Archives for category: Dark Money
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St. Louis: Dark Money Enters Suburban St. Louis School Board Elections (Correction!)

By dianeravitch
April 2, 2018 //
15

 

School districts in Missouri customarily have nonpartisan school board elections. No more. Tomorrow voters will go to the polls in the Parkway District (a suburb of St. Louis) to select two new school board members. Five candidates are running for two open positions on the school board.

An organization has entered the race to endorse candidates who are opposed to abortion, sex education, and student protests.

It has endorsed two of the five who are running.

Who is paying for this group’s campaign activities?

No one knows.

The group calls itself Advocates for Educating Taxpayer Accountability.

How ironic that a group that hides the names of its contributors says it favors “accountability” when it refuses to be either transparent or accountable.

Why are they hiding? Why don’t they announce their names?

Categories Dark Money, Fraud, St. Louis

Good News! Phony Billionaire Charter Group Collapses: ADDENDUM

By dianeravitch
February 6, 2018 //
22

 

One of the nation’s leading corporate education reform groups— Families for Excellent Schools—has collapsed. It adopted a name to suggest that it spoke for poor black and Hispanic families, but the families it represented were wealthy financiers from Wall Street, Greenwich, Connecticut, the Walton Family, and the Eli Broad family.

This is the group that spent millions to run ads attacking Mayor deBlasio when he had the gall to challenge Eva Moskowitz’s demand for free space in public schools and the right to force the city to pay for any space she was required to rent. Eva had the support of the powerful financiers of FES and Governor Cuomo, and together they beat DeBlasio and taught him not to challenge Queen Eva.

FES expanded to Massachusetts and poured millions of “Dark Money” (undisclosed names) into the referendum battle to lift the cap on charter schools. After the election, the state investigated the millions in outside money that poured into the race, fined FES nearly half a million dollars for failing to identify its donors, and banned them from operating in the state for four years.

Then came the embarrassment this week when FES was compelled to fire its leader, Jeremiah Kittredge, for inappropriate sexual behavior with a non-employee. As Politico reported, Kittredge was one of the most prominent reform leaders in the nation. But he acted like a jerk, making stupid vulgar comments about a woman’s breasts at an education reform conference, the Philos retreat. Kittredge was one of Eva Moskowitz’s closest advisors.

Then today came this announcement:

**FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE** FEBRUARY 5, 2018

New York, NY – Statement from Bryan Lawrence, Board Chair of Families for Excellent Schools:

“This is a sad day for everyone at Families for Excellent Schools. We are very proud of the work we’ve done to help thousands of families stand up for educational opportunity in their communities, and believe our vision of a world where every child has access to an excellent school has never been more important.

“Unfortunately, after a series of challenges over the past year and particularly given recent events, we have determined that the support necessary to keep the organization going is not there. We are beginning the process of winding down our work. I want to thank all those who have given their heart and soul to this organization since its inception; I know they will continue to advocate for the families and communities we serve.”

Mercedes Schneider wrote about the fall of this phony group here:

Families for Excellent Schools (FES) Is Shutting Down. Marvelous.

Politico explained the declining fortunes of FES this way (and hedged on whether FES was closing partially or completely):

The pro-charter group has seen its fortunes decline sharply over the last year. Its influence in New York has waned as de Blasio has largely declined to criticize charters and much of the local press turned its attention away from Families for Excellent Schools’ relentless schedule of rallies and press releases aimed at pressuring the mayor.

By 2016, the expensive rallies the group was best known for were no longer leading to policy wins at the city or state level, and the strategy was eventually abandoned.

And most crucially, the group suffered a disastrous political defeat in late 2016 from which it never fully recovered, sources say. After funnelling $20 million into a pro-charter ballot initiative in Massachusetts known as Question 2, the question was defeated at the polls by 25 points.

Several sources indicated its once-prolific fundraising became significantly more challenging in the aftermath of the Massachusetts loss.

https://www.politico.com/states/new-york/albany/story/2018/02/05/families-for-excellent-schools-planning-to-close-following-ceos-firing-235707

So, the big rallies with the matching T-shirts were no longer impressing politicians. The money was drying up. The executive director was caught in an embarrassing moment of monumental grossness.

