Mercedes Schneider has developed a specialty as a detective of Follow-the-Money. A forensic accountant of financial transactions in the corporate reform world.
In this post, she tries to figure out who funded Campbell Brown’s “The 74.”
It is harder than you can imagine to untangle this web, woven of money and connections. Behind it all: privatization and union-busting. “O what a tangled web we weave…”
Mercedes Schneider was interviewed for the documentary “Backpack Full of Cash.” At the time, the filmmakers did not have a title, and they called it “School Reform.” At their request, Mercedes signed a release to allow them to use her words and image in the film. The form is enclosed.
The filmmakers interviewed many other people, including Jeanne Allen, the director of the Center for Education Reform, which is virulently opposed to public schools. Before Jeanne founded the CER to advocate for choice, she worked for the far-right Heritage Foundation. She was among the first of the privatizers who saw the value of using the word “Reform” instead of the Center to Destroy Public zschools.
Allen didn’t like the documentary at all, because it did not praise her efforts to privatize public funding. She also doesn’t like that the filmmakers used her words, quite literally, as the title of the film.
Strangest of all is her complaint that the privatizers are vastly outspent by the unions. She says,
“The teachers unions spend $300 million a year on political races. We don’t have that kind of money.”
Bring out the world’s smallest violin.
The privatization movement is funded by a pack of multibillionaires, any one of which could outspend the unions.
Start with the Waltons, whose net worth is near $50 Billion. Aside from their contributions to political campaigns, they currently are spending $200 Million a year to open new charter schools. Then there is Billionaire Reed Hastings, who recently dropped about $5 Million into the Los Angeles school board race. Then there are Democrats for Education zreform, which pools the money of scores of hedge fund managers. Add billionaire Daniel Loeb, billionaire John Paulson, billionaire Eli Broad, billionaire Joel Greenlight, billionaire Michael Bloomberg, bilionaire Daniel Tepper, billionaire Rex Sinquefield, billionaire Betsy DeVos, billionaire Bill Gates, billionaire Philip Anschutz, billionaire Jonathan Sackler, billionaire JOHN Arnold, and many many more, all of whom have contributed to political campaigns to expand and benefit the privatization movement.
Teachers unions collect money from the dues of their underpaid members. They have skin in the game. Why are billionaires so passionate about defunding public schools?
A reader looked over the list of contributors to the Center for Education Reform. No teachers union has this many rich people contributing to its coffers.
The Achelis and Bodman Foundations
The Anschutz Foundation
The Apgar Foundation
The Laura and John Arnold Foundation
Mr. and Mrs. Dennis Bakke
Mr. Tim Barton
Mr. Brian Bauer
The Honorable and Mrs. Frank Baxter
The BelleJAR Foundation
The Blackie Foundation
The Bonsal Family
Ms. Katherine Brittain Bradley
The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation
The Broad Foundation
Mr. Eric Brooks
Mr. S. Joseph Bruno and Building Hope
Mr. Kevin Chavous
Ms. Kara Cheseby
The Ravenel and Elizabeth Curry Foundation
The Daniels Fund
Mr. Angus Davis
Mr. Kenneth Davis
Mr. and Mrs. Robert Devereux
Mr. Philip H. Dietrich
The Honorable and Mrs. Pete DuPont
Mr. and Mrs. Terry Eakin III
Mr. John C. Eason
Mr. William S. Edgerly
The Doris and Donald Fisher Fund
Mr. and Mrs. John Fisher
Mrs. Maureen Foulke
Mr. Robert W. Garthwait
Mr. Randy P. Gaschler
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
Mr. Philip E. Geiger
