Archives for category: Dark Money
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

Oklahoma: Billionaires Pushing Charter Schools and Vouchers Underwrite Salary of State Secretary of Education

By dianeravitch
May 23, 2022 //
33

Thank goodness for independent media! Oklahoma Watch published an investigative report that detailed a secret slush fund that supplements the salary of the state Secretary of Education.

(This story was produced in partnership with the Oklahoma nonprofit newsroom The Frontier.)

Gov. Kevin Stitt vetoed legislation that would have required cabinet members to file public reports to disclose their finances.

If Stitt had signed the bill last month, Oklahomans would learn that Secretary of Education Ryan Walters makes at least $120,000 a year as executive director of a nonprofit organization that keeps its donors secret. Walters is also paid about $40,000 a year by the state, according to state payroll data.

The nonprofit, Every Kid Counts Oklahoma, has refused to disclose its largest donors.

But a joint investigation by The Frontier and Oklahoma Watch has found that much of the organization’s funds come from national school privatization and charter school expansion advocates, including the Walton Family Foundation and an education group founded by billionaire industrialist Charles Koch.

As Secretary of Education, Walters serves as Stitt’s top advisor on public education policy and is the governor’s liaison for dozens of state boards and programs.

Walters’ outside employment with a nonprofit funded by advocacy groups could be a conflict of interest, said Delaney Marsco, senior attorney for ethics at the Campaign Legal Center, a nonprofit group that focuses on government transparency and accountability.

“If you are responsible for making decisions in a certain area of the government and you are being paid by an outside organization that has an interest in that, that absolutely can be a conflict of interest,” Marsco said. “If you are a public servant, your duty is to the public, and anything that kind of calls that into question, even raises the appearance of a conflict of interest, is a problem.”

Under Walters’ leadership, Every Kid Counts Oklahoma was the public face of Stitt’s program that distributed $1,500 grants to families in 2020 funded with $8 million in federal coronavirus relief money. The money was intended to buy tutoring and educational supplies. But a lack of safeguards allowed parents to use some of the funds to buy TVs, gaming consoles and home appliances, an investigation by Oklahoma Watch and The Frontier found. Emails and other recordsshow that Walters helped secure the no-bid contract with a Florida company to distribute the money. The U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Inspector General has opened an audit into how the state used those funds.

Walters, who declined multiple interview requests, is now running for state superintendent, an elected position overseeing the state Department of Education and a budget of over $3 billion. Unlike in federal elections, candidates for state office in Oklahoma are not required to fill out financial disclosures until after they are elected.

Please open the link and read on.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Dark Money, Democracy, Education Industry, Koch Brothers, Oklahoma, Scandals, Vouchers, Walton Foundation

Tom Ultican Reports on the Highlights of the #NPE2022 Conference in Philly

By dianeravitch
May 13, 2022 //
1

Tom Ultican, retired teacher of advanced mathematics and physics in California, is now a significant chronicler of the Destroy Public Education movement. He attended the recent national conference of the Network for Public Education in Philadelphia and recapitulates the excitement we shared at being in person after a 2-year hiatus.

After every conference, attendees say, “This was the best one yet.” They enjoy meeting people who are doing the same work to fight privatization of their public schools. By the end of the conference, attendees say they feel energized, hopeful, and happy to know that they are not alone.

I urge you to read Tom’s post. You will get a sense of the embarrassment of riches available to attendees.

I should add that the Nebraska Save Our Schools group shared the Phyllis Bush Award for Grassroots Activism. Nebraska is one of the few states that has managed to protect its public schools and keep out both charters and vouchers, despite being a Red State.

The Pastors for Texas Children, a co-winner of the award, has repeatedly blocked vouchers in the Texas Legislature and has consistently fought for funding for public schools. PTC has opened chapters in other Red states, where they mobilize clergy to support public schools.

A high point for me was interviewing “Little Stevie” Van Zandt, a legendary rock star and actor (“The Sopranos”), who is dedicated to getting the arts into schools, not as an extra, but across the curriculum. we had a wonderful conversation. He has funded lesson plans based on rock and roll, available free at his website TeachRock.

All of the general sessions were taped. I will post them when they become available.

