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New Jersey: Dark Money Is Paying to Double Down on High-Stakes Testing

By dianeravitch
February 22, 2019 //
15

Wake up, parents and teachers in New Jersey! The billionaires and Dark Money are launching a sneak attack on your children and students.

When he ran for office, New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy promised to scrap the Common Core-aligned PARCC and end the state’s high-stakes exit exams.

But billionaires and hedge fund managers don’t want to stop high-stakes testing. They love PARCC because it makes public schools look bad. Making public schools look bad helps the privatization movement.

Dark money and billionaires are dumping money into the bank accounts of key legislators to keep the testing machine alive. Find out which billionaire education reformers are behind the push to keep high-stakes standardized testing alive in New Jersey, and which legislators are doing their bidding. #HijackedByBillionaires

PARCC is a ridiculous exam whose standards were set so high that most students were certain to “fail” to reach proficiency. Half the states in the nation adopted it when it was unveiled in 2010, but almost all have abandoned it. Today only 5 or 6 states still use PARCC, and New Mexico recently announced it was dropping PARCC.
Legislator Theresa Ruiz is leading the fight to keep high-stakes testing. The Bill to save PARCC passed by one vote in the State Senate yesterday and goes to the Assembly for a vote on Monday.

“New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy campaigned on a promise to end PARCC and eliminate exit testing. Following his lead, the New Jersey Department of Education toured the state to get feedback on standardized assessments, wrote a report summarizing their findings, and proposed new regulations to replace ones passed during the Christie administration.

“But on September 12, 2018, before the Board’s discussion began, Senator Teresa Ruiz crashed the New Jersey State Board of Education meeting and suddenly regulations that seemed like a slam dunk were tabled.”

In Ruiz’s latest election, the largest contribution ($5,377) to her campaign came from Education Reform Now Advocacy (ERNA), a dark money 501(c)(4) advocacy organization associated with Democrats for Education Reform (DFER), a PAC started by billionaire education reformers.
As a 501(c)(4), ERNA is not required to disclose their donors. This means the people of NJ have no right to know who the money behind Ruiz’s largest campaign contribution came from.Ruiz also received maximum contributions of $2,600 from New Jersey billionaires Alan Fournier and David Tepper, the founders of Better Education for Kids (B4K). They are hedge fund managers who meddle in New Jersey education on behalf of testing and privatization.

B4K, Inc. gave Ruiz a direct contribution of $1,000.

B4K has been the bullhorn for Tepper and Fournier’s reform agenda for close to a decade.

Senate President Steve Sweeney, a Ruiz ally, has fast tracked the bill to be voted on by the full Senate.

Sweeney is no stranger to education reform billionaires either. In fact, in his last election, millions of dollars were spent to support Sweeney and fend off an attempt by the New Jersey Education Association to unseat him.

The New Jerseyans for a Better Tomorrow PAC, which is run by a former Sweeney aide, received over 2 and a half million dollars from General Majority PAC which is “widely seen” as being controlled by New Jersey political boss, George Norcross.

General Majority PAC brought in contributions from three of the nation’s biggest education reform champions.

The largest contribution of $500,000 came from Walmart heiress Alice Walton, followed by $200,000 from Texas billionaire and former Enron trader John Arnold, and $100,000 from California billionaire and Netflix founder Reed Hastings.

ERNA, the dark money 501 (c)(4) that was Ruiz’s largest campaign contributor, contributed $25,000 to General Majority PAC.

Sweeney also received direct maximum contributions of $2,600 from Alan and Jennifer Fournier, David Tepper and B4K, Inc..

Here is an infographic that shows the reach of Dark Money, Wall Street, hedge funds, and assorted billionaires into the effortto preserve high-stakes testing in New Jersey.

 

Categories Billionaires, Charter Schools, Common Core, Corruption, Dark Money, Education Reform, New Jersey, Testing

Washington Post Fact Checker: The Walton Family Makes More in 1 Minute than Their Average Worker in a Year

By dianeravitch
February 20, 2019 //
18

 

Glen Kessler, the Washington Post fact checker, reviewed Bernie Sanders’ claim that the Walton family makes more money in one minute than their average Walmart employee in one year. He said that Senator Sanders was right.