The Gleason Family Foundation
Dr. Charles J. Gorman
Mr. Jon Hage
Mr. John P. Hansel
Admiral Thomas B. Hayward
The Honorable Thomas J. Healey
The Shirley and Barnett Helzberg Foundation
The Christopher and Adrianna Henkels Charitable Fund
Mr. Donald Hense
Mr. Robert M. Howitt
Ms. Virginia James
Bob and Lynn Johnston
The Dodge Jones Foundation
Mr. William I. Jones
Mr. Melvin J. Kaplan
Mr. Robert D. Kennedy
The Kern Foundation
Mr. Norman V. Kinsey
Mr. Steven Klinsky
The Jean and E. Floyd Kvamme Foundation
Mr. Byron S. Lamm
Mr. Bob Luddy
Mrs. Maryann Mathile
Mr. Thomas McNamara
Mr. Anthony Meyer
The L & S Milken Family Foundation
Greg and Pam Miller
Mr. Michael Moe
Mr. and Mrs. Owen Moen
Mr. and Mrs. Stephen Moore
Mr. Gene E. Nicholson
Mr. and Mrs. Bill Oberndorf
Mr. Dennis Odle
Dr. Vivian Pan
Mr. and Mrs. Malcolm Peabody
The Ruth and Lovett Peters Foundation
The Pumpkin Foundation
The Honorable William J. Raggio
Mr. James S. Regan
Ms. Janice B. Riddell
Mr. Geoffrey Rosenberger, CFA
SABIS Educational Systems, Inc.
Michael and Ellen Sandler
Mr. Daniel P. Schmidt
Mr. Adam Shapiro
Mr. and Mrs. Stephen Sills
The William E. Simon Foundation
Ms. Shirley Sontheimer
The Smart Family Foundation
The Honorable H. Cooper Snyder
Mr. and Mrs. William B. Snyder
Mr. John R. Stambaugh
The John Templeton Foundation
Mr. Whitney Tilson
The Walton Family Foundation
Mr. Robert M. Weekley
The Honorable and Mrs. Ronald Weiser
Mr. Helmut Weymar
Mr. Chris Whittle
Jeff and Janine Yass
Ms. Marykay Zimbrick
And Jeanne Allen complains that her side is outspent by the teachers union!
Cry me a river!
How about a deal: Her side agrees to spend not a penny more than the teachers unions on political campaigns and advocacy?
Deal?
Jennifer Berkshire says that critics of Betsy DeVos and her family were wrong to write her off as a dummy. She has a long-term plan and is steadily moving towards it. Privatization of public schools is on her check list. Destruction of unions is on the list. Elimination of any restrictions on campaign cash is there. The long-term target is democracy. Not more of it. Elimination of it. Oligarchy.
Berkshire writes:
“If Betsy DeVos enjoys the occasional quaff of champagne on her private jet, the recent news that the Supreme Court is poised to deliver a knock-out blow to public sector unions presented a reason to celebrate. The announcement was made just hours before DeVos alit in Harvard Square last week, where she was the star attraction at a school choice conference. At Harvard’s Kennedy School, DeVos was met by one of the largest protests she has encountered to date: an all-ages demonstration vs just about everything Trump’s Secretary of Education has said and done during the past seven months. Inside, the event was tense, even hostile—another rocky outing in a tenure replete with them. Or at least that is the conventional wisdom.
“Turning red
“The latest Supreme Court case to take aim at the unions, Janus vs AFSCME Council 31, began two years ago with a suit filed by yet another right-wing billionaire: Illinois’ Bruce Rauner. While it is framed by conservatives as a case about individual rights and freedom, the aptly named “Janus” is about politics and power. Public sector unions, virtually the only ones left, provide the bank and the foot soldiers that get Democrats elected. At their best, they’ve spearheaded progressive causes that go far beyond the interests of their members. In Massachusetts, the teachers unions have been the driving force behind successful campaigns for a minimum wage hike, paid sick time for all workers, and are now pushing a tax on millionaires. The unions are also virtually the last organized defense of what’s left of our safety net—Social Security and Medicare; the right wants those next.
