Open this link to discover the big surprise that Steven Singer’s students gave him on the last day of school.
It defines the term “psychic income.”
it explains the rewards that teachers may get that are never never never available to lawyers, hedge fund managers, even billionaires. Eli Broad will never win this prize. No member of the Walton Family will ever receive what Steven got from his eighth grade students on the last day of school.
Tom Ultican writes here about the billionaire takeover of Camden, New Jersey. It was easy. Working with Republican Governor Chris Christie, who was eager to have someone take responsibility for the schools in the state’s poorest district, the billionaires got what they wanted.
Camden was their plaything, their Petri dish.
Have they ended poverty yet?
This article was published in the Detroit Free Press on a day when not many people were paying attention, December 25, 2018, but it should have been national news.
The Waltons, heirs to the anti-union Walmart empire, have been investing in black organizations to spread their views about charter schools.
The fact that the NAACP and Black Lives Matter have stood up to the bully billionaire behemoth and demanded a moratorium on charters is astounding and a great credit to their integrity.
It begins:
Amid fierce debate over whether charter schools are good for black students, the heirs to the Walmart company fortune have been working to make inroads with advocates and influential leaders in the black community.
The Walton family, as one of the leading supporters of America’s charter school movement, is spreading its financial support to prominent and like-minded black leaders, from grassroots groups focused on education to mainstream national organizations such as the United Negro College Fund and Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, according to an Associated Press analysis of tax filings and nonprofit grants data.
Here is the most astonishingly hypocritical statement in the article:
“Those closest to the challenge often have the best solution,” Marc Sternberg, who leads the Walton Family Foundation’s education efforts, said in a prepared statement.
In no particular order.
These are books I enjoyed and learned from.
Anand Giridharadas, Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World
Rucker Johnson, Children of the Dream: Why Integration Works
The front page of Sunday’s New York Times has a story titled “Who Owns the West?”
A couple of billionaires, that’s who.
The U.S. used to be the Land of Opportunity.
Now it is the Land of the Oligarchs.
IDAHO CITY, Idaho — The Wilks brothers grew up in a goat shed, never finished high school and built a billion-dollar fracking business from scratch.
So when the brothers, Dan and Farris, bought a vast stretch of mountain-studded land in southwest Idaho, it was not just an investment, but a sign of their good fortune.
“Through hard work and determination — and they didn’t have a lot of privilege — they’ve reached success,” said Dan Wilks’s son, Justin.
The purchase also placed the Wilkses high on the list of well-heeled landowners who are buying huge parcels of America. In the last decade, private land in the United States has become increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few. Today, just 100 families own about 42 million acres across the country, a 65,000-square-mile expanse, according to the Land Report, a magazine that tracks large purchases. Researchers at the magazine have found that the amount of land owned by those 100 families has jumped 50 percent since 2007.
Much of that land stretches from the Rocky Mountains down into Texas, where, for some, commercial forests and retired ranches have become an increasingly attractive investment.
Battles over private and public land have been a defining part of the West since the 1800s, when the federal government began doling out free acres to encourage expansion. For years, fights have played out between private individuals and the federal government, which owns more than half of the region.
But now, with wealthier buyers purchasing even larger parcels, the battle lines have shifted. Many local residents see these new owners as a threat to a way of life beloved for its easy access to the outdoors, and they complain that property that they once saw as public is being taken away from them.
The Wilkses, who now own some 700,000 acres across several states, have become a symbol of the out-of-touch owner. In Idaho, as their property has expanded, the brothers have shuttered trails and hired armed guards to patrol their acres, blocking and stymying access not only to their private property, but also to some publicly owned areas. This has drawn ire from everyday Idahoans who have hiked and hunted in those hills for generations.
In my new book, Slaying Goliath, I focus on heroes of the Resistance. One of them is Professor Maurice Cunningham of the University of Massachusetts. He is a professor of politics and a blogger who believes in “follow the money.” His relentless pursuit of Dark Money in the Massachusetts charter referendum of 2016 (where voters overwhelmingly rejected charter expansion) led to the demise of the billionaire-funded front group called “Families for Excellent Schools.” It so happened that the “families” were billionaires who never set foot in a public school and never will.
In this post, Cunningham describes his fruitless effort to get a media outlet to acknowledge that the “parent group” it featured was Walton-funded.
Back on June 10 Masslive.com ran an editorial titled Meet the Newest Education Union: Parents which turned out not to be about education or unions at all but about the WalMart-heir front Massachusetts Parents United of Arkansas. Helpful as always I sent an op-ed to Masslive setting the record straight but they paid no attention. Oh well. You can read the op-ed below.