Sad. The ed reform movement seems to be cracking up. Students First, gone. FES, gone. Who is next?

ADDENDUM:

Correction by a reader:

“Jeremiah Kittredge’s behavior was not just “an embarrassing moment of monumental grossness.”

“Jeremiah Kittredge guy was a serial creep. Consensual or not, Jeremiah was basically f—ing his way through the Families for Excellent Schools headquarters:

“POLITICO: “Kittredge has been involved in multiple consensual sexual relationships with colleagues throughout his relatively brief career in education reform, including at least one employee who reported directly to him, according to five sources with direct knowledge of the situation.”

“That’s from here:

https://www.politico.com/states/new-york/city-hall/story/2018/02/02/charter-champions-firing-came-after-sexual-harassment-allegations-233549

“Jeremiah picked the wrong year(s) to be engaging in this kind of Don-Draper-in-Mad-Men type carousing. (Mad Men took place in the early to mid 1960’s) Given the current MeToo/Times Up atmosphere, his behavior was / is monumentally anachronistic.”

Categories Billionaires, Corporate Reform, Dark Money, Education Reform, Failure

Inequality, School Privatization, and the Oligarchs Who Benefit

By dianeravitch
January 15, 2018 //
7

Jelmer Evers, Dutch scholar and teacher, draws together the seemingly disparate strands that connect the rise of neo-fascist movements, attacks on democracy, growing inequality, and the oligarchs’ determination to privatize public schools.

View at Medium.com

He writes:

“Rent-seeking and privatization are not just confined to the prison system. Almost every aspect of society has been opened up for markets and investors. In ‘The Privatization of Education: a Political Economy of Global Economy Reform’ (full text) Antoni Verger et all show that this is a global phenomenon in many guises, and that everywhere “individual and positional goals start to overshadow social and collective goals” These policies spread throughout very deliberate informal policy networks and more formal international frameworks.

“A telling example are the PISA tests. In the excellent ‘The Global Education Race: taking the measure of PISA and international testing’ Sam Sellar, Greg Thompson and David Rutkowski delve into the complex world of international testing. Many questions should be asked about what is actually being tested and what kind of conclusion can acutally be drawn from the data. They make clear that it these tests are not just about the tests, but just as much about the stories being created around them. And with the advent of ‘Big Data’ this is something we have to deal with. As they state: “the future of public education will depend on the creation of publics who understand enough about these technologies to debate their benefits, dangers and impacts on the collective project of teaching the next generation”.

“We must take that one step further and call for ‘publics’- and certainly professions- who understand the philosophies, histories, political economy and sociology around public discourses and for teachers around public education specifically. That is also the case in what I would deem the most important book about education that I’ve read the last year, Dennis Shirley’s ‘New Imperatives of Educational Change: achievement with integrity’. We should aspire to do the best for our children, but we also should do what is right and virtuous. And privatization, top-down accountability, casualization of the teaching profession, an infantile narrow look on ‘what works’ damage our children, our schools, our profession, and most importantly they do untold damage to our society and our democracy. As Yong Zhao states in a very good- and hopefully influential- article ‘What works might hurt: side-effects in education’ you have to look at side-effects and opportunity costs.

“And the opportunity costs of privatization and marketization of education are huge, and have big repercussions beyond education itself. If you are serious about education as a force for equity you have to take into account what your parties’ policies are doing to society and its children. You have to take into account that policies that undermining public education as a public institution- governed for and by the people- will damage everything that you stand for. So if you see a call for further flexibility, shortening, practice of teacher education, and call it ‘training’ be wary. Yes, teaching is a practice, but it is also a profession informed by science, philosophy and reflection.

“Sadly there are many forces undermining public education. From Silicon Valley, venture capitalists to right-wing politicians, sometimes under different heading: free-markets, pro-choice, efficiency or religious freedom. But it was the ‘New Left’- Democrats, New Labour, European social democrats- who have started us on this road. One could say they’ve softened up public education for the state that it is in in many countries around the world. This is now being exploited by right-wing governments, corporations and the 1%. It’s ironic that parties that were originally founded in the interest of labour have been the vehicles in it’s destruction.

