Archives for category: Billionaires
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George Joseph: How Trump’s Pal Carl Icahn Profits from His Charters

By dianeravitch
June 17, 2016 //
10

Presumptive Republican nominee has said that billionaire Carl Icahn is the kind of person he would pick as Secretary of the Treasury.

It seems there is a magnetic attraction between billionaires and charter schools.

Investigative journalist George Joseph took a closer look at Carl Icahn’s investment in charter schools:

Like Trump, Carl Icahn has also named a school after himself—seven charter schools in New York City to be exact (Icahn Charter School 1, Icahn Charter School 2, Icahn Charter School 3, etc.). And as with Trump University, the money trail suggests the organization running these schools may have served to enrich its billionaire founder, Icahn, at the expense of its own students. An AlterNet investigation finds that Carl Icahn appears to have treated his charity like a personal piggy bank, using it to make potentially tens of millions for himself while benefiting from tens of millions in tax deductions.

In 1997, Carl Icahn made a $100 million tax-deductible “contribution” to his public charity, the Foundation for a Greater Opportunity, scoring about a $45 million income tax reduction, according to an estimate by Gregg Polsky, a law professor at UNC. In January 2006, Icahn’s foundation suddenly sold back the stock gift to an Icahn corporation, Modal LLC. The $100 million gift in American Railcar Industries Inc. shares was conspicuously sold three days before the company was to go public, a process that often sparks a short-term hike in share value. The convenient date of the sale strongly suggests Icahn knew his limited liability corporation, rather than his educational charity, would make a killing off the public offering.

Isn’t it wonderful how some people, like Icahn, have figured out how to do good and make money at the same time?

Categories Billionaires, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization

Washington Monthly: What Would “Populism with a Brain” Look Like?

By dianeravitch
June 16, 2016 //
32

This is a provocative, must-read article by Barry C. Lynn of the New America Foundation and Phillip Longman, a senior editor at the Washington Monthly. They review the history of Populism and import its essential ideas into the present era.

The… first Populists drew upon a political philosophy with roots back to the American Revolution. Part of this tradition is familiar—a belief that government must be run by the people. Populists called for direct election of senators and led the push for referendums and initiatives to bypass corrupt legislatures. But another part is largely forgotten—that the people are sovereign over the economy and have a responsibility to structure markets to promote the common good.

This was the “democratic republicanism” of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. It holds that, just like political power, economic power must be distributed as widely as possible. Thus, the Populists focused much of their energy on combating efforts to monopolize commerce and natural resources, especially land. They also closely studied how to govern large corporations, and strongly supported unionization of workers and farmers to counter the power of concentrated capital.

Read their proposals for restoring power to the people.

This is one I like a lot, and I would add charter schools to their list:

What would a True Populist do today? Insist that the managers of any corporation receiving more than a quarter of its revenues from taxpayers—including defense contractors, universities, and hospitals—work at government wages. And require that the bosses of local public utilities earn no more than the public servants who regulate them.

They also propose breaking up the giant monopolies of Google, Amazon, and Facebook, and localizing retail, banking and other services.

Since the 1970s, both Democrats and Republicans have undone almost all these laws. The result has been a concentration of power and wealth that would have horrified True Populists. In groceries, pharmacies, hardware, and office supply, control has been consolidated in as few as one or two giants. So, too, wealth—the Walton family alone is now as rich as 140 million other Americans combined. And with the rise of online goliaths like Amazon, which aims to be the “Everything Store,” control will only be yet further concentrated.

What would a True Populist do today? Besides neutralizing large online retailers, a True Populist would revive the laws Americans used to localize banking, farming, and retail through the heart of the twentieth century.

About fifteen years ago, the Bush administration dropped the guard against vertical integration. Since then Comcast, which distributes television shows, has been allowed to merge with NBC, which produces shows. Amazon, the dominant retail marketplace for books, has been allowed to go big time into publishing books. And Google, which dominates search, has been allowed to compete directly with companies like Yelp, which rely on Google’s search engine.

What would a True Populist do today? Break up Amazon, Facebook, Google, Comcast, and any other essential network monopoly by banning them from owning companies that depend on their services.