It surprises me how little most media care about writing the basic facts about corporate “education reform” groups like MPU of AK, which would be non-existent without the millions of dollars poured in by the Waltons. The editorial board can take any position on issues they wish but it doesn’t excuse them from not informing their readers about who is funding and thus controlling the privatization fronts. Are they just not curious? I can’t imagine the motto “We don’t ask too many questions” would look good on the masthead. Is “follow the money” an elective in journalism school that got axed due to budget cuts? Is it not news that state education policy is being hijacked by family of billionaires? Is it still not news that the billionaires are from Arkansas?
If you’re from western Massachusetts, ask Masslive yourself, and feel free to pass along my Letter to Massachusetts Education Reporters which has six reasons why reporters should report on who is behind front groups with tantalizing names like Massachusetts Parents United, Educators for Excellence, and Democrats for Education Reform.
Cunningham says “Dark Money never sleeps.”
Any Group funded by the Waltons or other billionaires is by definition “inauthentic.”
Cunningham hates hypocrisy.
So do I.
Mercedes Schneider read the voluminous indictment of the founders of the online charter chain called A3. She describes the counts in the indictment in this post.
She writes:
In this post, I offer excerpts of the 67 counts detailed in the 235-page indictmentof Sean McManus, Jason Schrock, and nine others who used weaknesses in California’s charter school laws to construct a network of fraud and launder $50M in public funds into their own pockets over the course of years. These 11 individuals (and unidentified others) did so by opening multiple charter schools and using companies, both pre-existing and newly-created, to establish a complex system of self-dealing– with little to no education actually happening via those exploited, educational dollars.
The California legislature is currently deciding whether and how to reform the state’s charter law. The California Charter School Association is fighting any accountability or reform of the law. If a theft of more than $50 million by charter vultures doesn’t persuade the legislature of the need for reform, nothing will.
Bring on more theft of public money! More millions scooped up by entrepreneurs and grifters!
Thanks, Reed Hastings, Eli Broad, Bill Bloomfield, the Fischer family (the Gap and Old Navy), the Walton family, and all the other billionaires who make this piracy possible and who fund the CCSA!
Why spend money on public schools when it can go right into the bank accounts of smart and savvy entrepreneurs?
Adolph Reed Jr. and Cornel West blast the charter school advocates who dishonestly attacked Bernie Sanders’ plan for charter accountability as racist.
This is an amazing article. Please read it in full. I am not supposed to quote more than 300 words without violating copyright law. I would love to post it all, but I can’t. You have got to open it and read it.
Reed and West write:
During the Reagan era, ultraconservative columnist James Kilpatrick, a notorious segregationist since the southern Massive Resistance campaign against the 1954 Brown decision, took up the right-wing attack on Social Security from a novel angle. He opposed the program as discriminatory against African Americans because black men were statistically less likely than whites to live long enough to receive the old-age benefits. That was likely the only time in his public life Kilpatrick expressed anything that might seem like sympathy for black Americans.
A decade or so later, many advocates of the welfare “reform” that ended the federal government’s 60-year commitment to provide income support for the indigent similarly couched their efforts in feigned concern to help poor black people break a supposedly distinctive “cycle of poverty.” Similar disingenuous tears have accompanied the federal government’s retreat since the 1990s from direct provision of affordable housing for the poor. Thus, a racist premise that there’s a special sort of black poverty became a way to spin cutting public benefits for poor people as a supposedly anti-racist, anti-poverty strategy.
Now, despite abundant evidence to the contrary, the charter-school industry and its advocates also make such claims, asserting that charters offer unique opportunities for poor African-American children. On those grounds, for example, The Washington Post recently attacked the Bernie Sanders campaign’s Thurgood Marshall Plan for Public Education, which, among other features, supports the NAACP’s call for a “moratorium on public funds for charter school expansion until a national audit has been conducted to determine the impact of charter growth in each state.” In a May 27 masthead editorial, the Post described charterization as a civil-rights issue, claiming that charter schools can remedy the “most enduring—and unforgivable—civil rights offense in our country today [which] is the consigning of so many poor, often minority children to failing schools.” To justify that claim, the editorial cites research indicating that black students in charter schools “gained an additional 59 days of learning in math and 44 days in reading per year compared with traditional school counterparts.”
Reed and West demonstrate that multiple studies show that charter schools do not outperform public schools, and they are more segregated than public schools.
