Archives for category: Billionaires
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Lamar Alexander Disagrees with Betsy DeVos About Giving CARES Funds to Private Schools

By dianeravitch
May 22, 2020 //
9

Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, the ranking member of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, publicly questioned Betsy DeVos’s guidance to states to include private schools when distributing federal funding of coronavirus relief. DeVos says the money should be divided according to enrollment. Alexander says it was supposed to follow the Title I funding and go to the neediest students, who are not in private schools.

Politico Morning Education reports:

ALEXANDER, DEVOS PART WAYS ON STIMULUS GUIDANCE: DeVos is now getting pushback from Alexander for controversial guidance calling on school districts to distribute stimulus funds to private school students more expansively than they would under regular federal education aid through Title I.

— Her policy says schools should spend money on services for private school students based on the total number of all students enrolled, rather than poverty levels.

— “My sense was that the money should have been distributed in the same way we distribute Title I money,” Alexander told reporters on Thursday. “I think that’s what most of Congress was expecting.”

— DeVos defended her interpretation of the law when asked by POLITICO during a video conference to respond to Alexander’s comments. “In our implementation of Congress’ action under the CARES Act, we have indicated it’s our interpretation that it is meant literally for all students and that includes students, no matter where they’re learning,” she said.

— DeVos later said that public schools should work with their private counterparts to understand student needs and to help provide services, such as tutoring or teacher professional development for teachers.

Indiana’s superintendent Jennifer McCormick has announced that she will ignore the DeVos guidance. Tennessee, however, will divert money from needy public schools and give it to private schools with advantaged students.

As DeVos’s response shows, she doesn’t care what Congressional leaders think, not even when they are members of the Republican party. She does what she wants, without regard to Congressional intent or authorization or rebuke. She was born a billionaire, she is privileged, and she is spoiled. She is a hardened ideologue. She doesn’t care about helping poor kids as much as she cares about funding private schools. She doesn’t care about the law. She, like Trump, thinks she is above it.

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Billionaires, Funding, Poverty

Naomi Klein: Beware the Tech Billionaires and Their “Pandemic Shock Doctrine”

By dianeravitch
May 9, 2020 //
44

Naomi Klein coined the iconic book Shock Doctrine, about the way that the powerful elites use emergencies to expand their power because of the crisis. New Orleans was one of her prime examples of “disaster capitalism,” where the devastation of a giant hurricane created an opportunity to break the teachers union and privatize the public school system.

In this brilliant essay, published in The Intercept, Klein describes the many ways in which the plutocrats of the tech industry are turning the pandemic into a gold mine for themselves and planning a dystopian future for the rest of us.

Please read this provocative and frightening essay, which has numerous links to support her argument.

What she details is not just a threat to our privacy and our institutions but to our democracy and our freedom.

It is no coincidence, she writes, that Governor Andrew Cuomo is enlisting a team of tech billionaires to reimagine the future of the Empire State. They know exactly what they want, and it’s up to us to stop them.

She writes:

It has taken some time to gel, but something resembling a coherent Pandemic Shock Doctrine is beginning to emerge. Call it the “Screen New Deal.” Far more high-tech than anything we have seen during previous disasters, the future that is being rushed into being as the bodies still pile up treats our past weeks of physical isolation not as a painful necessity to save lives, but as a living laboratory for a permanent — and highly profitable — no-touch future.

Anuja Sonalker, CEO of Steer Tech, a Maryland-based company selling self-parking technology, recently summed up the new virus-personalized pitch. “There has been a distinct warming up to human-less, contactless technology,” she said. “Humans are biohazards, machines are not.”

It’s a future in which our homes are never again exclusively personal spaces but are also, via high-speed digital connectivity, our schools, our doctor’s offices, our gyms, and, if determined by the state, our jails. Of course, for many of us, those same homes were already turning into our never-off workplaces and our primary entertainment venues before the pandemic, and surveillance incarceration “in the community” was already booming. But in the future under hasty construction, all of these trends are poised for a warp-speed acceleration.