Wow! Now here is some fresh thinking.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Economy, Education Industry, Privatization

Eli Broad Releases Plan to Take Over and Privatize Public Education in Los Angeles

By dianeravitch
June 15, 2016 //
34

The Eli Broad-funded group “Great Public Schools Now” (sic) has released its plan for the destruction of democratically controlled public education in Los Angeles.

Despite the failure of charter schools to improve the education of low-income students unless they are free to choose the students they want and kick out the ones they don’t want, billionaire Eli Broad wants to put 160,000 children who are now in public schools into privately managed charters. The twist in this plan is that Broad and his allies have promised to take control of public schools, magnet schools, and other schools as well as their own charters. It seems that the billionaires and their minions know how to create successful schools. One wonders if this means that even the public schools will adopt “no excuses” discipline and kick out the kids who refuse to conform. To do this, the corporate reformers have to retain some public schools where they can drop the kids they don’t want.

The goal is to expand access for 160,000 students GPSN has identified as attending failing schools in 10 low-income Los Angeles neighborhoods to successful schools it wants to help replicate or expand.

The neighborhoods are in South LA, East LA and the northeast San Fernando Valley, chosen because they have “chronically underperforming schools and few high-quality school choices for struggling families,” the plan states.

GPSN says it will provide funding and support to high-performing schools no matter what type of school — charter, traditional, pilot, magnet or partnership — so they can be replicated and expanded. It will also support proposed schools with the potential to be high quality.

The widening focus is a shift from an early plan leaked last year that was developed by the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation to expand charter schools in LA.

“This is a different kind of initiative, very different than has been attempted in Los Angeles before,” said Myrna Castrejon, GPSN’s executive director. “I am particularly excited about the opportunity to really work across sectors to really strengthen all of public education.”

GPSN also is revealing today the makeup of its seven-person board, all of whom boast decades of experience in education. In addition to Siart and Flores, who is also a senior fellow at the Campaign for Grade-Level Reading, the board members are Gregory McGinity, executive director of the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation; Maria Casillas, founder of Families in Schools; Virgil Roberts, chairman of the board of Families in Schools; Marc Sternberg, K-12 education program director for the Walton Family Foundation, and Allison Keller, senior vice president and chief financial officer and executive director of the W.M. Keck Foundation.

All of these are corporate reformers with “decades” of privatizing public schools.

Bear in mind that in California, charter schools are not only deregulated, they operate without any supervision. There have been numerous charter scandals involving fraud and misappropriation of funds.

This is a disgrace. Eli Broad was educated in the public schools of Michigan, and he has become–along with the rightwing Walton Family Foundation–the major destroyer of public education in the nation. Naturally, the Walton Family Foundation’s education director Marc Sternberg is on the board of Eli Broad’s latest venture, bringing together the two most powerful and union-hating, public school-hating organizations in the US.

Expect a billionaire-funded drive to take control of the Los Angeles school board in the spring of 2017, to pave the way for the end of democratic public education in Los Angeles.

Categories Billionaires, Broad Foundation, California, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Los Angeles, Privatization

Idaho Students to Albertson Foundation: “You Don’t Know What You Are Talking About!”

By dianeravitch
June 14, 2016 //
20

High school students in the West Ada school district made a 3-minute video to respond to the Albertson Foundation’s attack on public education. (Read here about the Albertson Foundation’s attacks and its plan to open enough charter schools to enroll 20,000 students.)

The Albertson Foundation is leading a mean-spirited attack on public education in Idaho. They have underwritten television ads saying that the public schools are no good and 80% of the graduates are not prepared for college or careers. Attacks like this are always the prelude to demands for privatization and for replacing public schools with charter schools, vouchers, and virtual charters.

The students got tired of hearing these stale and erroneous complaints from a handful of billionaires who don’t like public education, so they made their own video. Of course, they can’t afford to put it on television, but they can put it on social media.

Let’s hear it for the kids! They are alright in Idaho!

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Reform, Idaho, Privatization

Harold Meyerson: The Challenge for Progressives in California to Clean Up Our Politics

By dianeravitch
June 12, 2016 //
11

Harold Meyerson, editor of The American Prospect, writes in the Los Angeles Times that progressives in California should stay involved in state politics and join to defeat the power of big money.

As he shows, the big money interests have combined to elect conservative Democrats and defeat progressive Democrats. Because of the state’s “top-two” primaries, regardless of party, the big-money guys are picking malleable conservative Democrats and pouring millions into their campaigns to pick off progressive campaigns.

