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Andy Spears: New Group in Tennessee Seeks to Eliminate Public Schools

By dianeravitch
November 11, 2025 //
7

Andy Spears is a veteran education journalist with a Ph.D. in education policy and a specialization in school finance. He lives in Nashville, but covers the national scene.

Spears writes:

In this post, he reports on an ominous development in Tennessee. A new organization in Tennessee has declared its intention to lure nearly 500,000 students out of public schools and into charter schools and voucher schools. The collapse in funding for public schools is likely to end public schools altogether.

Spears writes:

While state leaders consider expanding the state’s private school coupon program, a new nonprofit takes a bolder approach. A group calling itself Tennessee Leads registered with the Secretary of State as a 501(c)(4) issue advocacy organization with the goal of effectively ending public education in Tennessee by 2031.

The group was registered on October 14th and lists a business address of 95 White Bridge Road in Nashville. This is a nondescript business building in West Nashville.

The Registered Agent for Tennessee Leads is listed as “Tennessee Leads.” The group’s website says an IRS nonprofit application is pending.
In short, it is not yet clear who is backing this movement.

However, the group is not shy about its goals.

We support legislation to significantly increase the availability of Education Freedom scholarships, aiming to provide 200,000 scholarships annually by 2031. This initiative is designed to empower parents with more choices for their children’s education.

And:

Our efforts include advocating for the expansion of public charter schools, with a goal to increase student enrollment from 45,000 to 250,000. This initiative seeks to offer diverse educational opportunities and foster innovation in teaching.

If achieved, these two goals combined would take nearly half of all K-12 students in the state out of traditional public schools.

The group doesn’t really say the current model isn’t working – they just say they like “choice.”
The state’s current private school coupon scheme (ESA vouchers) has 20,000 students.

Moving that to 200,000 would cost at least $1.5 billion per year and take significant funds from local public schools.

Other states that rapidly expanded school vouchers saw huge budget hits to both state and local government.

[See Andy Spears’ post about Arizona’s universal school vouchers, which he refers to as “private school coupons for rich families.”]

[See his post on Indiana vouchers, where the costs rose neatly tenfold in less than a decade. The Indiana voucher is also a coupon for the rich to cash in at private schools. He predicts that Tennessee will be shelling out $1.4 billion a year for well-off kids to attend private schools by 2035.]

He writes that vouchers are a mess in Florida, because thousands of students are “double-dipping,” collecting voucher money while attending public schools.

[See his article on double-dipping and the voucher mess in Florida.]

He continues:

Florida relies on two official student counts each year — one in October and another in February — to allocate funding to school districts through the Florida Education Finance Program (FEFP). But after the October 2024 Count, major red flags appeared. Nearly 30,000 students (at an estimated cost of almost $250 million) were identified as both receiving a voucher and attending a public school. In some districts, almost all (more than all in one district) of their state funding had been absorbed by voucher payouts.

So, the Tennessee Leads plan would lead to a rapid decrease in state funds available for public schools – or, a significant increase in local property taxes – possibly, both.

It’s also not clear how Tennessee Leads plans to build charter school capacity to house an additional 200,000 students. Unless the plan is to just hand existing public schools over to charter operators – you know, like the failed Achievement School District model.

Oh, and there’s something else.

Tennessee Leads wants all schools to use Direct Instruction at all times for all students.

We advocate for the implementation of Direct Instruction methodologies across all public schools, ensuring that teaching practices are grounded in research and proven to be effective in enhancing student achievement.

Except studies on Direct Instruction suggest the opposite – that it does not improve student learning – in fact, it may be harmful to student academic and social growth.
Here’s more from a dissertation submitted by an ETSU student:

No statistically significant results (p = .05) were found between the year before implementation and the year after implementation with the exception of one grade level. Furthermore, no significant differences were found at any grade level between students participating in Corrective Reading and students not participating in Corrective Reading on the 2003-2004 TCAP Terra Nova test.

To be clear, Direct Instruction is highly-scripted learning – down to the pacing, word choice, and more – the “sage on the stage” delivers rote learning models and students are told exactly how to “do” certain things – the “one best way” approach with little room for student discovery.

More on this:

A remarkable body of research over many years has demonstrated that the sort of teaching in which students are provided with answers or shown the correct way to do something — where they’re basically seen as empty receptacles to be filled with facts or skills — tends to be much less effective than some variant of student-centered learning that involves inquiry or discovery, in which students play an active role in constructing meaning for themselves and with one another.

That is: Scripted learning/Direct Instruction is not evidence-based if the evidence you’re looking for is what actually improves student learning.

It holds true not only in STEM subjects, which account for a disproportionate share of the relevant research, but also in reading instruction, where, as one group of investigators reported, “The more a teacher was coded as telling children information, the less [they] grew in reading achievement.”