The difference is that the average Walmart worker has to go to work to earn money. The Waltons just sit still and get richer by the minute.

Kessler writes:

“The Walton family makes more money in one minute than Walmart workers do in an entire year. This is what we mean when we talk about a rigged economy.”

— Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), in a tweet, Feb. 14, 2019

This tweet from the campaign Twitter account of Sanders, a potential 2020 presidential candidate, caught our eye. Whether this is a definition of a rigged economy is a matter of opinion, but we were curious whether his factoid was right — does the Walton family make as much money in a minute as the company’s workers make in a year?

Let’s take a look.

The Facts

The Sanders campaign acknowledged that the information in the tweet came from a union-backed website known as Making Change at Walmart. The math behind this factoid is pretty simple and easily confirmed with documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Though Walmart is a publicly traded company, more than 50 percent of its shares are in the hands of the Walton family — 51.11 percent, to be precise. These shares are controlled primarily through two entities: Walton Family Holdings Trust and a holding company, Walton Enterprises. Members of the Walton family also have shares they control individually.

The three most prominent members of the family are Jim, S. Robson (Rob) and Alice, each estimated to be worth about $46 billion. They are the surviving children of Sam Walton, co-founder of the company. Other members of the family include Ann Walton Kroenke and Nancy Walton Laurie, children of Bud Walton, the other co-founder; Christy Walton, the widow of one of Sam’s sons; and 10 grandchildren (such as Lukas, worth about $16 billion, and Steuart, who is on the company’s board of directors).

When you add it up, the Walton family controls 1,508,965,874 shares out of 2,952,478,528 total shares outstanding, according to the company’s 2018 proxy statement.

Walmart’s most recent quarterly dividend was 52 cents a share, or $2.08 a year.

In other words, the Walton family earns $3,138,649,017.92 just in dividends a year, before adding in income from salaries, director’s fees and so forth. Yep, that’s more than $3.1 billion.

We have no idea how many hours a week members of the Walton family work on business, but a standard workweek is 40 hours, or 2,080 hours a year. That works out to $1.51 million an hour — or more precisely, $25,149 a minute.

By contrast, the union-backed website says, “at $9/hour, Walmart workers make less than $16,000/year working 34 hours per week, which is Walmart’s definition of full-time.”

Payscale says the average Walmart wage is $12 an hour, including managers, with cashiers earning $9.97 and sales associates earning $10.40. Walmart has previously told The Fact Checker that an entry-level worker earns $11 an hour.

For the sake of argument, let’s give these workers a 40-hour week. Walmart considers 34 hours full-time, which means that’s when workers can qualify for extra benefits, but under the law it has to start paying overtime when work exceeds 40 hours in a week. During holiday seasons, Walmart has been giving extra hours to existing workers rather than hiring seasonal workers. So a 40-hour week seems reasonable as a baseline.

Cashiers: $20,738 a year

Sales associates: $21,632 a year

Entry-level worker (Walmart figure): $22,880 a year

Walmart average (Payscale): $24,960 year

Walton family: $25,149 a minute

Even under a 40-hour metric, the Walton family still earns more in a minute than Walmart employees do in a year.

While the Walmart workers making $20,000 to $25,000 a year may pay little in income taxes or even qualify for the earned income tax credit, we should note that dividend income is taxed at a much lower rate than ordinary income. (This lower tax rate applies to “qualified dividends,” which would apply to the Walmart family holdings.)

The Waltons will have to pay only 20 percent tax on dividend income, compared with a 37 percent tax rate on annual income above $612,000 — so their taxes are almost cut in half. The workers will pay the 6.2 percent Social Security tax on all of their income, while the Waltons will stop paying any Social Security tax once their income exceeds $132,900. (There is no income limit on the 1.45 percent Medicare tax.)