Bernie Sanders’ keystone issue was to limit the role of money in politics. In California, the moneyed interests are saturating legislative races with donations that their opponents can’t match.

Over the past two years, oil companies and “education reform” billionaires have been funding campaigns for obliging Democratic candidates running against their more progressive co-partisans under the state’s “top-two” election process. In this week’s primary, independent committees spent at least $24 million, with most of that money flowing to Democrats who opposed Gov. Jerry Brown’s effort to halve motorists’ use of fossil fuels by 2030, and a substantial sum going to Democrats who support expanding charter schools.

Six years ago, according to the Associated Press, just one legislative primary race had more than $1 million in outside spending, and four had more than $500,000. This year, eight races saw more than $1 million in such spending, and 15 more than $500,000.

In a heavily Democratic district outside Sacramento, a November state Senate runoff will pit Democratic Assemblyman Bill Dodd, who opposed Brown’s legislation, against former Democratic Assemblywoman Mariko Yamada. Dodd has already benefited from one independent campaign funded by Chevron and other energy companies to the tune of more than $270,000, and from an education reform campaign funded by charter school proponents such as billionaire Eli Broad in the amount of $1.68 million.

Since progressives can’t match their millions, they should do their best to expose them and their surrogates as the puppets they are.

Public education in California is a plum for the billionaires. They want to privatize it. Who are the biggest spenders in the self-named “education reform movement”? Eli Broad, Michael Bloomberg, Reed Hastings, and Alice Walton. None is a parent in public schools. None has children in public schools. Two do not even live in California.

This is NOT what democracy looks like.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Bloomberg, Michael, Broad Foundation, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Democracy, Education Industry, Privatization, Walton Foundation

New York Times: How Donald Trump’s Casinos Went Bankrupt, But He Didn’t

By dianeravitch
June 11, 2016 //
43

It is always informative to learn how the super-rich get their money.

Categories Billionaires, Trump

Politifact: What Were the Top Tax Rates Under Eisenhower?

By dianeravitch
June 6, 2016 //
36

Bernie Sanders said recently that tax rates under Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower were as high as 90% for the highest income bracket.

 

Politifact assessed that claim and shows here that it is true.

 

What if Bill Gates, Eli Broad, the Walton family, the Koch brothers, Art Pope, Michael Bloomberg, Paul Tudor Jones, John Arnold, Jonathan Sackler (Mr. OxyContin) and all the other billionaires had their income taxed at Eisenhower rates? We would be able to repair our schools, pay our teachers, hire school nurses, and provide a world-class education. No wonder they prefer to promote school choice. It works for them.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Budget Cuts, Education Reform, School Choice, Supporting public schools

Readers React to L.A. Times’ Critique of Gates’ Meddling in Education

By dianeravitch
June 5, 2016 //
16

Here are letters to the editor printed in the Los Angeles Times in reaction to its editorial criticizing the Gates Foundation and other wealthy philanthropists for trying to control the nation’s education agenda.

http://www.latimes.com/opinion/readersreact/la-le-bill-gates-education-reform-20160603-snap-story.html#nt=blogroll

The theme of the letters is: why don’t people listen to teachers? If Gates had, he would have spent his $3 billion wisely and well. But instead, he squandered it on his own faulty ideas.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Failure, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates

Koch Brother Learns the Difficulty in Opening a New School: Allegations of Favoritism, Waste, Fraud, Sexual Harassment, and High Staff Turnover

By dianeravitch
June 4, 2016 //
18

Bill Koch, one of the famous billionaire Koch brothers, decided he wanted to open a great high school, an example for the nation. He created Oxbridge Academy in West Palm Beach, Florida, where the sky was the limit in terms of spending.

 

He recruited the chief financial officer of the U.S. Naval Academy as its headmaster by offering him a financial package worth more than $1 million a year.

 

Koch’s goal was excellence:

 

That’s the aim of Oxbridge Academy, whose roster of teachers and administrators recruited from around the country aspires to the highest of academic ambitions for their 580 students, who populate a sprawling West Palm Beach campus and engage in extracurricular activities that range from horseback riding to sailing and flight simulation and boast a football team that rarely loses.