Categories Charter Schools, Civil Rights, Closing schools, Community Schools, Corporate Reformers, Corruption, Courage, Creativity, Dark Money, Democracy, Detroit, Disruption, Education Industry, Education Reform, Equity, For-Profit, Hope, Innovation, Network for Public Education, Networkfor Public Education Action Fund, Nevada, Philadelphia, Privatization, Racism, Resistance, Standardized Testing, Supporting public schools, Teachers

Jane Mayer: A Dark Money Group That Is Trying to Block Every Biden Nominee

By dianeravitch
April 20, 2022 //
51

Jane Mayer is a brilliant and meticulous journalist for The New Yorker. She is the nation’s leading expert on “Dark Money,” the money funneled into politics whose donors are anonymous. In this article, she details the group that was behind the effort to derail the Supreme Court nomination of the highly-qualified Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson. The smear campaign was ultimately unsuccessful, because it was built on lies and distortions, and the attacks foundered in the face of Judge Jackson’s poise, demeanor, and temperament.

Formed in 2020, the group is called The American Accountability Foundation. It is registered as a tax-exempt charitable organization (like the odious ALEC), but is up-to-its-eyeballs in negative political activism. Its goal appears to be to block all Biden nominees with smear campaigns, lies, and distortions of their record and their views.

She writes:

While the hearings were taking place, the A.A.F. publicly took credit for uncovering a note in the Harvard Law Review in which, they claimed, Jackson had “argued that America’s judicial system is too hard on sexual offenders.” The group also tweeted that she had a “soft-on-sex-offender” record during her eight years as a judge on the United States District Court for the District of Columbia. As the Washington Post and other outlets stated, Jackson’s sentencing history on such cases was well within the judicial mainstream, and in line with a half-dozen judges appointed by the Trump Administration. When Jackson defended herself on this point during the hearings, the A.A.F. said, on Twitter, that she was “lying.” The group’s allegation—reminiscent of the QAnon conspiracy, which claims that liberal élites are abusing and trafficking children—rippled through conservative circles. Tucker Carlson repeated the accusation on his Fox News program while a chyron declared “jackson lenient in child sex cases.” Marjorie Taylor Greene, the extremist representative from Georgia, called Jackson “pro-pedophile.”

Their attack on Judge Jackson failed, but Mayer shows that they have slimed other well-qualified nominees, leaving key positions unfilled. she calls AAF “the slime machine.”

Among the nominees the group boasts of having successfully derailed are Saule Omarova, a nominee for Comptroller of the Currency, and Sarah Bloom Raskin, whom Biden named to be the vice-chair for supervision of the Federal Reserve Board. David Chipman, whom the President wanted to run the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, and David Weil, Biden’s choice for the Wage and Hour Division of the Department of Labor, both saw their nominations founder in the wake of A.A.F. attacks. Currently, the group is waging a negative campaign against Lisa Cook, who, if confirmed, would become the first Black woman to serve on the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors.

Tom Jones, the A.A.F.’s founder and executive director, is a longtime Beltway operative specializing in opposition research. Records show that over the years he has worked for several of the most conservative Republicans to have served in the Senate, including Ron Johnson, of Wisconsin; Ted Cruz, of Texas; Jim DeMint, of South Carolina; and John Ensign, of Nevada, for whom Jones was briefly a legislative director. In 2016, Jones ran the opposition-research effort for Cruz’s failed Presidential campaign. When I asked Jones for an interview, through the A.A.F.’s online portal, he replied, “Ms. Meyers . . . Go pound sand.” Citing an article that I had written debunking attacks on Bloom Raskin from moneyed interests, including the A.A.F., he said, “You are a liberal hack masquerading as an investigative journalist—and not a very good one.” Jones subsequently posted this comment on his group’s Twitter account, along with my e-mail address and cell-phone number…

Mayer describes vicious A.A.F. campaigns against Biden nominees, most of whom were women or people of color. one such was the sliming of Lisa Cook.

Mayer writes:

Liberal and conservative political groups habitually scrutinize a prominent nominee’s record or personal life in search of disqualifying faults. But the A.A.F. has taken the practice to extremes, repeatedly spinning negligible tidbits or dubious hearsay into damning narratives. The group recently deployed its unorthodox methods, Politico has reported, while “desperately pursuing dirt” on Lisa Cook, the nominee for the Federal Reserve. Cook, who has been a tenured professor of economics and international relations at Michigan State University since 2013, has attracted bipartisan support. Glenn Hubbard, the chair of the Council of Economic Advisers during the George W. Bush Administration, has said, “Cook’s talents as an economic researcher and teacher make her a good nominee for the Fed, adding to diversity of perspectives about policy.” In college, Cook won a Marshall Scholarship. She subsequently obtained a Ph.D. in economics from the University of California, Berkeley, taught at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, and served as a staff economist on President Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers. She also held appointments at the National Bureau of Economic Research and at various regional Federal Reserve banks. The A.A.F., though, has portrayed her as unqualified, and suggested that her tenure at Michigan State is undeserved.