“But this didn’t happen overnight and by itself. There have been deliberate and long running attempts to capture the state by moneyed interests, rent-seeking. In her book ‘Dark Money: the hiden history of billionaires’ Jane Mayer uncovers the strategies and overlapping policy networks, think tanks, “charities” of the Koch Brothers to revamp the United States into their right-wing image, through organisations like the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), ALEC, the Heritage Foundation, and numerous super-PACs. This has only accelerated after the ‘Citizens United’ ruling, which gave corporations and rich individuals unprecedented possibilities to buy influence in the political process. The capture of the state, the rent-seeking that van Bavel, Rodrik and Scheidel warn us about, has turned America increasingly into an oligarchy. As the final quote of Charles Koch in the book painfully illustrates: “I just want my fair share — which is all of it.” This is why North-Carolina is not a democracy anymore. Institutions are failing and the oligarchs are winning. And it isn’t restricted to the other side of the Atlantic.”

With the appointment of Betsy DeVos, he writes, the oligarchs have captured control of the federal government.

My view: Our present dire situation is far from terminal. Resistance is growing. Betsy has stripped the veneer from the so-called reform movement. She is all-in for privatization. There is nothing liberal, progressive, or even modern about her worldview.

It is only a matter of time until the marauders and oligarchs get their comeuppance.

View at Medium.com

View at Medium.com

Categories Accountability, ALEC, Betsy DeVos, Billionaires, Corporate Reformers, Dark Money, Democracy, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization

“Big Money Rules”: My Review of Two Important New Books

By dianeravitch
November 27, 2017 //
22

This is my review of two very important books: Nancy MacLean’s “Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America” and Gordon Lafer’s “The One Percent Solution: How Corporations Are Remaking America One State at a Time.”

Both books are important for understanding the undermining and capture of our democracy.

Both books explain the theory and practice of destroying the public sector for ideology and/or profit.

Read the review for a better understanding of the roles played by the Koch brothers, the DeVos family, and ALEC.

Categories ALEC, Betsy DeVos, Billionaires, Corporate Reform, Dark Money, Democracy, Koch Brothers

Sarah Darer Littman: How the Billionaire Sacklers Finance Privatization of Public Schools

By dianeravitch
November 17, 2017 //
4

If you read the previous post, you know that the Sackler family became fabulously wealthy by developing, manufacturing, and marketing a painkiller called OxyContin, an opioid. You also know that there is an opioid crisis in the nation that kills 50,000 people a year.

Sarah Darer Littman here explains how Jonathan Sackler has used his wealth to destroy and privatize public schools, replacing them with privately managed charter schools.

Littman, a journalist in Connecticut, write that Sackler:

“founded the charter school advocacy group ConnCan, progenitor of the nationwide group 50CAN, of which he is a director. He is on the Board of Directors of the Achievement First charter school network. Until recently, Sackler served on the board of the New Schools Venture Fund, which invests in charter schools and advocates for their expansion. He was also on the board of the pro-charter advocacy group Students for Education Reform.

“Through his personal charity, the Bouncer Foundation, Sackler donates to the abovementioned organizations, and an ecosystem of other charter school promoting entities, such as Families for Excellent Schools ($1,083,333 in 2014, $300,000 in 2015 according to the Foundation’s Form 990s) Northeast Charter School Network ($150,000 per year in 2013, 2014 and 2015) and $275,000 to Education Reform Now (2015) and $200,000 (2015) to the Partnership for Educational Justice, the group founded by Campbell Brown which uses “impact litigation” to go after teacher tenure laws. Earlier this year, the Partnership for Educational Justice joined 50CAN, which Sackler also funds ($300,000 in 2014 and 2015), giving him a leadership role in the controversial—and so far failing cause—of weakening worker protections for teachers via the courts.

“Just as Arthur Sackler founded the weekly Medical Tribune, to promote Purdue products to the medical professional who would prescribe them, Jon Sackler helps to fund the74million.org, the “nonpartisan” education news website founded by Campbell Brown. The site, which received startup funding from Betsy DeVos, decries the fact that “the education debate is dominated by misinformation and political spin,” yet is uniformly upbeat about charter schools while remarkably devoid of anything positive to say about district schools or teachers unions.”