In other words, dividend income is much more valuable on an after-tax basis than ordinary income.

A Walmart spokesman declined to comment.

The Pinocchio Test

Even assuming a 40-hour week, the average Walmart worker earns less in a year than the Walton family earns in a minute just from dividends paid on the family’s stock holdings. It’s an astonishing statistic, and it happens to be correct. Sanders thus earns the coveted Geppetto Checkmark. Regular readers know that we reserve this rating for claims that are unexpectedly true — and that’s certainly the case here.

Geppetto Checkmark

 

Categories Billionaires, Walton Foundation

Elizabeth Kolbert: The New Age of Philanthropy and the Crisis of Democracy

By dianeravitch
February 19, 2019 //
14

On this site, we have often complained about the philanthropists who impose their bad ideas on schools, which this far have consistently failed.

This article in The New Yorker reviews the new world of philanthropy, where the rich pay as little as possible in taxes and use their foundations to reorder the world as they think it should be. When they give, they end up in control, undermining democratic institutions and as rich as ever.

I strongly recommend a book titled “The Spirit Level,” which demonstrates that the most equal societies are the happiest societies.

On this subject, I recommend a book discussed in this article, Anand Giridharadas’ Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World.

Categories Billionaires, Education Reform, Hoax, Philanthropy

Red Queen in LA: Meet Billionaire Bill Bloomfield, Conservative Supporter of Charter Schools

By dianeravitch
February 19, 2019 //
9

 

When people think of Los Angeles billionaires who want to take control of the schools , they tend to think of Eli Broad and Reed Hastings.

Sara Roos, who blogs as Red Queen in LA, has done a deep dive into the political contributions of billionaire Bill Bloomfield, who gives generously to rightwing politicians and school privatization.

Mr. Bloomfield and his wife have spent $36 million since 2005 to advance their conservative Republican agenda.

This is an impressive investigation of the usesof Big Money to undercut democracy.

When billionaires call, politicians pick up the phone.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, California, Los Angeles

Bill Raden: Who Is Pouring Money into Special Election for LAUSD Seat?

By dianeravitch
February 17, 2019 //
6

 

Bill Raden of Capitol& Main reports here on the sources of the contributions for the March 5 LAUSD special election for the empty seat created by the resignation of Ref Rodriguez, who stepped down after being convicted of money laundering in his campaign for the board. He relies on the spade work of Sara Roos, who blogs as “Red Queen in LA.” Early vote by mail has started.

Raden writes:

“The latest update on the money race in Los Angeles Unified’s March 5 special election to fill out the term of disgraced Board District 5 member Ref Rodriguez comes courtesy of intrepid ed blogger Sara “Redqueeninla” Roos. In a must-read, granular analysis, Roos breaks down the race’s campaign donations by profession or “affinity.” The results? “An awesome display of the power of machine politics” reflected in the number and size of donations from city contractors, developers, commissioners, public employees and appointees, political consultants and public-private partners.

“Of the top four money recipients, Camino Nuevo Charter Academy executive Allison Bajracharya drew 75 percent of the charter-related donations in the race, which comprise 45 percent of her campaign’s receipts. Former Eric Garcetti aide Heather Repenning is second, with 15 percent of all charter donations (or seven percent of her campaign’s overall contributions). Though Repenning, who also leads the top four with a whopping .81 patronage rating, has pledged that she would refuse charter school money, the independent expenditure committee backing her candidacy has already banked a $5,000 check from millionaire businessman and charter super-patron Bill Bloomfield.”

To get the whole story, read Sara Roos’ investigative report here. 

Full disclosure: I support Jackie Goldberg, former teacher, former member of the LAUSD board, who served three terms in the state legislature, where she was chair of the Assembly Education Committee. she is deeply knowledgeable about education. I contributed to her campaign.

As is clear in Sara Roos’s tables,Jackie is not #1 in fundraising.

Word is that the charter lobby is sitting out the special election,waiting to see if there is a runoff. Then they will pour millions into defeating Jackie Goldberg. She is their worst nightmare.

