What does the word “education” mean when Doug Ducey calls himself “the education governor”? The answer is coming, but it’ll take me awhile to get there. Have patience.
When the Koch brothers, Charles and David, began their push to change politics and economic policy in the U.S. in the 1970s, an important part of their strategy was stealth. Spend millions of dollars, they decided, hundreds of millions of dollars, but stay in the background. Create and help fund multiple organizations, think tanks and college centers, all with lovely sounding names like Americans for Prosperity, Heritage Foundation and The Freedom Center, to help push their version of libertarianism into the center of American life in a determined effort to make this country a better place for the obscenely rich to live—but keep the Koch name out of it. Hold huge donor summits in posh resorts, but don’t let the reporters in. Only allow the Koch name into the spotlight when donations are made to causes like cancer research or New York’s Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts.
Things have changed over the past few years. The brothers been outed. Their names are regularly featured in the media and Democratic campaign pitches, and people have figured out ways to sneak recorders into their secretive donor summits. So they’ve emerged from the shadows, a bit, anyway. The spider web of interconnected groups they fund still have the same lovely, Koch-free names, but the Kochs have been forced to give in to the inevitable.
Case in point: The Koch brothers’ three-day donor summit in Indian Wells, near Palm Springs, which ended Monday. They let reporters in, with the understanding that they could report on the proceedings but not reveal the names of the 500-plus donors at the summit without the donors’ permission. Reporters, however, were allowed to reveal the names of politicians on the guest list, which included two governors: Matt Bevin of Kentucky and our own Governor Doug Ducey.
At the summit, the Koch network announced plans to spend at least $20 million to make everyone love Trump’s massive tax cuts for the rich (which included the occasional bone thrown to the non-rich, until the bones go away in a few years). They also plan to spend $400 million on the 2018 midterm elections, more than the RNC, the NRA and the Chamber of Commerce combined. Ducey, a shining star in the Koch firmament, is certain be a recipient of their campaign largesse. A little will be donated directly to his campaign and reported in the light of day, but most it will be in the form of dark money.
On another related front, the Koch brothers plan to dismantle the country’s current system of public education and replace it with something more to their liking.
Changing the education system as we know it was a central focus of a three-day donor seminar . . .
The Charles Koch Institute distributed roughly $100 million to 350 colleges and universities last year, up sevenfold over the past five years. What’s newer is the emphasis on elementary and secondary education. The network declined to offer exact figures but said it will double investment in K-12 this year, with much more planned down the road.
Doug Ducey is the brothers’ education point man.
In 2014, Ducey spoke at a Koch donor summit, praising the group’s support of his successful effort to defeat Prop. 204, which would have guaranteed an additional billion dollars for education in the state budget. Ducey’s efforts against the proposition were aided by $1.8 million from the Koch network.
Ducey received a multi-million dollar boost for his 2014 gubernatorial campaign from the Kochs. When he spoke again at the 2017 summit, he patted himself on the back for his successful expansion of Empowerment Scholarship Accounts, aka Education Savings Accounts, aka Vouchers on Steroids, with new legislation that allows all Arizona students to take advantage of the vouchers. At the same time, he praised the donors. To help him pass the ESA legislation, he told them, “I needed the power of the network.”
He spoke to members of the summit again Monday, praising himself one more time for the ESA expansion and warning the donors about Proposition 305, the ballot measure designed to roll back the expansion.
Addressing the seminar yesterday, Ducey touted the measure [to expand ESAs] as further reaching than anything that’s been tried in other states. He warned that, under Arizona law, if advocates lose at the ballot box, they will not be able to legislate on the topic in the future. “This is a very real fight in my state,” Ducey said. “I didn’t run for governor to play small ball. I think this is an important idea.”
Other speakers who followed Ducey echoed his anti-public school sentiments, using teachers unions as regular whipping boys. Next came the ask for money to push their education agenda.
At the end of what was essentially a sales pitch, members of the Seminar Network, as it is officially known, were asked to check a box on a piece of paper in front of them if they were interested in contributing to the education efforts.