On April 13th, Jones sent out the latest of at least three e-mail blasts from the A.A.F. to about fifty of Cook’s colleagues at Michigan State. In the most recent of these messages, which were obtained by The New Yorker, Jones said that Cook “did not warrant” tenure. Through a Freedom of Information Act request, the A.A.F. obtained records showing that the school’s provost had granted Cook full professorship in 2020, overruling a decision not to give her that title the previous year. Jones sent these personnel records to dozens of Cook’s colleagues, and asked, “Are any of you concerned that . . . she’s not good enough to sit on the Federal Reserve Board?” He urged any detractors to “not hesitate to” contact him. Meanwhile, Jones fished for further information by posting a message on an anonymous online gossip forum, Economics Job Market Rumors, which has been decried by one prominent economist as “a cesspool of misogyny.”

Some of the A.A.F.’s attacks on Cook carried racial overtones. Cook had made donations to bail funds for impoverished criminal defendants, including racial-justice protesters who had been arrested; she was following a tradition of activist lawyers in her family, and considered it a form of charity. The A.A.F. argued on Twitter that she had made “racist comments” and “even bailed out rioters who burned down American cities.” Cook’s reputation was sullied enough that the Senate Banking Committee vote on her nomination resulted in a tie, with no Republicans supporting her. Cook’s nomination can still proceed to the Senate floor, but her confirmation remains in limbo, as one conservative news outlet after another repeats the A.A.F.’s talking points. A writer for the Daily Caller, Chris Brunet, said in a Substack column that Cook is a “random economist at Michigan State University who has shamelessly leveraged her skin color and genitalia into gaining the backing of several key White House officials.” Brunet tweeted proudly that his critique had been promoted on Fox News by Tucker Carlson.

Cook’s nomination might yet go forward, but other targets with exemplary records, have been rejected because of A.A.F. slime campaigns.

Dark Money is a blight on our democracy. This particular group is using its resources to derail the agenda of the Biden administration. It is yet another strategy to undermine our democracy by preventing the duly elected President from staffing his administration with fully qualified appointees of his choice.

Categories Accountability, Dark Money, Evil, Lies

Learn About UnKoch My Campus

By dianeravitch
March 13, 2022 //
15

The Koch Foundation has made gifts to over 300 institutions of higher education. These gifts are restricted, given to create an “institute” or “center” where libertarian ideas can be promoted on campus. In one such center, a speaker was invited to lecture on “The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels.”

Universities should be open fora where different ideas can be debated, but it’s absurd to have a center devoted to only one point of view.

Fortunately a group called UnKoch My Campus has made a mission of exposing Koch money and its purposes.

I received this message recently:

At the beginning of February, Brown University faculty members voted to postpone the creation of a new Koch-funded center, the Center for Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (PPE). This push could not have happened without grassroots organizing efforts spearheaded by Students Against Koch Influence (SAKI). The faculty now intends to adopt a more robust gift and grant acceptance policy ahead of the next vote on the PPE center.

With growing awareness of the ways in which Charles Koch buys influence over hiring, research, and curriculum in higher education to achieve these goals, a call to protect against such donor interference in academia is growing. We built power with SAKI students to ensure we enacted a cohesive strategy to employ a rigorous pressure campaign at Brown University. We’ve also provided the resources to take campaigns like this to the next level, like our Model Funding Policies for higher ed institutions.

The move to kick Koch-funded research programs off of campuses across the nation is already underway and we’re hot on the Koch network’s trail. Join us for our national network call on Tuesday, March 15th at 5 pm EST. Representatives from SAKI will join us to discuss organizing tactics they used and how they plan to adopt a more robust gift and grant acceptance policy at their university. You are not going to want to miss this call.

Categories Accountability, Dark Money, Education Industry, Higher Education, Koch Brothers

John Merrow: “Parent Rights” and the War on Public Schools

By dianeravitch
March 11, 2022 //
78

By now, we have observed that the Koch-Walton-DeVos oligarchs take every opportunity to undermine public confidence in public schools. Wherever there is an organized attack on public schools and their teachers, it’s a safe bet that there’s dark money from libertarian billionaires.

John Merrow wrote recently about the new “parents rights” groups that have led the fight against public schools. His post was condensed by the blog of the Network for Public Education. Read the full post here on John Merrow’s blog..

Opportunistic politicians are also attempting to limit classroom discussion of other controversial topics. In late February Florida’s House of Representatives passed a bill to ban “classroom discussion about sexual orientation or gender identity” in the state’s primary schools. Governor DeSantis has indicated that he will sign the bill if the Senate passes it. [The legislature passed the bill and DeSantis will sign it.]