Which will win? Money or knowledge/wisdom/experience?

 

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Los Angeles, Privatization

Bill and Melinda Gates: Ignore the Critics, We Know Best

By dianeravitch
February 17, 2019 //
114

 

Bill and Melinda Gates ignore critics of their philanthropic efforts to change society as they wish. They even host weekly meetings with other billionaires, like Mark Zuckerberg and Charles Koch, to share ideas about redesigning the world.

In an article in Forbes, Gates defended his record and blamed me for the failure of the Common Core standards, which happened because I used the phrase “billionaire boys club” in my 2010 book “The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Resting and Choice Are Undermining Education.” Actually, the book scarcely mentioned Common Core, Which was not yet complete when the book went to press but it specifically criticized the hubris of Gates, Walton, and Broad for foisting their half-baked ideas on American public education, even though they are unelected and unaccountable.. I pointed out that they threw their weight around merely because they are billionaires, and I referred to them as the Billionaires Boys Club.

Yes, they do undermine democracy. The truth hurts.

It is gratifying to know that my pen is able to get his attention. I regret that he has refused to meet with me over the past decade. I have some good ideas for him. But he doesn’t listen.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Democracy, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Koch Brothers, Philanthropy

The Opioid Crisis: Who Should Be Held Accountable?

By dianeravitch
February 7, 2019 //
19

 

Over 200,000 people have died due to opioid addiction. The lead manufacturer of OxyContin is Purdue Pharmaceuticals in Connecticut. The company salespeople assured doctors and nurses that opioids were safe and effective.

Massachusetts Attorney General Maureen Healey is suing the company and members of its board of directors for the damage done by their drug.  The mai owners of Purdue are the Sackler Family, whose net worth exceeds $14 billion.

AG Healey wants to hold them accountable.

One of the main “charities” of Jonathan Sackler is charter schools. He has financed them in Connecticut through his organization called CONNCan. He has also financed 50CAN, which aims to spread charters nationally. He serves on the boards of other charter groups.

Read AG Healey’s devastating account of the family’s and directors’ actions.

https://www.mass.gov/files/documents/2019/01/31/Massachusetts%20AGO%20Amended%20Complaint%202019-01-31.pdf?_ga=2.233141022.1274067287.1549222015-666842443.1549222015

The Sacklers produced and marketed a drug that destroyed many lives. Now they use their fortune to endow museums and destroy public schools.

 

 

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Connecticut, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization

Farewell to the Early Childhood Programs at U.S. Department of Education

By dianeravitch
February 7, 2019 //
17

 

 

The U.S. Department of Education recently announced that a key policy post was given to a person who previously worked for the Walton Family Foundation and the Charles Koch Foundation. She came through Leadership for Educational Equity, which is TFA’s political training program. Vouchers for babies?

 

Meet the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education’s New Deputy Assistant Secretary for Policy and Programs

Image removed by sender. Directors Laurie VanderPloeg and Annie HsiaoHello, Early Learning Leaders!

I am excited to introduce myself. I am Annie Hsiao, and I have joined the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education (OESE) as the deputy assistant secretary for policy and programs. In this role I will provide leadership for OESE’s discretionary grants, including the early learning work and ED’s collaboration with the Administration for Children and Families in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to administer the new Preschool Development Grants — Birth through Five program.

Most recently, I was the senior advisor to the acting assistant attorney general of the Office of Justice Programs at the U.S. Department of Justice. In that position, I advised on policy, strategy, and programs in the division charged with awarding all of the agency’s grants, promoting crime reduction, and supporting victims of crime; as well as with public safety, rule of law, and juvenile justice reform. Prior to that, I was the director of strategic partnerships at Leadership for Educational Equity, a program manager at the Charles Koch Foundation, and a program officer at the Walton Family Foundation. I also served as the director of education policy at the American Action Forum, and, with an appointment from the George W. Bush administration, as the director of government and community relations at the National Endowment for the Humanities.

