EDUCATION
As Big Money continues to shape public
education, it can be hard to keep all the players straight — from wealthy
individuals, to foundations, to corporations. Here's your guide.
The
way some of them throw around the green stuff, you'd think corporate style
education reformers were made of money. Oh, wait. Some of them are. As Big
Money plays a bigger and bigger role in shaping public education, it can be
hard to keep all the players straight— from wealthy individuals, to
foundations, superPACs, astroturf groups and corporations. Here's a handy
reference guide:
1. Individuals
Some
of the wealthiest people on the planet are pouring their money into
corporate-style education reform. Some are doing this through foundations (see
below) and others are happy to invest their millions in politics to shape
policy, or directly into charter schools as money-making investments. Some have
a profit motive and others seem more ideologically driven (to privatize public
goods, oppose union rights, etc.). One thing all of these folks have in common?
Not one is an educator or education researcher. And none of their ideas is
based on evidence of what actually works for kids.
• Start here in Pennsylvania with
charter school operators like Van Gureghian, Governor Corbett’s largest
campaign donor. He makes so much money that he and his wife bought beach front
property in Florida worth $28.9million, while he’s been fighting for years to
keep his salary a secret. [See “Soaking the
Public”]
• Recall that 4 of the top contributors
to all political races last fall in our state had ties to charter school
operators. Wealth advisors are on record recommending that people add charter
schools to their investment portfolios, especially in places like Pennsylvania.
[See “Charters are
Cash Cows”] Cyber charter schools are particularly lucrative
investments, as the public taxpayers are currently over-paying them by
$1million every single day. [See “One Million Per
Day”]
• How about folks
like Philip Anschutz? He’s the oil billionaire with ultra-right politics
who owns Walden Media, which made the anti-public school films, “Waiting for
Superman” and “Won’t Back Down.” He funds groups that teach creationism in our
schools and oppose gay rights, environmental regulations, and union rights.
[See “We Won’t Back
Down Either”]
• Then there’s New
York Mayor Bloomberg, who likes the idea of privatizing schools so much
that he put $1million into the Los Angeles school board races last
month to try to maintain a corporate-reform minded majority there. Too bad his
horse didn’t win. [See “School Boards
Matter”]
2. Foundations
The
“big three” foundation are Gates, Broad, and Walton. Education historian Diane
Ravitch calls them the “billionaire boys club,” though each has a slightly
different emphasis. And there are others.
• The Gates
Foundation is currently funding teacher evaluation systems throughout the
country. As I have argued before, not only does this focus on the wrong thing,
by avoiding the issue of poverty (or even early childhood education where many
agree we might most effectively concentrate our resources), it starts with the
faulty assumption that we have a plague of bad teachers. Though the foundation
itself has warned that teacher evaluation should not be based solely on
high-stakes-testing, this is exactly what is happening all over the country (or
in many places, student testing is being used for a large portion of teacher
evaluation). The Gates Foundation is so large and distributes so much money
that it can essentially set policy through its grant making. And combined with
the Great Recession, school districts and other beneficiaries have not been
able to say no to the money nor been willing to point out that the emperor is
not wearing any clothes (i.e. that his “reforms” don’t work). Gates has also
launched a clever campaign to shift public opinion, by strategically targeting
grants to community organizations (for example, over a half-million to
A+Schools this year) and astroturf groups (see below) in
communities where they are working.