This is a future in which, for the privileged, almost everything is home delivered, either virtually via streaming and cloud technology, or physically via driverless vehicle or drone, then screen “shared” on a mediated platform. It’s a future that employs far fewer teachers, doctors, and drivers. It accepts no cash or credit cards (under guise of virus control) and has skeletal mass transit and far less live art. It’s a future that claims to be run on “artificial intelligence” but is actually held together by tens of millions of anonymous workers tucked away in warehouses, data centers, content moderation mills, electronic sweatshops, lithium mines, industrial farms, meat-processing plants, and prisons, where they are left unprotected from disease and hyperexploition. It’s a future in which our every move, our every word, our every relationship is trackable, traceable, and data-mineable by unprecedented collaborations between government and tech giants.

If all of this sounds familiar it’s because, pre-Covid, this precise app-driven, gig-fueled future was being sold to us in the name of convenience, frictionlessness, and personalization. But many of us had concerns. About the security, quality, and inequity of telehealth and online classrooms. About driverless cars mowing down pedestrians and drones smashing packages (and people). About location tracking and cash-free commerce obliterating our privacy and entrenching racial and gender discrimination. About unscrupulous social media platforms poisoning our information ecology and our kids’ mental health. About “smart cities” filled with sensors supplanting local government. About the good jobs these technologies wiped out. About the bad jobs they mass produced.

And most of all, we had concerns about the democracy-threatening wealth and power accumulated by a handful of tech companies that are masters of abdication — eschewing all responsibility for the wreckage left behind in the fields they now dominate, whether media, retail, or transportation.

That was the ancient past known as February. Today, a great many of those well-founded concerns are being swept away by a tidal wave of panic, and this warmed-over dystopia is going through a rush-job rebranding. Now, against a harrowing backdrop of mass death, it is being sold to us on the dubious promise that these technologies are the only possible way to pandemic-proof our lives, the indispensable keys to keeping ourselves and our loved ones safe.

Categories Billionaires, Data and Data Mining, Democracy, Disruption, Education Reform, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Online Education, Privacy, Privatization

Tom Ultican: Who Paid to Make Indianapolis the Second Most Privatized School District in the Nation?

By dianeravitch
April 30, 2020 //
8

In this post, Tom Ultican takes a close look at the takeover and privatization of the Indianapolis school district, funded by billionaires and managed by a well-funded group called The Mind Trust (which, of course, claims to be deeply concerned about “civil rights,” while stripping parents of color of their right to elect a school board that represents them). By Ultican’s reckoning, nearly 64% of the students in Indianapolis now attend privately managed schools.

He writes:

With the introduction of Innovation schools in 2015, Indianapolis Public Schools quickly became the second most privatized taxpayer supported schools system in America. It has zoomed past Detroit and Washington DC in the privatization sweepstakes to only trail the poster child for disaster capitalism, New Orleans. The right wing billionaire funded organization, The Mind Trust, has played a major role in this outcome.

He provides a handy list of the major funders of this betrayal of the public trust. Leading the charge is the Lilly Endowment, with a donation of $22.7 million, followed by the City Fund (Reed Hastings and John Arnold) at $18 million. And there are other familiar names, well known in the disruption industry.

Ultican traces the history of the disruption/privatization industry in Indianapolis and finds that its origins can be traced to the far-right extremists of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and the Koch brothers. You will not be surprised to learn that Teach for America and TNTP (the organization founded by Michelle Rhee) are integral to the privatization of Indianapolis’s schools. And Relay “Graduate School of Education” (the one with no real faculty or campuses or professors or researchers or library) is also in the mix.

Ultican reviews the sorry situation in Indianapolis, where disrupters have pulled the wool over the eyes of the public and the media with their dazzling sums of money, and he speculates about why billionaires are so devoted to undermining public schools and the teaching profession:

Why are billionaires spending so much to undermine professionalism in public education? It is probably not altruism. More likely, they want to reduce the biggest cost associated with education; teacher’s salaries. In the antebellum south, plantation owners preached anti-tax ideology because they owned the most and paid the most. Today’s billionaires aren’t much different. Most of them won’t put their children in public schools and really don’t value high quality public education. It seems the big motivation is to reduce tax burdens and simultaneously create new education industries.

Categories Accountability, ALEC, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Education Reform, Hoax, Indianapolis, Privatization

Betsy DeVos Hands Out Another $200 Million, Mostly to Rich Corporate Charter Chains

By dianeravitch
April 21, 2020 //
8

In 1994, the Clinton administration started a small federal program and funded it with $4.5 million to help launch new charter schools. At the time, charter schools were a new idea, and there were not many of them. The first charter school had opened in Minnesota in 1991, and six states passed laws authorizing charters in 1992. In 1994, the idea was too new to have produced results or research. So Congress allocated a measly $4.5 million.