It holds true when judged by how long students retain knowledge,7 and the effect is even clearer with more ambitious and important educational goals. The more emphasis one places on long-term outcomes, on deep understanding, on the ability to transfer ideas to new situations, or on fostering and maintaining students’ interest in learning, the more direct instruction (DI) comes up short.8

One wonders who, exactly, wants to advance an extreme privatization agenda while also mandating that those students remaining in traditional public schools are subjected to a learning model proven not only not to work, but also shown as likely harmful in many cases.
Eventually, an IRS determination letter will be issued, or the Registered Agent will be updated on the Secretary of State’s site. Or, perhaps, the “about us” section will offer some insight into the actors who would end public schools in our state.

On the day after this post appeared, Spears learned that a well-known political consulting firm was behind the proposal for Tennessee Leads. The firm had previously worked for the Tennessee Republican Party and for Governor Bill Lee. He wrote a new post.

It’s not at all clear why Governor Lee and his fellow Republicans are so enamored of charters and vouchers. Tennessee was the first state to win Race to the Top funding from the Obama administration. It collected a grand prize of $500 million. With that big infusion of new funding for “reform,” the public schools should be reformed by now. But obviously they are not.

Worse, Tennessee put $100 million into a bold experiment that was supposed to demonstrate the success of charter schools. The state created the Educational Achievement Authority, hired a star of the charter movement to run it, and gathered the state’s lowest-performing public school into a non-contiguous all-charter district. The EAA promised that these low-scoring schools would join the state’s top schools within five years. Five years passed, and the targeted schools remained at the bottom of the state’s rankings.

In time, the legislature gave up and closed the EAA.

Similarly, the evidence is in in vouchers. In every state that had offered them to all students, the vast majority are scooped up by affluent families whose kids never attended public schools. When public school students took vouchers, they fell far behind their public school peers.

Are Republican leaders immune to reading evidence?

Categories Arizona, Disruption, Education Industry, Failure, Florida, Funding, Hoax, Indianapolis, Inequality, Privatization, Republicans, Tennessee, Vouchers

Karen Francisco: The Roots of the Charter School Grift in Indiana

By dianeravitch
January 13, 2025 //
8

Karen Francisco retired as editorial page editor of the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette. She grew up in Muncie and graduated from Ball State University. She is a fearless advocate for public schools. I invited her to write about what happened in Indiana to turn Republicans against public schools.

She wrote this article for the blog.

The corporate-controlled American Legislative Exchange Council in 2011 rolled out a set of model bills designed to weaken one of its primary targets: public schools. “The Indiana Education Reform Package” was patterned after the destructive legislation pushed through by Indiana’s Republican legislative supermajority and then-Gov. Mitch Daniels.

Indiana has been setting the bar for public-school carnage ever since, quietly advancing a near-universal voucher program and advancing education privatization efforts. But the newly introduced House Bill 1136 is designed to serve as a death blow for public education in Indiana. It would immediately dissolve five school districts, including Indianapolis Public Schools, and effectively set every other district in the state on a path to elimination.

The bill requires the dissolution of districts that have lost more than 50% of students within the district’s boundaries to other schools. The districts’ schools would be converted to charter schools by July 1, 2028. The first schools converted would be those with the lowest test scores.

The legislation cleverly builds on those “education reform” measures designed to cripple public school districts. Ever-changing assessment standards kept the schools chasing arbitrary benchmarks. Sky-high income limits allowed wealthy families to abandon neighborhood schools for parochial and private schools. Inadequate funding and legislation favoring charter schools left districts without the resources needed to serve the at-risk students who are not welcome at voucher or charter schools.

Indianapolis Public Schools, in particular, has been hammered by Republican lawmakers and the city’s Democratic mayors. From an enrollment of nearly 40,000 in 2005, IPS now serves only 21,055 students, having lost thousands of students  to voucher schools, charters and poor-performing “innovation schools.”

Why is Indiana, known for its conservatism, such fertile ground for radical education policy? Blame it on a perfect storm of anti-democratic forces. Out-of-state billionaires like Netflix founder Reed Hastings and the heirs to the Walmart fortune have poured millions of dollars into the state to destroy teacher unions. Powerful Republican lawmakers have built careers off education privatization. Indiana’s strong evangelical community, including its newly elected lieutenant governor, has recognized the potential of expanding Christian Nationalist  influence with taxpayer-supported schools. 

The bigger mystery is why Indiana voters have allowed the continuing destruction of their public schools, electing and re-electing representatives actively working against the voters’ best interests.

I would like to believe House Bill 1136 is the proverbial bridge too far. But 40 years of newspaper experience in Indiana tells me most Hoosiers will show little interest in the imminent threat to two urban school districts and three small rural school corporations. Sadly, race and class play heavenly into opinions about Indiana public schools, and too many Hoosiers will dismiss the danger as “not my problem.”

