The Indypendent e-news
Led by a band of billionaires, the school-reform movement has gained increasing momentum during the past decade, spreading its reach into urban communities across the country. But instead of truly transforming public schools, private funders want to restructure them. They insist running schools like a business is the solution. At stake is not only control over hundreds of billions of dollars in local, state and federal funding, but also the future of the next generation of schoolchildren.
Bill Gates
Net Worth: $50 billion
Using the Gates Foundation as his instrument, the Microsoft co-founder has channeled tens of millions of dollars into transforming large high schools through the schools-within-a-school model. Critics say boutique public schools tend to enroll (or “cream”) the best students while receiving more per-pupil funding than their large-school counterparts. Gates has also allocated large sums of money to help fuel the growth of charter schools.
During the 2008 presidential election the Gates and Broad foundations teamed up to spend $24 million to influence public education policy. Their shared message: Expand charter schools and tie teacher pay to student performance on standardized tests. President Obama’s Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, has tapped top Gates Foundation officers to be his chief of staff and to head the agency’s Office of Innovation and Improvement. Foundation officers are also spearheading the $4.35 billion Race to the Top program, which promises aid to cash-strapped states that eliminate caps on charter schools and agree to place even greater emphasis on standardized testing. “It is not unfair to say that the Gates Foundation’s agenda has become the country’s agenda in education,” says Michael Petrilli of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.
Arne Duncan
Secretary of Education
A former professional basketball player and veteran of many pickup basketball games with Obama, the Harvard-educated Duncan has no formal experience as an educator. As CEO of the Chicago school system from 2001 to 2008, Duncan oversaw more than 60 school closings primarily in people of color neighborhoods while rapidly opening charter schools. The Gates Foundation funneled $63.2 million into the Chicago schools during Duncan's tenure and now Duncan is taking the “Chicago model” nationwide with the help of top aides recruited from the Gates and Broad Foundations.
Spencer Robertson
The son of a hedge-fund billionaire who has donated $10 million to Mayor Bloomberg’s school projects since 2003, Spencer Robertson opened the PAVE Charter Academy in 2008 inside P.S. 15, a successful elementary school in Red Hook, Brooklyn. Tensions further escalated when the DOE recently announced that PAVE would be allowed to expand inside P.S. 15 over the next five years, even though Robertson has received $26 million from the DOE to build his own school. Robertson’s wife Sarah, the head of the board at Girls Prep Charter School, was at the center of a similar controversy when the school recently sought to expand inside public school facilities in the Lower East Side.
James Shelton
Assistant Deputy Director of Education, Director of Office of Inn ovation and Improvement, DOE
Following Obama’s election, Shelton moved seamlessly from deputy director of education at the Gates Foundation to a post at the DOE as assistant deputy director overseeing a variety of grant programs that assist charter schools. Operating at the nexus of the public, private and nonprofit sectors, Shelton previously worked at Knowledge Universe, where he launched, acquired and operated education-related businesses. Shelton’s former Gates Foundation colleague Margot Rogers now serves as Duncan’s chief of staff.
Eli Broad
Net Worth: $5.4 Billion
Broad, a Los Angeles-based billionaire who made his fortune in insurance and real estate, has been at the forefront of the school restructuring movement over the past decade. Using the foundation that bears his name, he has pushed aggressively for schools to be run more like businesses. The Broad (pronounced like “road”) Foundation has seeded charter schools across the country, including in New York. It has also developed a number of programs to train school administrators, including the Broad Superintendent Academy, which instructs business, nonprofit, military, government and education leaders in how to manage urban school districts. A number of top officials at the New York City’s Department of Education have received Broad training. Speaking at the 92nd Street Y in New York City last year, Broad summarized his approach: “We don’t know anything about how to teach or reading curriculum or any of that. But what we do know about is management and governance.”
The Waltons
(Christy, Jim, Alice, S. Robson)
Net Worth: $79.4 billion
The Walton Family Foundation of Wal-Mart is the single biggest investor in charter schools in the United States, giving a total of $150.3 million during 2007-08. In New York, the Walton group has provided $15 million in construction funding plus more than $1 million per year for operating costs in recent years to help the Brighter Choice charter school network establish eight new schools in Albany, according to the Albany Times Union. Meanwhile, Gov. David Paterson has received contributions totaling $55,900 from Christy Walton, as he pushes legislation to lift New York’s current statewide cap of 200 charter schools.
Eva Moskowitz
Moskowitz, a former Upper East Side councilmember with close ties to the Bloomberg administration, earns more than $300,000 annually for running a chain of four small charter schools in Harlem. Like Spencer Robertson, Moskowitz has sparked protests in the predominantly people-of-color community she operates in as her schools move into existing neighborhood schools. Last April, the Broad Foundation awarded Moskowitz’s Success Charter Network $1 million over two years to support its four existing Harlem Success schools and to help it open 40 new schools in the New York City area over the next 10 years.