Of course, the GOP maintains that it’s doing this for parents “Speaking to legislators on the House floor, Rep. Joe Harding, the Republican who introduced the bill, said the measure is about “empowering parents” and improving the quality of life for the state’s children.” Florida isn’t alone. According to the highly regarded publication Chalkbeat, at least 36 states have adopted or introduced laws or policies that restrict teaching about race and racism.

As New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie wrote recently, “Defenders of this push for censorship say they are simply working to protect the nation’s children from prejudice, psychological distress and inappropriate material. ‘To say there were slaves is one thing, but to talk in detail about how slaves were treated, and with photos, is another,’ said Tina Descovich, a leader of (a Florida chapter of) Moms for Liberty, a conservative group that seeks to enshrine ‘parental rights’ into law.”

Ms. Descovich, who lost her seat on a local school board in 2020, is a parent, but many of the adults who have been disrupting local school board meetings not only do not have children enrolled in those schools; they are classic outside agitators, perhaps even from neighboring states.

Simply reviewing curricula and banning discussion aren’t enough for some. Legislators in Florida, Iowa, and Mississippi want cameras installed in classrooms so parents can watch what’s going on. “The Iowa bill, H.F. 2177, would require that cameras be placed in every public school classroom in the state, except for physical education and special education classes. The cameras would feed to livestreams that could be viewed on the internet by parents, guardians and others.” Educators who fail to keep the cameras operational would lose 5% of their salary, per infraction. The bill died in Committee, but its supporters haven’t given up.

The pandemic has created opportunities for opponents of public education. Twenty-two states created or enlarged school voucher programs in 2021, and more are in the offing. “School voucher proponents in statehouses across the country have spent much of the past year working to pass legislation that transfers critical public school funding to the private sector. Framing these debates around education “reform” and the inauthentic culture wars surrounding public schools, voucher proponents have been steadily working to undermine public education on the state level.” That’s from the publication of the National Education Association, which explains the loaded language.

But the NEA numbers are correct, as others have reported. ”Nearly half of all state legislatures last year increased funding for school choice programs in their state budgets or passed laws to expand or create new Education Savings Accounts or scholarship programs. They also notably expanded eligibility requirements to include home-schooling, charter schools and private schools. Four states created entirely new programs; three created new and expanded programs, and Ohio created the most improved programs of them all, according to the analysis. The majority, 14, either expanded or improved their existing school choice programs.”

While this isn’t the time or place to debate vouchers, let’s stipulate that money dedicated to vouchers would otherwise have gone to public schools.

COVID and the ensuing closure of most public schools frustrated many parents, some of whom felt that teachers cared more about their own health than their students’ learning. Teacher unions, a favorite whipping boy of the right, may have hurt their own cause by defending members who did not want to risk contracting COVID–but defending their members is what unions are supposed to do.

But what’s happening now has very little to do with education and far more to do with politics. Republicans feel that being ‘pro-parent’ is a winning position, even though barely 20% of households have school age children. I don’t think most Republican politicians really care whether parents dig deeply into curriculum. What they hope is that the other 80%–those without children–will be outraged at the idea of meddling teachers indoctrinating America’s children. Their goal is for the other 80% to go to the polls and vote Republican.

Categories Billionaires, Dark Money, Disruption, Education Industry, Parent Groups, Privatization

Dark Money Funded the Campaign Against School Closures and Masking

By dianeravitch
March 8, 2022 //
49

David Sirota, investigative journalist, former speechwriter for Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, and writer of the hit film “Don’t Look Up,” recently launched a blog called The Daily Poster. It’s well worth your time to read and to support The Daily Poster.

This important post by Walker Bragman and Alex Kotch documents the Koch money behind the campaign to get schools open, regardless of the risks, and to eliminate mask mandates. The goal of Charles Koch and others on the right was to get the economy back to normal.

Here is an excerpt:

The updated CDC guidance signals the Democratic party’s shift from beating the virus to surrendering to it as a fact of life — including in schools. The new approach was likely shaped by a number of factors, including declining COVID numbers, concerns about far-reaching public COVID fatigue, and the fact that many of those now most at risk of severe disease have refused to get vaccinated for non-medical reasons.

But the end of school masking is also in part due to a campaign by right-wing business interests, including the dark money network of oil billionaire Charles Koch, to keep the country open for the sake of maintaining corporate profits. These interests have been meddling in the education debate, first pushing to reopen schools and then fighting in-school safety measures, even as COVID case numbers were rising and children were ending up in hospitals. For nearly two years, these groups have been promoting questionable science and creating wedges between parents, teachers, and administrators in order to get America back to work — even at the risk of the nation’s children.