Elected school boards are the last piece of control Indiana voters exercise over education. Republican lawmakers eliminated the constitutional position of state superintendent of public instruction, and Indiana has always had an unelected state board of education.

House Bill 1136 starts the process of disbanding locally elected school boards, replacing them with boards filled by the governor, local officials and the director of the partisan Indiana Charter School Board.  It’s only a matter of time before every elected school board in the state is eliminated.

Look for the American Legislative Exchange Council to update its 2011 “Indiana Education Reform Package” with this crowning piece of anti-democratic legislation and for ALEC’s disciples to carry it across the nation.

Categories Accountability, ALEC, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Corruption, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Fraud, Funding, Indiana, Indianapolis, Privatization

Indianapolis: Privatizers Want to Eliminate Public Schools, Replace Them All with Charter Schools

By dianeravitch
January 9, 2025 //
7

The Indianapolis Public School District is approaching a red zone: the total elimination of public schools. A bill sponsored by a Republican legislator would require the dissolution of the district, the conversion of every public school into a privately-managed charter school, and the replacement of the elected board by an appointed one.

Amelia Pak-Harvey of Chalkbeat Indiana wrote about a recent meeting of the elected school board, where the pressure campaign to privatize the district was discussed.

“This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters at ckbe.at/newsletters”.

She wrote:

The Indianapolis Public Schools board is strongly opposing a bill that would dissolve the district and force it to convert to charter schools, a proposal that has spurred calls for an organized campaign against it.

The pushback against HB 1136 at the first meeting of the new school board on Tuesday comes as IPS faces the start of yet another legislative session Wednesday that could leave the district more financially strapped and struggling to stay alive.

The bill also became the focus at Tuesday’s meeting, where new board members were sworn in at a historic moment for IPS — for the first time, a board made up entirely of women of color leads a district overseen by its first Black female superintendent.

“This legislation is not student focused, and fails to reflect the community’s input on how they envision their public schools thriving,” board President Angelia Moore said in a statement on behalf of the board at the meeting. “Instead of fostering growth and innovation, HB 1136 risks dismantling the very foundation that supports student success and community collaboration.”

The bill would require Indiana districts to dissolve and transition into charter schools if more than half of students living in the district boundary enroll in a school outside the district. Under the proposal, IPS would dissolve, and 50 of its schools would convert to charters, according to the bill’s latest fiscal impact statement.

Four other districts — Gary Community School Corp., Union School Corp. in east-central Indiana, Tri-Township Consolidated School Corp. in the north, and Cannelton City Schools in the south — would also dissolve.

The bill, proposed by Republican State Rep. Jake Teshka of North Liberty, would also dissolve the IPS’ elected board and replace it with a seven-member board appointed by the governor, the mayor, the president of the city-county council, and the executive director of the Indiana Charter School Board.

IPS to face challenging legislative session

In addition to this bill, a number of other proposals could spell financial ruin for the district, at a time when it faces mounting pressure to share more resources with charter schools. Amid mounting competition from the charter sector, the district has already tried to right-size itself through its Rebuilding Stronger reorganization, which closed several schools last school year and reconfigured grades districtwide this school year.

A new charter advocacy group, the Indiana Charter Innovation Center, will push for charters to receive the same amount of funding from property taxes that traditional districts receive. That would require IPS to give more than the $4 million in property tax revenues it is estimated to give to charters this year, in accordance with a law passed last year.

And incoming Gov. Mike Braun has pushed for capping increases in property taxes, which could further restrict funding for traditional public schools.

IPS grapples annually with competition from Indiana’s strong school choice environment, which state lawmakers have bolstered in previous sessions. The district faces a fiscal cliff once additional property taxes from the 2018 operating referendum expire in 2026. Federal pandemic relief funds have also expired.

“Urban education systems face complex and nuanced challenges that may be unfamiliar to some policymakers,” Moore said at the meeting. “We invite legislators who are genuinely interested in public education to visit our district, gain firsthand insight on our unique mission and vision, and work alongside us to ensure sustainable and meaningful outcomes for students, educators, and families.”

Community members raise opposition to bill

Parents and staff also voiced their opposition to HB 1136 at the meeting Tuesday and called on the board to loudly protest it. Four people spoke against the bill, while three others suggested the board partner with charters, respond to the demand for educational choice, or work with lawmakers to improve the district.

The public support follows a separate call from a group of community leaders who last week called on IPS to consider how to remain operational amid “strong financial headwinds.”

“The legislature has taken notice and seems ready to act if needed,” read the statement from former mayors Bart Peterson and Greg Ballard; former IPS board president Mary Ann Sullivan; and city-county councilors Maggie Lewis, Carlos Perkins, and Leroy Robinson. “It is preferable, however, that any structural changes in IPS are driven locally and to the benefit of our Indianapolis students and community.”