Purdue Pharmaceuticals, the manufacturer of OxyContin, was masterful at marketing OxyContin. According to a critical GAO REPORT, IT handed out “lavish swag” for health care professionals.

The charter movement has adopted some of the same techniques.

“The description of “lavish swag” will sound familiar to anyone who has witnessed one of the no-expenses-spared charter school rallies that are a specialty of Sackler-funded organizations like Families for Excellent schools. Then there is the dizzying array of astroturf front groups all created for the purpose of demanding more charter schools. Just in Connecticut, we’ve had the Coalition for Every Child, A Better Connecticut, Fight for Fairness CT, Excel Bridgeport, and the Real Reform Now Network. All of these groups ostensibly claim to be fighting for better public schools for all children. In reality, they have been lobbying to promote charter schools, often running afoul of ethics laws in the process.

“Take Families for Excellent Schools, a “grassroots” group that claims to be about parent engagement, yet was founded by major Wall Street players. In Connecticut, the group failed to register its Coalition for Every Child as a lobbying entity and report a multimillion-dollar ad buy expenditure and the costs of a rally in New Haven.

“In Massachusetts, Families for Excellent Schools-Advocacy (FESA) recently had to cough up more than $425,000 to the Massachusetts general fund as part of a legal settlement with the Office of Campaign and Political Finance, the largest civil forfeiture in the agency’s 44-year history. Massachusetts officials concluded that FESA violated the campaign finance law by receiving contributions from individuals and then contributing those funds to the Great Schools Massachusetts Ballot Question Committee, which sought to lift the cap on the number of charter schools in the state, in a manner intended to disguise the true source of the money. As part of the settlement, the group was ordered to reveal the names of its secret donors. Jonathan Sackler was one of them.”

Why does Jonathan Sackler hate public schools?

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Connecticut, Corporate Reformers, Dark Money, Education Industry, Privatization

Dark Money Billionaires Lick Their Wounds after Defeat in Massachusetts and Look for New Targets

By dianeravitch
November 16, 2017 //
7

I was tempted to give an entire day to this post about the Dark Money group deceptively called Families for Excellent Schools.

The “families” are financiers, billionaires, and garden-variety multimillionaires. They enjoyed great success in New York, where they made an alliance with Governor Cuomo and launched a $6 Million TV buy to promote charter schools. Under pressure from Cuomo, the state legislature compelled the City of New York to provide free space to charter schools and to give Eva Moskowitz whatever she wanted.

Then, Families for Excellent Schools opened shop in Massachusetts, where they launched a multimillion dollar campaign to increase the number of charter schools.

Parents, teachers, the teachers unions, Rural and suburban communities turned against charter schools. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren joined the opponents of charter schools. Before the vote, the backers of Question 2 were revealed in the media (though not all of their names), and the referendum to expand the charter sector went down to a crashing defeat.

After the election, things went bad for FES.

“This September, the Massachusetts Office of Campaign and Political Finance fined Families for Excellent Schools a comparatively nominal $426,500. But it also forced the charter group to reveal its donors — a who’s who of Massachusetts’ top financiers, many of whom are allies of Gov. Charlie Baker — after it had promised them anonymity.”

In addition to the fine, FES was banned from the Bay State for four years.

One of the big donors to FES was the rightwing, anti-union Walton Family, which gave FES more than $13 Million between 2014 and 2026. The chairman of the Massachusetts Board of Education gave FES nearly $500,000.

Now FES is trying to redefine itself.

Here is a suggestion: support the public schools that enroll nearly 90% of children. Open health clinics in and near schools. Invest in prenatal care for poor women. Lobby for higher taxes for the 1%.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Corporate Reformers, Dark Money, Democracy, Education Industry, Hoax, Massachusetts, New York City, Privatization

Steven Singer: The Corporate Reformers Are Goliath, But Pretend to Be David

By dianeravitch
November 13, 2017 //
40

Steven Singer has noticed that the hired hands of the billionaire “reformers” like to play the role of victim.