They write:
As is a common occurrence in the privatization of public functions, lack of effective public oversight has provided the charter-school industry great opportunities for fraud and corruption. A 2019 national study by the Network for Public Education concluded among its findings that “Hundreds of millions of federal taxpayer dollars have been awarded to charter schools that never opened or opened and then shut down. Only a few months before the Washington Post editorial attacking Senator Sanders’s support for the NAACP’s call for a moratorium on charters, the newspaper published an investigative article exploring the nightmarish uncertainty that sudden closure of fly-by-night charter schools can inflict upon students and their parents…
The charter industry is about profiting off education. In addition to the officially for-profit companies involved, even many charter nonprofits are structured in ways that enable people and businesses to make money off them. Charter operators and affiliated entities have used public funds to obtain and privately own valuable urban real estate.
Moreover, administrative overhead for charter schools is often more than twice that of district schools, and charter executive salaries far exceed those of district administrators. A 2017 report found that in post-Katrina New Orleans, long touted as the Shangri-la of charterization, administrative spending per pupil had increased by 66 percent, while instructional spending had declined by 10 percent.
Bad as the out-and-out fraudsters and get-rich-quick schemers are, the most dangerous and destructive elements in the charter-school industry are the billionaire “philanthropists” like Bill Gates, Walmart’s Walton family, and Eli Broad, the hedge-fund operators, corporate chains, and their minions in think tanks and on op-ed pages, who, out of ideological and commercial motives, have for some time been plotting the privatization of public schools and the destruction of public education as anything more than an underfunded holding pen for the least profitable students….
Of course, teachers’ unions are the charter industry’s bête noire for a more old-school reason as well: There is no place for them in the business model. Charter-school teachers are paid less than teachers at traditional public schools, are less experienced, less likely to be certified, less satisfied with their jobs, have higher rates of turnover, and most important, are much more likely to be at-will employees who can be dismissed without cause. The charter-school industry has been able to impose these clearly less-desirable working conditions on teachers partly through taking advantage of young, idealistic people funneled from outfits like Teach For America. And the long campaign stigmatizing public-school teachers, as well as other public workers, and their unions as the equivalent of lazy welfare queens has enabled propagation of a narrative projecting the image of fresh-faced, energetic young elite-college graduates as more effective and desirable than experienced teachers…
Simply put, charter advocates’ sanctimonious bluster about charterization as a civil-rights issue is deeply disingenuous, and the attacks on Bernie Sanders as racist for joining the NAACP in opposing it are repugnant.
ProPublica reports on its investigation of the funding and mission of Teach for America, in which it discovered that TFA is an arm of the charter movement, which aims to replace public schools with non-union private charter school.
This is an eye-popping article, an exemplar of investigative reporting.
It begins:
When the Walton Family Foundation announced in 2013 that it was donating $20 million to Teach For America to recruit and train nearly 4,000 teachers for low-income schools, its press release did not reveal the unusual terms for the grant.
Documents obtained by ProPublica show that the foundation, a staunch supporter of school choice and Teach For America’s largest private funder, was paying $4,000 for every teacher placed in a traditional public school — and $6,000 for every one placed in a charter school. The two-year grantwas directed at nine cities where charter schools were sprouting up, including New Orleans; Memphis, Tennessee; and Los Angeles.
Here are some things you will see documented in this article.
TFA is one of the richest nonprofits in the nation.
TFA has received huge gifts from the anti-union, anti-public school Walton Family Foundation.
TFA supplies a large supply of teachers for non-union charter schools.
TFA has used its resources to help its alumni attain positions of power, as state and local superintendents and as state and local school board members, where they advocate for charter schools and TFA. In Colorado, a TFA alum Michael Johnston is running for U.S. Senate and has received huge campaign contributions from allies of TFA and DFER (Democrats for Education Reform).
Read the article to understand the nexus of power that ties TFA to the Waltons and the privatization movement.
To understand how deeply connected TFA is to rightwing politics, note that a member of its national board of trustees is former Tennessee Governor Bill Haslam, who promoted the DeVos agenda of charters and vouchers while in office. Haslam is a billionaire.
The two outside members of the board of TFA’s political arm, Leadership for Educational Equity (sic) are billionaires Emma Bloomberg and Arthur Rock.
Tom Ultican, retired teacher of physics and advanced mathematics, has become a scholar of the privatization movement.
in this post, he reviews the efforts of the charter lobby to undermine the effort to reform the egregiously defective charter law in California.
At times like this, you need a scorecard to keep track of the multitudinous organizations created by the billionaires who want to replace public schools with charter schools.
Ultican is one of the few people able to sort out the charter menagerie.
The Waltons, Reed Hastings, Eli Broad, Bill Gates, and assorted billionaires think they can create the illusion of popular support by spinning off more and more AstroTurf groups that have no connection to parents or teachers. Just money. Their ruse is failing. Betsy DeVos must be enjoying the charade.
Congratulations to Superintendent Tony Thurmond for getting a reasonable set of recommendations for charter law reform from a deeply divided task force.
Diane Ravitch's blog 