“Tapping Into The Full Productive Capacity Of The Workforce”

When the pandemic first hit the U.S. in the spring of 2020, Koch-affiliated groups saw an opportunity to reassess American education, moving away from public schools to private and homeschool alternatives. Koch and his brother David, who died in 2019, had spent decades fighting teachers’ unions, pushing school privatization, and attacking state education funding.

On March 13, 2020, Yes Every Kid — a front group founded by the Koch network in 2019 as part of a larger effort to shape K-12 education in the states — launched a #LearnEverywhere campaign promoting remote learning and homeschooling. Three days later, the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank co-founded and heavilysubsidized by Koch, published a commentary declaring that the U.S. could “tap into” charter, private, and homeschooling “if brick-and-mortar schooling is substantially disrupted.”

The Heritage Foundation, a right-wing nonprofit heavily funded by the Charles Koch Foundation and Charles Koch Institute, also published articles in March 2020 in favor of using public school funds to pay parents to homeschool their kids. Heritage senior policy analyst Jonathan Butcher wrote a policy brief for the Koch-founded-and-funded Mercatus Center, a free-market think tank based at George Mason University, calling to funnel state funds into for-profit charter school companiesproviding virtual learning.

The message was blasted out by other groups in Koch’s orbit, including his flagship political advocacy outfit, Americans For Prosperity (AFP); the Independent Women’s Forum, a dark money group bankrolled by Koch organizations and the heirs to the Walmart fortune; and the State Policy Network, a web of libertarian state-based policy organizations.

But within a few months, the school narrative out of Koch world began to shift, coinciding with growing concerns about labor shortages and changing workplace dynamics caused by nationwide school closures. According to Education Week, a staggering 55.1 million students were impacted by the closures at their peak.

The closures meant a loss of childcare for many parents, which contributed to plummeting labor force participation early in the pandemic. An April 2020 guide to school reopenings from the consultancy McKinsey & Co., whose clients include many of the world’s largest companies, estimated that 27 million Americans were dependent upon childcare in order to work.

“Where a significant proportion of workers rely on schools for childcare, reopening schools (at least for younger children) might be a prerequisite to tapping into the full productive capacity of the workforce,” the report noted.

The tight labor market changed the relationship between employers and their workers, who began demanding moreflexibility and better work-life balance. Companies were forced to respond by raising wages — albeit inadequately — in order to attract workers.

Enterprises like Koch’s were eager to force a return to the old paradigm. These interests had already begun employing the same think tanks and quasi-academic networks they had pioneered a decade before promoting the anti-government Tea Party movement to fuel and legitimize attacks on pandemic safety measures, so they could force a return to normalcy and boost corporate profits.

Now, these interests began to use the same playbook to try to force schools back to normal.

“Keeping Children At Home Might Expose Them To Considerable Risks”

The very groups that had celebrated remote learning as an opportunity for public school alternatives began demanding that schools reopen, citing concerns about learning loss as well as student mental health. These groups downplayed the risks of the virus and slammed teachers’ unions for holding up the return to normalcy.

In May 2020, two months after the World Health Organization declared COVID a global pandemic, the Hoover Institution, a right-wing think tank based at Stanford University that has received substantial backing from Koch over the years, held a virtual conference at which senior fellow Eric Hanushek argued that remote learning was causing learning loss among low-resourced students and damaging “teacher accountability” through the elimination of standardized testing.

The Koch-backed reopening push kicked into high gear after President Donald Trump, facing reelection and a slowing labor market recovery, tweeted in early July 2020, “SCHOOLS MUST OPEN” in the fall.

The Koch-affiliated right-wing think tank American Enterprise Institute (AEI), meanwhile, published a “blueprint” for reopening schools, citing the need to get parents back to work. The State Policy Network and its affiliates also started pushing for school reopening.

Two days after Trump’s tweet, Yes Every Kid published a playbook for reopening schools. Soon after that, Hoover senior fellow Scott Atlas, a radiologist who Trump would soon tap as his senior COVID advisor, called for reopening schools in an interview published that same day. Atlas argued that schools were an “essential business” and that the risk COVID presented to anyone under the age of 18 was incredibly low.