Expect a two-pronged attack from the Koch network against public education in Arizona: money to defeat Prop. 305 and more money to help reelect the man who calls himself “the education governor.” Despite Ducey’s protestations to the contrary, it’s the Koch’s vision of education he supports, not Arizona’s system of public education.
This article appears in Jan 25-31, 2018.
No, David, it’s not the “Koch vision of education” Ducey supports, it’s parents’ right to apply the education tax dollars they pay in ways that actually educate their students.
The attack is not “against public education,” it is against students being locked into schools that do not meet their educational needs. Unfortunately for students (and for the misleading case members of the SOS campaign and opponents of ESAs try to make), too many public district schools are not places that help their students thrive academically. Distract your readership from this fact as much as you like, it does not make it any less true.
Local influencers in the Democratic Party will have to put a LOT more pressure on TUSD to improve services to students than they have yet done before the Party will be able to fully remove the very real reasons many families need to be able to transfer the full amount of their per pupil funding elsewhere, if their children are to be properly educated. In that there are not enough seats in high performing schools in the public district and charter sector for all those whose neighborhood schools are failing them, it is best that seats are also opened in the private system. That’s what ESAs do: open seats in academically high performing schools to low income families that would not otherwise be able to occupy them.
It’s an interesting thing for the “Democratic” party to oppose. To understand the Party’s policy preferences, you need to understand that their real commitments are not to excellence in education, but to secularization and to retaining the right to “educate” other people’s children on certain highly politicized and divisive issues where there is no real consensus among the American citizenry.
Distract your readers anyway you want, You, but the State Constitution does not require any tax dollar support for any sectarian school, in fact prohibits it. There are hundreds of successes everyday in the incredibly diverse public schools, and you always whine about TUSD, well run for the school board. You can bet every dollar we have there is no voting for charter school boards or sectarian school control boards. Public schools serve everyone, with all the inherent challenges therein. If I can cherry pick students, I can be a big success, too. Its a catch 22, starve public schools, force every student challenge possible on them and then when parts dont work too well, try to destroy the system. Public schools in Arizona are just pawns in Duceys national ambitions, and pawns in the profiteering ambitions of corporate America for education.
Give education money to the parents and let them “cherry pick” the school. That way everybody is happy. Public schools are not starving, just look at admin payroll and benefits.
These lies of starving are a trademark of the democratic party. Nobody has been starved.
“Frances Perkins,” I wish you would stop hijacking the name of an admirable New Deal era public servant. From my point of view, your policy positions do not show commitment to the social justice ideals that the Perkins of the Roosevelt administration served well.
To correct just a couple of the misleading points in your above post:
–ESAs don’t involve the State “supporting sectarian schools.” ESAs give parents the per pupil funding derived from tax dollars parents have paid so PARENTS can choose the setting that best meets their child’s educational needs. Please explain why, if a religious (or non-religious) parent wants to apply their per-pupil funding in a school with a religious affiliation, other citizens should have the right to deny them the freedom to do so. The fact that a LOT of non-religious families choose to enroll their children in religiously affiliated schools both in K-12 and at the collegiate and graduate level seems to indicate that there’s more than doctrinal instruction going on in these institutions. If these institutions deliver academic excellence, as many of them do, how does it serve the common good to use economic disincentives to keep students from attending them?
–Unfortunately, public schools do not “serve everyone.” That is a lie. They under-serve many, especially poor minority students. It is not in under-served students’ best interests or in the community’s best interests for students to be required to attend a school where instruction in core subjects is not successful or where administrative mismanagement has created discipline problems that prevent teachers from teaching. Those problems in some of our public district schools are real and they cannot be solved overnight. Solving them requires a lot more commitment from the community at large, from the Democratic Party, and from the governance and administration of some of our public districts than we have seen in Tucson over the course of the last three decades.
It is important to highlight that ESA supporters do not want to destroy parents’ freedom to enroll their children in public district schools, but ESA opponents want to use economic coercion to prevent families with more modest means from having the full range of schooling options, cutting off access for many families to academically sound schools in the private sector.
The fact that ESA opponents need to eliminate freedoms to achieve their goals says a lot: if public district schools worked well for everyone, then why wouldn’t everyone choose them freely, “Frances”?