 

Tuition is $31,500 a year, though many students receive financial aid as part of Chairman Bill Koch’s desire to maintain a diverse student body elevated, as his industrialist father was decades ago, by the generosity of others. Koch, a Palm Beach energy industry billionaire, antiquities collector and America’s Cup winner, founded the West Pam Beach high school in 2011 and estimates he has invested $75 million to $100 million to make Oxbridge one of the finest in the nation.

 

But curtained behind the wooded grounds and low-slung buildings at Military Trail and Community Drive, say past and present employees, exists a working environment led by President and CEO Robert C. Parsons that’s fraught with firings, high turnover, accusations of sexual harassment and an emphasis tilting from academics to athletics….

 

What worries employees is the frequency of firings, the swiftness of departures and absence of explanation. One day a colleague is there and the next, gone.

 

That has been the pattern, not with just teachers but high-level administrators with top credentials, who came attracted by the excitement of creating an innovative, high-powered school only to find themselves out the door, sometimes in a matter of months.
Neen Hunt, for example, came before the school’s opening, to organize operations as academics chief. Hunt, a Phi Beta Kappa, cum laude graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, had earned a Master of Arts in Education and a Doctorate from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She came to Oxbridge from New York’s prestigious Calhoun School, where she was head of school.

 

She was gone before the first day of class….

 

Of the inaugural group of 17 teachers that started in fall 2011, many who Hunt recruited from around the country, eight were told in February 2012 their contracts wouldn’t be renewed but that they were expected to finish the term.

 

 

“It was such a horrible atmosphere and so unprofessional,” said one instructor who wasn’t fired. “They wanted me to come back but there was no way I was going to let my career be ruined by those people. The atmosphere felt evil and very controlling. It was one of the most disturbing places I have ever worked in under the guise of being an educational environment. It was shocking.”

 

When interviewed, Bill Koch said the high turnover didn’t bother him, because he works under the Jack Welch philosophy that the bottom 10 percent should be fired every year. Apparently, he didn’t notice that more than the bottom 10 percent were leaving every year.

 

Koch is now paying for an investigative team to get to the bottom of numerous allegations. Several top officials have been placed on paid leave, including the employee who was a whistle-blower.

 

Staff turnover has been amazingly high, considering the seemingly idyllic working conditions:

 

Mark Bodnar, the school’s former second-in-command, said he left the stress of working in that environment to hike trails in Arizona. He estimated that more than 120 people have been fired or quit, some after having left prestigious schools and moving their families cross-country to work at Oxbridge. Another source put the number at 135, including part-timers.

 

The school’s public relations manager, Carey O’Donnell, said that from 2011 to now, 96 employees left, 34 of them fired.

 

In the past two or three months, the school’s treasurer/chief financial officer, an accountant who was out on family leave and its baseball coach were fired and its security director demoted to security guard, according to current employees.

 

Be sure to read the comments on the original story in the Palm Beach Post. Some are from current or former employees.

 

When a reporter from the New York Times called to ask me about this story, in preparation for writing about it, I said that at least Bill Koch is paying for implementing his ideas instead of expecting the public to pay for them, as Bill Gates, Eli Broad, the Walton family, John Arnold, and many other billionaires are doing. Wouldn’t it be great if all of them opened their own private schools and tried out their educational ideas using their own money, instead of imposing them on other people’s children and demanding public support?

 

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Florida, Funding

When Billionaires Control the Media

By dianeravitch
May 31, 2016 //
31

The New York Times wrote  about the control of the mass media by billionaires, an issue that should concern us all. Not only do they own the media, some use it to promote their financial self-interest and political ideology.

 

This is is not an entirely new phenomenon, the story notes, mentioning William Randolph Hearst as an example. But Hearst co-existed with thousands of community newspapers. In this age of concentrated ownership of the media, a handful of moguls own the news.

 

Jim Rutenberg, the reporter, points out an ominous development. Billionaire Peter Thiel bankrolled a lawsuit by wrestler Hulk Hoganagainst Gawker.com, a gossip website, as payback for Gawker’s report that he was gay. Hogan won $140 million, which, if upheld on appeal, would put Gawker out of business.

 

This is an ingenious way to stifle dissent. If a billionaire doesn’t like a website, he or she can sue it into bankruptcy.

Categories Billionaires, Black Alliance for Educational Options, Education Reform, Freedom of Speech, Media
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