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Marty Levine: Beware Billionaires Bearing Gifts

By dianeravitch
September 26, 2022 //
13

Marty Levine wrote for the Nonprofit Quarterly for many years, where he distinguished himself as a skeptic of billionaires buying good press. He now writes his own blog, where this post appeared. He calls this post “The Corrosive Nature of Mega-Philanthropy.”

He writes:

I want this world to be a kinder, gentler place for all of its people. I want to admire those who sacrifice their own time and money in order to help those in greater need. I try, however imperfectly, to do the same. But I remain concerned about the growing power of those with great wealth to, even with the best of motives, turn their charity and philanthropy from acts of kindness to tools of power and control.

The Seattle Times opened a recent article about a project of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation with a recognition of how big gifts have an impact. “When philanthropists spend vast sums of money on a project, jubilation and high expectations ensue.” But it was the sentence that followed, “But money doesn’t necessarily produce results,” that grabbed my attention.

In this age of mega-philanthropy vast sums are donated with great frequency; as I write this the list of gifts of more than $1 million in 2022, as reported by the Chronicle of Philanthropy, is approaching 400. 18 individual gifts have exceeded $100 billion!

While we laud the act of giving, we ignore that these gifts are too often just another way for wealthy people to flex their muscles and continue to inappropriately exert social and political influence. And they do this with little or no public oversight, or with any public accountability for the effectiveness of their gifts or for the harms they may do.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and its associated Trust, with assets now in excess of $70 billion, stand as a stark example of this flawed system of philanthropy. The Gates’ philanthropic organizations are tax-exempt, which means that the Gates have personally benefited from the tax savings that our nation grants to donors. Because the Gates are allowed to donate funds to a structure they control, donating for them does not require them to relinquish the power at all. Their charitable venture just provides another mechanism of control, perhaps with a softer, kinder wrapping, but still a mechanism of influence and control.

And with that power, the Gates have brought their belief that they have the answers to some of the world’s most challenging problems and can impose those answers on those desperate for the resources they chose to give away. They have been able to put their solutions into action across the globe with little need to ensure that those whose lives they will be impacting agree with their directions or their proposed solutions. Their definition of philanthropy appears to begin with a belief that because they have amassed great wealth they are wise; that the size of their bank account is a measure of their intelligence and it gives them the authority to act. They act with a belief that because they are wealthy, they have no need to be accountable to those without wealth.

Read on to learn more about the philanthropists who use their gifts to control the lives of others.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Broad Foundation, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates

Jeremy Mohler: Privatization Sets the Stage for Rightwing Populism and Inequity

By dianeravitch
September 25, 2022 //
26

Jeremy Mohler is communications director for the nonpartisan organization “In the Public Interest,” which fights the privatization of public goods and services. This article draws a link between policies of privatization and the rise of rightwing populism

He writes:

It’s one sentence in a 1,244-word article, but it made me pause and think deeply.

The article is a guest essay in the New York Times about the rise of Sweden’s far-right political party, which was created out of a neo-Nazi group and resembles the increasingly Trumpian Republican Party with its hatred of immigrants, journalists, and others.

The sentence: “Once one of the most economically equal countries in the world, Sweden has seen the privatization of hospitals, schools and care homes, leading to a notable rise in inequality and a sense of profound loss.”

That makes me wonder: How much has privatization contributed to soaring far-right populism, white nationalism, and fascism in the U.S.?

In Sweden, argues journalist and author Elisabeth Asbrink, high levels of political and economic inequality leaves people looking for answers to why they’re suffering and who is to blame—and far right leaders are happy to provide them.

“It was better in the good old days, [those leaders] say, and people believe them,” Asbrink writes. “Back to red cottages and apple trees, to law and order, to women being women and men being men.”

Sound familiar?

As we have documented, the privatization of public schools, water, and other public goods increases inequality. Government contractors create new fees for things like delinquent tax payments and probation. They lower wages and benefits for workers. Privatization also has helped shred crucial parts of the social safety net, like Medicaid.

Scholars have argued along these lines for some time now. “Neoliberalism creates a failed democracy,” says cultural critic Henry A. Giroux, “and in doing so, opens up the fascists’ use of fear and terror to transform a state of exception into a state of emergency.”