They are bravely standing up to those teachers’ unions on behalf of “the kids.” All they have on their side are the Koch brothers, the DeVos family, Bill Gates, Eli Broad, the Waltons and a long list of other billionaires who want to privatize public schools and get rid of those unions.

Who is Goliath? Who is David?

Who are the real grassroots activists?

Don’t be fooled.

Categories Betsy DeVos, Billionaires, Broad Foundation, Corporate Reform, Dark Money, Hoax, Koch Brothers

The Economist: Dark Money and Local School Board Races

By dianeravitch
November 13, 2017 //
16

The Economist magazine published an article about an alarming phenomenon: the large amounts of money entering local school board races, much of it from mysterious political action committees, often from out-of-District and out-of-State sources.

Races in Denver, Douglas County, and Aurora County in Colorado attracted at least $1.65 Million.

Last spring’s School Board Race in Los Angeles was the most expensive in U.S. history, at $15 Million. Billionaires like Reed Hastings and Eli Broad make clear that they will spend whatever it takes to install true believers in privatization. In most such races, you are likely to encounter the same names, whether it is Hastings, Broad, Bloomberg, or members of the Walton family. You are likely to see other names associated with hedge funds or other parts of the financial industry. They have two goals in common: they love charter schools and they don’t like unions.

The intrusion of this kind of money into school board races is a danger to democracy. School boards are supposed to reflect the wishes of the local communities, not the purposes of out-of-State billionaires in search of willing puppets.

How can a local citizen, a parent or community leader, have any chance of running for school board if their opponent has a kitty of $100,000-300,000 to millions of dollars? I recall visiting a city where I was told that, in the past, a candidate could run by raising $40,000. Those days are over. That’s not good for democracy.

Categories Accountability, Colorado, Corporate Reform, Dark Money, Democracy, Denver

Douglas County, Colorado: Share the Joy as Public Schools Slate Whips Voucher Advocates!

By dianeravitch
November 10, 2017 //
4

Brian Malone, videographer, produced a film called “Education, Inc.” in which he portrayed the intrusion of Dark Money into School Board Elections, with the goal of privatization and destruction of public schools. He focused on Dougco in Colorado, where Voucher forces used big money to take control of the local school board.

On Tuesday night, organized parents and teachers elected their slate of public school supporters.

Brian Malone was there to film it, and he says he will change the ending of “Education, Inc.”

Share the joy by watching a few minutes.

For now, public education is back in Douglas County!

Categories Colorado, Dark Money, Supporting public schools, Vouchers

Report From Denver: Public Education Advocates Win a Seat on School Board: Extraordinary

By dianeravitch
November 9, 2017 //
8

The Denver School Board is supposed to be bought and paid for by Dark Money, so public education advocates rejoiced when they elected one person to the seven-member Board.

Jeannie Kaplan, a former member of the board and now a tireless activist, tells the story here. She says it was EXTRAORDINARY!

“Dr. Carrie Olson, 33 year DPS teacher, soundly defeated incumbent, “reformer,” Mike Johnson., and she did so with $33,747 in her campaign war chest and a completely volunteer “staff.” The dollars and vote totals cited in this post can be found here and here. As of the last campaign finance report Mr. Johnson had raised $101,336 on his own and was the beneficiary of $42,777 from Democrats for Education Reform( DFER) dark money and $6320 Stand for Children dark money. His 11,193 votes cost his campaign $13.44 each; Carrie’s 11,121 votes cost her $2.73 per vote. He spent almost 5 times as much per vote as she. Extraordinary.”

Jeannie’s underfunded (almost unfounded) Group is called ODOS (Our Denver Our Schools). In one race, it supported a dynamic high school graduate named Tay Anderson. The union, however, decided to support a candidate who is from TFA and works for the TFA leadership training program, which grooms TFA Teachers to get involved in political roles. The latter candidate swamped poor Tay, and now TFA has two seats on the Denver board.

As you can see, Denver is a hotbed of political intrigue and big money.

But ODOS is celebrating because it elected one member to the board.

Given the odds, that was quite an accomplishment.

Categories Dark Money, Democrats for Education Reform, Denver, Privatization, School Choice, Stand for Children
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