• The Eli and Edythe
Broad (rhymes with “road”)Foundation runs a non-accredited
superintendents training program premised on the idea that business executives
with no education experience will improve urban school districts. Both the
current and former Pittsburgh superintendents are Broad Academy graduates
(though Dr. Linda Lane is an educator). The Foundation promotes teacher
effectiveness and competition (i.e. charter schools), and drafted
President Obama’s current reform strategy. They also literallywrote the book
on how to close schools, using Pittsburgh as an example. Eli Broad
also continues to spend his personal millions on corporate-reform, putting a
half-million into the LA school board races this spring alone. [Los Angeles
Times, 4-24-13]
• The Walton Family
Foundation derives its money from Wal-Mart and gave $158 million in K-12
education grants last year to promote charter schools and voucher programs. Its
current top grantees include Teach for America, which has come under increased
scrutiny for its method of placing young college graduates with only a few
weeks of training in urban schools with the neediest students, where they stay
only two years. (Teach for America, by the way, is looking to set up shop in
Pittsburgh and has been making inquiries about hiring a local executive
director. Stay tuned.) Here in our state the Walton Family Foundation is also
funding the Pennsylvania Coalition of Public Charter Schools. And they fund
Bellwether Education Partners, the group hired by Pittsburgh Public Schools
(through subcontract with FSG) to craft its education plan. [Walton Family
Foundation 2012 Grant Report]
• Let’s not overlook the role
that other foundations play in education reform. Remember a decade ago when
thePittsburgh Foundation, the Heinz Endowments, andGrable
Foundation (the big three education philanthropies in Pittsburgh) yanked
their funding from the school district, forcing them to introduce new reforms?
[Post-Gazette,
7-10-02] The history books have yet to finish writing that episode –
and there were no doubt both positive and negative long-term outcomes – but it
illustrates the power that foundations can wield over a school district.
• What about when a venerable old
foundation starts behaving badly? Our big sister grassroots group in
Philadelphia, Parents United, recently filed a legal complaint against
the William Penn Foundation “based on the fact that they had
solicited millions of dollars in donations for an exclusive contract” with a
consulting group, with an agreed “set of ‘deliverables’ such as identifying 60
schools for closure, mass charter expansion, and unprecedented input into labor
and contract negotiations – without the School District of Philadelphia being a
party to the contract.” After a legal analysis by the Public Interest Law
Center that concluded the foundation was essentially engaging in illegal
lobbying and funneling private donations for the purpose, Parents United joined
the Philadelphia Home & School Council, and the Philadelphia branch of the
NAACP in bringing the complaint. [Parents United,
2-14-13]
3. SuperPACs
The
Citizens United ruling opened the door to massive spending by corporations in
politics and ushered in the era of superPACS. Without spending limits, now we
are seeing just how much influence money can buy in politics (where education
policy is set).
• Students First PA PAC (not
to be confused with Michelle Rhee’s national organization, see below), started
in 2010 by three Philadelphia investment brokers to funnel millions into the
state races of pro-voucher candidates. Co-founder Joel Greenberg is on the
board of the American Federation for Children, a national group run by Betsy
DeVos with mega-wealthy (and ultra-right) backers including the Koch brothers,
who have used the super PAC to channel their out of state dollars into
Pennsylvania politics. [See “It’s All About
the Money, Money, Money”] And Gov. Corbett tapped Joe Watkins, the
chairman of Students First PA, to be the Chief Recovery Officer for the
struggling Chester Uplands school district last year – a bit like putting the
fox in charge of the hen house, since he now has the power to hand those public
schools over to charter operators. [See “Taking the
Public out of Public Education”]
• Fighting Chance PA
PAC shares a name with a campaign launched by the “Pennsylvania Catholic
Coalition” last spring, an effort associated with the Philadelphia Archdiocese,
which has been lobbying hard for voucher legislation to fund its struggling
schools. The new PAC was entirely financed by three wealthy Philadelphia
hedge-fund founders who started the Students First PA PAC, because apparently
one super PAC on your resume is just not enough. And their largest
contribution? To Rep. Jim Christiana, a Republican from Beaver County (site of
the proposed Dutch Royal Shell cracker plant) who introduced last year’s
voucher-in-disguise EITC tax credit bill. Rep. Christiana also received money
from the Walmart PAC. [See “2-4-6-8 Who Do
We Appreciate?”]
4. Astroturf groups
Astroturf
groups are fake grassroots organizations. They are funded by deep pockets,
manipulated to look like local efforts to give the impression that they
represent real community opinion. But they are as authentic as a field of
plastic grass.