But I think it’s important to highlight the role of privatization—something embraced by both parties for the past 40 or so years.

A Democratic candidate for governor of Pennsylvania, Josh Shapiro, recently endorsed private school vouchers, which would take public money from the state’s lowest funded public schools and give it to private schools.

Like privately operated charter schools, private school vouchers might help some students, but they leave most of the others behind in public schools starving for resources.

Conservatives have long pushed for such privatization schemes, and Democrats have too often joined them. Meanwhile, America’s far too many underfunded schools continue to suffer—with policies like charter schools and vouchers only making things worse.

And we wonder why “Make America Great Again” resonates with so many people.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Inequity, Privatization

Arizona SOS Files Signatures to Block Universal Vouchers

By dianeravitch
September 24, 2022 //
13

Arizona voters blocked vouchers in 2018 by a 2-1 margin. The Koch-DeVos machine came back with an even bigger voucher proposal this year. Save Our Schols Arizona, a grassroots group of volunteers once more gathered signatures to compel a state referendum to block vouchers. The billionaires hate democracy and will try to stop the referendum.

The Arizona Republic reported:

A school voucher program scheduled to become law Saturday is on hold after public-school advocates gathered enough citizen signatures to temporarily block the controversial program.

On Friday, the Save Our Schools movement submitted 141,714 signatures to the Arizona secretary of state as volunteers concluded a drive to refer the voucher program to the 2024 ballot for voters to decide.

The law, authorized by the GOP majority in the Legislature and signed by Republican Gov. Doug Ducey, would be the first universal voucher program in the nation, using taxpayer dollars for private education efforts.

It would expand the state’s Empowerment Scholarship Account program to every Arizona schoolchild, providing an estimated $7,000 of taxpayer money per child for a range of educational services, from private school tuition to tutors to support for parents who opt to teach their children at home…

Raquel Mamani, an educator and parent, celebrated the petition drive, saying it puts on hold “the anti-public education, anti-parent, anti-student agenda forced into our state by extremists.”

Volunteers gathered signatures from all 15 counties in 80 days, a sign of widespread support, said Nicky Indicavitch, outreach director for Save Our Schools Arizona.

“Arizonans want top quality, fully funded public schools in every neighborhood,” she said.

This is the second time in five years public-school proponents have taken to the streets to block voucher expansion. In 2017, a similar referendum drive sent an expansion of the ESA program to ballot, where voters in 2018 rejected it by a margin of nearly 2 to 1.

Friday’s filing had echoes of the 2017 effort, but both supporters and opponents of the ESA program expect a more robust, heavily funded fight this time around.

The American Federation for Children [the DeVos organization] has signaled its support for the expanded program, and a “decline to sign” movement that tried to discourage people from signing the referendum petitions said it has proof of illegal signature efforts…

After the universal expansion passed in June, the state started taking preliminary applications. Data released last month showed 6,500 families had applied in just two weeks. Of those families, about 75% indicated they did not have a child previously in public school.

Those early findings solidified opposition from public-school advocates, who argued that the numbers showed the beneficiaries were likely people already paying private tuition and looking to cash in on a hefty state subsidy.

Categories Accountability, Arizona, Betsy DeVos, Billionaires, Democracy, Education Reform, Extremism, Koch Brothers, Vouchers

Kathryn Joyce of Salon: Florida Ranked #1 by Group That Wants to Eliminate Public Schools

By dianeravitch
September 21, 2022 //
14

Kathryn Joyce of Salon has written one dynamite article after another about the movement to destroy public education. In this post, she writes that Florida was ranked # 1 in “educational freedom” by the far-right Heritage Foundation, which wants to privatize all schools. This is a brilliant, must-read article!

Arizona, which has pushed hard to expand charters and vouchers, came in a close second.

That claim, along with the fact that the list’s top 20 states are mostly deep “red” and its bottom 10 are almost all dark “blue,” might come as a surprise to education watchers who are familiar with more traditional assessments of education performance. But in the Heritage Foundation’s inaugural “Education Freedom Report Card,” the think tank is grading according to a different metric entirely: not things like average student funding, teacher salary or classroom size, but how easily state legislatures enable students to leave public schools; how lightly private schools and homeschooling are regulated; how active and welcome conservative parent-advocacy groups are; and how frequently or loudly those groups claim that schools are indoctrinating students….