“Rebuilding Stronger shut down schools. The loss this community felt cannot be overstated. Don’t let their loss be in vain,” parent Kristen Phair told the board in between sobs. “I am asking each of you commissioners to take a united stand and be loud in advocating against this bill. Please help us organize. Our families want to organize against this.”

The group urged IPS to share more property tax funding with charter schools.

But Noah Leninger, a teacher at Robert Frost School 106, urged the board not to accept any such compromises.

“More charter schools will not save IPS,” he said. “No matter what they’re called — if we’re honest and we call them charter schools, if we lie to ourselves and our community and call them Innovation Network schools — whatever the name, the rapid and unchecked expansion of these unaccountable grift mills has not gotten IPS out of this mess.”

Board member Gayle Cosby, who beat an opponent backed by political action committees supportive of education reform to return to the board, said that she was encouraged by the crowd. She also scrutinized the often repeated call by charter supporters for IPS to “partner” with charters.

“My definition of partner does not include any entity that is actively seeking to destroy or dissolve our district, as noted in the proposed legislation,” she said.

Board member Nicole Carey said the challenging times will require courage from district leaders.

“To everyone tonight, I want to say stand with us, stay engaged, hold us accountable to this promise of prioritizing the needs of our students,” she said. “It is going to take all of us.”

Categories Charter Schools, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Extremism, Indiana, Indianapolis, Privatization

Indiana: Charters and Vouchers Score Big $$ in Legislative Session

By dianeravitch
May 24, 2023 //
5

Indiana blogger Steve Hinnefeld reports on the gains of the billionaire-funded school choice industry in the last session of the Indiana legislature. The Republican dominated state is all in for enriching both charters and vouchers, without any proof of success.

Hinnefeld writes:

Indiana’s private school voucher system was the big winner in the 2023 legislative session, but charter schools came in a close second. They secured sizeable increases in state funding to pay for facilities and transportation, along with – for the first time – a share of local property taxes.

As Amelia Pak-Harvey of Chalkbeat Indiana explains, the success followed an all-out lobbying and PR effort in which charter supporters teamed with voucher proponents. Advocates insist charter schools are public schools, and private schools certainly aren’t. But the joint effort was effective.

The Republican supermajority in the General Assembly rewarded charter schools with:

  • An increase to $1,400 from $1,250 per pupil in “charter and innovation network school grants,” intended to make up for the fact that charter schools haven’t been able to levy property taxes.
  • A new law that says school districts in four counties, Lake, Marion, St. Joseph and Vanderburgh, must share increases in their local property-tax revenue with charter schools.
  • A requirement that districts in the same four counties share with charter schools if their voters pass a referendum to raise property taxes to pay for operating expenses.
  • $25 million in fiscal year 2024 for facilities grants for charter schools. That’s in addition to the “charter and innovation school network grants” listed above.

All told, the budget and student funding formula will provide about $671 million in state funds over the next two years for brick-and-mortar charter schools and another $112 million for virtual charter schools. That doesn’t include the local property tax funding that charter schools in four counties will receive.

House Speaker Todd Huston, R-Fishers, said at the start of the session that expanding school choice would be a priority. Growing the voucher program was on the table from the start, but it wasn’t until the last day of the session that charter school funding bills took their final shape.

As Chalkbeat reported, a $500,000 campaign by charter supporters, including catchy TV and Facebook ads attributed to the Indiana Student Funding Alliance, certainly helped. The Institute for Quality Education, an Indianapolis organization that promotes vouchers and charter schools, helped pay for the ads. Its political action committee, Hoosiers for Quality Education, gave over $1.3 million to Republican campaigns in 2020-22. Another pro-charter group, Hoosiers for Great Public Schools, gave over $1 million. Arguably no other special interest did more to keep the Statehouse in solid GOP control.

Both PACs are largely funded by out-of-state billionaires: the Walton family of Arkansas for Hoosiers for Quality Education and Netflix CEO Reed Hastings for Hoosiers for Great Public Schools.

The Student Funding Alliance campaign initially focused on getting a share of a planned property-tax operating referendum for Indianapolis Public Schools. IPS dropped plans for the referendum, and the call for “parity” in school funding shifted to the legislature, where it had a ready audience.

Charter schools get about the same per-pupil state funding as district schools. They get more federal money. But they haven’t been able to raise money with property taxes. That will now change for charter schools in the four designated counties, and that’s two-thirds of the charters in the state. By my count, 56 of Indiana’s nearly 100 brick-and-mortar charter schools are in Indianapolis (Marion County) and nine are in Lake County.

