This article explains succinctly why certain members of the billionaire boys club have decided that Washington State absolutely positively must have charter schools. Their recipe for school reform: the free market. And why not? The free market works for them. Will they put their own children (or in the case of the Bezos family, grandchildren) in charter schools? Don’t be silly.
Archives for category: Walton Foundation
Parent Revolution, the organization handsomely funded by the Gates Foundation, the Broad Foundation, and the Walton Foundation, has finally gotten a charter conversion in the state of California, nearly two years after the law was passed.
Some victory: In a school with 600 plus students and 400 families, only 286 parents voted for the charter; when some changed their mind and tried to rescind their vote, they were told by a judge that they could not take their signature off the petition.
Only those who supported the charter were allowed to vote on which charter operator would run the new charter. That reduced the number of eligible voters to180.
Of the 180 who were eligible, only 53 voted on which operator would win control of their public school.
The winning operator received a grand total of 50 votes. That is 1/8 of the parents in the school. That is less than 15% of the parents in the school.
In the linked article above, no mention is made of the fact that the Adelanto school district had a charter that was closed last year because its operators engaged in funny business with the public’s money.
An article in a Georgia newspaper identifies the money behind the charter referendum.
Remember that Governor Nathan Deal wants the power to create a state commission to approve charters even though the local school board turns them down. This is based on ALEC model legislation. It serves corporate interests while spurning local control.
The advocates raised almost half a million dollars as of September 1. Almost all of that money came from out of state donors. A big donor was Alice Walton of the Walmart family in Arkansas, who is also a big contributor to the charter campaign in Washington State.
At the same time, the opposition to the referendum had raised less than $90,000, and there were no big donors.
On this charter issue, big donors are swamping local democracy. We seem to be moving rapidly back to the age of the robber barons, only this time it’s the schools they want to buy, not the railroads or other basic industries (they have already outsourced most of them).
Ten people have supplied 91% of the $8.9 million raised to promote a charter school referendum in Washington State.
Prominent among the super-donors are Bill Gates, Walmart heiress Alice Walton, Amazon Titan Mike Bezos, and venture capitalist Nick Hanauer.
It’s fair to say that none of these financial sponsors have a child in the public schools of Washington state or that they will ever have a child in the public schools of Washington state.
They are doing the old noblesse oblige thing, that thing you do for the children of the peasant class.
Jeff Bryant asks whether Michelle Rhee is the Ann Coulter of education.
Rhee expends great energy insisting that Democrats support the hard-right agenda of ALEC. She tries to sell the idea of a bipartisan consensus to eliminate collective bargaining rights, teacher tenure, test-based evaluation, and privatization via charters and vouchers.
Democrats would be wise to stick to their historic agenda of equality of educational opportunity and public education.
Rhee has no popular base for her agenda. Although she claims two million members, most of those “members” seem to be people (like me) who innocently signed an online petition supporting teachers. When she held a rally in Hartford, Connecticut, last fall, no one showed but media and a handful of onlookers.
What she does have is a load of money, contributed by Rupert Murdoch, the Waltons, and assorted rightwing billionaires. She uses it to support Republican candidates and the few Democrats who endorse vouchers or promise to oppose unions.
Her relentless promotion of the anti-union film “Won’t Back Down” demonstrated her lack of any popular backing. The film had the worst opening weekend in thirty years of any movie in wide distribution (2500 screens), and immediately died at the box office, despite heavy marketing and advertising. The Regal cinema chain (owned by Philip Anschutz, whose company Walden Media produced the film) is now offering two tickets for the price of one. But in these hard economic times, it’s tough to sell a story in which the union members are the bad guys and the entrepreneurs are the good ones.
A reader sent the list of contributors to the campaign for 1240 in Washington State, which authorizes charters. See here and here for more about 1240.
Please read the list. Not clear if anyone on it is a parent of a public school student. What you will see is a list of billionaires in the high-tech sector.
Will big money buy the referendum?
Is public education for sale to the billionaire boys’ club?
Help your friends fight off the charter billionaires in Washington State.
Tomorrow is Money Blast Day:
It’s here – Money Blast Day in Washington state to fight off I-1240 that would establish charter schools here. (Washington is one of just nine states that does not have them and we have voted – three times – and said no to charters.)
But Bill Gates and his wealthy friends just infused the Yes side to the tune of $3M (they are up over $8M total). It’s a David and Goliath fight that we intend to win but we need help.
The No On 1240 campaign is having a MONEY BLAST all day on October 11th to raise money for this fight that has national implications. We have an angel donor that will match the first 50 people who donate $100.
Please help us draw this line in the sand against charters, their poor outcomes, their bad ramifications and the insanity that is the “conversion/trigger” charter embedded in I-1240. (This would allow a charter to use a petition signed by parents OR teachers to take over ANY existing school, failing or not. It would be the harshest conversion charter trigger in the country.)
Please help us say NO to charters and NO to I-1240.