In the 26 years since the federal Charter Schools Program started, the charter idea has burgeoned into an industry with state charter school associations, lobbyists in D.C. and in state capitols, and support from numerous foundations, billionaires, corporations, and Wall Street. There is considerable research about charters as well as controversy surrounding their methods of selecting and retaining or excluding students. Charters now enroll 6% of the nation’s students.

Two things are clear:

1. The charter sector today is very well funded by billionaire patrons such as the Walton Family Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Eli and Edythe abroad Foundation, the Laura and John Arnold Foundation, and Netflix founder Reed Hastings. It has no need of federal funding.

2. Some charters get high test scores (and are accused of skimming to get the “best” students), some get the worst scores in their states, and most get scores about the same as public schools with similar demographics. In the one all-charter district in the nation, New Orleans, about half the schools are rated D or F by the state. Although the charter industry sings their praises, it’s clear that charters have no secret sauce to lift up every child.

Yet despite the fact that charters have a huge number of financial angels with very deep pockets, despite the fact that they do not solve the deep-seated problems of American education, despite their spotty academic record, funding for the Federal Charter Schools Program has grown to $440 million per year.

Under Betsy DeVos, the CSP has become her personal slush fund to help The expansion of large corporate charter chains, like KIPP and IDEA. The original idea that the federal funds would launch entrepreneurial start-ups is long forgotten.

About two weeks ago, DeVos released the latest CSP funds and again favored the big corporate charter chains, which have many millions in reserve and long lists of billionaire patrons.

DeVos handed out the first $200 million to her favorite chain, IDEA, which has no financial need. IDEA won $72 million, having previously received more than $200 million from DeVos. IDEA, you may recall, is known for its lavish spending. Its board approved the lease of a private jet for nearly $2 million a year, but had to cancel the lease because of adverse publicity in Texas, where the chain is based. Its CEO hired a private jet to take him to meet with DeVos in Florida; he was the only passenger. The chain’s executives,lacking their own jet, are allowed to fly first class with their families, not exactly like public school employees on official travel.

The second biggest winner was Mater Academy, which won $57 million. It is affiliated with the for-profit (and very rich) Florida for-profit chain Academica.

The Network for Public Education published two reports about the CSP in 2019, documenting that the program is shot through with waste, fraud, and abuse. About 40% of the charters funded by CSP either never opened or closed not long after opening. The loss of federal funds was $1 billion. The first report—Asleep at the Wheel— is here. The second report—Still Asleep at the Wheel—is here.

Tom Ultican reviewed the two NPE reports and recounted Betsy DeVos’s unsurprising hostile response to them. Why would she relinquish control over $440 million, which helps corporate chains that divert money from public schools and advances DeVos’s long-term goal of wrecking the foundations of public education?

It is ironic that the Trump administration in its now forgotten budget for the coming year proposed to eliminate the federal Charter Schools Program by folding it and 28 other federal programs into a bloc grant to the states. At the same time, Trump and DeVos proposed The creation of a multi-billion dollar voucher program. The Democratic-controlled House of Representatives made clear that these proposals were Dead on Arrival. Nonetheless, the charter lobbyists were shocked to discover that charter schools are just a stepping-stone to vouchers for DeVos.

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Billionaires, Broad Foundation, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Privatization, Trump, Vouchers, Walton Foundation

Teachers and Principals in Oakland Give More to Neediest than Billionaires

By dianeravitch
April 18, 2020 //
11

The blog started today with an account of the paltry amounts of money that our leading edu-philanthropists are contributing to alleviate the suffering of students and families during this crisis and to help public schools through the crisis.

By contrast, some principals and teachers in the Oakland Education Association have agreed to give half or all of their stimulus checks to the families of undocumented workers, who will receive nothing. In proportion to their wealth, the teachers and principals are about a million times more generous than the billionaires.

The educators at the Oakland Unified School District launched the Stimulus Pledge campaign Thursday in response to the enormous stress and despair they say they are witnessing among immigrant parents who have lost all income under shelter-in-place orders, but are left out of unemployment insurance and many other benefits.