In the category of education choice, Heritage’s primary focus is on education savings accounts(ESAs), a form of school voucher that allows parents to opt out of public schools and use a set amount of state funding (sometimes delivered via debit card) on almost any educational expenses they see fit. ESAs can be used towards charter schools, private schools, parochial schools and low-cost (and typically low-quality) “voucher schools,” as well as online schools, homeschooling expenses, unregulated “microschools” (where a group of parents pool resources to hire a private teacher) or tutoring. The report’s methodology also notes that the percentage of children in a state who attend these alternatives to public schools figures into its rankings, implying that families who choose traditional public schools are not considered examples of educational “freedom.” The “choice” category also awards points based on how non-public schools are regulated, docking states that require accreditation or the same level of testing mandated for public schools.

States can lose points if they have credentialed teachers and gain points if they let anyone without any credentials teach. They also lose points if they have good pension plans and unions. They gain points by having strong bans on “critical race theory” and gain points for teaching patriotic history.

What’s especially noteworthy about this report — which Heritage says it will release on an annual basis — is how closely most of its ranking criteria track with the right’s broader education agenda. Over the last few months, almost all the issues addressed in this report have been highlighted as key action items for conservative education reformers, from the promotion of ESAs, as a preferred pathway to universal school vouchers, to alternative teacher credentialing to the expansion of the anti-CRT movement, which now encompasses anything related to “diversity, equity and inclusion…”

Framing the report by invoking the libertarian economist [Milton] Friedman — who, over the course of his controversial career, proposed eliminating Social Security, the Food and Drug Administration, the licensing of doctors and more — is a telling choice. In a foundational 1955 essay, as Heritage notes, Friedman famously argued that “government-administered schooling” was incompatible with a freedom-loving society, and that public funding of education should be severed from public administration of it — which would end public education as the country had known it for generations…

“Friedman may have been an accomplished number-cruncher, but when it came to social issues, he was a crackpot,” said Carol Corbett Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education. He claimed that “vouchers ‘would solve all of the critical problems’ faced by schools,” from discipline, to busing to segregation, Burris continued. “He presented no evidence, just claims based on his disdain for any government regulation….”

By 1980, Friedman was declaring that vouchers were merely a useful waypoint on the road to true education freedom, which would include revoking compulsory education laws. In 2006, shortly before his death, Friedman told an ALEC audience that it would be “ideal” to “abolish the public school system and eliminate all the taxes that pay for it.”

For Heritage to use Friedman as its ideological lodestar, public education advocates observe, makes clear what the report values most in the state education systems it’s ranking….

“The fact that the Heritage Foundation ranks Arizona second in the country, when our schools are funded nearly last in the nation, only underscores the depraved lens with which they view the world,” said Beth Lewis, director of the advocacy group Save Our Schools Arizona, which is currently leading a citizen ballot referendumagainst the state’s new universal ESA law. “Heritage boasting about realizing Milton Friedman’s dream reveals the agenda — to abolish public schools and put every child on a voucher in segregated schools….”

“With this report,” added Burris, “the Heritage Foundation puts its values front and forward — that schooling should be a free-for-all marketplace where states spend the least possible on educating the future generation of Americans, with no regulations to preserve quality.” It’s no accident, Burris added, that Heritage’s top two states, Florida and Arizona, were ranked as the worst on the Network for Public Education’s own report card this year.

Categories Billionaires, Bush, Jeb, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Corruption, DeSantis, Disruption, Education Industry, Privatization, School Choice, Vouchers

Lloyd Lofthouse: Who Corrupted Our Political System with Big Money?

By dianeravitch
September 20, 2022 //
21

Our political system changed for the worse and became less democratic when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2010 to lift the ban on political spending by corporations and labor unions. The vote was 5-4. Justice John Roberts joined the conservative bloc to provide the deciding vote. The decision is explained and posted here on the Federal Elections Commission’s website.*

Lloyd Lofthouse, our frequent commentator and friend, wrote the following commentary about the ongoing and disastrous influence of big money in elections:

Private companies becoming citizens and doing this stuff is nothing new.

