Archives for category: Walton Foundation
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Grassroots Arkansas: ACTION ALERT, 10:30 AM Tomorrow!

By dianeravitch
October 29, 2019 //
1
Supporters of Students,
Join our students as they stay home for a “sick-out” in solidarity with our educators tomorrow, Wednesday, October 30th. If you are a caregiver of a student, you can call their absence in, and no matter who you are, you can join them at 12:45pm outside the Governor’s Office in the State Capitol, wearing red, holding supportive signs, and supporting them in their demands to meet with the Governor about an immediate return to democratically-elected, local control and return of recognition of the LREA Little Rock Teachers’ Union.
If you are a caregiver of a student or a student yourself, please fill out this pledge to show Asa, Key, and the State Board of Education how many students intend to follow educators in the event of a work action and encourage them to come to the table.
You can also support them by donating to the Bread for Ed fund here to provide meals for students who would be out of school during a shutdown and to cover associated costs. Over 70% of Little Rock students rely on free or reduced lunch, and your support will make it possible for them to stand in solidarity with teachers and educators.
You can support the LREA Member Care fund here to provide support for members in the case of a collective job action. Funds will be provided to members based on demonstrated need.
Lastly, save the date for Monday, November 4th, 5-7pm, for an LREA fundraiser at South on Main.
Together, we will win!
GRASSROOTS ARKANSAS
Categories Accountability, Arkansas, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization, Walton Foundation

The Walton Family: Ungrateful Graduates of Public Schools

By dianeravitch
October 29, 2019 //
26

No philanthropy has spent more money to undermine and privatize public schools than the Waltons. The Waltons are the richest family in the U.S., possibly in the world, with a net worth in excess of $200 billion.

The Walton Family Foundation claims credit for launching at least one of every four charter schools in the nation. The foundation aims to eliminate public education, crush teachers’ unions, and destroy the teaching profession. The foundation has given nearly $100 million to Teach for America to supply inexperienced, ill-trained teachers to public and charter schools.

It is hard to understand the Waltons’ animus towards public schools, since the patriarch Sam Walton, his wife Helen, and all of his children were graduates of small-town public schools.

Sam graduated from David H. Hickman High School in Columbia, Missouri. His wife Helen was the valedictorian of her public high school in Claremont, Oklahoma.

John Walton (who died in a plane crash in 2005) graduated from the Bentonville High School in Bentonville, Arkansas.

Alice Walton, the richest woman in the world, graduated from Bentonville High School in 1966.

Jim Walton, net worth exceeding $40 billion, graduated from Bentonville High School in 1965.

Rob Walton’s wikipedia entry does not say where he attended school, but very likely it was the Bentonville public schools, like his siblings.

Why do the Waltons hate public education? Why do they feel no gratitude towards the free and democratically controlled public schools that educated them? Why no gratitude towards the experienced public school teachers at Bentonville public schools?

When a Walton store moves into a small community, it destroys Main Street by undercutting the prices that mom-and-pop stores need to survive. Mom and pop may get hired to be Walmart greeters or stocking clerks. Main Street dies as Walmart thrives. If the Walmart doesn’t show a profit, it closes, leaving the region without commerce.

On the website of the Walton Family Foundation, this saying by the matriarch is posted:

“It’s not what you gather but what you scatter that tells what kind of life you have lived.”

Favorite saying of Helen Walton
The Waltons have exemplified greed, hostility to the common good, ingratitude, selfishness. What a legacy.
 

Categories Accountability, Arkansas, Walton Foundation

Arkansas: Cathy Frye Offers a Who’s Who of the Walton Privatization Movement

By dianeravitch
October 28, 2019 //
6

Cathy Frye is a veteran journalist who joined the staff of the Arkansas Public Schools Resource Center as communications director for three years. She learned that APSRC was a shell organization funded by the billionaire Waltons to trick rural schools into joining the Walton crusade to eliminate public schools.

In this post, Frye names names.

She begins:

Tonight, I am sharing a Who’s Who in the Arkansas education “reform” movement.

First – a reminder: The end game is not charterization. It is privatization. Charter schools are merely a bridge. Look at them as place-holders.

The Arkansas Public School Resource Center, where I worked for three years as the communications director, purports to support both open-enrollment charter schools and rural traditional school districts. In actuality, APSRC is one of many Arkansas-based and Walton-funded lobbying entities.  Some of these organizations specialize in charters. Others exist to promote private schools and vouchers. One seeks to convince teachers that they don’t need to belong to unions. A couple others promote the alleged glories of school “choice.”

Here’s a list of such organizations:

Remember, Arkansas is not the only state being targeted by American billionaires who seek to do away with public education and those pesky teachers’ unions. The Waltons are among those leading the charge. Curious, isn’t it, that the Waltons and other billionaires who are supposedly concerned about education haven’t donated a dime to public schools. Instead, they’re focused on supporting charters and private schools. 

 

Categories Accountability, ALEC, Arkansas, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization, Walton Foundation

Massachusetts: Waltons Spend Millions to Block New Funding for Public Schools

By dianeravitch
October 24, 2019 //
43

 

Maurice Cunningham, a professor of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts, is renowned for his practice of “following the money” in Massachusetts. He naturally keeps encountering the Walton money that flows generously to torpedo public spending for public schools in Massachusetts. Maurice Cunningham is one of the heroes in my forthcoming book SLAYING GOLIATH.

In this post, he identifies the malign tentacles of Walton money that is currently engaged in trying to block legislation to increase the funding of public schools in the Bay State.

You can’t tell the players without a scorecard, and Cunningham provides the scorecard. The name of the organization is less important than the source of the money. If you spot a group called Latinos for Education, remember they are a Walton front.

When you think of the name Walton, think of a family that has accumulated over $150 billion but abhors unions, detests the minimum wage, and likes to keep their workers underpaid and tightly controlled. And think of a family that is intent on destroying the public schools that 85% of American children attend. How would you describe them? Avaricious. Greedy. Selfish.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Hoax, Privatization, Walton Foundation

Cathy Frye Tells All About the Shadowy World of School Choice in Arkansas, Part 7

By dianeravitch
October 23, 2019 //
5

Cathy Frye worked for a Walton-funded front organization called the Arkansas Public School Resource Center, which really didn’t want to help public schools.

She has been spilling the beans in a series of posts. This is her latest. 

Her post contains links to her previous posts.

She begins:

The Arkansas Public School Resource Center touts itself as a “collaborative local partner” when describing how it excels in supporting rural traditional public schools and open-enrollment charter schools. 

APSRC, funded since 2008 by the Walton Family Foundation, describes the reason for its existence thusly:

The mission of the Arkansas Public School Resource Center is to support the improvement of public education by providing advocacy services on behalf of public schools with a special emphasis on charter schools and rural districts.

This is a blatant lie. 

Yes, APSRC will draft – and lobby for – legislation that will benefit the state’s open-enrollment charter schools. It also will sit idly by while Walton-backed legislation regarding private-school vouchers floats through the Legislature. I’ve watched APSRC do this twice, during the 2017 and 2019 legislative sessions. 

But this “nonprofit” organization does not represent – let alone advocate for- the 85 percent of the state’s rural traditional public schools that are paying $2,500 per year to be members of APSRC. 

Nor does APSRC “represent” Arkansas’ larger school districts that are spending thousands of dollars on “technical-assistance” contracts. 

So why do 85 percent of Arkansas’ traditional public school districts remain – or become – APSRC members? 

 

Categories Accountability, Arkansas, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Corporate Reformers, Education Reform, Hoax, Walton Foundation

Max Brantley: The Waltons Vicious Assault on Arkansas’ Public Schools and Its Teachers’ Union

By dianeravitch
October 19, 2019 //
4

 

Max Brantley, the editor of the Arkansas Times, is a journalist who fearlessly stands up to the all-powerful Walton Family in the state they think they own. Brantley is a hero of the Resistance in my forthcoming book SLAYING GOLIATH.

In this post, Brantley describes the Waltons’ efforts to destroy the Little Rock School District and to crush the Little Rock Education Association.

He writes:

They are doing to Little Rock schools what the foundation of the family fortune did to small towns all across America — hollowing them out. It’s a years-long, billion-dollar effort that favors “choice” — privately run charter schools, vouchers for private schools, taxpayer support for homeschoolers and a diminishment of the role of elected school boards.  Parents know best, the Walton acolytes assert, even when the studies show little proof that the various choices beat conventional public schools. They are still searching for the magic bullet for the grinding reality of the impact of poverty on standardized test scores, the misleading standard by which “failure” is determined…

Little Rock teachers are…complaining of a mass e-mail from the anti-union Arkansas State Teachers Association last night warning teachers against striking. This group had a $362,000 startup grant from the Walton Family Foundation, no surprise given how notoriously anti-union Walmart has always been. ASTA also has ties to a national anti-union organization founded by like-minded billionaires.  Teachers weren’t too happy to be spammed by the group. ASTA also has been peppering state newspapers with op-eds touting their anti-union views. Its leader, Michele Linch, was the lone public voice on the other side of an outpouring of public opposition to the attack on the LRSD and its union by the state Board of Education.

Teachers in Little Rock ARE talking strike. I confess misgivings. There’s not a readily attainable goal as seen in other states, such as a pay increase. Nor is there any realistic hope for a change of heart in the Asa Hutchinson- (and thus Walton-) controlled education hierarchy. As Ernie Dumas wrote this week, racial discrimination and union hatred (tied historically with racist thinking) have always been with us in Arkansas. The recent LRSD takeover was nothing more than a combination of both by the white male business ruling class, with the primary immediate goal of union wreckage.

The Waltons collectively have a fortune in excess of $100 billion. They buy people, they create organizations to implement their evil schemes, they think they can squelch democracy by the power of money.

Those with the courage to stand up to them—journalists like Max Brantley, the teachers of the Little Rock Education Association, the parents and activists of Grassroots Arkansas—are the heroes of our time. They oppose autocracy, plutocracy, and a vast conspiracy to destroy democracy.

 

Categories Accountability, Arkansas, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Democracy, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization, Resistance, School Choice, Unions, Vouchers, Walton Foundation

Maurice Cunningham: Waltons Are Trying to Block Funding Increase for Massachusetts Schools

By dianeravitch
October 19, 2019 //
4

 

Maurice Cunningham is the ghostbuster of Dark Money in education. He is a professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts. He is a hero of the Resistance in my forthcoming book SLAYING GOLIATH.

In this post, he details the efforts of the Walton Family of Arkansas to block the Massachusetts’ legislators who are trying to increase funding for the public schools of their state.

He writes:

The three interest groups pushing to undermine the Massachusetts senate’s education funding bill are all Walton funded, two of them essentially full-time agents of the Waltons. They have to solve a problem for the right-wing Wal-Mart heirs: not that funding public education might fail, but that it will succeed.

The Waltons, who contributed over $2 million in dark and gray money to the pro-charters side in 2016 through mechanisms set up by Democrats for Education Reform Massachusetts, would prefer to promote charter schools and charge toward a fully privatized system with employee relations mimicking those of Wal-Mart itself. But the political momentum now is all in the direction of a vast increase in public funding, and the Waltons’ best hope is to throw sand into the implementation gears.

He quotes from two books that explain the Walton ideology. This is one:

This is the ideological mind set of the Waltons, as explained by historian Nelson Lichtenstein in The Retail Revolution: How Wal-Mart Created a Brave New World of Business. Of The Walton family’s interest in education, Lichtenstein writes:

Because so much of Walton and Wal-Mart philanthropy is crudely self-interested, critics are tempted to find a pecuniary motive for the Walton family’s interest in education. But their support for competition and privatization is an entirely ideological project, based on a desire to enhance the social and cultural value of a free market in which government is weak while public goods like hurricane relief, education, and health care are the fodder for entrepreneurial transformation. Since public schools are by far the most pervasive of public institutions, and highly unionized to boot, this “$700-plus-billion-a-year industry”—John Walton’s phrase—has been a good place to start.

If you think all this sounds somewhat Koch-like, Charles and the late David Koch committed to K-12 education reform too –by which they also mean to destroy public education. The Kochs and Waltons have kicked in $5 million each as partners in a project called 4.0 that will be an ideas factory for privatization. Also, never untangle the Kochs or Waltons ideology with their fervor for low taxes on themselves.

 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Dark Money, Democracy, Education Industry, Funding, Massachusetts, Privatization, Walton Foundation

Cathy Frye: Inside the Shadowy World of the Arkansas School Choice “Movement,” Part 6

By dianeravitch
October 17, 2019 //
1

 

After a long career as a journalist, Cathy Frye worked for the Walton-funded “Arkansas Public School Resource Center,” an organization funded by the Waltons to hoax rural school districts and suck them into the Waltons’ plan to eliminate public education in the state. She has been posting about what she learned as communications director for the APSRC during her three years in the organization. This is her sixth post. Links to the first five are included in her post.

The thing to remember about the Waltons is that whatever they fund related to education is intended to advance their goals of eliminating public schools, destroying teachers’ unions, and undermining the teaching profession.

This, despite the fact that Sam Walton, his wife, and his children graduated from public schools.

Their defining features as a family are greed and a lack of gratitude for the schools that educated them.

 

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Hoax, Privatization, Vouchers, Walton Foundation

Arkansas: Inside the Shadowy World of the School Choice Movement, Part 5

By dianeravitch
October 15, 2019 //
2

Cathy Frye continues her tell-all report on working in a Walton-funded organization called the Arkansas Public School Resource Center. APSRC enlisted 85% of the state’s rural school districts with offers of help but its real purpose was to promote the Walton agenda of eliminating public schools and replacing them with private choices.

In this post, she describes the hostile, sexist, secretive workplace at APSRC and explains why she quit.

Categories Accountability, Arkansas, Education Industry, Privatization, Walton Foundation

Mercedes Schneider: Louisiana State Board of Education, Bought and Paid For

By dianeravitch
October 13, 2019 //
5

 

Mercedes Schneider reports that the deluge of out-of-state money into the election of the state board of education was sufficient to elect a board amenable to the failed strategies of testing and choice. 

No fresh ideas to be expected from Louisiana. Just the same tired nostrums that were written into federal law nearly 20 years ago.

Schneider wonders if the new board will reappoint State Superintendent John White, a former TFA corps member and a graduate of the unaccredited Broad Academy. White was appointed in 2012 and was a cheerleader for charters and vouchers. Under his leadership, Louisiana has not only stagnated on the authoritative national test called NAEP, it has dropped almost to the rock bottom. One thing we have learned about corporate reformers: they are never dissuaded by failure. They fail and fail, but they never change course.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Failure, Louisiana, Privatization, Testing, Vouchers, Walton Foundation
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