The charter school movement owes its current level of success to its friends in high tax brackets. Lots of friends. We wouldn’t have as many charters as we have now, by a long shot, if deep-pocketed donors hadn’t contributed billions to get them started and prop them up. And they’d get far less press without all the privatization/”education reform” groups funded by the same rich folks who help them make it into the news.
Take the private donors out of the charter school biz, and we’d have a backwater education movement with significant outposts around the country, a band of ardent supporters and occasional articles in the media, including thought pieces like “Will charter schools ever catch on?”
A number of the deep-pocketed charter supporters are men who made their money in high tech and hedge funds. Their allegiance has less to do with an objective analysis of charters than their dislike of government regulations and their oversized, self-made-man egos. Other donors are billionaires who made their money the old fashioned way, they inherited it. Together, they’ve plowed billions into charter schools. That’s on top of taxpayer funding, of course. Charters get per student dollars from state budgets, just like district schools.
I used “billions” to describe the money going to charters. Did I add a zero to the total to exaggerate the contributions to charter schools? The answer is, no. Billions it is, no exaggeration necessary. To get a sense of the kind of money that flows to charters from private sources, let’s push aside all the donors except one, not because the others’ contributions are insignificant, but because this one money machine cranks out cash for charters at an amazing rate. I’m talking about the Walton Foundation.
The Walton Family Foundation is funded by the folks who brought you Walmart. The three siblings, heirs to the Walton fortune, are the 11th, 12th, and 13th richest people in the U.S. according to Forbes magazine. Put their money together, and they’re worth $27 billion more than Jeff Bezos, the top dog on the list.
According to the Walton Foundation’s literature, it has contributed more than a billion dollars to K-12 education through 2015. The lion’s share went to charter schools or organizations which assist and promote charters. The Foundation claims it has given financial support to one in every four charter schools in existence. It plans to give another billion by 2020.
That’s two billion from a single source, without looking at big funders like the family of Trump’s secretary of education, Betsy DeVos, or the tech and hedge fund bros education historian Diane Ravitch refers to, appropriately, as The Billionaire Boys Club.
Let’s take a look at a sampling of the Walton Foundation’s 2016 grants, the most recent listing on its website. The Foundation gave out a grand total of $454.4 million in grants that year. Of that, $190.9 million went to K-12 education. I’ve limited the list below to K-12 contributions over a million dollars, starting with the largest grant — $23 million to Charter Fund, Inc. — and working down from there. The word “charter” crops up in a number of the grantees’ names. If you google the others, you’ll find most are either directly related to charters or are part of the privatization/”education reform” cabal which supports charters and similar education options.
Arizona doesn’t have a large presence on the list, but $1.5 million went to the Arizona Charter School Association, which is a centralized private support system for our state’s charter schools. That’s half of the Association’s operating budget.
Here’s the list.
CHARTER FUND, INC. $23 million
TEACH FOR AMERICA, INC. $15 million
BUILDING EXCELLENT SCHOOLS, INC. $6.2 million
KIPP FOUNDATION $6 million
NEW TEACHER PROJECT, INC. $5.5 million
CALIFORNIA CHARTER SCHOOLS ASSOCIATION $5 million
LEADERSHIP FOR EDUCATIONAL EQUITY FOUNDATION $5 million
NEWSCHOOLS VENTURE FUND $4 million
EDUCATION REFORM NOW, INC. $3.6 million
ALLIANCE FOR SCHOOL CHOICE, INC. $3.2 million
NATIONAL ALLIANCE FOR PUBLIC CHARTER SCHOOLS $3 million
NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF CHARTER SCHOOL AUTHORIZERS $2.6 million
FOUNDATION FOR EXCELLENCE IN EDUCATION, INC. $2.6 million
EXCELLENT EDUCATION DEVELOPMENT $2.5 million
EDUCATION FORWARD DC $2.3million
50CAN, INC. $2.3 million
CHARTER SCHOOLS DEVELOPMENT CORPORATION $2.2 million
GREAT SCHOOLS $2 million
RELAY GRADUATE SCHOOL OF EDUCATION $2 million
FAMILIES FOR EXCELLENT SCHOOLS, INC. $1.8 million
PHILADELPHIA SCHOOLS PROJECT $1.7 million
THE ARIZONA CHARTER SCHOOLS ASSOCIATION $1.5 million
UNITED NEGRO COLLEGE FUND, INC. $1.5 million
EDUCATION TRUST, INC. $1.4 million
PRESIDENT AND FELLOWS OF HARVARD COLLEGE $1.4 million
SCHOOLS THAT CAN MILWAUKEE, INC. $1.3 million
4.0 SCHOOLS $1.3 million
CHARACTER LAB, INC. $1.2 million
THE MIND TRUST, INC. $1.2 million
ILLINOIS NETWORK OF CHARTER SCHOOLS $1.2 million
NEW SCHOOLS FOR NEW ORLEANS INC. $1.1 million
SUCCESS ACADEMY CHARTER SCHOOLS, INC. $1million
MINNEAPOLIS FOUNDATION $1 million
NATIONAL PUBLIC RADIO, INC. $1 million
Yeah, it’s true, progressives have their deep-pocketed donors too, funding education ventures along with various think tanks and political campaigns. But c’mon, let’s get serious. Progressives have a few deep pockets. Conservatives have a closet full of cargo pants, every pocket stuffed with tens of millions — hundreds of millions — of dollars to be given away with abandon.