In almost every other instance, government entities that levy property taxes – school districts, cities, counties, townships, etc. – can be held accountable via elections. If you don’t like how the school district is spending your tax dollars, you can vote out the school board. That won’t be the case with charter schools, which are privately operated nonprofits with appointed boards.

Expanding school choice was a key part of GOP legislators’ education program, but it wasn’t the only part. The supermajority also passed what the ACLU referred to as a “slate of hate”: laws to ban gender-affirming care for trans youth, set the stage for banning books and prosecuting school librarians, ban teaching about sex in early grades, and force schools to out trans kids to their parents.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Deregulation, Disruption, Education Industry, Funding, Gender, Indiana, Indianapolis, Privatization, Vouchers

Indianapolis: Low-Performing Charter School Reopens with a New Name

By dianeravitch
September 1, 2022 //
11

Chalkbeat Indiana reports on the innovative way that a failing charter school fixed its problems: It changed its name! Ignite Achievement Academy is now the Genius School! There!

Single-digit proficiency rates. Plummeting attendance. A work environment described in a former employee’s lawsuit as “one big mess.”

Ignite Achievement Academy came to and left Indianapolis Public Schools within just four years under challenging circumstances. Some low test scores from Elder Diggs School 42 — the traditional school Ignite took over — dropped even lower on Ignite’s watch, while attendance fell below the district average and staff retention rates became the worst in the district.

These falling scores and other poor metrics led Ignite to become just the second charter school to not have its partnership renewed with the district’s innovation network.

Yet despite the school’s challenges, the mayor’s Office of Education and Innovation (or OEI) – the school’s authorizer – has allowed the school to continue operating as an independent charter school under a new name.

Ignite has transitioned from an IPS-affiliated restart charter school to the Genius School, an independent K-6 charter school in a new location near the city’s Fairgrounds neighborhood. It is on probationary status due to poor performance.

Brilliant! The failing Ignite Achievement Academy School is now the Genius School!

You can’t make this stuff up.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Education Industry, Failure, Indianapolis

Parent: Why I No Longer Support Vouchers

By dianeravitch
September 20, 2021 //
28

Dountonia Batts is a parent advocate and community organizer in Indianapolis. she is a member of the board of the Network for Public Education. She explains here why she once supported vouchers but no longer does.

I can remember exactly when my thinking about school vouchers began to change. I was attending a community meeting, waiting to find out whether my small children, then in kindergarten and first grade, were going to receive vouchers to attend a private school. The meeting was almost over when a community member stood up and told us how disturbed she was by the way we all kept talking about ‘my children.’ “We have to be focused on the children who do not have the choices you have,” she told us solemnly. “They’re going to fall through the cracks.” It would take me years to see for myself what she meant, but the seed was planted that night.

My two sons did get school vouchers and were accepted to a private Baptist K-12 school. As the years passed, I became more aware of the impact of the decision I’d made. It started with my own children. After the murder of Trayvon Martin in 2012, my oldest son wore a hoodie to school and it was viewed as a political statement. The signs that he wasn’t really welcome at a school that got less diverse in each successive grade became more apparent. I saw the eyes and heard the comments in the bleachers. My youngest son was the only Black child in his class. He started to get discouraged, convinced that he wasn’t smart. He never found his people at that school. I began to understand that school is about more than academics. The social element really matters too.

My perspective really began to change when my husband, Dr. Ramon Batts, decided to run for school board in Indianapolis. He could see what I’d been missing—that as charter schools and vouchers expanded, the school system in Indianapolis was falling apart. All of the high schools in our neighborhood had been shut down, even as charter high schools were popping up. Here was the neediest school system in the state, serving the neediest kids, and yet funds were being systematically drained away. And it was only getting worse. In the years that my children had been attending their private school, Indiana had expanded eligibility for the voucher program again and again. Today, families earning up to $140,000 can attend private schools at public expense. 

For the first time I really began to think about the impact of the decision I’d made on everybody else. By pulling away from the public system, I was leaving less for the kids who’d been left behind, including the ones who couldn’t get into private schools, or who got kicked out because they didn’t conform to what the schools wanted. The more I saw, the more it bothered me. I was using public dollars to perpetuate discrimination in the name of school choice. I decided that I could no longer accept school vouchers for my children because it was unethical. 

Today, both of my children attend public schools, and my younger son has finally found “his people.” And I’m now an advocate for public education. I try to get parents to understand that if we defund, undermine or privatize public schools we’re doing a disservice to the majority of parents for whom private schools are not an option. I try to help them see what I finally did: that the decisions we make when it comes to our own children have an impact on everybody else. All those years ago, that woman at the community meeting warned that we were drifting dangerously away from the idea of a common good. At the time, I couldn’t understand what she meant. I do now.

