Grit and determination. They can go a long way if you hope to change the world. Especially when you’re the Koch Brothers and you have $97 billion to back up your grit and determination.
Ninety-seven billion. That’s the combined worth of Charles and David Koch. Separately, they share sixth place on the Forbes 400 list of the richest Americans, but as a two-headed monster peddling their influence to make the country more conservative, libertarian and pollution-friendly (they’re in the oil business, after all), they the top the list.
[Frightening side note: If you combine the fortunes of the three richest Waltons, the family that gave us Wal-Mart and spends hundreds of millions pushing educational privatization, their total worth comes to $115 billion, $18 billion more than the Kochs.]
Seeing as how I recently wrote a guest column in The Weekly‘s print edition about University of Arizona’s Center for the Philosophy of Freedom, aka the “Freedom Center,” and I plan to continue writing on the topic, and seeing as how the Kochs furnished nearly $2 million to help start the Center, I want to take a look at a Politico article which came out a couple days ago, How the Kochs are trying to shake up public schools, one state at a time. It begins:
With school choice efforts stalled in Washington, the billionaire Koch brothers’ network is engaged in state-by-state battles with teachers’ unions, politicians and parent groups to push for public funding of private and charter schools.
The privatization/”education reform” crowd has a lock on the White House and the Department of Education, and it’s got either a majority of Congress or close to it, but if that isn’t enough (and it doesn’t look like it is, the education agenda is stalled), there’s always Charles and David Koch to put their billions to work. And let’s not forget Ed Sec Betsy DeVos’s well-funded American Federation for Children, which she had to step back from when she got her position in Trump’s cabinet. It pours money into state and local races to help elect candidates who support educational “choice.” Hundreds of thousands of AFC dollars have found their way into the coffers of “choice”-friendly candidates for Arizona’s legislature.
The Politico article is mainly about the Kochs’ Libre Initiative which, according to the article, is “under the umbrella of the Charles and David Koch-funded Americans for Prosperity.” It’s in eleven states including Arizona, targeting the Hispanic population with its pro-charters-and-vouchers, anti-public-schools agenda.
I dug back into the Weekly archives and found Jim Nintzel wrote an article about the group in 2014, saying the LIBRE Initiative put $700,000 into ads targeting then-candidates Ron Barber and Ann Kirkpatrick, so the group has been active in Arizona for awhile.
The Politico article also talks about Americans for Prosperity’s ongoing attempts to block a referendum on the legislature’s expansion of the Empowerment Scholarship Accounts which provides private school vouchers for any family that wants them. If the efforts of Koch’s AFP fail and the referendum passes, we’re back to vouchers for a smaller group of students. The article mentions that Governor Ducey attended a Koch donor retreat and publicly thanked the brothers’ network for helping him pass his vouchers-for-all bill. “I need the power of the network,” Ducey said. The Koch brothers have Ducey’s back.
Recently, Americans for Prosperity joined the fight against Proposition 204, the Strong Start Tucson initiative which plans to make preschool available to as many as 8,000 Tucson three and four year olds if it passes.
From pre-K to K-12 to Arizona’s state universities, the Koch brothers and the organizations they fund are very, very busy trying to shape Arizona’ education to their liking.
This article appears in Oct 26 – Nov 1, 2017.
Might “their liking” be effective education? Education that actually prepares a young person for the real world? Unlike the socialist pap being taught in TUSD today.
Hey, David — Did you ever consider rigorously assessing the merits of a given proposal, rather than trying to defeat it just by attaching the “BAD-GUY-KOCH-FUNDED” label to it?
In order to understand what happened with Trump’s election, you need to understand the fallout from 2008 and the activities of the Clintons and the DNC.
In order to understand how the so-called “privatization” agenda has gained strength, you need to know what happens with political machines and some of our larger urban public school districts. To combat the privatization agenda, you need to be prepared to object to the adoption of politically tendentious curricula in public school districts whether they originate from the left or from the right. You need to support transparent public process relentlessly and uniformly.
In order to know why people object to 204, you need to examine what has happened to desegregation funds in TUSD. Just because a given funding allocation seems a good idea on the theoretical “social justice” level does not mean local institutions and networks are prepared to implement it in such a way that it can actually achieve the intended benefit for the targeted populations.
Real good is achieved at the ground level, by examining what is actually happening in the schools, not by moving your theoretical-philosophical chess pieces around on an abstract “Koch-brother-bad-guy” – “public-institution-always-good-guy” chess board.
If the public sector loses in the current struggles, it will be because no one remembered what it was supposed to be and stood up effectively and publicly to ask it to BE THAT. It will not be because the Kochs and those like them have billions of dollars.
Thank goodness for this movement. Otherwise all of us who can’t afford private schools would be stuck with the local mediocre overcrowded, politically correct public school.
Money Talks, Bullshit walks. By privatizing all of Public Education , guess what. Kiss the National Education Association goodbye and job security for millions goes out the window. The Koch brothers and the Republicans don’t give a damn about the quality of education our children get ,all they want to do is remove any job security that the Teachers Union offers . By removing the Teachers Union it’s easier to keep pay low by demanding teaching standards that are impossible to achieve so that teachers can be fired, demoted, or not given pay increases so they will leave on their own. If you ever fall into the delusion that a Republican is doing something to improve your situation you can bet your ass that they have found a backdoor way to destroy you and everything you hold dear. Most Americans are so easily duped and deceived because most of them think their opinions are more important than facts. If you ever took the time to read about the Koch family you would have a better understanding of how they manipulate, cheat, lie and steal at every opportunity. When they do anything good for the public it’s to distract from their deceptions. Money doesn’t make you compassionate and it doesn’t make you intelligent but it will help you give the illusion that you possess those wonderful attributes and there you have the Kochs in a nutshell. Currently Arizona has a teacher shortage so the Republicans in Phoenix have decided to make it easier for an unqualified person to take a teaching job so they can continue with the divide and destroy tactics to reach their goal of complete control. If you ever take the time to study our political situation you will find that Republicans rarely do anything for the 99% and they do not know how to govern. All they can do is control by force. They do not have the mental faculties to govern and it’s much easier to control.