A few days later, the Heritage Foundation joined in, claiming in an online article that in-person learning was possibly “one of the safest activities the nation can restart,” and that “keeping children at home might expose them to considerable risks to their educational progress, their mental health, their nutrition, and alarmingly, even their safety and welfare…”

The drumbeat to return to in-person schooling continued throughout the summer and into the fall. Koch’s flagship group, AFP, put out an online recruiting call for people to reach out to Kansas state legislators and urge them to give school districts and schools the “flexibility” to reopen. A week later, the Mercatus Center published a policy brief warning of “educational scarring” if schools remain closed. Mercatus would later start funding the work of Brown University economics professor and parenting blogger Emily Oster after she began publishing controversial research and articlessupporting school reopenings and downplaying concerns about children and COVID.

On August 12, 2020, the Independent Women’s Forum called on schools to reopen across the country, citing detrimental impacts on student learning and mental well-being. And in October 2020, Hoover’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes released a study estimating that in spring 2020, students lost 57 to 183 days of learning in reading and 136 to 232 days of learning in math.

Big industry groups also fought school closures, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the nation’s premier corporate lobby group. In September 2021, Chamber executive vice president and chief policy officer Neil Bradley said that “we have to have the schools fully reopen” in order to help solve the labor shortage.

“The Dangers Of Masks”

As schools started reopening under the new Democratic administration, Koch-affiliated groups adopted a harder line. In the lead-up to the 2021 state elections, the organizations began opposing in-school mask requirements for students and teachers in addition to closures…

Meanwhile, Koch groups and their affiliates have also quietly worked to support grassroots efforts to end mask mandates.

The Maine Policy Institute put up a petition on its website opposing mask mandates in schools, arguing that “many parents are uncomfortable with their children being required to wear masks in schools” and that “families deserve a choice.” The Federalisthelped promote a lawsuit against Indiana state officials over school mitigation measures brought by parents who erroneously claimed COVID wasn’t infectious in children.

The Koch network also has ties to the shadowy nonprofit Parents Defending Education (PDE). Founded in early 2021, PDE promotes private schooling and combats liberal “indoctrination” in public schools around the country, often by ginning up anger at school boards. The nonprofit’s vice president, Astra Nomani, as well as its director of outreach, Erika Sanzi, have been vocal critics of school mask mandates, and the organization keeps a directory of conservative parents groups that support ending such mandates and other conservative causes….

Please open the link and read the full article. Before reading it, I was unaware of this well-funded, well-coordinated campaign. I was also unaware that the work of Professor Emily Oster at Brown University was funded by the Koch-related Mercatus Institute as well as the Walton Family Foundation, and the Arnold Foundation.

Categories Dark Money, Education Industry, Health, Koch Brothers

Good News in Charleston: School Board Delays Privatization Effort

By dianeravitch
January 12, 2022 //
13

It is great when good things happen, especially when they prove the power of the pen. Backstory: an anonymous reader of this blog left a comment asking whether I was aware that a billionaire (Ben Navarro) was promoting privatization of the Charleston public schools. I was not, so I started googling. Every local news story was written by Paul Bowers, the education writer for the Charleston Post and Courier. I found Bowers on Twitter and invited him to write for my blog about what was happening in Charleston. He agreed and sent me his article last Friday night. I quickly realized this was a national story that needed more exposure than my blog alone. I sent it to Valerie Strauss at the Washington Post blog “The Answer Sheet,” and she agreed that we would post it simultaneously on Saturday morning.

We knew that the Charleston school board was holding an important meeting on Monday January 10, where they were expected to approve the privatization plan, called “Reimagine Schools.”

As Bowers wrote on his own blog:

The Charleston County School Board is preparing to vote Monday, Jan. 10, on a proposal called “Reimagine Schools” that would affect 23 predominantly Black schools in the district, potentially turning them over to management by an unnamed private third party.

Paul Bowers attended the school board meeting, not as a reporter but as a parent. He reported the results of the meeting here.

The school board stalled the privatization plan. Professionals spoke out eloquently against it. It may come back in the future, so vigilance is required. But for now, thanks to Paul Bowers, it’s off the table. Here is the account in the Post and Courier.

Read Bowers’ story and enjoy knowing that bad things can be stopped by shining a bright light on them and educating the public. Not always. But it’s sweet when it happens.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Dark Money, Education Industry, Segregation, South Carolina

Dark Money in the Holy City: A Short History of School Privatization in Charleston, South Carolina

By dianeravitch
January 8, 2022 //
29

Paul Bowers was the education reporter at the Charleston Post and Courier. He wrote this post at my request. A reader alerted me to the billionaire-driven attack on public schools in Charleston, and I had the good fortune to find the journalist who knew the story.

Paul Bowers writes:

Every few years, South Carolina becomes a battleground for school privatization. It looks like 2022 is going to be one of those years.