“Just days before DeVos appeared at Harvard, she was back in Michigan, taking what was essentially a victory lap. She exhorted the crowd at a conservative gathering on Mackinac Island to pat themselves on the back for the Mitten State’s having gone Republican in the 2016 Presidential election—the first time since 1988. “We in Michigan have a lot to be proud of, but nothing more than that,” DeVos said. The story of just how the DeVos’ pulled off the feat of turning Michigan red is long and ugly, involving mountains of cash, the steady erosion of representative democracy, and a decades-long effort to dismember the state’s once powerful teachers union: the Michigan Education Association.
“Michigan went right-to-work in 2012, ushered into the former cradle of industrial unionism via the DeVos’ trademark combo of political arm twisting and largesse. Another DeVos-inspired law made it illegal for employers, including school districts, to process union dues, while simultaneously making it easier for corporations to deduct PAC money from employee paychecks. This summer the DeVos’ succeeded in driving a final nail into the MEA’s coffin: the GOP-controlled legislature essentially eliminating pensions, among the last tangible benefits that teachers in Michigan receive from their unions. The union leaders I spoke to when I traveled through the state reporting on DeVos’ legacy were candid about the increasingly precarious state of their organizations. But far worse lies ahead. The demise of retirement benefits means that new teachers have little incentive to join the unions; the shrinking terrain of collective bargaining gives veteran teachers little reason to remain in them.”
Dark Money is winning. Betsy is its face. That’s why she always smiles, no matter how many protestors complain. She is pinning their wings in her scrapbook.
Democracy is in deep trouble.
Rachel M. Cohen writes in The Atlantic about a new study by Jesse Rothstein, showing that education is important but it is not the key to economic and social mobility.
She writes:
“A new working paper authored by the UC Berkeley economist Jesse Rothstein builds on that research, in part by zeroing in on one of those five factors: schools. The idea that school quality would be an important element for intergenerational mobility—essentially a child’s likelihood that they will one day outearn their parents—seems intuitive: Leaders regularly stress that the best way to rise up the income ladder is to go to school, where one can learn the skills they need to succeed in a competitive, global economy. “In the 21st century, the best anti-poverty program around is a world-class education,” Barack Obama declared in his 2010 State of the Union address. Improving “skills and schools” is a benchmark of Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan’s poverty-fighting agenda.
“Indeed, this bipartisan education-and-poverty consensus has guided research and political efforts for decades. Broadly speaking, the idea is that if more kids graduate from high school, and achieve higher scores on standardized tests, then more young people are likely to go to college, and, in turn, land jobs that can secure them spots in the middle class.
“Rothstein’s new work complicates this narrative. Using data from several national surveys, Rothstein sought to scrutinize Chetty’s team’s work—looking to further test their hypothesis that the quality of a child’s education has a significant impact on her ability to advance out of the social class into which she was born.
“Rothstein, however, found little evidence to support that premise. Instead, he found that differences in local labor markets—for example, how similar industries can vary across different communities—and marriage patterns, such as higher concentrations of single-parent households, seemed to make much more of a difference than school quality. He concludes that factors like higher minimum wages, the presence and strength of labor unions, and clear career pathways within local industries are likely to play more important roles in facilitating a poor child’s ability to rise up the economic ladder when they reach adulthood….
“Jose Vilson, a New York City math teacher, says educators have known for years that out-of-school factors like access to food and healthcare are usually bigger determinants for societal success than in-school factors. He adds that while he tries his best to adhere to his various professional duties and expectations, he also recognizes that “maybe not everyone agrees on what it means to be successful” in life….
“Rothstein is quick to say that his new findings do not mean that Americans should do away with investments in school improvement, or even that education is unrelated to improving opportunity. Certainly the more that people can read, write, compute, think, and innovate, the better off society and liberal democracy would be. “It will still be good for us if we can figure out how to educate people more and better,” he says. “It might help the labor market, our civic society, our culture.” But Americans should be more clear, he says, about why they are investing in school improvement. His research suggests that doing so in order to boost a child’s chances to outearn their parents is unlikely to be successful. According to Rothstein, education systems just don’t go very far in explaining the differences between high- and low-opportunity areas.”