“But for 100 years, corporations were not given any constitutional right of political speech; in fact, quite the contrary. In 1907, following a corporate corruption scandal involving prior presidential campaigns, Congress passed a law banning corporate involvement in federal election campaigns. That wall held firm for 70 years.” …

“Then came Citizens United, the Supreme Court’s 5-4 First Amendment decision in 2010 that extended to corporations for the first time full rights to spend money as they wish in candidate elections — federal, state and local. The decision reversed a century of legal understanding, unleashed a flood of campaign cash and created a crescendo of controversy that continues to build today.”

https://www.npr.org/2014/07/28/335288388/when-did-companies-become-people-excavating-the-legal-evolution

“Citizens United is a conservative 501(c)(4) nonprofit organization in the United States founded in 1988. In 2010, the organization won a U.S. Supreme Court case known as Citizens United v. FEC, which struck down as unconstitutional a federal law prohibiting corporations and unions from making expenditures in connection with federal elections. The organization’s current president and chairman is David Bossie.[1]”

“Dark Money: Citizens United unleashed unlimited spending in our elections, and groups can now spend hundreds of millions without disclosing their sources of funding. We advocate for greater transparency in election spending.”

https://www.brennancenter.org/issues/reform-money-politics/influence-big-money/dark-money

*The FEC commentary begins with this paragraph about the Citizens United decision:

On January 21, 2010, the Supreme Court issued a ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission overruling an earlier decision, Austin v. Michigan State Chamber of Commerce (Austin), that allowed prohibitions on independent expenditures by corporations. The Court also overruled the part of McConnell v. Federal Election Commission that held that corporations could be banned from making electioneering communications. The Court upheld the reporting and disclaimer requirements for independent expenditures and electioneering communications. The Court’s ruling did not affect the ban on corporate contributions.

I do not understand the last sentence of the paragraph, which contradicts everything that precedes it as well as the practical effect of the CU decision. If there are any lawyers out there who can explain this apparent contradiction, I welcome your comments.

Categories Billionaires, Dark Money, Democracy, Elections, Funding

Why Did the Ford Foundation Kill Off Its Highly Successful Diversity Program?

By dianeravitch
September 19, 2022 //
13

The Ford Foundation decided to eliminate one of its best programs. This program has encouraged some of our most outstanding scholars of color. Who made this decision and why?

A millionaire foundation president constantly surrounded by controversy and verbal missteps (Google Darren Walker), a former University president who resigned, and the “cold” wealthy Apple tech heir just killed the most successful philanthropic diversity effort ever. Darren Walker, Francisco G. Cigarroa, and Laurene Powell Jobs are sunsetting the Ford Fellowship. For decades, this program has been addressing educator diversity in higher education and enhancing the contributions of faculty of color. Despite its unrivaled accomplishments— in an instant— one of the most successful diversity programs of all time— 6,102 fellows since the inception of the program in 1967— is now in the dustbin of history.

 

Educator diversity is one of the biggest challenges facing education today. It is an acute issue as students of color rarely encounter teachers of color in K-12 and then have the same experience in higher education. The last decade of research has shown that higher education hasn’t moved the needle and improved diversity in an appreciable way— but the Ford Fellowships clearly have. Mary Beth Gasman, a Professor at Rutgers University, said in the Washington Post that higher education has not solved this problem because colleges and universities “don’t want” faculty of color and now neither does the Ford Foundation.

 

In an email message to Ford Fellows, Darren Walker, Francisco G. Cigarroa, and Laurene Powell Jobs and the Ford Foundation board offered a couple of flawed reasons for killing the prestigious and impactful program. They argued that “winding down” the Ford Fellowships is acceptable because the Gates and Lumina foundations participate in higher education philanthropy. Leaving to the side the failures that the Gates Foundation has wrought on K-12 and Higher Education, it’s a straw man argument because unfortunately neither of these— nor any other foundation— are funding educator diversity in higher education in “meaningful and inspiring ways” as the Ford Foundation fellowships have done.