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, Indianapolis, Parents, Supporting public schools, Vouchers

Educators: Beware “The City Fund” and Its Many Tentacles of Privatization

By dianeravitch
February 7, 2021 //
14

This article was co-authored by a group of educators who oppose privatization. They have identified the primary driver of privatization in their different communities: The City Fund, subsidized primarily by corporate “reformers” Reed Hastings and John Arnold. The City Fund is led by experienced privatizers who have tried their hand in places like Tennessee and New Orleans, where the PR was great but the results were not. It opened its operations with $200 million in hand from its funders. Lots of money, no members, and a charge to go out into the nation and find cities where they could disrupt the local school board elections by underwriting advocates of privatization. They are undermining public schools and democracy at the same time. They should hang their heads in shame. They won’t.

The authors of the following are: Dr. Tracee Miller was an elected member of the St. Louis Board of Education. Dr. Keith Benson is president of the Camden Education Association. Christina Smith is Secretary of Indianapolis Public Schools Community Coalition. Dawn Chanet Collins, East Baton Rouge Parish School System Board Member and Candidate for Metro-Council 6. Bobby Blount is a San Antonio Northside ISD Trustee. Don Macleay is a member of Oakland Public Schools Action 2020.

They wrote the following article:


Education Privatization: Eerie Similarities in Stories from 15 Major US Cities

A new education reform movement has made its way across the country whose goal is not reform, but privatization. That coalition is led by billionaires forcing their extreme market bias onto our school system. Its framework steers tax dollars away from the public schools and toward their chosen consultants, partner groups, curricula, and other products and services without oversight from elected officials. The movement manifests in the expansion of charter schools and their enrollment, division of public districts into factions, incubation of community advocacy groups, promotion of anti-public school legislation, and influencing of state and local campaigns. 

To say that the proponents of this model engage in deceptive tactics would be a gross understatement. Aside from disguising their approach with buzzwords like innovation, transformation, and social justice, they funnel money through PACs, then through individuals and groups, to make their funding difficult to trace. This shroud of financial and ideological secrecy also makes the money, desperately needed in public education, easier for schools and organizations to accept.

One major national funder of this reactionary education philosophy is The City Fund. The City Fund distributes money from corporate school reform philanthropists, such as John Arnold and Reed Hastings, to local city organizations to accomplish the goals listed above. Its political organization, Public School Allies, makes campaign contributions to local school board candidates who are likely to adopt the same philosophy. “Reform” money has changed what used to be $1,500 local campaigns into $20,000 races for school board.The model being promoted by The City Fund and its affiliated organizations has been seen nearly to fruition in New Orleans and Indianapolis, and the stories being played out in other cities where The City Fund operates are eerily similar. 

We are education experts and advocates who represent cities and schools across the country that are being impacted by this movement and we refuse to be complicit. Our stories from Camden, Oakland, Indianapolis, San Antonio, Baton Rouge, and St. Louis account for only a fraction of the cities where these movements are underway, and we hope that sharing our experiences will help others recognize the tactics wherever they appear.

Recent articles about The City Fund and its influence in St. Louis and in local school board races inspired us to contact each other. What we discovered is unsettling. The organizations funded by The City Fund present themselves as local grassroots organizations when nothing could be further from the truth. While propping up these local organizations with millions of dollars, The City Fund also places its own supporters on the organizations’ boards to influence their ideology and decision-making. These groups and their partner community advocacy groups have equivalents in at least 15 cities. A few examples of umbrella groups sponsored by The City Fund include The Mind Trust in Indianapolis, the Camden Education Fund in Camden, City Education Partners in San Antonio, redefinED in Atlanta, RootED in Denver, The Opportunity Trust in St. Louis, San Joaquin A+ in Stockton, REACH in Oakland, and New Schools in Baton Rouge. 

Naming more equivalent organizations here would be unhelpful, but recognizing their actions is critical to identifying their influence. In addition to the strategies listed earlier, organizations affiliated with The City Fund have engaged in a variety of similar behaviors. In most locations they have created a school-finder tool and promoted a common application for traditional and charter schools. These groups host community events or support the publishing of reports where skewed data imply the deterioration of public education, and often push the idea that charters are the only solution. They make similar demands of school boards and of individual board members to conform with their ideals, and react with similar misinformation when confronted by the public or the media.  The uniformity across cities is so striking that on several of our joint calls there was audible relief when one of us realized we weren’t the sole target of this deception.

These organizations are not home-grown local groups established to solve local problems, but are experts at pretending to be. While they employ well-meaning advocates who  are energized  by words like equity or opportunity and promote themselves as organizations who seek to understand community sentiment, these groups are the local arms of The City Fund, whose model seeks to, and has experienced frightening success in, advancing the privatization of public education. With privatization comes the loss of local control and democratic ideals. 

