they won’t be regulated or accountable to the public in any way.
It’s not the slightest bit subtle either. The 74 will hold a “forum” on “choice” and the forum will consist of a charter school founder, a national ed reform pundit who supports and lobbies for charters and vouchers, and an academic who supports charters and vouchers.
If you thought “choice” included public schools, well, you are mistaken. Public school supporters and advocates are entirely shut out of ed reform events. Public schools (and students) don’t exist in this “movement” other than to be used as promotional tool to expand charters and vouchers.
Public schools are in the middle of a politically motivated firestorm right now, started and promoted by many of the same people who work full time promoting charters and vouchers. You wouldn’t know it to read ed reformers. If you read within the ed reform echo chamber you would believe the biggest issue facing public education in this country is Biden’s reform of the federal charter school program.
Here’s what the Fordham Institute, one of the hundreds of ed reform orgs, are working on right now:
expanding private school vouchers
lobbying against regulation of the federal charter school program
Can anyone see the huge glaring hole in the work of ed reformers? What’s missing? You guessed it- public schools and public school students.
Public schools won’t be mentioned again in ed reform until the state testing results come back. The only relevance of the state testing results will be how they can be used to lobby for more charters and private school vouchers.
“Modern “school choice” ideology promoted by many white billionaires is little different from the strategies of southern segregationist in the 1950s and 60s. It still increases segregation and creates an “inherently unequal” and racist education system.”
The only difference between the segregationists and the billionaire assault on the commons is that the billionaires manipulate through their weaponized wealth. Politicians step out of their way or in some cases assist in the billionaires’ plan to destroy public education. It is no accident that the districts they try to crush are minority majority school systems. Under the guise of choice and better education, the wealthy are trying to create separate and unequal privatized schools for poor minority students.
I got notice from an Arnold spokesperson that he would sue me if I didn’t delete the post.
Imagine attempting to go up against the lawyers that someone like Arnold can buy.
This is justice in America.
Exactly right, Bob. If a billionaires sues you, prepare for bankruptcy
I wrote that Enron employees lost their pensions when the company went bankrupt. But he emerged unscathed. That made him very angry. I am not talking about John Arnold, of course. I’m talking about Chaim Jones. Y
Indianapolis may be the model, but Denver is the biggest recipient. $21 million to RootEd which is everywhere. School board races, legislation, “community organizing.” Thomas does an incredibly important “deep dive” into the heinous City Fund. Thank you to him and you for posting this very important piece.
I’ve read enough about John Arnold to think he is a Putin-style ogre that cannot be trusted with OUR lives, and like all Putin-style oligarchs (there are far too many on this planet), Arnold meddles in OUR lives all the time, and that meddling isn’t good for US.
I agree that there should not be any billionaires. Individual wealth should be capped at, I’m being generous here, $100 million in net worth, and not one cent more.
And I’m probably wrong. A $10 million cap would be better.
I am for a 231 thousand dollar cap on personal worth. Consider the things that 231 describes:
The number of cubic inches in a gallon
The highway from Indiana to Florida
The Article of the Treaty of Versailles that gave full responsibility of the war to Germany
The highest wind velocity ever recorded on Mt Washington
The number of the US Civil Law Code that makes teaching someone how to blow up something illegal.
Now with all that, how can a person make a law limiting personal wealth without considering 231?
How can a fund be servicing a city like San Antonio Texas when the city has nothing to do with public schools and there are multiple independent school districts inside that one city (the same goes for Fort Worth).
Education journalism would be better if reporters and writers remember that not all school systems work like the NYC school system.
No matter how many districts are in San Antonio, the City Fund is going after them all.