Part 1 of this two part (or maybe three part) series tracked the purposeful stealth of the Koch Brothers since the 1970s when they began their push to change the country’s politics and economic policy, until their cover was blown a few years ago, and the brothers decided, if you can’t fight it, flaunt it. They adopted a more public persona, even going so far as to let reporters into the inner sanctum of their donor summit a few days ago, where Governor Ducey spoke about how much he loves his expansion of the Empowerment Scholarship Account program, and how that expansion is threatened by Proposition 305 which is scheduled to go before the voters in November. He loves his vouchers almost as much as he loves tax cuts, and almost as much as our “education governor” loves fighting against significant increases to K-12 funding. The fact that the Kochs and their donor networkers love those things as much as Ducey loves them makes the governor’ reelection campaign coffers very, very happy.
I was browsing through education news last week and came across an op ed in the Houston Chronicle praising Education Savings Accounts, which is the generic name for what our legislators have redubbed Empowerment Scholarship Accounts. As I looked to see who wrote it, I experienced a simultaneous sensation of familiarity and surprise. The author is Matthew Ladner, who I know well from long arguments we carried on in the comments section of my posts when I wrote on Blog for Arizona and Ladner was a vice president of research at the Goldwater Institute. The surprise came when I read the bottom of the op ed and found out he’s now “the senior research fellow at the Charles Koch Institute.” I knew Ladner had left GI, but last I heard, he was working on policy and research at Jeb Bush’s Foundation for Excellence in Education. Since I don’t see him mentioned on the current FEE website, I guess Ladner isn’t wearing hats in both places. It looks like he’s left Jeb for Charles Koch.
The employment and adventures of Matthew Ladner create a series of connected dots where the last dot connects back to the first. Taken together, they offer a revealing snapshot of the very formidable, very influential, very affluent “education reform”/privatization movement.
The Goldwater Institute has plenty of wealthy donors, which means it has lots of money to play with, enough to pay people like Matthew Ladner comfortable six figure salaries. The well-paid employees’ jobs are to figure out ways to publicize and further GI’s conservative/libertarian agenda. Ladner is a hard working guy who is good as his job, but somehow he always found time to indulge in spirited, intellectual arguments. So when I started writing critical posts on Blog for Arizona about what he was doing at GI (I headed the posts “Fools Gold.” Get it? Foolish statements from the Goldwater Institute?), Ladner responded at length in the comments section. I answered his comments, also at length. He answered back, other commenters joined in, and pretty soon we had comment strings running for tens of thousands of words. I found Ladner to be an intelligent, witty, formidable opponent. As I read his arguments, I kept returning to a line that cropped up regularly at the end of 1940s gangster movies. As the criminal mastermind was hauled off to jail, one detective would look at a fellow detective and say, “If only he used his gifts for good instead of evil.” That’s what I thought about Ladner. It would be great to have him fighting the good fight on our side.
Ladner likes charter schools, and he loves vouchers. What he hates is the restriction in the state constitution against spending state money on religious education. He often expressed his fondness for Arizona’s private school tax credits which give money to School Tuition Organizations, and they give it out as private school scholarships (keeping a generous ten percent to cover “expenses”), but he thought there must be another way to make vouchers legal.
ESAs are Ladner’s baby, with help from others on the GI payroll. They’re an ingenious work-around where the state gives money to parents who can spend it on private school tuition, including for religious schools. The vouchers violate the spirit of the constitutional prohibition against religious school vouchers while staying just within the letter of the law. When Governor Brewer signed ESAs into law in 2011, Arizona became the first state to adopt the voucher program. Since then, they’ve spread to a number of other states with conservative governors and legislatures.
Ladner was a busy boy while he was at GI. He was a high ranking member of the educational task force for ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council), the organization that creates model legislation for Republicans to take back to their states and turn into law. He was the author of ALEC’s annual Report Card on American Education for a number of years. Ladner’s report cards graded states on the quality of their education, using their openness to charter schools and vouchers as two of the most important criteria. That meant Ladner ranked Arizona among the top states in the nation, while Massachusetts, whose international test scores are competitive with the top scoring countries in Europe and Asia, ranked far lower.
One of the few states Ladner put above Arizona on the ALEC report card ranking was Florida. And no wonder. For years, Ladner had sung the praises of Florida’s education system and its governor, Jeb Bush. He wrote a long, overly enthusiastic paper about the Florida Education Miracle—though the state’s educational achievements weren’t especially miraculous—complete with numerous charts and graphs, and an introduction by Governor Bush.
