The attached report was prepared by Unkoch My Campus and SOS Arizona. Unkoch My Campus is an activist organization that exposes the nefarious influence of the Charles Koch network in higher education. It decided to examine the Koch effort to capture K-12 education and teamed up with SOS Arizona. The result is a brilliant, informative, important critique of a billionaire-funded attack on American public education. Please read it.

Executive Summary

The Koch network’s massive and targeted “investments” are reshaping K-12 education. According to the Washington Post, in early 2018, Koch officials announced plans to “fundamentally transform America’s education system,” including K-12. Stacy Hock, a major Koch donor, called K-12 “[t]he lowest hanging fruit for policy change in the United States today[.]”

In order to influence K-12 public education, the Koch network has financed local, state, and national mechanisms to create multiple crises — only to turn around and cite these same crises as reasons to adopt their free market solutions.

*Supporting the seating of state legislators who intentionally defund public education

*Destabilizing state funding in schools to promote policies that divert funds away from traditional public schools to charter schools, private schools, and online education under the guise of “school choice”

*Funding higher education centers that create the curriculum and textbooks being used in some K-12 programs

*Astroturfing moral panic about ideologies that critique their idea production and theory of change as regressive and racist (Critical Race Theory)

The Koch network has made no secret about the critical role that public education plays as an ideal arena for influencing U.S. policy and culture.

Through a variety of tactics — charter schools, vouchers, curriculum, textbooks, trainings, using state politicians to engage in culture war against progressive ideas and more — the Koch network is able to ensure the spread of their ideas, including climate disinformation and free-market favoring economics philosophy.

All public institutions are a threat to the Koch network’s free market economic agenda. In their assault on public education, the network has taken actions to increasingly privatize and corporatize K-12 institutions. In doing so, they’ve created a lot of waste, pushed to close “failing” schools, favored CEO-like superintendents, aggressively cut costs, and more.

Lack of public accountability and transparency surrounding private and charter schools, as well as privately created curriculum and textbooks, leaves little room for parents and educators to take action against undesired and harmful agendas. Privatized education institutions are often not subject to audits, regulations that create standards for educators, and can lack standards for curriculum and assessment.

The Kochs’ infiltration of K-12 education harms students, teachers, and our democracy. Students are losing access to quality public-school education. Teachers are losing access to resources and the support needed to create a healthy, generative public-school ecosystem. Finally, our democracy is harmed as students are taught with Koch-funded curriculum that promotes regressive and ahistorical ideologies that contribute to myths of meritocracy, normalizes extractive economic practices which

See the pdf here.

Governor Abbott opposes mandates for masks and vaccinations. Yesterday he tested positive for COVID. He has been holding large meetings where no one is masked.

Chicago Public Schools was first to ban the popular graphic novel Persepolis,” in 2013.

The book has sold millions of copies. The author, Marjane Satrapi, was born in Iran and used the book to tell her story. Chicago school officials decided to pull the book from classrooms and school libraries, after receiving complaints that the book was not “age-appropriate.” The officials saw two pages that circulated among them. There is no indication that any of them actually read the book. The Superintendent at the time was Barbara Byrd-Bennett, who was subsequently sent to prison for accepting bribes to buy services from vendors.

A graduate student asked for copies of internal emails about the decision to remove the book:

News of the ban broke on March 14, 2013, when a local education blogger got hold of an email from the principal of Lane Tech College Prep High School which informed teachers and staff that he had been directed in no uncertain terms to collect all copies of Persepolis from the school’s library and classrooms. He was given no explanation for the sudden purge, he said.

Chicago Public Schools CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett started backpedaling later that day, after teachers and students raised objections and local media began asking questions. Byrd-Bennett revised the directive in another email to principals, saying that “we are not requesting that you remove Persepolis from your central school library.” But the book was still banned from seventh grade classrooms and “under review” for use in eighth through tenth grades. Teachers of college-level AP classes for 11th and 12th grade students would be allowed to retain the book in their curricula.

Unsurprisingly, Byrd-Bennett’s “clarification” did little to assuage the concerns of teachers and especially students, who organized a demonstration outside Lane Tech on March 15. By then, CPS was receiving national press coverage and stern rebukes from free speech groups, including CBLDF through the NCAC’s Kids’ Right to Read Project. In response to the growing furor, district spokesperson Becky Carroll claimed that “the message got lost in translation, but the bottom line is, we never sent out a directive to ban the book…. We’re not saying remove these from buildings altogether.”

Allan Singer, a professor of social studies education at Hofstra College in New York, wrote at Daily Kos about the recent decision by the Commack School Board to ban Persepolis.

He writes, in part:

The city of Persepolis was founded by Persian Emperor Darius I in 518 B.C. as a religious center and the capital of the Achaemenid Empire. The Persian Empire was defeated by Alexander the Great and Greek armies about 330 B.C. and the city was burned. Today its ruins are located in southwestern Iran and are considered one of the world’s greatest archaeological sites.