Bill Gates just added another $2 million, and Alice Walton of the Walmart family just dropped another $1 million.
I am donating $100. Will you donate whatever you can?
I have a copy of the judge’s writ and will try to post it (it is in a pdf file and I don’t know how to copy that).
Background: UTLA has resisted the imposition of value-added-assessments to evaluate teachers, knowing that research shows these measures to be highly unstable and inaccurate. UTLA was burned two years ago when the Los Angeles Times created its own rating system and used test scores to publish its ratings of thousands of teachers.
Subsequently a California group called EdVoice, funded by billionaire foundations (Broad and Walton), discovered a 40-year-old law called the Stull Act, which says that pupil performance should factor into the evaluations of teachers and administrators. EdVoice filed suit on behalf of anonymous parents to demand that the LAUSD school board start using test scores to evaluate teachers.
An interesting thing about the billionaire foundations: They want charters (and in Walton’s case, vouchers). They want teachers to be evaluated by test scores. But typically, when the law is written (as in Louisiana), teachers in charter schools are exempt from evaluation by test scores. What does that mean?
One critic wrote me to say that this is “Deasy v. Deasy,” since LA superintendent Deasey is known to support such measures. I am willing to give John Deasey the benefit of the doubt, as he has a chance to show that he stands against junk science (VAM).
And the law says both teachers and administrators so presumably the leadership of the district will be evaluated by test scores as the decision moves forward.
Meanwhile, here is the UTLA lawyer’s summary of the decision:
PLEASE DON’T BELIEVE EVERYTHING YOU READ IN THE TIMES OR DAILY NEWS. THE ONLY ITEM BEFORE THE JUDGE YESTERDAY WAS THE TIME FRAME WITHIN WHICH THE DISTRICT MUST COMPLY WITH THE DECISION REGARDING THE REQUIREMENTS OF THE STULL ACT. THE PLAINTIFFS WERE TRYING TO IMPOSE AN EARLY SEPTEMBER DEADLINE, WHICH WAS REJECTED BY UTLA, AND THE COURT. THE ONLY OUTCOME FROM YESTERDAY IS THAT THE DISTRICT HAS UNTIL DECEMBER 4 TO RETURN TO COURT TO SHOW COMPLIANCE, WHICH ALLOWS TIME FOR MEANINGFUL, GOOD FAITH BARGAINING. (IF THERE IS NOT MEANINGFUL, GOOD FAITH BARGAINING BY THE DISTRICT, UTLA CAN SEEK APPROPRIATE RELIEF FROM PERB.)
Jesus E. Quiñonez
Holguin, Garfield, Martinez & Quiñonez, APLC
This morning my former colleague Mike Petrilli at the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute wrote a paean of praise in honor of billionaire Eli Broad. He began it by saying:
It wouldn’t be super-hard to poke fun at Eli Broad. (Diane Ravitch did a mean-spirited version of that when she called him and his peers “The Billionaire Boys Club.”) Here’s a man who made his fortune building tract housing in the ‘burbs, who micromanages grants down to the penny, a man who names more than a few things after himself (the Broad Prize, the Broad Fellows, and his latest museum project, simply The Broad). He’s the 1 percent of the 1 percent of the 1 percent, and not ashamed of it, either.
I was surprised to hear Mike say that it was “mean-spirited” of me to refer to him and Bill Gates and the Walton Family Foundation as members of “the Billionaire Boys’ Club.” They are billionaires and they are guys. So I wrote Mike and asked him if I had said anything that was inaccurate, and he said, no, nothing inaccurate, just mean-spirited.
I admit I didn’t realize that people as powerful as Eli Broad (“the 1 percent of the 1 percent of the 1 percent”) were so sensitive to criticism. If I offended him, I am truly sorry. I don’t aim to offend.
But I hope that he will give some thought to how his actions affect the lives of other people, people he will never meet. Certainly he is not sensitive to the pain that he causes parents and communities when he sends out graduates of his Broad Superintendents’ Academy to close down their neighborhood schools. No matter how much they cry, he doesn’t hear them.
And he doesn’t give a hoot when parents and educators complain that the people he trains have an unpleasant habit of taking control of the state or district political machinery and short-circuiting democratic control of public education. For a chilling reminder of the Broad methods, read this account of a letter from a former employee of the New Jersey Department of Education.
I wouldn’t want Eli Broad to think I was mean-spirited in describing him and his foundation. I didn’t intend to be mean at his expense. In turn, I wish he would be sensitive to the feelings of parents and educators who love their local public school and don’t want anyone to turn it into a charter run by outsiders. I know it is hard for extremely wealthy people (“the 1 percent of the 1 percent of the 1 percent”) to put themselves in the shoes of the “little people,” the people who are pulling down $40,000 or $50,000 or even $70,000 a year. It’s hard for a triple 1-percenter to imagine why such people care so much about their school or their job or their career or having a decent pension for their old age. But, Mr. Broad, if you should read this, please remember: They have feelings too.
Diane
Diane Ravitch's blog 