Actually bslap, who can always be counted on, like a metronome, to represent a small faction of the lunatic right, you are incorrect. With vouchers only those of you who can ALMOST afford private schools will now be able to afford them….because the vouchers don’t actually help people who can’t afford any of the cost themselves–that would be actually helping the poor, and that is not, NOT, what the game is about.
And yes, public institutions need to be held accountable, but that is certainly not to say that private ones are any better. In fact, thats the oldest capitalist myth in the world-the myth that says privatization works. It works for the few, and if you are one of the few or that is where your priorities lie than that is enough and you have really swallowed the individualistic rhetoric well. But if your priorities lie in the direction of the many, there is ample AMPLE evidence that privatizing water (think Flint), health care (think US with its millions of people who haven’t been able to partake), education (think Detroit or New Orleans with some of the worst schools in the country–oh but they’re CHARTERS so they must be great? NOT) does not help the many….and the fact that there are exceptions to the rule does not change the rule.
Public schools have rotted to the core. And that is not the fault of the Koch Bros.
These kids don’t know the pledge, they have never studied the US Constitution, they believe the world’s climate is actually heating rapidly, and are taught that government is the solution to everything. And the rich ought to pay for all their needs
Watch how those snake oil salesman try to hang onto their power. This is exactly why Trump won. Along with the fact that the Democrats let Hillary lie and cheat some more.
Let parents choose. All poor parents are not stupid. The left just uses them for their bidding.
Part of the solution, Betts Putnam-Hidalgo, is to make sure that public funds are granted only when public standards of transparency and proper process are met. Job #1 for supporters of the public sector is to educate the public about what public means and what kinds of protections are absent when privatization as practiced in Arizona and other Koch-influenced States happens.
Who is doing that? And who is effectively holding our public institutions accountable for living up to the ideals of transparency and proper process they are supposed to embody? If they dont provide a genuine contrast to the private sector in how they operate, they are effectively undermining their own case for support.
In venues like this, there is a lot of attention paid to criticizing the operations of the private sector, an easy target and stock villain, and too little paid to ensuring the public sector functions properly and doesnt deteriorate into something constituents have good reason to want to escape, much harder to do. Take Safiers critique of the Koch support for making ESAs more broadly available. Bottom line is if the public schools in some neighborhoods are in fact having serious problems functioning, you are not improving the overall quality of education in this region if you block exit from those institutions by ensuring public per-pupil funding cannot be transferred out with students who want to exit. It would have been better if these public schools had not been allowed to deteriorate. It would be better if the schools into which students are transferring were held to public standards of transparency and proper process, but thats not the lay of the land. And we are here in part because there wasnt enough effective citizen education to help people understand what public means and why its important and there wasnt enough and still isnt enough citizen advocacy to keep the governance and administration of large public school districts on track.
There is no easy solution to the current problems in this region and whatever solutions there may be cant be put together on a purely ideological level. They have to be built from the ground up, working directly with troubled institutions that dont conform to our ideas of what they theoretically should be.
The world is 6,000 years old. We should have the freedom to let religious schools claim tax dollars to preach that falsehood. Praise Jesus. You want kids to learn the constitution? Start with Amendment 1.
Must-read book. “‘Dark Money’ and its ongoing relevance ” LA Times April 2017
http://beta.latimes.com/books/jacketcopy/la-ca-fob-jane-mayer-20170412-story.html
“Vast sums of money in the form of what Mayer calls “weaponized philanthropy” funds battles against taxes, labor unions, environmental regulation, scientific research and civil rights efforts. Secrecy is a big part of the story. “The covert nature of these maneuverings that really caught my eye,” she explained. “I found it fascinating. They’d gone to such lengths to cover up the money trail.”
That sounds a lot like the liberal fraud they call global warming.
That sounds a lot like the conservative frauds they call Trump and his senseless climate change denying supporters, you know, people such as Wayne Olson.
Way to go Wayne! Now that Ratt and Wrong, Again haven’t posted using those names for quite some time…are you vying for their lowly troll status?
It seems to me that you are definitely picking up that mantle. Too bad that you aren’t investing your free time more wisely.
Basically the Kochs what to privatize everything, except the military. They see average Americans and our opinions as irrelevant. In regards to public education, they want it eliminated. They also want to dismiss making going to school mandatory.
Here is the libertarian platform on education from1980 when David Koch ran for vice president:
We advocate the complete separation of education and State. Government schools lead to the indoctrination of children and interfere with the free choice of individuals. Government ownership, operation, regulation, and subsidy of schools and colleges should be ended.
As an interim measure to encourage the growth of private schools and variety in education, we support tax credits for tuition and for other expenditures related to an individual’s education. We support the repeal of all taxes on the income or property of private schools, whether profit or non-profit.
We condemn compulsory education laws, which spawn prison-like schools with many of the problems associated with prisons, and we call for the immediate repeal of such laws.
Until government involvement in education is ended, we support elimination within the governmental school system, of forced busing and corporal punishment. We further support immediate reduction of tax support for schools, and removal of the burden of school taxes from those not responsible for the education of children.