Joanne Weiss
Director, Race to the Top program, DOE
Joanne Weiss served as a director and chief operating officer for the New School Venture Fund from 1998 to 2008 before being appointed to head the Obama administration’s Race to the Top program. Using venture philanthropy largesse provided by Broad, Gates and other wealthy individuals, Weiss helped incubate networks of privately controlled charter schools and charter management organizations as well as organizations to mold new teachers and principals in the education reform movement’s technocratic image.
Michael Milken and Larry Ellison
Net worth: $2 billion and $27 billion
Michael Milken dominated Wall Street in the 1980s using junk bonds to fuel that decade’s merger mania before landing in federal prison for violating securities laws. Now, Milken has gone into the education business as chairman, co-founder and driving force behind Knowledge Universe, a multinational conglomerate that operates for-profit day-care centers and schools and makes interactive educational toys. Ellison, CEO of Oracle, co-founded the company with Milken.
Democrats for Education Reform
Established by four New York-based hedge-fund millionaires active in the charter school movement — Whitney Tilson, Charles Ledley, John Petry and Ravanel Boykin Curry IV — this political action committee seeks to build and solidify support for corporate educationreform initiatives inside the Democratic Party, lest it be tempted to heed the concerns of teacher unions or other critics of running schools like a business.
Michael Bloomberg
Net Worth: $17.5 billion
Bloomberg spent $75 million to win the New York mayoralty in 2001. Since then, he has used his Midas-like wealth to dominate the city’s political process while pursuing a top-down, data-driven vision of school reform. When New York won the 2007 Broad Prize for Urban Education, education historian Diane Ravitch described it as “a prize conferred by one billionaire on another.”
Rev. Al Sharpton
Sharpton began preaching the gospel of school reform in 2008 when he joined forces with New York Schools Chancellor Joel Klein to found the Educational Equality Project (EEP). Last fall, Sharpton went on a five-city road trip with “odd couple” buddy Newt Gingrich as well as Secretary of Education Arne Duncan to tout the Obama administration’s Race to the Top program. Sharpton’s support for the school reform cause has also yielded its earthly rewards. According to a March 2009 report by Juan Gonzalez of the New York Daily News, Sharpton’s National Action Network (NAN) received a $500,000 donation immediately following the establishment of EEP. Sharpton’s benefactor: Plainfield Asset Management, a Connecticut-based hedge fund, where former schools Chancellor Harold Levy is a managing director. The donation came at a time Sharpton was set to pay $1 million in back taxes and penalties he and NAN owed.
Sources: Forbes 2009 Fortune 400, Gates Foundation, newschools.org, The New York Times, Broad Foundation, gothamschools.org, Walton Family Foundation, Albany Times Union, Chicago Public Schools, rethinkingschools.org, wsws.org, U.S. Department of Education, Knowledge Universe, forbes.com, Ed Week, New York Sun, edwize.org, New York Daily News, ednotesonline.org.
For more information see the following articles in this issue of The Indypendent:
"Taking the Public Out of Schools" by John Tarleton
"Inside Columbus High School" by Mary Annaïse Heglar
"Bloomberg's 12-Step Method to Close Down Public Schools" by John Tarleton
"New York City Schools by the Numbers" by John Tarleton
"FIRST PERSON: Stealing the Best and Brightest from Public Schools" by Seung Ok
Comments
Readers interested in national information on high-stakes testing and test-based accountability and pro-education ways to overhaul testing and support genuine school improvement should check out http://www.fairtest.org and http://www.edaccountability.org.
Monty Neill
Director, FairTest
Chair, Forum on Educational Accountability
Tarleton is wrong about Duncan being a Harvard-trained lawyer. The ONLY degree Arne has earned is a bachelors degree in sociology.
Duncan is a former private-school attending Chicago native who graduated from Harvard in 1987 with a B.A. in Sociology. He was on the college’s basketball team, and after graduating, played professional basketball in Australia for four years.
After his oversees basketball adventure, Duncan returned to Chicago and was immediately given a job by John Rogers, a longtime friend and former Hyde Park basketball buddy who had also attended the Chicago Lab School. At that point, Rogers had become the CEO of the largest US minority-run mutual fund firm, Ariel Capital Management.
In 1991, Rogers placed Duncan in charge of running the Ariel Education Initiative, a non-profit set up by Rogers' firm to advance "...educational opportunities in economically disadvantaged areas.” It seemed like a good fit for Duncan, after all, he had tutored a lot at his mother’s inner-city after school program when he was a kid, he had an unused bachelor's degree in sociology, and he was Rogers' friend and a basketball player.
The rest is history. In 1998, after running Rogers’ local non-profit for several years, Duncan went to work for Chicago Public Schools, becoming Deputy Chief of Staff for former CEO Paul Vallas. In 2001, he was appointed CEO of Chicago Public Schools by Mayor Daley. At the press conference when Obama announced his appointment of Duncan as U.S. Secretary of Education, Rogers was right there to praise him. Duncan was sure to thank Rogers, his "mentor" and close friend of 35 years.
Basketball is a HUGE part of Rogers’ life. For years he has played in three-on-three basketball tournaments where Arne Duncan has been a regular member of his team.