Union membership is another factor that explains whether children can escape poverty. But unions are under siege, and that route has been nearly closed off by the joint efforts of ALEC, the Koch brothers, the Walton family, and other billionaires who want to pull the ladder up behind them and claim that school choice will solve the economic disparity that benefits them.
Betsy DeVos is the keynote speaker today at a conference on “The Future of School Choice,” sponsored by Paul Petersen’s Program on Education Policy and Governance at the Kennedy School at Harvard.
Might as well be called “The Glorious and Lucrative Future of School Choice” because there are no critics invited, no supporters of the public schools attended by 85-90% of American students. She will be surrounded by adoring fans, which may help her forget that she is the most unpopular member of the Trump cabinet.
DeVos will be introduced by the dean of the Kennedy School, who is not at all embarrassed to host a conference utterly lacking in balance or fairness. Apparently, he is hoping the students ask questions, since the panelists won’t.
Curiously, the names of the funders–which originally included the foundations of Charles Koch and Bill Gates–have been scrubbed from the program. The only named sponsor is EdChoice.
Click to access future-of-school-choice-agenda.pdf
Hundreds of protestors are anticipated.
https://m.facebook.com/events/131082490873746/
DeVos has devoted her life’s work to privatization of education. Her own state of Michigan has been her plaything, since she has funded so many politicians. Thanks to her intervention, education in Michigan is a hot political mess, and the state’s standing on NAEP has fallen substantially.
She owes her home state an apology.
This is an alarming article about the invasion of corporate and philanthropic money into higher education, not to underwrite the purposes of higher education, but to buy control of policy and thinking.
The most obvious example is the millions donated by Charles Koch to spread the gospel of free markets and individual responsibility.
All told, the Charles Koch Foundation has invested some $200 million in higher education activities since 1980, with more than $140 million of that money allocated since 2005, funding over fifty free-market research centers and institutes at universities. And these beachheads of private campus cash have become lush islands of ideological purity by partnering with like-minded philanthropists such as Papa John’s CEO John Schnatter and the recently deceased Philadelphia Flyers owner Ed Snider.
But all this high-profile private funding has also provoked a backlash. Groups such as Kochwatch and UnKoch My Campus have galvanized public attention and even sparked protests at campuses nationwide. So the Kochtopus has rebranded. Starting in 2014, Charles Koch introduced the “Well-Being Initiative” with a blog post under his signature and a conference at the Charles Koch Institute in Washington, D.C.
One speaker was Koch beneficiary James Otteson, a philosopher and executive director of the BB&T Center for the Study of Capitalism. BB&T is a bank holding company formerly chaired by a man named John Allison, who retired in 2010 and now serves as “executive in residence” at the center. He was also president and CEO of the libertarian Cato Institute. In 2011 he caused a stir by promising through the BB&T Charitable Foundation to provide grants as high as $2 million to schools that established courses on the first principles of modern capitalism with Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged as required reading. That novel, of courses, preaches naked self-interest as a virtue. At conferences like these, however, the candid celebration of capitalist predation doesn’t always align so cleanly with the institutional interests of the Koch Foundation. So the focus has been rejiggered to explore “what enables individuals and societies to flourish and how to help people improve their lives and communities.”
Koch is far from alone. Read the article and see how many other billionaires have stepped into the game to buy scholars and whole departments.
This is the auctioning off of academic freedom and intellectual pursuit. It is a scandal. Call it intellectual corruption.
Lisa Haver is a retired teacher in the Philadelphia public schools and co-founder of the Alliance for Philadelphia Public Schools.
In this article, she asks who gave the billionaires the right to reorganize our public schools, when none has any knowledge or experience in education.
None of them has a clue about how to teach r how to run a school. Yet people are lining up to get their money.
Who will hold them accountable when their ideas fail, as Bill Gates Common Core failed?
She is thinking now of Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg. She is thinking of Laurene Powell Jobs. They know nothing about education.
