These advocacy groups often claim to be grassroots groups, and they advocate for reforming public schools. They push for parental choice, vouchers, charter schools, ending the power teachers have through collective bargaining, ending teacher job security by getting rid of tenure.
They have myriad tasks, but their goals are usually set by the foundations that fund them.
The New York Times has a revealing article about how Bill Gates and his foundation are spending huge amounts to get education done his way. It's working because money talks loudly.
Behind Grass-Roots School Advocacy, Bill GatesA handful of outspoken teachers helped persuade state lawmakers this spring to eliminate seniority-based layoff policies. They testified before the legislature, wrote briefing papers and published an op-ed article in The Indianapolis Star.
That means they persuaded them to get rid of tenure and begin to layoff teachers with seniority.
They described themselves simply as local teachers who favored school reform — one sympathetic state representative, Mary Ann Sullivan, said, “They seemed like genuine, real people versus the teachers’ union lobbyists.” They were, but they were also recruits in a national organization, Teach Plus, financed significantly by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Rather a strange statement from a state rep who appears to have preset views. "genuine, real people versus the teachers’ union lobbyists." What an odd thing to say.
...The foundation spent $373 million on education in 2009, the latest year for which its tax returns are available, and devoted $78 million to advocacy — quadruple the amount spent on advocacy in 2005. Over the next five or six years, Mr. Golston said, the foundation expects to pour $3.5 billion more into education, up to 15 percent of it on advocacy.
Given the scale and scope of the largess, some worry that the foundation’s assertive philanthropy is squelching independent thought, while others express concerns about transparency. Few policy makers, reporters or members of the public who encounter advocates like Teach Plus or pundits like Frederick M. Hess of the American Enterprise Institute realize they are underwritten by the foundation.
There is a very revealing statement from Hess. He says "“As researchers, we have a reasonable self-preservation instinct...
there can be an exquisite carefulness about how we’re going to say anything that could reflect badly on a foundation. Everybody’s implicated,” he added.Not surprisingly two unions, the AFT and the NEA are listed among the groups receiving funding. They received 6.3 million from Gates over 3 years. Lot of money. The Perdido Street blog made a list of all the groups listed in the NYT article who are receiving Gates money.
Nothing grassroots about these groupsLet's list the groups, organizations, institutions, notable education reform individuals and media companies that are named in the Times article as on the Gates Foundation payroll:
1. Teach Plus
2. The Education Trust
3. Education Week
4. Education Equality Project
5. Harvard University (which got a $3.5 million grant to place “strategic data fellows” who could act as “entrepreneurial change agents” in school districts in Boston, Los Angeles and elsewhere)
I just realized that may be why Chris Christie was given such a warm welcome at Harvard's School of Education. He embodies the
reforms the billionaires want.CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Conservatives may see Harvard as the heart of liberal darkness, but on Friday it gave a warm, even enthusiastic reception to Gov. Chris Christie and his ideas on education overhaul.
Speaking to almost 200 students and staff members at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, the New Jersey governor drew rounds of applause with his talk of sharply limiting teacher tenure, rigorously evaluating teachers and administrators, curbing the power of teachers’ unions and pledging to appoint more-conservative justices to the State Supreme Court.
Here are more of the groups listed at Perdido Street blog.
6. Scores of other schools and universities
7. The National Governors Association
8. Council of Chief State School Officers
9. Achieve Inc.
10. The Alliance for Excellent Education
11. The Fordham Institute
12. The Center on Education Policy (which laughingly touts itself as "independent" while sucking on the Gates Foundation largesse)
13. The New Teacher Project
14. The AFT and the NEA
15. The ad campaign for "Waiting for Superman"(Gates spent 2 million to publicize the movie.)
A few more:
16. Foundation for Educational Excellence, founded by Jeb Bush, a former governor of Florida
17. Educators for Excellence
18. Frederick Hess, education writer and blogger, member of the American Enterprise Institute
19. NPR and other public media
Also interesting is the information on other foundations funding "advocacy" groups to push for privatizing education. Here is an article from Think Progress.
Meet The Billionaires Who Are Trying To Privatize Our Schools And Kill Public Education– Dick DeVos: The DeVos family has been active on education issues since the 1990's. The son of billionaire Amway co-founder Richard DeVos, Sr., DeVos unsuccessfully ran for governor of the state of Michigan, spending $40 million, the most ever spent in a gubernatorial race in the state. In 2002, Dick DeVos sketched out a plan to undermine public education before the Heritage Foundation, explaining that education advocates should stop using the term “public schools” and instead call them “government schools.” He has poured millions of dollars into right-wing causes, including providing hundreds of thousands of dollars into seed money for numerous “school choice” groups, including Utah’s Parents for Choice in Education, which used its PAC money to elect pro-voucher politicians.
And Betsy DeVos.
– Betsy DeVos: The wife of Dick DeVos, she also coincidentally happens to be the sister of Erik Prince, the leader of Xe, the mercenary outfit formerly known as Blackwater and is a former chair of the Republican Party of Michigan. Mrs. DeVos has been much more aggressive than her husband, pouring her millions into numerous voucher front groups across the country. She launched the pro-voucher group All Children Matter in 2003, which spent $7.6 million in its first year alone to impact state races related vouchers, winning 121 out of 181 races in which it intervened. All Children Matter was found breaking campaign finance laws in 2008, yet has still not paid its $5.2 million fine. She has founded and/or funded a vast network of voucher front groups, including Children First America, the Alliance for School Choice, Kids Hope USA, and the American Federation for Children.
That is at least five voucher front groups funded by her.
Other groups founded by the DeVos family that are listed are – - American Federation for Children (AFC) and Alliance for School Choice (ASC).
Think Progress then mentions Bill and Susan Oberndorf and the groups they fund. The ones mentioned are AFC, the Center for Education Reform, and the Brighter Choice Foundation.
Then the article speaks of The Walton Foundation and their funding of "the New York-based Brighter Choice Foundation, half a million dollars to the Florida School Choice Fund, $105,000 to the Foundation for Educational Choice, $774,512 to the Friends of Educational Choice, $400,000 to School Choice Ohio, and gave $50,000 to the Piton Foundation to promote a media campaign around the Colorado School Choice website — all in 2009 alone."
And the Think Progress article does not even mention the Broad Foundation. However a parents' blog does.
The question I ask is why should Eli Broad and Bill Gates have more of a say as to what goes on in my child’s classroom than I do? – Sue Peters, Seattle parentThe Gates Foundation, the Walton Family Foundation, and the Broad Foundation form a powerful triumvirate. The combined net worth of the three families who operate these foundations is $152 billion. By strategically deploying their immense wealth through training school leaders, financing think-tank reports, and supporting “Astro Turf” advocacy groups, these three foundations have been able to steer the direction of education reform over the past decade.
The Broad Foundation is the least wealthy of the three, but has still spent nearly $400 million on its mission of “transforming urban K-12 public education through better governance, management, labor relations and competition.” But what does that actually mean?
The signature effort of the Broad Foundation is its investment in its training programs, operated through the Broad Center for the Management of School Systems and the Broad Institute for School Boards. The Broad Center for the Management of School Systems is the larger of the two and consists of two programs: the Broad Superintendents Academy and the Broad Residency in Urban Education.
The attack on public schools has been a long time in the making. It's organized, and it's ruthless. It is not a game to the reformers. They are deadly serious, and they are not listening to teachers or parents.
The power of big money is showing now, and there is no one defending public education except a few bloggers.
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