Persepolis lived again in the graphic arts book Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood (Pantheon Graphic Library 2004) by Marjane Satrapi. Satrapi was born in Iran and grew up in the current capital city, Tehran. Her parents were leftwing political activists and after the 1979 Islamic revolution they arranged for her to move to Vienna, Austria when she was fourteen. She later returned to Iran where she studied Visual Communication and earned a Master’s Degree from Islamic Azad University in Tehran. At the age of 24, Satrapi left Iran to live in France. 

Her black-and-white 341-page graphic novel Persepolis is autobiographical and recounts Satrapi’s experiences from age six to fourteen, including surviving a missile attack and learning about torture. The New York Times named it a Notable Book and Time Magazinecalled it the “Best Comix of the Year” for 2004.

Because the book includes a realistic pictorial depiction of torture and as part of the new rightwing assault on multiculturalism and anything that even suggests association with critical race theory, Persepolis is under attack and its educational supporters are threatened with retribution. At a recent Commack, New York school board meeting high school students and alumni protested against the removal of the book from 11th grade English classes. It has been an assigned text for more than a decade. Students from Islamic and South Asian backgrounds pointed out that it is the only place that someone like them appears in the entire 7-12 English Language Arts curriculum. Speakers who were also attacking Critical Race Theory demanded that Persepolis be dropped as “pornographic.”

If you want to learn more about the censorship of textbooks and books used in schools, read my book The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn (Knopf).

There’s been much discussion around the nation about racism. Is it persistent? Is it systematic? Is it behind us?

Read this story that appeared in the Washington Post and it should end the debate (although it won’t).

An African American man, who happens to be a veteran, brought his teenage son with him as he went house hunting with a real estate agent (also black) in Wyoming Michigan. A neighbor saw them entering the house that was for sale and called 911 to report a break in.

The police sent an armed team, who surrounded the house, entered and handcuffed the potential buyer and his young son.

Racism? Of course.

The story says:

As a police officer turned Roy Thorne around to cuff his hands behind his back, the 45-year-old father saw the same happening to his 15-year-old son.

Feelings came quickly then to Thorne, who’s Black: rage that his son was being arrested. Humiliation that the teenager had to watch his dad get handcuffed while the whole neighborhood looked on. Confusion about how viewing a house with his real estate agent on a Sunday afternoon could lead to a half-dozen police officers pointing guns at them.

The state leaders of Oklahoma banned any mask mandates by school districts, showing their contempt for local control. But Oklahoma City, the state’s largest district, declared that it would defy the state and require all students and staff to wear masks. The district cares more about students than the Governor and Legislature.

Other districts in the state are following Oklahoma City’s lead.

The Tulsa school board is planning to sue the state to invalidate the masking ban.

It’s wonderful to see school districts fighting an irrational ban that endangers the lives of students and staff!

Today the AFT Executive Council unanimously passed a resolution that supported vaccinations.

WASHINGTON—The executive council of the American Federation of Teachers last night unanimously passed a resolution guiding the union on workplace vaccination policies. The resolution is one of several passed by the board since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, designed to protect the health and safety of AFT members and the communities we serve. It was brought to the council in light of the significant change in circumstances with the delta variant and rising COVID-19 cases, infections in children(link is external), and an ongoing effort by the union to educate members and communities on the importance of vaccination.

In response to the passage, AFT President Randi Weingarten said:

“Throughout this pandemic, our No. 1 priority as a union has been to keep our members, our communities and those we serve safe. COVID is mutating, it’s spreading to kids, and vaccines remain our best defense to protect people and prevent the spread of disease; prevent hospitals from overflowing; keep our economy functioning, plus reopen—and keep open—our schools for full-time in-person learning.

“The variant and ensuing rise in cases have changed the situation: More employers are considering vaccination policies, including mandates. And while we still believe the best way to increase vaccinations is through education and voluntary adoption, we want to be in a position to work with our employers on workplace vaccination policies, including how they’re implemented—so people who need to be vaccinated can get accommodations, so everyone has access to vaccines and time to get them, and so no one is penalized for medical or religious reasons. Moving forward, we will bargain the impact of these vaccination policies.

“We believe that workplace policies should be done with working people, not to them. In fact, several of our affiliates have already worked with elected officials, school districts and other employers on vaccine or test policies. This once-in-a-generation pandemic calls for us to work together to keep people safe and put COVID-19 behind us.

“As educators, healthcare professionals and public employees, we play an important role in our communities, and the overwhelming majority of us are vaccinated. We will continue to advocate for masking, testing, and accurate science-based information about vaccinations to combat the rampant disinformation that’s literally killing American people. Vaccines work. Vaccines are safe. And vaccines save lives.”

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