“We are in contact with our families every day and what we are hearing is heartbreaking,” said Anita Iverson-Comelo, a principal at Bridges Academy at Melrose, in East Oakland. “We feel like we have to do something.”

At least eight teachers at Bridges Academy, including some making less than $50,000 per year, have pledged all or part of their stimulus checks, said Iverson-Comelo. She and six other principals, whose higher salaries might disqualify them from the coronavirus federal cash aid, also plan to donate.

Many families have no income at all and rely for food on the district’s “grab and go” food program. They sure could use some help from Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg or Reed Hastings or Jeff Bezos.

Speaking of billionaires, Robert Reich said on Twitter that Jeff Bezos has increased his net worth by $24 billion during the crisis but still won’t give Amazon workers paid sick leave.

Feeding the hungry is not on the billionaires’ agenda. It’s not innovative. It’s not a game-changer.

It’s an act of love.

Categories Billionaires, Love, Oakland, Philanthropy, Teachers

Chalkbeat: Big Education Philanthropists Are Missing in Action on Coronavirus Response

By dianeravitch
April 18, 2020 //
13

Matt Barnum of Chalkbeat checked to see what the billionaire philanthropists are doing in response to the coronavirus. The answer: Not much.

When asked to underwrite charter schools, Teach for America, and wacky teacher-evaluation systems, they shell out hundreds of millions of dollars. When the nation’s schools are closed by a pandemic, and it’s clear that millions of children need food security, computers, and internet access, the money slows to a dribble. When the nation’s schools face massive budget cuts because of declining revenues, and these cuts will increase class sizes, cause layoffs, lead to drastic cuts in the arts and athletics, Will they wake up and pitch in to help?

He writes:

Here’s how four of the largest education foundations and grantmakers are responding:

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation says its “commitment to and overall objective of our education strategies are not changing.” But it is prioritizing supporting teaching by expanding “access to interactive, student-facing digital content and high-quality print materials” and “supporting data collection efforts to understand the impact of COVID-19 on educators and families.”

The City Fund, which is funded primarily by John Arnold and Reed Hastings, said it has committed new $100,000 grants to in its 14 active cities, and also allowed those organizations to repurpose $100,000 of existing grants to respond to the coronavirus. That will total nearly $3 million in emergency support. In Oakland, for instance, the Oakland Reach has used this to provide small cash payments of families in need. In D.C., money has gone to a fund to make Wi-Fi and laptops available to students. In St. Louis, a nonprofit has created a “remote learning innovation fund.”

The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative has awarded over $1.6 million to education groups, including money to those aiming to expand broadband access in the San Francisco Bay Area, to disseminate resources to parents, and to provide guidance to school districts moving instruction online.

The Walton Family Foundation did not offer details. But along with the Kauffman Foundation, it has contributed to a $2 million education relief fund in Kansas City designed to support teachers, families, and schools with costs and challenges associated with COVID-19.

So far, most of the private grants in response to the virus amount to a few million dollars at most. By comparison, the federal stimulus for K-12 schools totaled $13.5 billion — and many worry it won’t be anywhere near enough, considering that high-poverty school districts are facing a daunting combination of greater needs and less money.

When billionaires pony up only a few million in the face of a national catastrophe, that’s not a contribution. That’s a tip. That’s surely not “putting children first.”

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

Tom Ultican: Billionaire-Funded Group Claims Progressive Are Most Inequitable

By dianeravitch
April 13, 2020 //
37

Tom Ultican reports on a billionaire-funded paper that makes the strange claim that the most progressive cities are the most inequitable. The “study,” he points out, was not peer-reviewed nor was it written by scholars with academic credentials. Its central thesis is that progressive cities are less able to educate students of color than conservative cities.

Since conservative cities spend less than progressive ones, is the underlying message that we should spend less on schools?

The paper is titled: “The Secret Shame: How America’s Most Progressive Cities Betray Their Commitment to Educational Opportunity for All.”

Was it produced by a right wing think tank? No, it came from the media website Education Post, which regularly touts school choice and critiques public schools.

As you will see, the methodology and the conclusions are strained, if not downright bizarre. as Ultican puts it, the paper is a polemic, a word salad, not a study.

The billionaires funding the organization called Brightbeam that produced this paper are Michael Bloomberg, the Waltons, Mark Zuckerberg, and Laurene Powell Jobs.