The City Fund does not make it clear when it is investing in a city; fortunately, we have the opportunity to learn from each other and to stop the corruption before it becomes so deeply embedded in our systems that it can’t be reversed. The individuals peddling their agenda under the guise of education equity will continue to steer public dollars toward their private programs and gain financial and political capital until we decide public education is too important to jeopardize for a scheme. We are all complicit in the perpetuation of inequity if we choose to let this continue now that we know the truth.

Co-authored by: 

Dr. Tracee Miller, former member of the Board of Education for St. Louis Public Schools; 

Dr. Keith Benson, President of the Camden Education Association and author of Reform and Gentrification in the Age of #CamdenRising: Public Education and Urban Redevelopment in Camden, NJ; 

Christina Smith, Secretary of Indianapolis Public Schools Community Coalition; 

Dawn Chanet Collins, East Baton Rouge Parish School System Board Member and Candidate for Metro-Council 6; 

Bobby Blount, San Antonio Northside ISD Trustee; 

Don Macleay, Oakland Public Schools Action 2020.

Categories Billionaires, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Democracy, Disruption, Education Reform, Indianapolis, St. Louis, Standardized Testing

Tom Ultican: School Board Elections Pit Billionaires vs. Public School Advocates

By dianeravitch
November 13, 2020 //
9

Tom Ultican writes here about three major school board elections: Oakland, Los Angeles, and Indianapolis. These are districts that are in the crosshairs of the billionaire privatizers. No one can explain why billionaires want to privatize the public schools in these three districts (as well as dozens more). We now have nearly 30 years of evidence that neither charters nor vouchers produce educational miracles. New Orleans is not a national model: Last year, half the charter schools in this all-charter district were identified by the state as D or F-rated schools. Assignment to anyone: Why do the billionaires keep funding failure?

Ultican reports that the pro-privatization candidates vastly outspent the pro-public education candidates. In Oakland, the pro-public education slate won all but one seat (in that race, the pro-public education groups were divided, or they would have had a clean sweep).

In Los Angeles, the billionaires won one seat, enough to give them a single-seat majority of the school board.

In Indianapolis, the billionaires swamped the pro-public education candidates with their vast spending power.

It is an attack on democracy when billionaires from out-of-state (or from in-state) can drop a few million into a local school board race and make it impossible for ordinary citizens to compete. The individuals and the groups funding this assault on democracy–Michael Bloomberg, William Bloomfield, Stacey Schusterman, Arthur Rock, the Walton family, Reed Hastings, Doris Fisher, and other billionaires should hang their heads in shame. So should Stand for Children (which funnels billionaire money into races against public school advocates) and The Mind Trust.

For their ceaseless efforts to dismantle public schools and replace them with privately managed charters, I hereby place the following billionaires on this blog’s “Wall of Shame”: Michael Bloomberg, the Walton family, Reed Hastings, William Bloomfield, Doris Fisher, Arthur Rock, and Stacy Schusterman.

The same richly deserved dishonor goes to the infamous servant of the billionaires, Stand for Children.

Categories Billionaires, Bloomberg, Michael, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Education Reform, Hoax, Indianapolis, Los Angeles, Oakland, Privatization, Shame, Wall of Shame

Indianapolis: Stop the Billionaires from Capturing Our School Board!

By dianeravitch
October 29, 2020 //
5

John Loflin of Indianapolis writes about the money flowing into the city’s school board elections from out-of-state billionaires and their usual front called Stand for Children.

Loflin writes:

To whom it may concern:

Just in case you have not seen this Recorder story, “Political groups give over $200,000 to Charter friendly candidates for IPS” here’s the link: Political Groups Give $200,000 To Some Candidates In IPS Board Race.

This inordinate, almost obscene, amount of money–notably from out of state donors–just to run for a board seat in a school district with just 31,000+ students, raises deep concerns about how democratic is the institution of public education in Indianapolis: http://vorcreatex.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Purchasing-the-2012-2014-and-2016-IPS-school-board-elections.pdf.
Who is flooding Indianapolis with such large amounts of money?

We know Stand for Children/Mind Trust are now spending hundreds of thousands of dollars, using a 501c4 in Oregon, to elect their candidates. We also know that Stand for Children, the Mind Trust, Rise Indy, and the Teachers Alliance for Equitable Public Schools (TAEPS) are all part of the same group of people out to buy and control IPS. They’re funded by conservative white billionaires like Michael Bloomberg or Alice Walton who will never step foot in Indianapolis. And they use state legislation created by the conservative/right-wing American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). 