 

Walker, Cigarroa, and Jobs and the Ford Foundation board also engage a sleight of hand by mentioning that they will refocus on “social and racial justice.” What they neglect to mention is that the Ford Fellowship have supported the intellectual foundation of grassroots social and racial justice activism and movements. For example, while the program has encompassed many intellectual disciplines, this award has identified and supported some of the leading educational scholars and movement influencers such as Travis Bristol (Educator Diversity), Keffrelyn Brown (Culturally Relevant Pedagogy), Julian Vasquez Heilig (Community-Based Education Reform), Delores Delgado Bernal (Latinx students and schools), Daniel Solorzano (Critical Race Theory), Angela Valenzuela (Ethnic Studies), Chezare Walker (Black Youth and schools), Bryan Brayboy (Indigenous students and schools) and many more. I can only imagine how slighted the scholars of color supported by this fellowship may feel by this gross oversight of their widespread impact on social and racial justice. What Walker, Cigarroa, and Jobs and the Ford Foundation board don’t realize is that the fellowships are funding social and racial justice intellectual capital across the nation and globe. If they would have asked the Ford Fellows, they may have realized this. Furthermore, to set up a competitive and false dichotomy between funding Ford Fellowships and racial justice and movement building is insulting and demeaning for Ford Fellows and communities of color.

 

Killing the Ford Fellowships is not actually a “judgement call” as they say in their closing statement, but rather severe ignorance of the incredibly rich history of the Ford Fellowship. The closing of the Ford Fellowships just compounds Darren Walker’s ongoing errors, controversies, and missteps as a leader. Maybe for Darren Walker this “judgement call” is payback as the Ford Fellows created a movement and publicly protested his extensive support of prisons.

 

So, what is to be done? How do we hold the board members of the Ford Foundation representing Xerox, Ford, Davidson Kempner, Aluko & Oyebode, Cisco Systems, Sigma Impact, Mastercard and others accountable? Do you know how to reach out to them? Should Ford Fellows boycott the proposed 2023 conference? If Walker, Cigarroa, and Jobs and the Ford Foundation board were truly interested in movement building, the fellowship could have been reworked to encourage scholars to apply who are leaders and were identified as future leaders in social and racial justice. This new approach would add to the heritage of the Ford Fellowships and honor the legacy of leadership whose shoulders Walker, Cigarroa and Jobs and the Ford Foundation board stood on— but have now fallen off. By simply killing the Ford Fellowships, Darren Walker, Francisco G. Cigarroa, and Laurene Powell Jobs and the Ford Foundation board are destroying the intellectual foundation of social and racial justice movements and killing philanthropy’s most successful diversity program of all time. Shame on them.

Categories Billionaires, Higher Education, Race, Shame

Peter Greene: What Did the Broad Academy Accomplish?

By dianeravitch
September 17, 2022 //
35

I first met a Broadie about 15-18 years ago, when I was attending the wedding of a friend’s daughter. I conversed with a bright, young woman for about 10 minutes, then asked her where she was working. I’d guess she was 30 years old. She replied that she was in training to be an urban superintendent. Oh, I said. Are you a principal? No, she said. How many years have you been a teacher, I asked. None, she said. So how can you be an urban superintendent, I innocently asked. “I’m learning the skills I need at the Eli Broad Urban Superintendents Academy.”

Since then, I’ve seen many Broadies come and go, some leaving a trail of destruction, deficits, and demoralization behind them.

Peter Greene reviews a recent study of the Broad Academy and its graduates. It sets out to determine what the graduated accomplished. The short answer is “not much” or “nothing” in terms of school reform. But where Broadies went, charters expanded.

The Broad Academy has been around since 2002. Founded by Eli Broad, it’s a demonstration of how the sheer force of will, when backed by a mountain of money, can cause qualifications to materialize out of nothing. The Broad Foundation (“entrepreneurship for the public good”) set the Academy up with none of the features of a legitimate education leadership graduate program, and yet Broad grads kept getting hired to plum positions around the country. And now a new study shows what, exactly, all these faux graduates accomplished.

Give Eli Broad credit– his personal story is not about being born into privilege. Working class parents. Public school. Working his way through college. Been married to the same woman for sixty years. Borrowed money from his in-laws for his first venture– building little boxes made of ticky tacky. Read this story about how he used business success and big brass balls to make himself a major player in LA. He was a scrapper; Broad called himself a “sore winner.”

