A story on the front page of the Star.
Be still my heart!
Last week I wrote a post about the amount of money the Walton Family Foundation — the Walmart fortune — has poured into charter schools, with a promise of a billion dollars total between 2015 and 2020. The AP story looked beyond the Walton Foundation. It began with a Bill Gates connection I didn’t know about. Washington state is one of the last states to resist the charter school movement. Gates put millions into creating a charter school law, then funded the Washington State Charter Schools Association. When the courts ruled the law unconstitutional, Gates spent more money to keep six charters open while they fight to reinstate the law.
Along with charter supporters like Gates and the Waltons, the article mentions the Dell computer family and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg. The Billionaire Boys Club stretches much farther than that. A recent example. In the California gubernatorial primary, Netflix founder Reed Hastings plowed $7 million into the candidacy of ex-Los Angeles mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, a big charter school supporter. He did it under the cover of a group named Families & Teachers for Antonio Villaraigosa for Governor 2018, which put more than $13 million into the campaign, almost all of it from a few rich donors. Villaraigosa lost in spite of the funding.
In my earlier post, I wrote that the charter presence in Arizona and around the country would be much smaller if it weren’t for the billions of private dollars spent on their behalf. Sometimes it’s spent openly, but often it’s done by stealth. A favorite method is the use of dozens of pro-charter astroturf groups, supposedly grassroots organizations, with impressive websites and an office address. Often they claim to represent specific groups, like African Americans or Hispanics, to give the impression of a groundswell of support. The actual organization can be a small office with one employee or even a post office box. But in advertising and public relations, perception is everything.
On a similar but separate note, I recently finished the book, Democracy in Chains, by Nancy MacLean. The rest of the title tells you the book’s subject: “The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan For America.” Not everyone’s cup of tea, I know, but an excellent book if you’re interested, good story telling, reasonably easy reading, and very revealing. It could be billed as a sequel to Jane Mayer’s Dark Money, covering similar ground from a different perspective, adding to Mayer’s information and insights without repeating them.
The book talks about the libertarians’ push to mainstream their agenda. Well known names like the Koch brothers are mentioned, along with lesser known figures. What’s relevant to this discussion is, the movement wasn’t catching on. They couldn’t pull together the kind of following needed to create a mass movement. No worries, they decided. We’ll just keep plowing money into universities, think tanks, political campaigns and lobbying. The money magnified their voices a million fold. They succeeded and failed, succeeded and failed, but as long as they kept the money flowing, failures were nothing but temporary setbacks.
Without the billionaires’ fierce determination, their use of stealth to fly under the radar and limitless wealth, the libertarian-inflected right in this country wouldn’t be in the dominant political position it is today. The same goes for the prominence of the privatization/”education reform” movement. A single dollar bill whispers in the wilderness. A billion dollars can scream its message to every corner of the country.
This article appears in Jul 12-18, 2018.
Thanks for the reading recommendation, David, but I’d had quite enough of low-quality politicized horror stories after reading the ludicrous “Dark Money!!!”
Maybe next time you can recommend a title that hasn’t been the subject of as much controversy about historical authenticity and mis-use of sources as MacLean’s screed.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2017/07/20/did-nancy-maclean-make-stuff-up-in-democracy-in-chains/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.5c40ba24d63d
(Y’all need the villainous billionaires, don’t you, to distract the Tucson public from what is as obvious as the broad side of a barn: CRAP quality “educational” services in our largest local representative of the fabulous “democratically controlled!!” “transparent!!!” PUBLIC SCHOOL DISTRICT.)
Keep it up. Some people ARE simple minded enough to enjoy the kind of fairy tales Jane Mayer and Nancy MacLean and David Safier cook up. And some people like Harlequin Romances and some like Fox News…it’s all pitched at about the same level, albeit to different audiences.
AAAaaaaMEN
The Walton Family Foundation is on a mission to save millions of minority children and children from poverty.
You continue to look at us with a straight face and tell us that everything is fine and will be fine with our district education system. All we need are a few more cycles of education reform dreamed up by the Gates Foundation, our Colleges of Education and our Think Tanks.
Unfortunately, the Walton Family Foundation has a think tank and, like the Gates Foundation, spews forth toxic ideas for education.
Policy makers will dance to any tune if it is a condition for getting grants.
We now have another spectacular policy failure from the Gates Foundation as you documented a few days ago- years after the failure took place and still remains in place doing its damage.
The Walton Think tank has its toxic failures too, just nobody has noticed them yet.
People who analyze the effect of culture on society have a saying: fish will be the last to discover water.
The Gates Foundation and the Walton Foundation still haven’t discovered water.
I obviously don’t GET IT. My granddaughter has attended a public school, Davis, and now attends a charter school, City High, Both provide a good educational experience. Children attended private and churches, before public schools were in existence. And the upper class continue to send their children to private schools, and Catholics often send their to children to Catholic schools with no obvious negative effects to our society. So what is the problem with charter schools? Is society going down the tubes? In my opinion, we should be welcoming Walton and Gates contributions to our education system. The result is more school choice. Will public schools, as the exist now, become extinct? Maybe. The world is a changing. Either adapt or ….
Its about the political machines intertwined with some public school districts and their desire to regain their monopoly on the use of public funds for education, DennyG. They have all kinds of fancy smoke they blow, fairy tales they tell, and excuses they make, but in the end it comes down to covering up the fact that they want to coerce families WHO DO NOT WANT TO to remain in the public district school system. They are quite happy to degrade the quality of education a lot of kids receive in order to increase the revenue streams they control.
Good questions to ask when weighing the various political camps education funding policy proposals:
*Who is broadening options and encouraging free choice?
*Who is narrowing options and compelling people to use schools they would not choose, if they had other options?
Ironically, you will find that its the so-called liberals doing the latter.
I am curious about Mr. Safier’s and everyone else’s opinion about what I call the “Education Grand bargain”. Basically, AZ increases per pupil spending to the point where it is top 10% in the nation and indexes to keep up with inflation, but also removes collective bargaining for teachers unions and establishes a no strings attached voucher system where the money follows the student, and schools have the freedom to set curriculum just like charter schools do now, but with more state oversight.
Also, Nancy McLeans book has been widely discredited by academics on both sides of the aisle, and its sad that she attempts to slander academics like Jim Buchanan who en route to winning a Nobel prize also contributed greatly to researching the hidden incentives of politicians.