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

Cleveland: Billionaire-Owned Corporation Kills Local Newspaper

By dianeravitch
April 10, 2020 //
7

Patrick O’Donnell is one of the best education journalists in the nation. He has covered charter and cyber charter scandals in Cleveland and in Ohio without fear or favor. Ohio, as you may have noticed, is awash in charter corruption.

O’Donnell worked for the Cleveland Plain-Dealer until last weekend, when the newspaper pushed out its leading journalists and told them they could cover far-flung areas if they want to stay employed. The order from on high essentially fired union journalists and gutted the newspaper’s coverage of Cleveland.

The Plain-Dealer is part of Advance Publications, which is owned by the billionaire Newhouse family. Advance is engaged in cost-cutting that will destroy local journalism. It’s all about the Almighty Dollar.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Education Reform, Media, Ohio

Missouri: Professor of Economics Renounces Award to Protest Donor Influence

By dianeravitch
April 6, 2020 //
3

This is a message from UnkochMyCampus, an organization dedicated to stopping the nefarious influence of the super-rich on campuses, starting with the Koch family. In this case, the contribution to a Missouri university came from billionaire Rex Sinquefield, a rightwing libertarian extremist. Mr. Sinquefield is a strong supporters of charter schools and vouchers.

Please consider signing the letter of thanks to this brave professor, David Repach.

In an act of protest, a professor at Saint Louis University (SLU) has renounced his Endowed Chair in Economics. In a memo explaining his decision, Dr. David Rapach cites the university’s acceptance of a financial donation “rife with violations of well-established academic norm” as his reason for renoucing the John Simon Endowed Chair. The $50 million donation came from St. Lous billionaire Rex Sinquefield, a local political donor well known for funding campaigns to cut taxes and privatize public goods in Missouri.

Saint Louis University’s decision to accept donor-influenced financial support from Rex Sinquefield is reflective of the ultra-wealthy’s strategy to use colleges and universities to build public support for their private legislative agenda– an agenda that harms working families and public education.

Show your support for Professor Rapach by signing our petition endorsing his courageous action!
“I hope to send the message to students that principles are more important than the money and/or prestige that accompany particular titles. Based on my understanding of SLU’s mission, I feel compelled to renounce the Simon Chair to be true to my principles and to protest what is happening at SLU.” -Dr. Rapach’s March 9, 2020

Sinquefield’s agenda includes pushing the repeal the progressive income tax system, thwarting efforts to secure fair wages for hard-working Missourians, and investing in legislation that weakens Missouri’s public schools. The violations of academic norms in the donation allow Sinquefield to leverage SLU to promote his private interests and legislative agenda. Help us demand that colleges and universisties serve the common good, not private interest!

Sign the Petition
In solidarity,

Samantha Parsons

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Courage, Higher Education, Koch Brothers, Resistance

Wired: Billionaire Philanthropists Should Not Be Responsible for Solving Public Problems

By dianeravitch
March 30, 2020 //
67

Rob Reich and Mohit Mookim write in “Wired” about the efforts by Bill Gates, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, and Chinese billionaire Jack Ma to step in and do what the federal government has failed to do in responding to the coronavirus pandemic.

They warn:

Public health is a paradigmatic public good. We should never be dependent on the whims of wealthy donors—as philanthropy is increasingly dominated by the wealthy—for our collective health and well-being.

That would be a betrayal of democracy. Rather than democratic processes determining our collective needs and how to address them, the wealthy would decide for us. We wanted rule by the many; we may get rule by the rich.

The coronavirus pandemic presents us with an immediate need for a response and it reminds us of the importance to invest so that we avoid preventable disasters in the future. At the moment, it’s all hands on deck for the emergency. But this is not what big philanthropy is built for. Or what it can sustain. The richest country in the world must step up to fund public health rather than relying on the richest people in the world to do it piecemeal.

Rob Reich is Professor of Political Science at Stanford University and author of Just Giving: Why Philanthropy is Failing Democracy and How It Can Do Better. He is the faculty codirector of The Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society, which has received grants from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Mohit Mookim is a researcher at the Center for Ethics in Society at Stanford University.

Curiously, the co-author Rob Reich Of the article leads an organization funded by the Gates Foundation. Will Bill Gates listen to him?

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Democracy, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Health, Philanthropy
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