Broad believed that education was in trouble, but he did not believe schools had an education problem. He believed they had a management problem–specifically, a management problem caused by not having enough managers who treated schools like businesses. The goal has been to create a pipeline for Broad-minded school leaders to move into and transform school systems from the inside, to more closely fit Broad’s vision of how a school system should work.

Through a residency program, Broad often sweetens the pot by paying the salary of these managers, making them a free gift to the district. A 2012 memo indicated a desire to create a group of influential leaders who could “accelerate the pace of reform.” And Broad maintained some control over his stable of faux supers. In one notable example, John Covington quit his superintendent position in Kansas abruptly, leaving stunned school leaders. Not until five years later did they learn the truth; Eli Broad had called from Spain and told Covington to take a new job in Detroit.

Broad did not particularly believe that public schools could be reformed, with his vision of privatization becoming ever more explicit (leading to the 2015 plan to simply take over LAUSD schools). The Broad Academy offered an actual manual for how to close schools in order to trim budgets. The process was simple enough, and many folks will recognize it:

1) Starve school by shutting off resources
2) Declare that schools is failing (Try to look shocked/surprised)
3) Close school, shunt students to charterland

Anecdotally, the record for Broad Faux Supers is not great. Robert Bobb had a lackluster showing in Detroit. Jean-Claude Brizard received a 95% no-confidence vote from Rochester teachers, then went on to a disastrous term of office in Chicago. Oakland, CA, has seen a string of Broad superintendents, all with a short and unhappy tenure. Christopher Cerf created a steady drumbeat of controversy in New Jersey. Chris Barbic was put in charge of Tennessee’s Achievement School District, and resigned with all of his goals unfulfilled(and recommended another Broad grad as his replacement). John Deasy’s time at LA schools ended with a hugely expensive technology failure, and he’s been bouncing from failure to failure ever since..

But now a trio of researchers takes us beyond the anecdotal record. Thomas Dee (Stanford), Susanna Loeb (Brown) and Ying Shi (Syracuse) have produced “Public Sector Leadership and Philanthropy: The Case of Broad Superintendents.”

The paper starts with some history of Broad Academy, and places it in the framework of venture philanthropy, the sort of philanthropy that doesn’t just write a check, but stays engaged and demands to see data-defined results. The we start breaking down information about the Broad supers.

The Academy members themselves. They are way more diverse than the general pool of superintendents, so that’s a good thing. Slightly more than half of academy participants and about two-thirds of the Broad-trained superintendents have some teaching experience. This is way lower than actual school superintendents, and probably even lower because I will bet you dollars to donuts that the bulk of that “teaching experience” is a couple of years as a Teach for America tourist passing through a classroom so that they can stamp “teacher” on their CV like an exotic country stamped on a passport. On the other hand, one in five Broadies has experience in the military.

Open the link and read on. I can think of a few Broadies who created chaos and left deficits and demoralization behind as they left.

Categories Administrators, superintendents, Billionaires, Broad Foundation, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Education Industry, Failure

Arizona: Vouchers Will Harm Our Children

By dianeravitch
September 16, 2022 //
11

Beth Lewis, the director of Save Our Schools Arizona, thought that vouchers were a dead issue after 2/3 of voters rejected them in 2018.

But the Republican legislature, egged on by the usual billionaires, came back with a voucher plan even worse than the one that was defeated. They probably figured that the volunteers couldn’t muster the energy and resources to fight another round.

Beth Lewis writes:

This June, hours before adjourning their legislative session, Republican majority lawmakers delivered a massive blow to Arizonans by passing a universal voucher program that will siphon public dollars away from public schools to private schools with zero accountability to the public. Even worse, this program is significantly larger than a similar voucher program that was rejected by voters in 2018 by a margin of more than 2-1.

Make no mistake, lawmakers did not pass this bill at the urging of their constituents — who overwhelmingly support and rely on local public schools — but at the behest of special interest groups like Betsy DeVos’ American Federation for Children who aim to dismantle the public education system.

Lawmakers tried to sell these expanded vouchers as “school choice,” but we all know it has nothing to do with school choice and in fact harms the choice of the 1 million students who choose AZ’s public schools.