“Over the past 20 years, education policy has increasingly been enacted not to satisfy the needs of the students and their families, but the wants of the wealthy and powerful who are converting public education from a civic enterprise to a marketplace for edu-vendors: the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation has paid to expand charters and lobby for the use of Common Core standards in all 50 states; real estate and insurance mogul Eli Broad now leads a group of corporate funders pushing a plan to move half of all K-12 students in Los Angeles into charter schools; the Walton family has initiated a new $1 billion campaign to promote charters nationwide; Trump financier Carl Icahn has established a chain of charters in New York City.
“No one elected these billionaires, and they are accountable to no one. We can’t call our members of Congress to object to their policies. While Americans continue to condemn the power of the very rich to influence elections, we must also fight to stop them from having more influence over the future of our young people than the constituents of democratically elected school boards.”
Karen Wolfe, parent activist in Los Angeles, writes about a dramatic turn of events earlier today. Eli Broad wanted to open a STEM school in Los Angeles. Not with his money, of course, but with public money. He also wanted more autonomy for charter schools, so they have even less oversight than they now have. It is highly unusual for a billionaire to ask the Legislature to give him a school. The Los Angeles Times thought it set a bad precedent but they supported it because, well, he does give the Times $800,000 a year (their reporters are untainted by his money, fortunately, but $800,000 is real money). And if the powerful charter industry in California needs anything, it is more oversight, more accountability, more transparency, not less.
And guess what! ELI BROAD LOST!
Karen Wolfe writes:
Victory in California!
On the final day of the legislative session, a massive coalition of teachers & parents, activists & experts, unions & school boards, those Democrats and these Democrats, and Republicans beat big money!
AB 1217, a bill sponsored by Eli Broad, would have established a school in the middle of Los Angeles, and so much more. It would have created a law–and set a statewide precedent–to let charter school operators circumvent local districts, the County Office of Education, and even the State Board of Education. This has never been done in California, where “local control” is fiercely protected. Obliterating that is a top priority of the charter lobby.
But we won!
What an uprising. First, a couple of us button-holed some of our local delegates to the Democratic Party in Los Angeles. Especially on the heels of the recent school board election, they got it! And they got to work. Within two days, the matter was put on the Los Angeles Democratic Party Central Committee agenda as an emergency measure. It passed unanimously–and it put our state legislators on notice. They were not going to sneak this through.
Then we California BATs sent out an Action Alert and worked up and down the state asking public education activists to call their senators. BATS started tweeting. Diane Ravitch posted it, and our state senators were getting calls from activists across the country. They knew they were being watched.
Before one caller even started talking, a senate staffer said, I’ll put you down as opposing. She said, how do you know that? He told her, I can hear a child in the background.
Each day, it stayed off the Senate floor. Were they waiting for the right moment, or did they know support was crumbling?
Then the Network for Public Education sent an eblast to tens of thousands of Californians who care about public education. Los Angeles activist Lauren Steiner took our message to a whole new community of California activists, opposed to privatization in general.
All the while, the teachers unions were working the legislature, and getting more partners to join the fight. School boards, firefighters, the PTA, all against this bill.
Together, we spoke truth to power and MADE them listen. We will not let them sell off our schools in secret, pretending that it is putting “kids first”.
Thank you to everyone who made calls!
Diane Ravitch always says, “We will win, because they are few, and we are many.” Sometimes it is hard to remember that. Today, I believe!
The Los Angeles Times knows that it is a truly bad idea to let a billionaire buy a school of his choice in the LAUSD, but hey, it is Eli Broad, and he does provide $800,000 a year to underwrite education coverage in the LA Times.
LAUSD already has STEM schools, but this is Eli’s STEM school, and he really wants it.
Besides, it will provide wonderful resources for a few hundred kids in the nation’s second biggest school district, so who can say no?
So much for public education. So much for deliberation and due process. So much for billionaires buying whatever they want.