I am originally from California, and earned a bachelor’s degree in political science and Asian American studies from the University of California, Los Angeles, and a master’s degree in education policy from Harvard University.

OESE and the Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP) look forward to continuing their partnership to promote positive learning experiences for our youngest learners!

During this busy time of the year, we hope you take time to check out some of the resources we are highlighting this month, including exciting work from the Early Learning Research network and a great opportunity from our colleagues at HHS for individuals interested in promoting developmental screenings to become an Act Early Ambassador.
Categories Billionaires, Childhood, Pre-K, K, Early Childhood Education, U.S. Department of Education, Walton Foundation

Forbes: Can AltSchool “Save Itself from Failure”?

By dianeravitch
February 5, 2019 //
31

Susan Adams, an editor at Forbes, took a close look at AltSchool, a billionaire-funded effort to reinvent American education by putting kids on computers. 

Max Ventillaleft Google tolaunch his startup. He’s raised plenty of dough from the billionaires, but success is thus far out of reach. Successmeans making money.

“We’re two intense hours into an interview in a stuffy, glass-paned meeting room in a former 24 Hour Fitness that is now home to one of AltSchool’s two small private schools in San Francisco for grades pre-K through 8. Ventilla, who left Google to launch AltSchool in 2013, has spent $30 million annually over the last several years while trying to find steady footing for his for-profit education startup, which runs four schools; the other two are in New York City.

“AltSchool’s 240 students, including two of Ventilla’s children—Leonardo, 5, and Sabine, 7—are guinea pigs for a software platform that AltSchool is attempting to sell to hundreds of schools both private and public. So far it has 28 customers. Revenue in 2018 was $7 million. “Our whole strategy is to spend more than we make,” he says. Since software is expensive to develop and cheap to distribute, the losses, he believes, will turn into steep profits once AltSchool refines its product and lands enough customers.

Max Ventilla, CEO and cofounder of AltSchool.

Max Ventilla, CEO and cofounder of AltSchool.TIMOTHY ARCHIBALD

“But as Ventilla admits when he lets his guard down, reaching profitability will be quite a stretch. The story of how AltSchool arrived at this point—burning cash in a failed attempt to create a profitable private-school network and fighting to sell an expensive edtech product in a crowded field—shows that the best intentions, an impressive career in tech and an excess of Silicon Valley money and enthusiasm don’t easily translate into success in a tradition-bound marketplace where budgets are tight.

“Ventilla, wearing jeans, scuffed black leather slip-ons, a faded polo shirt with AltSchool’s logo and a black fleece jacket, has been able to hemorrhage cash because, as he has it, “I’m good at telling AltSchool’s story and I’m good at raising money early.” So good that he has raised $174 million in venture capital at a $440 million valuation, according to PitchBook, more than almost any other startup working on K-12 education. That sum includes a personal investment of more than $15 million from Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan. Zuckerberg initiated two hours-long one-on-one meetings with Ventilla in late 2014, when AltSchool was only 18 months old. “He’s very detail-oriented, and he likes to drill down,” Ventilla says of Zuckerberg.”

The article has little vignettes of a few of the billionaires reinventing education.

 

Categories Billionaires, Technology

MIchael Hiltzik: Time to Tax the Billionaires

By dianeravitch
February 4, 2019 //
22

 

Michael Hiltzik, columnist for the Los Angeles Times, writes that America is tiring of its selfish, greedy billionaires.

The billionaires are upset that Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez-Cortez wants to raise taxes on incomes over $10 million a year and that Elizabeth Warren is proposing a wealth tax for the fabulously wealthy. How terrifying!

Bit Anericans are not frightened by these proposals. Billionaires are.

https://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-billionaires-20190201-story.html

What do you think about a man who spent $100 million on a 305-foot yacht, who already owns a 220-foot yacht? That’s Daniel Snyder, owner of the NFL Redskins.