Back in the 2000s, the New York real estate investor Howard Rich backed a series of South Carolina candidates pushing school vouchers, which would funnel public education funds into private schools. More recently, we have seen efforts by Gov. Henry McMaster and the state legislature to create a Tennessee-style “turnaround district,” to deregulate for-profit online charter schools via authorizer shopping, and to divert federal COVID-19 relief funds from public schools to private schools. Teachers and parents have had to fight these advances tooth and nail and have so far kept most of the damage at bay.

Lately it seems like the tip of the spear for privatization efforts in South Carolina is the Charleston County School District, a starkly segregated and unequal district anchored by a world-renowned tourist destination. The Charleston County School Board is scheduled to vote Jan. 10 on a proposal called “Reimagine Schools” that would allow a private third party to make decisions at 23 predominantly Black schools. I thought now would be a good moment to revisit the history of school board power struggles and dark-money campaigns in Charleston County.

The pressure to privatize the governance of public schools often comes from two of South Carolina’s billionaires, the chemical manufacturer CEO Anita Zucker and the debt collection agency CEO Ben Navarro. Sometimes working in tandem, sometimes independently, Zucker and Navarro tend to promote more charter schools and private takeovers of public schools.

Zucker and her advocacy organization, the Tri-County Cradle to Career Collaborative, were involved in a 2015-2016 effort to create a “turnaround district” at the state level, modeled after failed efforts in Tennessee, Louisiana, and Michigan. The proposal involved lumping the state’s lowest-performing schools into a new district and bringing in third-party operators to manage them. Similar bills were introduced in Georgia and North Carolina around the same time, but the idea never received serious discussion in the South Carolina Statehouse.

Navarro is best known nationally for his failed 2018 bid to buy the Carolina Panthers NFL team. In the financial world, he is known for his Sherman Financial Group, a privately owned firm that filed more lawsuits against defaulted credit-card debtors than others in the industry during COVID-19 lockdowns, according to a recent Wall Street Journal investigation.

In the arena of education, Navarro is known for his private Meeting Street Schools, which are sometimes lauded as a model for improving the test scores of low-income students from at-risk communities. Since 2014, Meeting Street Schools has entered unique public-private partnerships with South Carolina public school districts, starting with the takeover of two elementary schools in North Charleston.

With a boost of private funding, the schools invest in wraparound services for students and their families, offer additional psychological support, place two teachers in each classroom, and operate on an extended school day and academic calendar. Those practices have a proven track record of success, but most schools in South Carolina lack the funding to carry them out.

Meeting Street Schools also heavily recruit staff from Teach for America and KIPP, and they preach the trendy mid-2010s gospel of “grit” – in fact, the disciplinary model is so gritty that one Meeting Street-run elementary school suspended one-quarter of its students in a single school year. Before opening the schools under new management, Navarro sought and received a special exemption from the state’s employment protections for teachers. As a result, Meeting Street principals can hire and fire teachers at will.

Navarro is also closely associated with the Charleston Coalition for Kids, a dark-money group that emerged in 2018 and immediately outspent all other donors combined on advertising for a slate of school board candidates. Much of the Coalition’s funding and spending is hidden from public view thanks to state election law and the group’s nonprofit status, but FCC records reveal it spent at least $235,000 on TV commercials alone in the run-up to the 2018 school board election – four-and-a-half times what all of the candidates combined raised for their own campaigns. (Local activists estimated the Coalition’s spending on Facebook ads, billboards, and other media might have cost additional hundreds of thousands of dollars.)

The Coalition spent big on the school board election again in 2020, investing $306,000 on TV commercials, including attack ads against two Black incumbents. Today 6 of the 9 sitting Charleston County School Board members have received backing from the Coalition.

A number of national organizations have taken an interest in Charleston school politics as well, including 50CAN (formerly StudentsFirst) and the Broad Foundation.

After failing to create a statewide turnaround district in 2016, the 50CAN affiliate SouthCarolinaCAN shifted its focus to the local level – specifically to Charleston County. When I interviewed then-Executive Director Bradford Swann in December 2016, he said his organization would be focused on “grassroots organizing” via a 5-month fellowship program for parents.

The result was Charleston RISE, a parent advocacy group that also operates a parent help hotline. Billboards advertising its services have appeared all over the county, particularly in low-income neighborhoods. Charleston RISE trainees were among the founding members of the Charleston Coalition for Kids when it launched in 2018. Some RISE members said they helped vet school board candidates for the Coalition.

Currently the Charleston County School Board is deciding how to spend its share of the COVID-19 recovery funds provided under the American Recovery Act’s ESSER III program. Multiple local nonprofits submitted proposals on how to spend the money, but only one has gotten a public hearing.