Corporate America (today’s modern Trumpettes) hated everything Frances Perkins belived in. Free taxpayer supported public schools, minimum wage laws, social security (Paul Ryan, corporate clone, shouting “entitlement reform” at a every instance), health insurance for all (Wilbur Cohen), worker safety laws, protection of women, child labor laws.The first woman cabinet secretary in history. She would not support taxpayer money for private, elitIst schools, even though she went a to Mt. Holyoake. It is funny how the word “freedom” has been hijacked by religious fanatics and anti public school advocates, to mean the opposite of what it means. So I guess we should all have take ” freedom” to redirect our tax dollars to private our interests if we don’t like the public services delivered. I want my tax dollars, returned to me for poor private prison management, for hypocritical “freedom” schools at UofA, the raises given to Ducey’s staff, paying for terrible legislators, etc. et. al.
Oh for Gods sake, that a person who regularly comments behind multiple names, each brilliantly connected to the topic at hand, but not a single one her own, would go after someone for using a pseudonym… Its a joke, right? Brilliant arguments, all, now how about the nerve to use your own names?
The point was not that she should use her own name, Betts Putnam-Hidalgo, but that she should stop mis-using the worthy name of Frances Perkins. Opponents of ESAs are no more genuine supporters of labor interests, properly understood, than they are liberals, properly understood.
No surprise at all that you are as little a fan of the freedom to comment anonymously as you are of other important freedoms one might mention. Ironically, its a pretty self-righteous, dogmatic, intolerant and coercive vibe that resonates in some liberal circles these days.
You dont think Frances Perkins would have supported the right of the poor to receive a GOOD education, Frances? Not a time-wasting, substandard excuse for an education delivered in dangerous facilities by insufficiently qualified teachers? I think youre wrong about that.
You and your crowd get away with a lot by assuming anything that is called public district must be worth supporting. Bulletin from the real world: public district school Fruchthendler has little in common with public district school Booth-Fickett or Secrist. Insisting that poor kids not be given the means to exit schools that fail to give them a decent chance of developing their abilities is not liberal and has much more to do with promoting ignorant and false POLITICAL IDEOLOGIES associated with self-interested POLITICAL MACHINES than it has to do with protecting the interests of children or the interests of labor or minorities.
https://www.alternet.org/education/arizona…
DeVos and the Mercers helped Bannon put Trump into the presidency. They share this with the Kochs, the need to privatize, to choke “government” or as Grover Norquist said, “drown it in the bathtub.” I hear all of this great charter school chatter, know that Ducey loves it because the Kochs love it and he loves their donations, but surely those who argue that poor kids have a right to a good education too should know by now that there is really only one successful charter school with several branches in Arizona, and also that the chances of a poor kid with not exemplary grades has the chance of a snowball in hell of getting into one of them. There are no checks and balances on the charters, no followup. Even the few reports they are required to provide don’t get done. DeVos wants religious schools. Trump wants his Evangelical following to run both education and politics from the religious classroom because they like him. Let’s assume a minority child from a neighborhood on the south or west side that is classified as low income wants to attend a posh school in the foothills. First they have to get in and having been through the process where my grandkids only got into great schools because they had great grades, that is an obstacle, but perhaps not as high as the fact that the family of that child may work for minimum wages, maybe even two jobs and is the only means for the child to get to school. Do you think that is going to happen? Charter schools are just a code for segregation, rich from poor, white from black or brown, neighborhood environment, and how very badly the Kochs want their “Freedom” classes fed into the brains of impressionable children. Ducey has handed out millions to the Kochs who have also put in millions to get their message into ASU and UofA, in philosophy, in economics and business models. I don’t know how Chris Bannon, Steve’s brother, feels about his involvement with those programs at the University of Arizona, or what he shares of his brothers vision of what the world should be, but I do know that Ducey is robbing public schools blind. I do agree that TUSD should be broken down into smaller districts to stop the bleed upwards towards their administration, but private and religious schools for profit and stealing money from public education is a very bad thing.