”At the same moment, hedge fund owner Ken Griffin was disclosed as the buyer of the most expensive home in America, a $238-million Manhattan penthouse. According to Bloomberg, he already owns two floors of the Waldorf Astoria hotel in Chicago ($30 million), a Miami Beach penthouse ($60 million), another Chicago penthouse ($58.75 million) and another apartment in Manhattan ($40 million).”

How many homes does one man need?

Hiltzik writes:

Our emerging political debate over taxing the rich seems to be getting bogged down in details — how high a tax rate, should we tax income or wealth, etc., etc. But this fixation on nuts and bolts is obscuring what may be the most important aspect of the discussion: America is becoming fed up with its billionaires.

That sentiment is long overdue. It has begun to surface in the suggestion by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez that the top marginal rate on high incomes shift back to what it was in the 1950s or 1960s, and in Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s proposal for a wealth taxon those with high net worth.

Since the Reagan administration, the political establishment has strived to convince Americans that extreme wealth in the hands of a small number of plutocrats is good for everyone. We’ve had the “trickle-down” theory, the rechristening of the wealthy as “job creators” and their categorization invariably as “self-made.” We’ve been told, via the simplistic Laffer Curve, that if you raise the tax rate you get less revenue.

There are three main subtexts of these arguments, all of which show up in the email in-box whenever I write about wealth and taxation. First: The extreme wealth of the few creates wealth all along the income scale, for the masses. Second: It’s immoral — confiscatory — to soak the rich via taxation, at least above a certain level that never seems to be precisely defined. And third: If we torment the wealthy with taxes, they’ll pack up their wealth and leave us, whether for some more accommodating nation on Earth or some Ayn Randian paradise.

Experience has shown us that the first argument is simply untrue — extreme wealth begets only more inequality. The second argument begs the question of where reasonable taxation turns into confiscation, although the level of taxation of high incomes today is nowhere near as high as it was in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, when economic gains were shared much more equally with the working class. As for the third, Warren’s answers to capital flight include stepping up IRS enforcement resources, which have been eviscerated by political agents of the wealthy, and imposing an “exit tax” on any plutocrat renouncing his or her U.S. citizenship to evade U.S. taxes.

Why are billionaires beginning to be treated so skeptically?

One reason surely is the evidence that extreme wealth has a corrosive effect on the economy. Wealth inequality places immense resources in the hands of people unable to spend it productively, and keeps it out of the hands of those who would put it to use instantly, whether on staples or creature comforts that should be within the reach of everyone living in the richest country on earth.

Multimillionaires and billionaires love to describe themselves as “self-made,” but the truth is that every fortune is the product of other people’s labor — the minimum-wage workers overseas who assemble Michael Dell’s computers or the low-wage baristas in Howard Schultz’s Starbuck stores, or the taxpayers who fund the roads, bridges and airports that help keep their businesses profitable….

The issue of how many billions are too many billions has been placed in high relief by the presidential campaign of Schultz, the ultimate billionaire vanity project. Schultz condemns calls for higher marginal tax rates on the wealthy and, typically for his species, portrays himself as a man who has gotten where he is today by taking advantage of America as the land of opportunity — so what’s keeping you layabouts from doing the same. But he also mentions, in passing, that he grew up in federally subsidized housing in New York. So someone, somehow, gave him a leg up using tax revenue.

It’s proper to question why people like Schultz and Dell feel so strongly about a marginally higher tax on their marginal income.

People like Schultz “live what is, for almost all practical purposes, a post-scarcity existence,” Paul Campos observes aptly at the Lawyers, Guns & Money blog. “If you have three billion dollars, then you can buy almost anything without even bothering to consider what it costs, since what it costs is, to you, practically indistinguishable from ‘nothing.’ Given that everything is for you already basically free, why would you even care if your tax bill goes up? Especially given that you live in a society in which, despite what is by a historical standards an almost inconceivable amount of total social wealth, lots of people still have to worry about getting enough to eat, not freezing to death in the next polar vortex, etc?”

Categories Billionaires, Democracy, Education Reform
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