• Operating at the national level
are groups such as Michelle Rhee’s Students First. Rhee is best known as
the former Chancellor of the D.C. school district where she publicly fired a
principal on film as part of her massive school closure effort there. She became
well known for supposedly increasing student test scores, but there are now
serious questions of large-scale cheating (by adults). Students First promotes
her privatization agenda of charters and vouchers as well as merit pay and
teacher evaluation systems based on high-stakes-testing. The Walton Family
Foundation just gave the organization $8 million. [Washington Post,
5-1-13] At the same time, Rhee has been caught inflating the number
of members in her organization to make it appear that it has a much broader
base of support by using deceptive petitions (for un-objectionable issues such
as anti-bullying) on the progressive change.org site to capture the names of
unsuspecting new “members.” [DianeRavitch,
8-3-12]
• Parent
Revolution practically wrote the book on how to create an astroturf
organization. Founded in California by a charter school operator – with major
backing from Gates, Broad, and Walton – the group got a “parent trigger law”
passed and then hired agents to convince two towns to turn their schools over
to the them. But many parents later said they had been purposefully misled and
filed lawsuits to try to stop the conversion of their schools to charters. [See
“Won’t Be Silent”]
• Closer to home, we learned just
last week that the Gates Foundation is backing a new astroturf group here in
Pittsburgh. Called Shepherding the Next Generation, the Washington D.C.
based organization has been trying to recruit churches – especially in our
African American communities – to preach the Gates agenda of teacher
evaluation. [See “Astroturf”]
Having one of the wealthiest people on the planet funding outside organizations
like this to come into a community and shift the public conversation seriously
erodes democracy. This is not about promoting an authentic community dialogue,
but about promoting a specific ideology of school reform.
5. Corporations
Perhaps
not surprising, corporations control some of the big money at stake in
corporate-style education reform. Here are a few to keep your eye on.
• Testing companies have
significantly benefitted from the dramatic expansion of testing under No Child
Left Behind. Nationally, we are spending $1.7 BILLION a year testing our kids.
[Brown Center on
Education Policy at Brookings, report Nov. 2012] And corporations
like Pearson Education, Inc. and McGraw Hill spend millions lobbying
state legislatures to keep their products in favor. [Republic Report,
5-4-12] The new national Common Core Standards are also creating a
bonanza for companies that make textbooks and assessment materials.
• Pennsylvania has a contract
with Data Recognition Corporation. Taxpayers in the Keystone state
are footing the bill for average spending of $32.2 million a year on testing
students. [Brown Center on
Education Policy at Brookings, report Nov. 2012] That’s a lot of
money that is not getting spent on actually educating children.
• Struggling school districts are
increasingly turning to hybrid or “blended” learning models to deliver content
at least partially on-line as a cost-savings measure. A major 2010 Department of
Education review of the literature found that blended-learning
does not offer better learning outcomes for students, but it will surely be
good for corporate bottom lines. Pearson is promoting its Connections
Learning as the solution to schools looking to close their
achievement gap and reduce the cost of teachers.
• Finally, don’t forget
about ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council where corporate
members write business-friendly laws and have them introduced word-for-word
into state legislatures. In education reform, ALEC promotes the unregulated
expansion of charters and vouchers, keeping both unaccountable to the public
while taking away control from local democratically elected school board officials.
In Pennsylvania, ALEC issued a
guide helpfully pointing out how legislators could get around
our troublesome constitution, which prevents public money from being spent on
religious schools. The Gates Foundation granted $375,000 to ALEC from
2010-2013, before cutting all ties with the organization last spring after
becoming the target of an online petition that gathered over 23,000 signatures
in just a few hours. [See “There’s Nothing
Smart About ALEC”]
Now
that’s a lot of money coming from a lot of sources. It’s helpful to think about
the “big tent” metaphor here: there are many Big Money players in this tent,
with multiple motivations. Clearly some are driven by profit motive and stand
to make a lot of money. Some share ultra-right interests in de-unionization and
de-regulation and are happy to push those interests in the field of education.
Many others are driven by an ideological agenda of corporate-style education
reform. One thing is for sure: all that Big Money under one big tent is having
an enormous impact on our public schools.
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