Republican lawmakers have long argued that universal vouchers would “free children from a broken school system.” But that argument was utterly destroyed recently when the Arizona Department of Education reportedthat 75% of families seeking new Empowerment Scholarship Accounts, which is what this voucher program is called, have never stepped foot in a public school.

And that’s just the start. Approximately 85,000 students already in private school and homeschool will become eligible for ESA vouchers overnight, potentially diverting another $600 million in funding away from public schools every year. This amounts to a 20% blow to local public schools across the board – a blow they cannot withstand. But of course, Governor Doug Ducey, DeVos and their cronies know that.

These deep dips into the school funding bucket drain the funding of the choice of 1 million AZ students who choose public schools. That’s not school choice— it’s highway robbery.

The only goal this disastrous bill accomplishes is fattening the bank accounts of special interests and for-profit operators at the expense of Arizona kids. Universal vouchers leave our taxpayer dollars ripe for fraud and abuse at the hands of extremist charlatans like Charlie Kirk and his radical Turning Point Academies (founded the same month as passage of Ducey’s voucher expansion). Using taxpayer dollars to indoctrinate children on bigotry and intolerance is not school choice – it’s dangerous.

Public funds belong in public schools where there is oversight and transparency, not in privately operated businesses with no accountability to taxpayers. There is nothing in this voucher expansion that would stop a bad actor from opening up a “private school” in a strip mall, lying to the parents, taking $7000 per child and closing up shop. Ducey’s expansion gives the state no mechanism to recover misspent or fraudulently used funds. There is zero oversight of academics, performance, curriculum, safety, or teacher credentials. And there is nothing to stop voucher schools from discriminating against students who don’t “fit” their ideology or mold. That’s not school choice – it’s indoctrination and segregation.

The entire program is a walking permission slip for future scandal, segregation, fraud and abuse. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of Arizona kids sit in overcrowded school classrooms with outdated textbooks, leaking roofs, and under-resourced teachers.

Save Our Schools Arizona is working to stop this law by turning in 118,823 valid signatures on Sept. 23, so that AZ voters will have the final say on the 2024 ballot. Find locations to sign the petition at teamsosarizona.com.

Beth Lewis is a mom, public education advocate, and K-12 policy expert who fights for a fully and equitably funded school for every Arizona child. As Director of Save Our Schools Arizona, Beth works to bring parents, educators, elected officials, business leaders, and community members together in support of Arizona’s public schools, which strengthen our communities and our great state. Beth has taught elementary and middle school in Arizona for 12 years. She holds a BA from the University of Notre Dame and a Master’s in Education from ASU. Reach out to her at beth@sosarizona.org

Categories Accountability, Arizona, Betsy DeVos, Billionaires, Corruption, Democracy, Education Industry, Privatization, Resistance, School Choice, Vouchers

New Study: Broad Supes Made No Difference, Other Than Increasing Charter Schools

By dianeravitch
September 5, 2022 //
31

A new study confirms what many critics of the Broad Foundation’s Superintendents’ Academy long suspected. Despite Eli Broad’s boasting, his program had no positive effects on student performance, but the “graduates” expanded privatization by charter schools.

Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis

Month 202X, Vol. 8, No. 1, pp. 1 –27

DOI: 10.3102/01623737221113575

https://doi.org/10.3102/016237372211135

 

Public-Sector Leadership and Philanthropy: The Case of Broad Superintendents

Thomas S. Dee

Stanford University

Susanna Loeb

Brown University

Ying Shi

Syracuse University

 

Using a unique panel data set on the 300 larg-est school districts, we examined the impact of Broad superintendents on a broad array of dis-trict outcomes. Our results indicate that the hir-ing of a Broad superintendent had no clear effects on outcomes such as student completion rates, enrollment, the closure of traditional public schools, and per-pupil spending on instruction or on support services. However, one exception to this pattern is particularly notable. We do find evidence that the hiring of a Broad superinten-dent results in a growing charter school sector. Specifically, we find that the hiring of Broad superintendents is associated with a trend toward increased charter school enrollment and a growth in the number of charter schools that extends beyond the short tenure of the typical Broad trainee.