Does the LA Times agree that any other rich person should be allowed to get funding from the state for any school they want to open? Oh, yeah, that’s charter schools.
The LAUSD board split on the issue, with the pro-charter majority (all in debt to Eli Broad) supporting it, and the anti-charter minority saying that the district already has many excellent STEM programs which could use extra funding. (If they voted again today, the vote might be a tie, since the president of the board was just charged with multiple felony counts of campaign finance fraud.)
But with Eli, enough is never enough. He enjoys sticking his big thumb into the public’s eye and expecting gratitude.
Let us never forget that he secretly contributed money to defeat a ballot proposition to increase funding for the public schools.
If he can’t control them, why bother?
When I learned that the phony “Families for Excellent Schools” was forced to pay a hefty fine by state officials in Massachusetts, I invited Maurice T. Cunningham to write about it. New Yorkers are familiar with this billionaire-funded group from the time when it made a $6 million television buy to thwart Mayor de Blasio’s plan to establish accountability for charter schools. FES, pretending to be the voice of poor black and brown families, suddenly appeared with bulging pockets to shower millions on TV advertising and politicians, not what one would expect from “families” who live in poverty. As a result of their efforts, charters in New York City got the right to co-locate in public school buildings with no rent ever, and if they preferred a private space, the city was obliged to pay for it. What was certain was that not a one of the billionaires behind FES was planning to send any of their children to charter schools or public schools in New York City.
During the campaign in Massachusetts last fall, Professor Cunningham wrote about the dark money pouring in to influence the Question 2 referendum. Despite the money, opponents of charter expansion lost.
This is what Professor Cunningham wrote:
Families for Excellent Schools Driven Out of Business in Massachusetts
Maurice T. Cunningham
Associate Professor, University of Massachusetts at Boston
Families for Excellent Schools, the hedge funded bully of school privatization, has not only been exposed but driven out of business in Massachusetts.
Last year FES was leading the campaign, through its ballot committee Great Schools Massachusetts, to pass a referendum that would expand the number of possible charter schools in the state. Not only was GSM overwhelmed at the November election by teachers unions, but FES’s wild spending attracted the attention of the Massachusetts Office of Campaign and Political Finance. This past week OCPF released a Disposition Agreement with FES that found that the group had violated Massachusetts campaign finance laws. FES acted as a political committee without registering with OCPF, and channeled over $15 million from donors “without disclosing the contributors, and by providing funds to the GSM Committee in a manner intended to disguise the true source of the contributions.” (OCPF press release here).
The consequences for FES: OCPF levied its largest fine in history, over $426,000, being the total amount of cash on hand for FES and its political arm Families for Excellent Schools-Advocacy. FESA agreed to dissolve its social welfare group status with the Internal Revenue Service. FES Inc. agreed to forego political activities in Massachusetts for four years.
Not only did OCPF release its Disposition Agreement it also required OCPF to divulge the donors it had promised to hide, and their contributions. FES’s list of funders was eye-popping. Boston hedge fund titan Seth Klarman of Baupost LLC was in for $3.3 million. Bain’s Joshua Bekenstein and his wife chipped in with $2.5 million. Jonathon Jacobson of Highfields Capital Management was good for $2 million. Other contributors came from Adage Capital Management, Summit Partners, and Par Capital Management. Alice Walton of the WalMart fortune kicked in $750,000.
Each of those powerful individuals was promised by FES that their identities would be kept secret, hidden behind the Internal Revenue Code rules for 501(c)(4) social welfare organizations. Except this time, it didn’t work. OCPF conducted a thorough investigation and exposed FES for what it is: a dark money political operation.
The Disposition Agreement should be studied across the country and state regulatory agencies pressed to follow its teachings. There is absolutely no reason why citizens should not be informed about who is spending millions to influence their vote. It’s shameful and the dark money train must be derailed if we are not to descend into a plutocracy. OCPF’s action is great news for Massachusetts and great news for democracy.
Diane Ravitch's blog 