Check the diagram connecting all the dots “Out of state ed reform money floods into Indiana communities.”https://www.indianacoalitionforpubliced.org/2020/10/25/out-of-state-education-reform-money-floods-into-indiana-communities/?fbclid=IwAR0YlnDEXVJorGXk1It7xIpnRSlp9FBEtISSVZjZOh7r415toXBRF7DqlEY

Inline image

Now Bart Peterson’s PAC, Hoosiers for Great Public Schools, is in the mix,
IPS candidate Mr. Kenneth Allen $$

https://www.wfyi.org/news/articles/ips-school-board-candidates-biography-raises-questions

http://ofm.indy.gov/CampaignFinanceAPI/Document/Index?documentName=IPS+School+Board%5cAllen%2c+Kenneth_schbd-msdips_2020-10-14_CFA-4-PE.pdf  $102, 333

http://ofm.indy.gov/CampaignFinanceAPI/Document/Index?documentName=IPS+School+Board%5cAllen%2c+Kenneth_schbd-msdips_2020-10-14_CFA-11.pdf   +$21,000=$123,333Search IPS candidate’s campaign finance records here:https://www.indy.gov/workflow/search-campaign-finance-records
A closer look at Bart Peterson’s Hoosiers for Great Public Schools PAC which has $400,000.00

https://campaignfinance.in.gov/INCF/TempDocs/411150e6-8fb6-4c1e-aaf6-c25bd5769224.pdf?fbclid=IwAR1-MfMLKt7Lyan4RHG_M2VglDQ6cQqXq5oKCfJ5J_p5A_2a2HVOYjypqBk

Rise Indy PAC has $559,995.00https://campaignfinance.in.gov/INCF/TempDocs/7a1c3a86-0c53-419d-a8a0-efe4588f2660.pdf?fbclid=IwAR1Sew-TmY98x3s3ROeqd-ZE6Dd2AadxFzeKpYN9awQQp5vu2cGr4kuJrHUHere’s the article “Who paid to make IPS the 2nd most privatized school district in the US?”

https://dianeravitch.net/2020/04/30/tom-ultican-who-paid-to-make-indianapolis-the-second-most-privatized-school-district-in-the-nation/Here’s an essay I wrote, “Does Indianapolis actually want an entirely privatized school district?“http://vorcreatex.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Does-Indianapolis-actually-want-an-entire-privatized-school-system.pdf. 
Let’s have a public conversation about why someone needs $123K to run for school board, and if we have a democracy or a corporatocracy.

John Harris Loflin

Parent Power–Indianapolis affiliate of Parents Across AmericaEducation-Community Action Team

317.998.1339

Categories Billionaires, Corruption, Dark Money, Education Reform, Elections, Indiana, Indianapolis

Tom Ultican: Who Paid to Make Indianapolis the Second Most Privatized School District in the Nation?

By dianeravitch
April 30, 2020 //
8

In this post, Tom Ultican takes a close look at the takeover and privatization of the Indianapolis school district, funded by billionaires and managed by a well-funded group called The Mind Trust (which, of course, claims to be deeply concerned about “civil rights,” while stripping parents of color of their right to elect a school board that represents them). By Ultican’s reckoning, nearly 64% of the students in Indianapolis now attend privately managed schools.

He writes:

With the introduction of Innovation schools in 2015, Indianapolis Public Schools quickly became the second most privatized taxpayer supported schools system in America. It has zoomed past Detroit and Washington DC in the privatization sweepstakes to only trail the poster child for disaster capitalism, New Orleans. The right wing billionaire funded organization, The Mind Trust, has played a major role in this outcome.

He provides a handy list of the major funders of this betrayal of the public trust. Leading the charge is the Lilly Endowment, with a donation of $22.7 million, followed by the City Fund (Reed Hastings and John Arnold) at $18 million. And there are other familiar names, well known in the disruption industry.

Ultican traces the history of the disruption/privatization industry in Indianapolis and finds that its origins can be traced to the far-right extremists of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and the Koch brothers. You will not be surprised to learn that Teach for America and TNTP (the organization founded by Michelle Rhee) are integral to the privatization of Indianapolis’s schools. And Relay “Graduate School of Education” (the one with no real faculty or campuses or professors or researchers or library) is also in the mix.

Ultican reviews the sorry situation in Indianapolis, where disrupters have pulled the wool over the eyes of the public and the media with their dazzling sums of money, and he speculates about why billionaires are so devoted to undermining public schools and the teaching profession:

Why are billionaires spending so much to undermine professionalism in public education? It is probably not altruism. More likely, they want to reduce the biggest cost associated with education; teacher’s salaries. In the antebellum south, plantation owners preached anti-tax ideology because they owned the most and paid the most. Today’s billionaires aren’t much different. Most of them won’t put their children in public schools and really don’t value high quality public education. It seems the big motivation is to reduce tax burdens and simultaneously create new education industries.

Categories Accountability, ALEC, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Education Reform, Hoax, Indianapolis, Privatization
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