On Monday January 10, the school board will vote on a proposal called Reimagine Schools that would target 23 low-performing schools in low-income and majority-Black parts of the county. Leaning on a “Schools of Innovation” law recently expanded by the state legislature, the proposal would authorize a takeover of individual schools by an unidentified “Innovation Management Organization.” The Schools of Innovation law also allows a school to hire up to 25% of its teachers in certain subject areas without a state teaching license.

The organization that proposed the Reimagine Schools plan is the Coastal Community Foundation, a relative newcomer to school board lobbying. The foundation and its CEO, Darrin Goss Sr., have promoted the Meeting Street Schools public-private partnership model as a way of getting around “bureaucratic” regulations. (Complicating matters further, the Coastal Community Foundation also administers an investigative fund and Education Lab for the local daily newspaper, The Post and Courier.)

The 9-member school board gave the Reimagine Schools proposal initial approval by a 6-3 vote in December without holding any community input sessions about it. All 6 members who voted to approve for the proposal had been endorsed by the Charleston Coalition for Kids.

Whatever the Charleston County School Board decides, the privatization push will continue in parallel at the state level. The state superintendent of education post is up for grabs this fall, and the first candidate to announce her run was Ellen Weaver, a charter school advocate with the conservative Palmetto Promise Institute. A central proposal in her platform is the creation of an Education Scholarship Account, a modified private school voucher program.

Sound familiar? If at first they don’t succeed, they give it a new name and try again.

***

Paul Bowers is a parent of 3 public school children in North Charleston, South Carolina. He was The Post and Courier’s education reporter from 2016-2019 and was part of a team that won the 2018 Eddie Prize from the Education Writers Association. Find him on Twitter at @Paul_Bowers and read his work at brutalsouth.substack.com.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Dark Money, Education Industry, Failure, Privatization, South Carolina

Tom Ultican: The Attack on Democracy and Public Education by Charles Koch, ALEC, and Dark Money

By dianeravitch
December 1, 2021 //
38

Tom Ultican, retired teacher of physics and advanced mathematics, has written an incisive analysis of the libertarian attack on democracy and public education, funded by billionaires and advanced by rightwing think tanks. He “follows the money,” and it leads him to Charles Koch, the Bradley Foundation, the Scaife Foundation, the Walton Family Foundation, ALEC, the Manhattan Institute— and other oligarchs and their tools.

He pulls no punches as he weaves together the contrived panics over “critical race theory” and anti-maskers. “Parents Defending Education” and “Moms for Liberty” are but a few of the astroturf groups who have been mobilized to terrorize school boards and other parents. Funded by Dark Money.

Ultican writes:

Nancy MacLean observed that Buchanan and Koch had concluded, “There was no glossing over it anymore; democracy was inimical to economic liberty.” (Democracy in Chains page 152)

The anti-democratic impulse of the oligarch must be contained. There is an underlying wisdom to democratic decision making. It is a wisdom that bends toward equity and humanism. Public education is the soil from which that wisdom can flower. For the past five decades, an autocratic businessman has been pushing our country in the direction of widespread suffering and discrimination.

Neither capitalism nor socialism is a perfect guide for society. Education, medicine, prisons and policing are not well suited to a strict capitalist approach. A strict socialist approach does not function well in manufacturing, farming and entertainment. Ideologues demanding one of these two economic methods to the exclusion of the other are a problem. The guide to balancing these competing ideologies is humanism. In other words ponder, “The policy best serving the majority of the people while maintaining a keen eye to insure that the minority is not abused.”

The best way to move society forward toward a more perfect union is to make democracy ever more inclusive. And the best way to improve democracy is to protect and fund public education.

An important read.

Categories Accountability, ALEC, Billionaires, Dark Money, Democracy, Education Industry, Koch Brothers

Jeannie Kaplan: Dark Money Floods into Denver School Board Races

By dianeravitch
October 13, 2021 //
4

Jeannie Kaplan, a former member of Denver’s elected school board, has warned for years about the subversion of Denver’s school election by well-funded, out-of-state “reformers.” Their money makes it difficult for ordinary citizens to run for the school board.

In this post, Jeannie reports that Dark Money is back and is prepared to fund candidates who support charter schools and other elements of the failed “reform” agenda. She has identified the groups that act as pass-throughs for Dark Money, she has tallied the total (to date) of $360,000, but it’s usually impossible to identify the original source of the money.

Categories Billionaires, Charter Schools, Colorado, Corporate Reform, Dark Money, Denver, Education Reform
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »