Three Billionaires Combine to Seek a “Breakthrough” in Education, Despite a Long Record of Failures

By dianeravitch
August 4, 2021 //
25


Matt Barnum of Chalkbeat reported that the Gates Foundation, the Walton Family Foundation, and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative are joining forces to fund a “breakthrough” in American education, despite the consistent failures they have experienced.

Are they slow learners or persistent?

Barnum writes:

The Advanced Education Research & Development Fund, announced Wednesday, is already funded to the eye-popping tune of $200 million from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, and the Walton Family Foundation. (Gates and Walton are also supporters of Chalkbeat.)

AERDF (pronounced AIR-dif) says its focus will be on what it calls “inclusive R&D,” or bringing together people with different expertise, including educators, to design and test practical ideas like improving assessments and making math classes more effective. Still, the ideas will have “moonshot ambitions,” said the group’s CEO Stacey Childress.

“One of our mottos for our program teams and the projects they fund is ‘heads in clouds and boots on the ground,’” she said.

It’s an unusually well-funded start for a new education organization, especially as big education funders have seen their influence wane in recent years after some of their ideas showed uneven results and prompted backlash. AERDF suggests these funders still have significant ambitions for improving education in the U.S., even if those efforts are less splashy — or controversial — than they once were.

The organization emerged from work that began in 2018, when CZI and Gates teamed up to invest in R&D. That resulted in a project known as EF+Math, which funds efforts to embed lessons in executive functioning — a set of cognitive skills related to self control and memory — into math classes.

“These executive functioning skills allow you to focus on what’s important, ignore distractions, let you think flexibly to solve problems and keep track of ideas,” said Melina Uncapher, the program’s director. “Perhaps not surprisingly, they’re strongly related to math skills.”

That effort, now part of AERDF, will start work in three school districts — Newark, New Jersey; Vista Unified in California; and Middletown, Ohio — this fall, said spokesperson Ed Wyatt.

You could write a book about their any failures. In fact, I already have written two. One is called Reign of Error and the other is Slaying Goliath.

What the billionaires refuse to recognize is that the root cause of poor academic performance is poverty. One experiment they might try is to raise the standard of living for targeted communities. Or they could fund hundreds of community schools with wraparound services for children and families.

Instead they prefer to search for the magic bullet that will overcome the obstacles in the lives of children who live in poverty. It appears that they learned nothing from their previous adventure into “education reform.”

A suggestion for the funders: Read Richard Rothstein’s Class and Schools.

Categories Billionaires, Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative, Education Reform, Failure, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Walton Foundation

Rachel Cohen: How Advocacy Groups Are Refuting the Critics of CRT

By dianeravitch
August 3, 2021 //
19

Rachel Cohen wrote an interesting post about how progressive advocacy groups, teachers, and activists are responding to broad-brush attacks on schools teaching Critical Race Theory.

There’s been dozens of articles written about Chris Rufo, the man responsible (and who is quite proud to take credit for) turning “critical race theory” into the latest villain in the culture wars. (For examples see: here, here, and here.)

Rufo has been quite explicit about his strategy, saying “We have successfully frozen their brand—‘critical race theory’— into the public conversation and are steadily driving up negative perceptions. We will eventually turn it toxic, as we put all of the various cultural insanities under that brand category.” He also said, “The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think ‘critical race theory.’ We have decodified the term and will recodify it to annex the entire race of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans.”

But despite “critical race theory” being in the news so much, I felt very unclear of how, if at all, liberal and left groups were organizing to respond to these new attacks, given that they aimed to take down virtually all equity and anti-racism work along with it.

In my new story for The Intercept, I spent some time reviewing the plans of teacher unions, education advocacy groups, left-leaning think tanks and liberal legal organizations, to find out. I obtained four messaging guides circulating around the liberal universe with professional talking points on how to respond to the barrage of attacks, and I interviewed authors of those guides.

These organizations are trying to walk a tight, and sometimes awkward rope. Most progressive groups have opted to distance themselves from critical race theory — attempting to “reframe” and “redirect” the conversation — while still hoping to affirm that they want to teach about systemic racism, which Critical Race Theory is all about. They’re also emphasizing the need to trust students to learn about racism, while insisting CRT is not ‘age-appropriate’ and is a law-school level concept irrelevant to K-12.

I expect this story and associated strategies to continue to evolve in the coming months. There are some broad similarities embraced by the various liberal groups, but I also found some competing visions and disagreements over what would be the best way to fight back. There’s a lot of fear right now, because people are trying to figure out how to push back without actually amplifying and strengthening bad faith arguments on the right. It’s tough, and this is a common problem in liberal politics not unique to education. See: policing.

There’s a lot of emphasis right now on teaching “truth” and “honesty” in schools. And to the extent that means opposing censorship, and a willingness to confront dark parts of our past, that’s all good. But a lot of this debate really is about something else; it’s about what’s the right way to narrate and spin the same set of general facts. And the fact is even professional historians disagree on that. As education historian Jon Zimmerman says in the piece, “We should have the courage to let kids in on that little secret that we don’t all agree on what the correct historical narrative is.”

You can read the story here.

Categories Michigan, Parent Groups, Race

Maurice Cunningham: Why is the Press Uninterested in the Corporate Invasion of Public Education?

By dianeravitch
August 3, 2021 //
89

Readers of this blog have followed the advance of privatization of public school funding for nearly a decade. We know the big foundations and individuals that support privatization. We have followed their activities and watched as all of their strategies have failed to match their promises. The great puzzle, to me, is the indifference of the mainstream media. While they cover political scandals of every variety, they are just not interested in the sustained campaign to divert public money to schools there privately managed,to religious schools, to other private schools, and even to homeschooling. The media rightly criticized Betsy DeVos’s crusade for school choice, but as soon as she left office, they lost interest in the issue. Meanwhile, red states are rushing to open more charter schools and fund more vouchers.

Maurice Cunningham explored this issue in a recent post on the blog of the MassPoliticsProfs. He chastises the Boston Globe, but the same complaint could be directed to most mainstream media.

He begins:

Suppose WalMart swept into Boston and spent millions to acquire Market Basket. The town would go ballistic. It would be covered every day in every media outlet, front page of the Boston Globe. But the Walton Family Foundation of Arkansas—the exact same heartless* mercenaries—spends millions of dollars to take over public schools and it gets ignored. Why is that?

He discusses “Hidden Politics” and “the Politics of Pretending.” He has written frequently about astroturf groups and how they present themselves to a gullible media as authentic spokesmen for parents or for some other groups.

That’s the PR facade, he says. What really matters is: who is funding these groups? Why doesn’t the media care?

I always thought that if out-of-state billionaires could be proven to have entered the state using local fronts to change Massachusetts education policy that would be a great, great, great story. I’ve been proven wrong again, and again, and again. I still think it’s a great story, it’s just a great story that only gets told at a small political science blog. Why is that?

Why is that?

Categories Betsy DeVos, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Education Reform, Funding, Home Schooling, School Choice, Vouchers

Garrison Keillor: What’s in a Name?

By dianeravitch
August 2, 2021 //
49

In this delightful column, Garrison Keillor muses about the Cleveland Indians’ decision to change their name to Cleveland Guardians. As a boy, he wanted to be an Indian when the kids played cowboys and Indians.

He begins:

It’s okay by me that the Cleveland Indians will be the Cleveland Guardians even though “Guardian” is a colorless term and they might’ve done just as well with Employees or Tenants. And “Indians” is hardly a slur. I grew up admiring Indians as a boy and trying to imitate them — I had no desire to be a cowboy, I was an Indian, and I can see how my Indianness was a natural step in wanting to be a writer and not a cog in a corporation. To me, then as now, the real insult is the title “vice president.” My Ojibwe friend Jerry uses the word “Indian” freely because, as he says, “There are too many tribes for even an Indian to keep track of.” I’ve never heard the words “native American” come out of his mouth.

It’s fine for the Washington Redskins to rename themselves, and I suggest, thinking of Washington, that Lickspittles would be appropriate or Filibusterers. As for Minnesota, I was never fond of Twins as a nickname but it’s an improvement over Gophers. The gopher is a rodent, a cousin of the squirrel and rat. There are more distinguished rodents, such as the porcupine or beaver, but the gopher is near the bottom of the gnawing order, along with the hamster. No athletic team will be named the Hamsters. Count on it.

Open the link and read the rest.

Categories Humor

Samuel Abrams Reviews Joanne Golann’s Critique of “No Excuses” Charter Schools

By dianeravitch
August 2, 2021 //
39

Samuel Abrams worked for many years as a teacher in a New York City public school. After earning his doctorate, he became executive director of the National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education at Teachers College, Columbia University. The Center consistently produces valuable reports about privatization. Consider joining its mailing list.

Here, Abrams reviews Joanne Golann’s recent book Scripting the Moves, a close analysis of “no excuses” charter schools. Open the link to read the full review and an excerpt from the book.

Abrams writes:

Few education initiatives have generated as much praise as well as philanthropic funding as the “no-excuses” charter school movement. Yet criticism of the movement has recently been growing, from both inside and out, so much so that KIPP (short for Knowledge Is Power Program), the movement’s standard-bearer, dropped its motto—“Work Hard. Be Nice.”—one year ago in acknowledgement of the conflict between the organization’s rigid code of conduct and its goal of fostering student independence.

No book captures the tension between these competing forces as well as Joanne W. Golann’s Scripting the Moves: Culture and Control in a “No-Excuses” Charter School (Princeton University Press, 2021). In this NCSPE excerpt, Golann lays the foundation for her analysis, a sociological case study based on 18 months of observations at a “no-excuses” charter middle school beginning in March 2012. In keeping with much case study research, Golann, an assistant professor of public policy and education at Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College, does not identify the school or its location, other than to note it is not part of a large network of charter schools and is situated in a medium-sized former industrial city in the northeast. Golann gives the school a pseudonym: Dream Academy.

As Golann recounts, the “no-excuses” movement began with the founding of one KIPP middle school serving low-income minority students in Houston in 1994. Another KIPP middle school serving low-income minority students in the Bronx opened in 1995. With students at both schools posting top scores on state reading and math exams, KIPP won acclaim. “For its first eight years, KIPP Academy Houston was recognized as a Texas Exemplary School,” Golann notes, “and KIPP Academy New York was rated the highest performing middle school in the Bronx for eight consecutive years.”

A segment on 60 Minutes in 1999 made that acclaim national and brought to the fore the school’s “no-excuses” pedagogical strategy: a much longer school day (running from 7:25 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.), strict behavioral expectations, and unyielding commitments by parents and teachers alike to student success, all in the name of guaranteeing that every student makes it to and through college.

Embodying KIPP’s unrelenting focus on deportment has been its ubiquitous prescriptive acronym, SLANT, standing for Sit up straight at one’s desk; Listen attentively to teachers and peers alike; Ask and answer questions; Nod in acknowledgment of instructions; and Track the speaker with one’s eyes.

In the wake of the segment on 60 Minutes, more positive coverage followed. In addition to a subsequent segment on 60 Minutes, laudatory articles appeared by David Grann in The New Republic, Bob Herbert and Thomas Friedman in The New York Times, Stanley Crouch in The New York Daily News, Leonard Pitts in The Miami Herald, and Jay Mathews in The Washington Post. Mathews built on those articles in his book about KIPP called Work Hard. Be Nice (Algonquin, 2009). The husband-and-wife team of historian Stephan Thernstrom and political scientist Abigail Thernstrom earlier praised KIPP for its resolve and methods in their book No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning (Simon & Schuster, 2003). Malcolm Gladwell devoted a chapter of his book Outliers (Little Brown, 2008) to KIPP’s impressive academic outcomes and linked them to the extended hours required of both students and teachers. Paul Tough likewise commended KIPP for its dedication to character education in his book How Children Succeed (Houghton Mifflin, 2012).

In conjunction with this positive coverage, the philanthropic spigot opened up. Doris and Donald Fisher, founders and owners of The Gap, gave $15 million to KIPP in 2000 to start replicating and afterward continued to give the organization about $5 million a year to that same end. Other foundations, including those steered by the Waltons and Gates, have since contributed many millions more. And in 2010, the U.S. Department of Education gave KIPP an Investing in Innovation grant of $50 million to further replicate.

By 2020, Golann reports, KIPP served 110,000 students in 255 schools across the country. Of these students, 88 percent came from low-income families; 95 percent were Black or Latino. Thirteen similar “no-excuses” networks evolved in KIPP’s shadow. By 2020, these networks, from Achievement First and Aspire to Success Academy and YES Prep, together enrolled another 200,000 students in 433 schools across the country. The demographics of Dream Academy, in particular, reflected those of KIPP: over 80 percent came from low-income families; about 67 percent were Black; about 33 percent were Latino.

To Golann, the problem with these “no-excuses” schools is not scalability, though scaling up these networks is indeed difficult. These schools depend on a finite number of young teachers who can work such long hours. They also depend on a finite amount of philanthropic funding to cover the cost of after-school music programs, supplementary tutoring, field trips, and college visits. More fundamentally, these schools depend on students and families that can handle the steep behavioral and academic expectations.

This last constraint is indisputable. In this regard, Golann cites the failure of Tennessee’s Achievement School District (ASD). “In 2010, Tennessee created the ASD to take over and contract with charter management organizations (CMOs) to turn around the state’s lowest-performing schools,” Golann explains later in her book. “By 2014-15, eighteen of the twenty-three ASD schools were managed by CMOs, many operating from a ‘no-excuses’ framework. After five years of turnaround efforts, the ASD schools failed to show any significant gains in students’ academic outcomes.” The key difference between conventional “no-excuses” charter schools and those in the ASD, writes Golann, is that the former involve an application process as well as specific commitments from parents and students alike to follow a contract while the latter simply enrolled all students from the designated neighborhood.

As I document in “Education and the Commercial Mindset” (Harvard University Press, 2016), a similar story unfolded over the same time period in Houston, where the economist Roland Fryer applied the KIPP curriculum to nine district high schools and eleven middle schools in an undertaking called Apollo 20. Without the application process as well as student and parent contracts defining KIPP, Apollo 20, like Tennessee’s ASD, lacked the buy-in critical to the everyday operation of “no-excuses” schools.

Please open the link to complete the review and to read an excerpt from the book.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Discipline, Education Industry

Jeff Bryant: Charter Industry Lobbies Hard to Prevent Ban on Federal Funding of For-Profit Charters

By dianeravitch
August 1, 2021 //
12

Jeff Bryant is one of the best informed writers about charter schools in the nation. He is chief correspondent for Our Schools and director of the Education Opportunity Network. He explains here why the charter industry is using misinformation to stop a Democratic proposal to ban federal funding for for-profit charter schools.

He begins:

The top lobbying group for the charter school industry is rushing to preserve millions in funds from the federal government that flow to charter operators that have turned their K-12 schools into profit-making enterprises, often in low-income communities of color.

The group, the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools (NAPCS), objects to a provision in the House Appropriations Committee’s proposed 2022 education budget that closes loopholes that have long been exploited by charter school operators that profit from their schools through management contracts, real estate deals, and other business arrangements. NAPCS also objects to the legislation’s proposal to cut 9 percent from the federal government’s troubled Charter Schools Program (CSP).

The House budget proposal, which was passed out of the majority Democratic committee “in a party-line vote,” according to the Hill, has been praised by numerous education groups, including the National School Boards Association, the National Education Association, and the National Center for Learning Disabilities, for, among many things, more than doubling Title I funding for schools serving low-income children, providing over $3 billion more to educate students with disabilities, and increasing federal spending on K-12 education programs, Education Week reports.

The legislation mostly aligns with the President Biden administration’s proposed budget for K-12 spending, as reported by Chalkbeat in April 2021, and the provision ending federal funding of for-profit charter school operators reflects Biden’s pledge, made in his presidential campaign, to “not support any federal money for for-profit charter schools, period.”

The For-Profit Charter Problem

The specific provision regarding for-profit charters that NAPCS objects to states, “None of the funds made available by this Act or any other Act may be awarded to a charter school that contracts with a for-profit entity to operate, oversee or manage the activities of the school.”

Controversies over for-profit charter school operators are long-standing and largely unresolved…

As University of South Carolina law professor Derek Black explains on his personal blog, “Most states require charter schools to be nonprofit. To make money, some of them have simply entered into contracts with separate for-profit companies that they also own. These companies do make money off students.”

A 2021 report by the Network for Public Education (NPE)—an organization co-founded by education historian Diane Ravitch that advocates for public schools—examined more than 1,000 charter schools that were contracted with for-profit management companies and found that the schools’ nonprofit boards were often mere fronts for profit-making enterprises that use the charter schools they operate to “maximize their profits through self-dealing, excessive fees, real estate transactions, and under-serving students who need the most expensive services.”

Among the practices that for-profit charter operators employ, according to the NPE report, is to establish “sweeps contracts” that “give for-profits the authority to run all school services in exchange for all or nearly all of the school’s revenue.”

The report also “identified over 440 charter schools operated for profit that received grants totaling approximately $158 million between 2006 and 2017,” from the CSP, despite “strict regulations” against awarding CSP funds to charter schools operated by for-profit entities…

NAPCS’s president and CEO Nina Rees told a CNN reporter that the legislation “could impact schools that contract out for cafeteria services, special education services, or back office staff…”

After the CNN article was published, it was updated with a quote from Connecticut Representative Rosa DeLauro, a Democrat who chairs the House committee that drafted the proposal, who called NAPCS’s petition campaign “a well-funded misinformation campaign,” and said, “The language [of the proposed legislation] is clearly focused on ending the practice of charters accepting federal funds only to have the school run by a low-quality, for-profit company rife with conflicts of interest.”

Categories Charter Schools, Education Industry, For-Profit

Linda Lyon: We Are Killing the Planet: Does Anyone Care?

By dianeravitch
August 1, 2021 //
38

Linda Lyon, a military veteran and former president of the Arizona School Board Association, writes here about the devastating effects of climate change and the lack of will to confront it.

Consider some of the evidence she offers:

The news over the past month has been full of climate change stories. You’ve no doubt seen that Lake Powell, Lake Mead and the Great Salt Lake are all at record lows and although drops were predicted, the pace at which they are happening, is shocking. Lake Powell is now below the target level requiring mandatory cutbacks next year to Arizona, Nevada and Mexico with California following if the decline continues.

Record heat blasted the Pacific Northwest last month, with Portland hitting 116 degrees and Seattle 108 degrees, both record highs. Even more surprising, was the 121 degree temperature hit in the British Columbiavillage of Lytton.

The deaths of almost 200 people is attributed to the recent Pacific Northwest heat wave, 50 hawk chickswere found to have flung themselves from their nests 50 feet high just to try to escape the heat, an estimated one billion mussels, sea stars and other shore-dwellers died from exposure to unusually hot air, and countless fish are struggling to survive, including the endangered Chinook salmon which can’t survive beyond their egg stage in overheated waters.

And it isn’t just in the Pacific Northwest. As of July 23rd, the U.S. had set 585 all-time heat records, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). One place, Death Valley, hit 130, considered the hottest reliable temperature ever recorded there.

According to the University of Nebraska’s Drought Monitor, 60% of the U.S. West is in exceptional or extreme drought with less than 1% of the West not in drought or abnormally dry. Average rain- and snowfall per year in the West has fallen from 22 inches per year in the 1980s and 1990s, to 19 inches from 2010 to 2020 and only 13.6 inches from July 2020 to June 2021. Now in a megadrought, the West has extremely low soil moisture, setting the stage for more frequent, and much larger and hotter wildfires.

These fires now rage across the U.S. West, and in Oregon alone, over 475,000 acres have burnt thus far in eight fires, with the largest, the Bootleg fire, generating so much energy and extreme heat that it’s creating its own clouds and thunderstorms and sending dense smoke 3,000 miles from one side of the country to the other. By the third week in July, 60 other fires were burning across the American West for a total of over one million acres consumed by fire. In fact, the average million acres burned in wildfires each year has doubled in the past two decades. And, they are happening earlier in the year and more often over the years, negatively impacting the ecosystem’s ability to regenerate.

Open the link and read it all.

Categories Environment

John Merrow Thanks Tucker Carlson for a Truly Stupid Idea

By dianeravitch
July 31, 2021 //
30

John Merrow, former PBS education reporter, thanks FOX News pundit Tucker Carlson for one of the silliest ideas ever.

Merrow writes:

I am coming out of retirement to help Tucker Carlson save American public education, our children, and, by extension, our way of life. But this is not about me; it’s about the brilliant campaign created by America’s premier ‘uber journalist,’ Tucker Carlson of Fox. (I put ‘journalist’ in quotes not to disparage Mr. Carlson but to indicate that he stands head and shoulders above his pedestrian counterparts.)

Mr. Carlson has recognized that the greatest threat to America’s future is NOT climate change, the rich-poor wealth gap, Russian cyber warfare, or China. No, the greatest danger to our way of life is Critical Race Theory, which simply cannot be allowed to be taught in our schools.

Mr. Carlson’s solution is nothing short of brilliant: Cameras in every public school classroom so that teachers who try to subvert our youth by filling their heads with dangerous ideas can be identified, publicly shamed, and fired.

There are nay-sayers, of course: Short-sighted critics who maintain that cameras are an invasion of privacy. And some studies indicate that academic achievement suffers when everyone is under surveillance, but Mr. Carlson is not swayed; he keeps his eye on the prize: protecting young minds from getting in the habit of asking questions or even expressing doubts.

I hope it is obvious that Merrow is writing with his tongue in his cheek.

Merrow guesses that there are some three million classrooms in the nation. The cost of wiring them and installing cameras and microphones would be about $12 billion, he estimates.

Merrow writes:

One minor downside: We will probably have to buy the cameras, microphones, and DVRs from Chinese, Tiawanese, or Swiss companies, because American companies missed the boat when it came to creating effective security systems.

But even if more than $13 billion leaves our shores without benefiting the American economy, Mr. Carlson’s plan will still create prosperity because it’s going to create several million jobs–the men and women who will spend their days watching our teachers, taking careful notes, and, inevitably, bearing witness against those teachers who are polluting the minds of our children.

I hope Mr. Carlson will support giving employment preference to devoted viewers of the Fox channel, because their antennae will be sensitive to what matters. They will be able to spot “Critical Race Theory” easily, because Mr. Carlson and his colleagues have educated them.

We will need to hire at least a million of these “Watchers” at a cost of roughly $40,000 per year, for a total of $4,000,000,000. This will be an annual expense

Let me be blunt about what’s at stake: If you are not willing to spend more than $17,000,000,000 to save our nation from subversion, I think you should leave the country now.

Because I believe I can help Mr. Carlson save America, I am coming out of retirement. I have created an on-line training program for “Watchers,” which provides basic training in recognizing the educational subversion known as Critical Race Theory…

I am calling the program, which costs only $100 per adult learner, the“Critical Race Aggressive Pedagogy Trap,” or “CRAP TRAP.” You can sign up here, or you can meet me on the corner of Morse and Fuller Streets and hand me the cash.

Please open the link and finish reading this wonderful satire.

Categories Ignorance

Maurice Cunningham: Phony Parent Groups Lead Attacks on Critical Race Theory

By dianeravitch
July 31, 2021 //
48

Maurice Cunningham is a political scientist with a deep interest in how Dark Money influences education policy. His motto is: “Dark Money never sleeps.” He is a master at following the money. He customarily blogs at a website called MassPoliticsProfs, but was kind enough to send me this post first.

He writes here about the groups pushing the attacks on critical race theory:

The Corporate Critical Race Theory Attack: Chaos is the Product

“The backlash” begins an opinion piece in Newsweek by Parents Defending Education outreach director Erika Sanzi, and these may be the most accurate two words published by those who are attacking “wokeness,” gender studies, and Critical Race Theory. The sad fact is that white backlash has a proven record of effectiveness in American politics and it is once again being employed in the service of right wing corporate interests. The end product desired has less to do with CRT than with spreading disruption, fear, and chaos across America’s most important democratic public institution, schools.

According to the Washington Post, as of June 24 CRT (a theory developed in law schools and not well known among most Americans) has exploded on Fox News. The term was heard on Fox only 132 times in 2020 but has been mentioned 1,860 times this year, escalating month by month. The narrative is that grassroots parents groups have discovered the threat CRT poses to their children in schools and have arisen organically across the country to form local parent groups, a movement noticed and captured by websites and the powerful Fox News. The truth is that of an oligarch-funded and coordinated campaign using time tested techniques.

Follow the Money

Over the past five years I’ve been following “education reform” groups created by billionaire investors with names like Families for Excellent Schools, Massachusetts Parents United, and National Parents Union which have presented diversity as their public face while attacking teachers. So when I saw the launch of Parents Defending Education on March 30 I took note because it follows a different path: white backlash aimed more at school boards, superintendents, and principals. The first thing to do when evaluating these groups is always, follow the money.

But as the financial backers of groups like PDE well know, public disclosure of funders will only come about nearly two years down the road, if then, in publicly available Form 990 tax returns for organizations with Internal Revenue Code 501(c)(3)status as charitable organizations. PDE president Nicole Neily has refused to disclose the organization’s donors when asked by media outlets. It’s not just that she won’t. She can’t. Disclosure would likely reveal ties to radical right funders tied into the Koch network and similar underwriters. We know this thanks to work done by PRWatch and from Sourcewatch at the Center for Media and Democracy. They show that Neily is a political operative at Koch network funded operations like the Independent Women’s Forum, Franklin Center, and Speech First.

The Speech First association is instructive. Neily is founding president of that non-profit as well. Sourcewatch has identified some of its funders as the Bader Family Foundation for $30,000, Fidelity Investments Charitable Gift Fund: $500,250, Judicial Education Project for $1,000,000, and National Philanthropic Trust: $500,000. The real check writers will probably never become known. Form 990s show that Neily is the sole employee, earning $161,000 in 2018 and $150,000 in 2019. Speech First brings lawsuits against universities for policies touching on race. For this, it paid the law firm Consovoy McMullen $950,000 in 2018, and to get the word out paid the Republican communications firm Creative Response Concepts $106,000. Boiled down, Speech First is a pass through that allows wealthy conservative donors to remain hidden while paying Consovoy McMullen to attack universities.

And who represents Parents Defending Education? Why, Consovoy McMullen. William Consovoy also represents Donald Trump and clerked for Justice Clarence Thomas. The firm is conservative legal royalty. PDE did not hire it after an especially successful bake sale.

Parents Defending Education, No Left Turn in Education, and Moms for Liberty

PDE launched its well-developed website featuring pages with links to its allies, most of which were branches of groups called No Left Turn in Education and Moms for Liberty. According to NBC, No Left Turn in Education was launched in 2020 when a parent from a Philadelphia suburb became enraged at her children’s school for teaching concepts of racism after the police murder of George Floyd. Elana Yaron Fishbein then sprang into action to attack wokeness and founded NLTE. In September she appeared on Fox’s Tucker Carlson program and the next day the group’s Facebook increased from about 200 followers to over 30,000 and there are now 30 chapters in 23 states.

But when I looked at local NLTE chapters’ Facebook pages linked to through the PDE site in April, I found sparse membership: Alabama, 7; Arkansas, 3; Delaware, 6; Iowa, 2; Idaho, 4; Indiana, 8; Michigan (Betsy DeVos home state), 13; Mississippi, 3; Montana, 2; North Dakota, 2; Massachusetts, 17; Hawaii, 1. All of the NLTE Facebook pages featured the same banner, a montage of diverse teens against a background of school lockers, each student smiling and engaged, not a pimple on their perfect teenage faces; probably models, most certainly not local students. As for Moms for Liberty, it too had sparse membership in its affiliates: Arizona, 17; Wright Co, Minnesota, 8; Corpus Christi Nueces, Texas, 70. Moms for Liberty’s creation story is similar to others in the anti-public education universe: “moms on a mission to stoke the fires of liberty.” The story goes that two parents became upset with their local schools and started up a parents group. It happens. It’s a lot more unusual for the two grassroots moms to then book former Fox host Megyn Kelly for a fundraiser with tickets running from General Admission of $50 up to Presenting Sponsor for $20,000 with perks including a photo with Ms. Kelly and corporate logo on print and online marketing materials.

From Parents Defending Education, No Left Turn in Education, Moms for Liberty and on to groups like National Parents Union, the creation stories are similar. A handful of disgruntled moms talk over their frustrations, determine to start their moms or parents group to seek change, and then in pour the millions of dollars; contracts are quickly signed with nationally recognized public relations firms and pollsters (one newly birthed charter school-tied group in Rhode Island immediately hired a Biden pollster); the head mom is booked on Fox or featured in national media outlets. Conservative outlets like The Federalist, Washington Times, Campus Fix, and most importantly Fox News amplify the misleading message.

How to Attack Educators in a Few Easy Steps

The tactics for going after K-12 educators did not spring up anew but have been adapted from successful attacks on college and university professors. Isaac Kamola has explained this in an important article titled Dear Administrators: To Protect Your Faculty from Right-Wing Attacks, Follow the Money. Kamola finds that groups like Campus Reform and Campus Fix, which pay conservative students as “reporters” to whistleblow on their professors, are funded by wealthy right wingers including Koch who wish to gain leverage over what is taught and researched at America’s universities. These attacks follow a common script. Something a professor says or writes in research, a lecture, or even on social media is grabbed and most often taken out of context; there is never an engagement with the actual intellectual product. (In Shadow Network: Media, Money, and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right, Anne Nelson shows that Campus Reform is tied into right wing clearing house organizations the Leadership Institute and Council for National Policy). The targets are often scholars of color, especially women, and their work focuses on race or inquiries into capitalism. The out of context remarks are then percolated through a right wing ecosystem which includes web sites funded by the same network and all the way up to Fox News. Results can be stark. After Campus Reform did a story on a speech by Princeton University professor Keenga-Yamahtta Taylor the piece was picked up by Fox; threats against Professor Taylor were so virulent she cancelled talks in Seattle and San Diego. After Campus Reform misrepresented remarks by Trinity College professor Johnny Williams the campus had to be shut down due to threats and Williams was unfairly placed on leave. So the radical right knows how to generate chaos. Parents Defending Education has refined the play book further.

PDE relies upon two modes of attack on schools (which may include charter as well as public schools). The first, often well covered in the media and with appearances on Fox, is individuals who inundate school districts with public records requests. The second involves anonymous attacks on school personnel, concealment guaranteed by guidance offered by PDE to assure their agents remain hidden.

NBC News reported on one now famous Fox-supported attack by an individual wielding public law requests. A Maine parent named Shawn McBreairty was disgruntled with his local schools and joined No Left Turn in Education. He has filed over 50 public records law request with his Maine school district, tying up education professionals serving the public for his individual crusade. In South Kingstown, RI a parent whose child is enrolled but not yet attending kindergarten in the town filed 200 public records law requests “seeking copies of middle and high school curricula, lists of all books related to gender available in the library and 10 years’ worth of harassment complaints and emails.” The district estimated it would take 300 hours to fulfill the request. Local officials were undoubtedly right in assessing the attack as an effort to disrupt public education and attack a public good. The Rhode Island parent was rewarded with an appearance on Fox. When districts try to resist the onslaught of requests, corporate spokespersons like PDE’s Sanzi are ready with pro-wrestling sincerity to whine—to Fox News—about the people’s right to know. These groups weaponize the very openness of government to undermine government.

In a forthcoming work, Kamola and co-author Ralph Wilson show how groups like Speech First use discovery in lawsuits to create a “nightmare for administrators and their general counsel.” PDE and allies are now using public records lawsnationwide to achieve the same goal against public school districts.

While the public records requests are designedly onerous and discouraging, at least educators can tell where the attacks are coming from. The second tactic promoted by PDE is much worse, to encourage anonymous attacks against educators.

Take a recent example involving the Boston suburb of Wellesley, Massachusetts. This was an anonymous complaint forwarded by PDE grumbling that Wellesley had violated civil rights laws by providing affinity rooms for students to process their emotions after anti-Asian attacks across the nation. Ms. Neily confessed she has no idea who submitted it to PDE or if anyone in Wellesley agrees with the complaint. This is a baked in design by PDE as we see from examining the operation’s website page that teaches How to Create “Woke At” Pages. It provides detailed instructions for how to set up “an anonymous, safe Instagram page.” First set up a Gmail account “that can’t be tied to you.” Gmail is recommended because the site creator will also need to set up “an anonymous Google Form . . . which allows you to receive anonymous tips” that shields the informant’s identity, even from the Woke At administrator. At all times “we recommend erring on the side of secrecy.”

The Woke At instructions encourage PDE’s local spies to check out social media pages of educators which may reveal woke attitudes. The Understanding Woke Jargon page catalogs terms like “social justice” or “antiracism” the group finds offensive. Questions to Ask School Officials offers gotcha questions that can be asked of woke school officials “with cameras rolling.”

Why the advice to always act with hidden identities? Because of the terrifying disposition of those “woke activists” who talk about “inclusion, equity, justice” but are really “divisive, toxic, and extreme.” PDE is one education organization that was absent on the day irony was taught, for it insists on secrecy while pretending it promotes transparency. Concealment is especially important “given how angry and retaliatory many woke activists get when criticized.” PDE understands that much of its audience consumes a heavy diet of Fox News. Research by Jeffrey M. Berry, James M. Glaser, and Deborah J. Schildkraut shows Fox’s “underlying strategy is to anger viewers by stoking their resentment of racial and ethnic minority groups” and building fear. For instance, after the images of George Floyd’s murder, which initially shocked even Sean Hannity, Fox repeatedly showed video of “rioting and looting by protestors, relying on film showing fires burning and Blacks running out of looted stores with stolen merchandise in their arms.” These images were repeatedly shown well beyond the first week, after which there was little new such behavior to report upon. But the coverage stokes ideas of lawlessness and fear.

Whether by an avalanche of public records requests or generating negative coverage from anonymous tipsters, PDE and its allies are in business to create disruption and chaos in public education.

Getting Results

As Kamola has shown with his work detailing the corporate backed assault on higher education, these tactics often work. They are now working at the K-12 level. Public records requests have tied up school boards and administrators. NBC reports that Washoe County, Nevada halted in person school board meetings “after residents filled a large auditorium and lobbed insults and threats of violence during the public comment portion.” When open meetings later convened in a smaller venue, many residents waited long hours in the hot sun to make their comments against CRT and anti-discrimination policies—including quite a fewwho do not even have students in the system. “During the most recent meeting, which lasted 11 hours, speakers railed at school board members, calling them Marxists, racists, Nazis and child abusers, among other epithets.” In Rockwood Illinois, the St. Louis Post dispatch reported, teachers called upon the school board and superintendent to protect them against “personal attacks and outright threats of violence.” In Camas, Washington, the state’s 2020 teacher of the year thanked the school board and administrators for defending her efforts to promote inclusion and access after some residents “railed against the school district’s ‘woke’ agenda, COVID-19 mask mandates, remote learning and racial justice and equity programs.”

After all, as No Left Turn Maine’s Shawn McBreairty said in an email to NBC News, “This is a war with the left, and in war, tactics and strategy can become blurry.”

As the corporate agitators behind all this understand, they are making public service exhausting and distasteful, a campaign to drive good community members away from serving. This isn’t an unfortunate byproduct. We’ve seen it at the university level. It’s intentional.

The Rise of the Right Wing Moms

In announcing PDE’s complaint against the Columbus, Ohio public schools for its willingness to address racism in the wake of the police shooting of 16-year-old Ma’Khia Bryant, Ms. Neily acknowledged that no Columbus parent had complained, but that PDE was just a concerned group of parents. “We just all work from home,” Neily told the Columbus Post-Dispatch. “We’re all working moms.”

That sounds cozy and homey but Neily is a well-compensated veteran of numerous right wing organizations, including not only Speech First but the Cato Institute. Sourcewatch reports that “Nicole Neily has worked for many Koch-affiliated groups.” Ms. Sanzi has worked for billionaire funded school privatization groups, also bringing home a hefty paycheck. According to research from Mercedes Schneider the Education Post, an online publication originally funded by Eli Broad, paid Sanzi $121,000 in 2016 and $131,000 in 2017. She is also a “senior visiting fellow” at the Fordham Institute.

This is another area where patterns are not immediately visible but things become more clear years down the road when Form 990s become available. What we see is that following the emergence of these organizations with their tales of concerned moms banding together is that the moms are actually political operatives or communications professionals being well paid. Take for example Keri Rodrigues, “mom-in-chief” of the Walton backed Massachusetts Parents United. One of the several creation stories is that Ms. Rodrigues (always identified as a former union organizer) and a few other mothers gathered in their local library and decided to start a parents group. Actually, Ms. Rodrigues had been state director for Families for Excellent Schools, which ran a losing ballot campaign to increase charter schools in Massachusetts in 2016. She is also a communications professional, having been a radio host. MPU and an affiliate paid Ms. Rodrigues over $388,000 in 2017-2018. But the mom-in-chief story has had some penetration.

When the CDC announced reopening guidelines for schools in May 2021 Ms. Rodrigues, now also of Walton and Koch backed National Parents Union, appeared on Fox News to accuse teachers unions of undue influence. The host accused “teachers unions of basically writing the guidelines” a claim that Ms. Rodrigues enthusiastically agreed with. There was no basis for that claim other than that the unions, like over fifty other advocacy groups, had offered comments to the CDC. But it was blown up by Republican senators from a letter provided by a Republican dark money group. And then on to Fox and the eagerMs. Rodrigues.

Thus we shouldn’t be too surprised by a recent Media Matters study that showed that a number of the concerned parents featured on Fox News criticizing CRT are actually Republican political operatives. Quisha King, an African American woman billed by Fox News as an “everyday American” who is “Northeast Florida co-chair of Moms for Liberty” and “mom of two daughters” is also a GOP political consultant who worked for the Republican National Committee in 2020. Though Fox News billed Ms. Neily as a parent fighting against CRT in schools, Media Matters added that she “has spent her entire career working in and for libertarian and conservative political advocacy organizations and think tanks . . . .” PDE senior fellow Elizabeth Schultz was noted by Fox’s Dana Perino as a former Fairfax County, Virginia school board member. But she is also a former Trump appointee to the Department of Education, under Betsy DeVos. Before being defeated for re-election to the school board Schultz was known for opposing “‘expanding the school system’s sex-education curriculum to include lessons on gender identity and transgender issues’ and supporting armed teachers in classrooms.”

Charles Koch’s Pincer Movement

Far right groups like Parents Defending Education are new born but billionaire funded corporate education reform groups like Massachusetts Parents United and National Parents Union have been around a bit longer. Families for Excellent Schools was successful in New York until its 2016 Massachusetts charter school campaign was badly beaten, its dark money donors were ordered to be disclosed by the state’s Office of Campaign and Political Finance, and its CEO was fired after #MeToo allegations surfaced. These groups often present themselves as leaning liberal, non-partisan but vaguely Democratic, featuring spokespersons who are women of color, and advocating for their privatization policies as being pro-civil rights. National Parents Union even released a statement defending Critical Race Theory on May 21, but it seems to have dropped the topic since. Why then would Charles Koch, a likely source of support for the right wing groups, also be funding National Parents Union?

But he is, through his Charles Koch Institute, which is partnered with the Walton Family Foundation in a joint venture called the Vela Education Fund. Vela dropped $700,000 on NPU to promote home schooling. NPU then spread Vela funds around in grants for home schooling. As Casey Parks explained in The New Yorker these foundations “advocate ‘school choice’—rerouting money and families away from traditional public schools through such means as charter schools, which are publicly funded but privately managed, and vouchers, which allow public-education dollars to be put toward private-school tuition.” NPU had been launched by the Walton Family Foundation to help in the Waltons quest to undermine teachers unions. Recognizing the opportunity presented by closed schools Vela formed and wrote the $700,000 check even though NPUhad been in business only a few months. Vela has pursued other such opportunities including funding the far right Home School Legal Defense Association.

Coincidentally or not in 2017 the civil rights-proclaiming Ms. Rodrigues and the radical right Ms. Sanzi were partners in another venture named Planet Mom, which featured a podcast and proposed radio show. In her paid position at Education Post Ms. Sanzi wrote of Ms. Rodrigues “I consider her a partner in this work. And a friend.” It’s a small planet, after all.

The point is not Critical Race Theory, or charter schools, virtual schools, or home schools. The point is to undermine public education, keep taxes low, spread doubt of the efficacy of public goods, and demolish institutions like unions and local school communities that make demands on the Waltons and Kochs of the nation. It is, as Nancy MacLean has said, to put democracy in chains. Diverse-presenting National Parents Union and white backlash Parents Defending Education serve the same cause.

Whither We Are Tending and What to Do About It

I hope my colleagues in academia continue to speak out about the intellectual contributions of Critical Race Theory and the fine efforts of K-12 educators to provide the kind of schooling all our students need—open and honest about the nation’s race and history and our ongoing challenges, including corporate promoted white backlash.

On the other hand, don’t expect any engagement from Nicole Neily or the anti-CRT bard Christopher Rufo, who has helped spike this ridiculous campaign. In a triumphant appearance at the Claremont Institute, Rufo described his annoyance at scholars trying to bait him into a discussion of what CRT really means and proclaimed “I don’t give a shit about this stuff.” (Nine minute mark)

As Isaac Kamola has urged, start with follow the money and pursue that relentlessly. There’s a reason groups like PDE and NPU can’t come clean about their funding sources and amounts and that reason is that they know the public is suspicious of the Kochs and Waltons of the world and what’s more, the public and America’s billionaires are on a different page on policy issues.

These are corporate generated right wing attacks. Say it. Name names.

Come awake to the threat. Recognize what this is and that isn’t just about wokeness or even education but something else Koch and the Waltons can’t say out loud: to destroy the capacity of people to coalesce together and fight for a better life for themselves, a project that offends oligarchs ideologically and threatens their power and pocketbooks. They focus on educationbecause schools have been a fertile locale for white backlash but also a source of great progress, because teachers unions are a barrier to them, and because local community organizations defy them.

That means that teachers unions, school boards, superintendents, principals, lunch workers, school bus drivers, custodians, business, parents and students—everyone who serves their local school community—have to recognize that they need to fight together against this assault. In other words, join together to take action—exactly what the Waltons, Kochs, and other radical right billionaires fear.

And stand up for a real education for all our children, not the white(wash) backlash being promoted by phony AstroTurf fronts like Parents Defending Education. Remember, fronts are fronting for someone and in this case, fronting for radical right billionaires.

Money never sleeps. Follow the money.

Maurice T. Cunningham is recently retired as an associate professor at the University of Massachusetts at Boston and a union member. He is the author of the book Dark Money and the Politics of School Privatization, forthcoming in 2022.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Dark Money, Disruption, Education Industry, Koch Brothers, Media, Parent Groups, Privatization, Walton Foundation

Traverse City: The Success of Common Sense and Decency

By dianeravitch
July 30, 2021 //
28

Nancy Ackerman Will, a teacher in Traverse City, Michigan, updated my post today about the angry protestors at a recent board meeting, who accused school leaders of allowing critical race theory to “seep in” to the schools.

She posted this good-news comment:

I am an elementary music teacher for Traverse City Area Public Schools. I appreciate your article, but you should know that three days ago the TCAPS Board approved a revised Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging resolution with much stronger language to support our students. This time the meeting room was packed with people in support of the resolution, wearing red shirts in solidarity. Parents, grandparents, members of the faith community and students spoke in support of strengthening and passing the resolution.

I am pleased to say this was the end result. https://www.record-eagle.com/news/tcaps-board-passes-equity-resolution-7-0/article_64121fba-ee47-11eb-83b8-036d823f2f6c.html

Video of the 3 hours of public comment at the meeting and then two hours of the Board members crafting a final document can be viewed here: https://livestream.com/tcapslive/board/videos/224040779

Categories Accountability, Michigan, Parents, Racism
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