Interesting, Sound Cloud. True, there is insufficient oversight of education in Arizona and unfortunately that cuts across all sectors, including the public district sector. There are a lot of regulations on the books but many of them are unenforced. While the “gardeners” have been negligent in pulling the weeds, some of our public ed “gardens” have become so choked with parasites it is difficult to know how to wade into them and help the young plants that should be growing there. Many have tried, many have failed with one chronically untended Tucson “garden” in particular, which you acknowledge in suggesting that you agree that TUSD should be broken up.
In this context, some have concluded that transplanting is the only option to save the seedlings in some of the more troubled garden plots. And, contra the prevailing Democratic Party wisdom, some of the plots locally available to receive transplants are well tended gardens that WILL allow the transplants to thrive. The ones I have direct experience with are non-profit, responsibly administered, using qualified faculty. You say that students from poor neighborhoods are not the ones who will benefit from choice policy. I’m not sure how public districts like Catalina Foothills assess incoming students and whether they find ways to block students they don’t want to enroll. But those of us who’ve been inside responsibly administered non-profit private schools have direct experience with students with genuine financial need being admitted to and benefiting from attending institutions that have made that possible through responsible use of tax-credit funded, need-based scholarships. Arizona choice policy has created a complicated situation with some parts that work and some that don’t. Like everything else in the state, it absolutely needs better regulation and oversight. But to try to address it, as many do, with oversimplified villain-and-hero dramas and cudgel it out of existence is absolutely going to make things worse for many students, and it is NOT going to solve the intractable problems in districts like TUSD.
If all public subsidies for alternative schools were eliminated, many parents of modest means who have paid taxes in support of K-12 education would be told that tax dollars cannot be used to support their own childrens’ K-12 educations unless they agree that their childrens’ educations will take place in a public district system that underserves far too many poor and minority students. They would have to transfer their children from schools that work for them to schools that do not. That is the local reality, even more troubling when we acknowledge that much of the rhetoric condemning choice policy is coming from Democratic Party grandees whose own children are or have been enrolled in District 16 or in one of the few enclave schools in TUSD: Fruchthendler, Sam Hughes, UHS, schools with test scores and conditions that are NOT common to all TUSD schools and schools that are NOT open to all comers. When these “liberal” (?) gurus influence public policy in a way that determines that other parents cannot take their per-pupil funding out of the public district system it means something very different to families on the South and West sides (some of whom DO attend responsible non-profit privates through tax-credit funded need-based scholarships) than it means to the influencers who push the universal application of public policy that does not harm them personally.
Irresponsible and cruel.
It really is a tragedy that a person who knows so much would not run for public office. The national head of the Libertarian Party lives in Phoenix, if I am not mistaken. Perhaps that is a possibility as they are the TRUE “liberals” (the historic meaning of the word,not the current usage) around here. AND they support vouchers and charters, with the collateral damage of completely denuding those disastrous public schools while they are at it. Dark horses have won before!
It is the fault of the public schools. It could not have happened otherwise. This is just like trying to explain to a liberal WHY Trump won. They just can’t grasp that they have moved themselves to irrelevancy. Come back to the center. The other side would do the same.
Hatred serves it’s master. Nobody else.
If you want to comment, BPH, address the ideas discussed. Perhaps you will change someones opinion. Those parents of children using choice policy to enroll their kids in schools that enable their kids to thrive really need to understand why its morally wrong for them to apply the per pupil funding derived from their tax dollars in (shudder) PRIVATE schools or (worse!) CATHOLIC schools when they should be saving TUSD (?!) by enrolling their kids in a school that has the problems you KNOW many of those schools have.
Separate choice policy in your mind from underfunding public schools and punitive testing: they do not belong together and many who support the former do not support the latter. There would be broader and more effective support for public schools if liberals did not tie supporting public schools to undermining alternatives and abolishing choice.
Moana S:
It was chilly on my way to work today because I forgot my jacket. Because of that, I want to thank you for the blast of hot air that you included in your commentary.
Conservative know-nothings just can’t grasp WHY the majority of this country were pissed about a sexual assaulting, white supremacist baby-man “winning” the presidency with damn near 3 million less votes.
Hatred is serving your Orange Marmalade Master. Nobody else.