Another of Rogers' regular basketball teammates for many years is Craig Robinson, Michelle Obama’s older brother. Both men attended Princeton and played on the school's basketball team. After graduating from college, Robinson became a wealthy businessman but gave up that work in 1999 to become a college basketball coach.
Knowing Rogers via her brother, Michelle introduced Obama to him when she started dating Obama seriously, around 1990. This would have been about the time Arne Duncan returned to Chicago and was starting to work for Rogers' non-profit, as well as playing basketball with him again.
So now the relationship between Rogers, Robinson, Duncan, and Obama is explained. By the way, Rogers' ex-wife, Desirée Glapion Rogers, is the White House social secretary whose work was criticized when two reality-television aspirants got by the Secret Service at a recent state dinner. The White House defended her from having to testify before congress.
Read the second half of this entry to learn more
http://perimeterprimate.blogspot.com/2009/05/linda-darling-hammond-didnt...
Re my comment above:
48% of U.S. teachers hold an advanced degree.
The percentage is 78% in NY, 43% in CA , and 51% in DC.
http://www.edweek.org/media/37masters-c1.pdf
Almost half of the U.S. teaching force which works in schools today is more educated than Mr. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan.
Still think Obama is the first black president? Seems to have the rich upper class networking thing down pat. I hear a lot of business, finance, managment, Harvard and Princeton talk. Bottom line this federal education reform agenda needs to be confronted as a Constitutional issue and struck down as unconstitutinal. It is clearly spelled out that under the law of the land the issue of education is not only the legal responsibility of the states and local governments it is the appropiate responsibility. I suggest we stop wasting our time and money on whether NCLB is effective or not, the purpose of charter schools and other issues and begin getting ready to mount a valid legal argument against the Federal Government and the US Department of Education and put education back where it legally belongs, in the local cities and towns of the great states of this nation.
I think these are the faces of "reform schools" not school reform. There's nothing good going on for children and their parents in the majority of charter schools. Just the rich getting richer at the expense of the next generation of poor and middle class, who are being criminalized and prepared for factory work or the penal system; both of which continue to profit the wealthiest of our citizens - it's a win/win for them, and a 50 year step back in history...
It's great rich people and their buddies are involved with public education. They'll make some mistakes, but it's better than a union and politically controlled system where the graduation rates NEVER improved.
You all are wrong, the real faces of school and education reform are: B.F. Skinner, Benjamin Bloom, Aldous Huxley, John Dewey, John B. Watson, Ronald Havelock, UNESO, Marc Tucker, and the 103rd Congress of 1993 and 1994. People listed in your article are promoters of the new world’s global economy of redistributing wealth under one world government. It is not a conspiracy. Would be interested in joining the debate and what we need to do to fix our schools.
educationdoctors@aol.com
When friends are hired by their friend boss, they never have to work hard at the job. And they certainly can't speak out against their boss.
Ms. Harris is on the mark.....Please let them hear her! The first step of fixing the schools is to get rid of school board members. Replace them with retired teachers and principals. What has Ernie done since he was appointed to his post? He is too quite on some very important issues
Skinner, Bloom, et al, as well as the NEA are to BLAME for the current sad state of affairs of our public school systems. To say they reformed our schools is a huge understatement! They reformed it right into a product no one wants. To add insult to injury, the "philanthropists" listed in your article don't care about giving a child a well rounded education. That would open up opportunities for the child. Can't have that! Instead, the "philanthropists" work hard to bribe school systems to mold potential future employees into their particular business model. A ready-made employee reduces corporate America's training costs, and in the end, greatly reduces opportunities for the newly indentured servant, thereby ensuring low turnaround in the company.
To replace school board members with retired teachers and principals is allowing the fox to watch the hen house!!! Talk about about a conflict of interest!!! Gee, I wonder how they would vote when it comes to COLA's or health insurance premiums for retirees? Public schools belong to the public. The public is not totally comprised of idiot parents (as the NEA would like you to believe). There are a few of us who can walk upright without dragging our knuckles. A broad variety of lay wisdom is what is needed. Teachers, students, and taxpayers benefit when board members have backgrounds in construction, health, public relations, fundraising, business, accounting, legal, higher education, legislation, etc. Sure, a school system may have those types of employees on their payroll, but those people are not hired to represent the best interests of the public, rather they are hired and fired by the superintendent (who sometimes doesn't give a rat's behind about public opinion either). In other words, it takes a village to watch and govern the hen house.
The VERY FIRST STEP to fixing America's public schools is to abolish the US Department of Education and return education policy to the local/state level.
I just read a great book by a real expert of school reform, Diane Ravitch.
"The Life and Death of the Great American School System"
I recommend it to anyone who truly wants to understand what's happening with our schools.
These bunch of fascists and their social change guru William Ayers need to be run out on a rail along with the UN and any other snake oil salesmen that are sucking up our tax dollars with fad programs and brainwashing our kids for the new world order.
WE AS TEACHERS HAVE HAD ENOUGH OF THIS TRASH!
To see how local citizens in one small town are fighting the corporate takeover of our local schools visit http://ksdcitizens.org. Some of our articles are reaching a nationwide audience of education activists.
Add new comment