We view the overall implications of these findings as nuanced. On the one hand, this Broad Foundation initiative was successful in placing new leaders with distinctive characteristics and training in a substantial number of U.S. school districts. Yet, we also find that these leaders had unusually short tenures and no clear effects on a variety of district outcomes.

Categories Accountability, Administrators, superintendents, Billionaires, Broad Foundation, Charter Schools, Closing schools, Corporate Reform, Disruption, Education Industry, Failure, Hoax, Research

Rightwing Mega-Donor Gives $1.6 Billion to Fund Extremist Candidates

By dianeravitch
September 3, 2022 //
44

A billionaire named Barre Seid has given $1.6 billion to a new far-right group, to be used to fund extremist candidates.

ProPublica wrote about how the billionaire structured the deal to avoid taxes.

An elderly, ultra-secretive Chicago businessman has given the largest known donation to a political advocacy group in U.S. history — worth $1.6 billion — and the recipient is one of the prime architects of conservatives’ efforts to reshape the American judicial system, including the Supreme Court.

Through a series of opaque transactions over the past two years, Barre Seid, a 90-year-old manufacturing magnate, gave the massive sum to a nonprofit run by Leonard Leo, who co-chairs the conservative legal group the Federalist Society.

The donation was first reported by The New York Times on Monday. The Lever and ProPublica confirmed the information from documents received independently by the news organizations.

Our reporting sheds additional light on how the two men, one a judicial kingmaker and the other a mysterious but prolific donor to conservative causes, came together to create a political war chest that will likely supercharge efforts to further shift American politics to the right.

As President Donald Trump’s adviser on judicial nominations, Leo helped build the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority, which recently eliminated Constitutional protections for abortion rights and has made a series of sweeping pro-business decisions. Leo, a conservative Catholic, has both helped select judges to nominate to the Supreme Court and directed multimillion dollar media campaigns to confirm them.

Leo derives immense political power through his ability to raise huge sums of money and distribute those funds throughout the conservative movement to influence elections, judicial appointments and policy battles. Yet the biggest funders of Leo’s operation have long been a mystery.

Seid, who led the surge protector and data-center equipment maker Tripp Lite for more than half a century, has been almost unknown outside a small circle of political and cultural recipients. The gift immediately vaults him into the ranks of major funders like the Koch brothers and George Soros.

In practical terms, there are few limitations on how Leo’s new group, the Marble Freedom Trust, can spend the enormous donation. The structure of the donation allowed Seid to avoid as much as $400 million in taxes. Thus, he maximized the amount of money at Leo’s disposal.

Sourcewatch says about him.

Barre Seid is a right-wing industrialist and donor to advocacy groups and thinktanks attacking climate science and promoting Islamaphobia. He is closely allied with the Koch network and funnels dark money through the same groups used by the Kochs, including Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund.

Seid built a fortune as the Chairman and CEO of Trippe Manufacturing Company (now known as Trippe Lite), which produces electrical equipment such as surge protectors and power strips, and Fiber Bond, which produces HVAC equipment.[1][2] In 1985, he established the Barbara and Barre Seid Foundation. It donates primarily to education, cultural organizations and the arts, and other philanthropic associations.[3]

Attacks on Climate Science

Seid is a major donor to the Heartland Institute, a vocal denier of climate science. According to leaked internal Heartland Institute documents obtained by DeSmogBlog, between 2007 and 2011, Seid contributed over $13,342,267 in donations.[4][5] In September 2013, the Heritage Foundation hosted an event for Heartland Institute CEO Joseph Bast and two of Heartland’s contracted climate denial scientists Willie Soon and Bob Carter. During the event, the Heartland Institute representatives would present a report titled “Climate Change Reconsidered” which was funded by Barre Seid. The report denies the seriousness of global warming and directly challenges the findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change(IPCC). According to Greenpeace, the Heartland Institute falsely claims that the report is peer-reviewed.[6]

The Heartland Institute, in addition to denying climate change, is a big supporter of vouchers.

The Sourcewatch article describes his effort to take control of a small liberal arts college outside of Chicago and turn it into a reflection of his extreme ideology.

Categories Bigotry, Billionaires, Democracy, Education Industry, Environment, Extremism
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