“Need a million? Sure, no problem, here you go.” “Need ten million? I’m going to have to see some ID first.” If a venture is successful, “Great, here’s some more money.” If it’s not, “No biggie, there’s plenty more where that came from.”
It must be nice.
This article appears in Jun 21-27, 2018.
Public school failures caused it all. And I am thrilled that it did.
Just curious. How much $ do the public sector/educator unions hand over to politicians to assure that public schools keep their monopoly ? To be fair, the Waltons are not the only well heeled player in this dance of financial elephants.
Why don’t progressives have many deep pocketed donors? Are progressives in general bad at business, do they make bad decisions, or are they lazy?
They spend too much time whining and scheming to produce any other than hatred, jealousy and division.
Public schools worked just fine when we actually supported them, they helped build the largest middle class we had. Why aren’t there as many super rich progressives? Maybe because they care more for the general welfare of the country and the world than their own self aggrandizement and worship of money and power? BTW, why do almost all right leaning comments have no real name or picture?
“But c’mon, let’s get serious. Progressives have a few deep pockets.” – Is this willful blindness, or are you seriously making this claim? Did you follow 2016 presidential campaign? Clinton vastly outspent Trump during the campaign by almost 2 to 1 ($1.19 billion vs. $646.8 million). Have you heard about the Democracy Alliance, the secretive liberal counterpart to the Koch Brothers network? (They have a website, check them out.) How about Tom Steyer? Yes, conservatives have rich folks who throw lots of money around, but it’s pretty naive to believe that liberals don’t have their own squad of millionaires & billionaires doing the exact same thing.
And the Walton Foundation spent $191 million on K-12 education in 2016? AFT and NEA’s national organizations – excluding their state & local affiliates – spent $309 million in FY 2016 (and that’s excluding compensation, benefits, taxes). According to the Center for Responsive Politics (aka, OpenSecrets), AFT and NEA were among the biggest campaign contributors in the country during the 2016 election cycle, ranking 9th and 11th, respectively (WFF isn’t even in the top 50). Plus, there’s an entire network of hundreds of “non-profit” groups who are pushing this anti-charter, “privatization” message.
Admittedly, charter opponents have successfully spun a narrative that presents themselves as the poor underdogs fighting off the efforts of a “cabal” (your word) of plutocrats seeking to destroy public education. In truth, the balance of money and power in this fight is on the side of those opposed to charters, no matter how much defenders of the status quo tell themselves otherwise.
petercook, I would love to see some documentation for your number about the teachers union spending. Open Secrets says that teachers unions’ political involvement came to “more than $32 million” in 2016, which it says in “an all-time high.” https://www.opensecrets.org/industries/ind…
Other numbers would be helpful as well. How much did Democracy Alliance contribute? How about Tom Steyer? On the Republican side, how about Sheldon Adelson? Robert Mercer? The DeVos family? Any numbers you come up with, you should really source, because I don’t know you well enough to take your word (Full disclosure: I don’t know you at all)
Always get documentation and citations to back up claims, David. Even (or perhaps especially) from people you DO know well.
All of this generosity may or may not be good for the charter school movement. However, clearly many of these organizations have become dependent on the Walton Foundation for their operating expenses.
That means that every cockamamie idea that the Walton Think tank comes up with has prominence. It also means that none of these organizations can survive in a free market where you have to live on the revenues derived from student attendance- perpetual children living in the Walton basement.
The Walton Foundation has this concept of “All A’s.” That you can get rid of all the B through D schools and everything will be hunky dory. The state charter board has expressed this accountability concept through a convoluted equation that uses, reuses and uses again the same data to achieve a superficial sophistication.
They have also become a regulatory morass with well over forty different approvals that charter schools have to obtain in a whole variety of situations.
In difficult situations, each one of these approvals could kill a charter school. The Walton foundation has been an intellectual driving force behind “approval culture.”
For example, charter schools have to seek permission from the state charter board to add students. Otherwise, they don’t get paid for those students. Numerous schools have lost money because the state board couldn’t get that approval on their agenda on time.
This is so bizarre it seems straight out of fiction.
The state legislature has been asleep at the switch.