So when Jeb started his own well-funded “education reform”/privatization organization, Foundation for Excellence in Education, he took Ladner aboard to help move the privatization agenda forward.
Now Ladner is at the Charles Koch Institute. After working for a few organizations funded by super-rich supporters of “education reform,” he finds himself at the source, working for the multi-billionaire who, along with his brother David, is one of the premier funders of conservative and libertarian causes in the country.
The Koch brothers were late to the “education reform” game. For years, they spent money to create college centers, think tanks and high school curricula to further their libertarian agenda, but they didn’t think they could have much impact on the education privatization movement, even though its goals of dismantling “government schools” and turning education over to the private sector are right in their philosophical wheelhouse. Now the brothers are all in. And who better than Ladner, a talented guy with years of experience in the field, to help guide them along?
Which brings us to the present. Matthew Ladner, working for Charles Koch, published an op ed last week in the Houston Chronicle about how great ESAs, which he helped create, would be for Texas. A few days later, Governor Doug Ducey spoke at the Koch donor summit, praising himself and the donor network for expanding our ESA program to include all of Arizona’s children. When Ducey finished, a few other speakers seconded his ideas and expressed anti-public school sentiments, making sure to trash teachers unions. Then the multi-millionaires and billionaires gathered in the room were handed pieces of paper so they could pledge to contribute money to further the Koch brothers’ education privatization efforts.
A significant portion of the donor’s largesse is sure to land in Ducey’s campaign and in the fight against Arizona’s anti-voucher proposition. Some of the money will be in the form of straightforward donations, but most of it will be dark money, where donors’ identities hide in the shadows.
And so we come full circle, starting in Arizona with the Goldwater Institute, making stops at ALEC, the Foundation for Excellence in Education and the Charles Koch Institute, and returning to Arizona. When it comes to education privatization and the dismantling of the public school system, what happens in Arizona definitely doesn’t stay in Arizona. It makes its way around the country, then finds its way back home again.
The organizations Matthew Ladner has been a part of only scratch the surface of the organizational and financial might of the education privatization movement. There’s the Walton Foundation, backed by the Walmart fortune. There’s the DeVos Foundation, backed by the Amway fortune. There’s the . . . but why go on? You get the idea, right?
This article appears in Jan 25-31, 2018.
David-
You are entirely too kind but partially off the mark. You may not have heard but Arizona students have been leading the nation in academic gains on NAEP. Arizona was the only state to see statistically significant gains on all six NAEP exams (4th and 8th grade math, reading and science) for the entire period we can track all 6 exams (2009 to 2015).
When you examine the gains of cohorts of students in NAEP our 4th graders of 2009 learned more math than any other state by the time this group became 8th graders in 2013. The 4th grade class of 2011 did the same feat in 2015. The reading results were almost as good. Science tests alas are not scaled to allow such comparisons but our students have been among the leaders in over time improvement between different student cohorts.
The good news does not stop in 2015. State AZMerit scores improved in 2016 and again in 2017.
Now if I were out to destroy public education Id be a bitter fellow, but instead I am a happy warrior. The AZ constitution guarantees public funding for K-12 and thus would be entirely safe from me even if I wished it otherwise, which I dont. The aim of those of us who believe in enhancing the opportunity for families to find a good fit school is not to destroy public ed but rather to make it work for a growing % of families. So far so good in Arizona.
I love the way David Safier eagerly courts commentary from members of conservative think tanks and engages in spirited debates with them, but ignores commentary from parents with children enrolled in local public schools. This is what parents trying to get children educated here can expect if they step forward and try to engage in advocacy to improve services in Arizona public schools: NONE of the policy issues that need to be addressed locally will be addressed; NONE of the improvements that need to be made to governance, administration and service delivery will be made, meanwhile we are offered spectator seats at thrilling (?) theoretical debates like this one and expected to be grateful for the opportunity to listen to the great THEORY OF PUBLIC ED while the PRACTICE of it rots.
This is why your side will not win, David Safier: it is not because your theories aren’t beautiful, it is because you and your crowd refuse to pay attention to the realities on the ground, in the schools, and so your theories don’t connect with the realities we are experiencing in the schools. When private (and, yes, also Catholic) schools deliver good education and many public schools don’t, even fans of the public sector (in theory) and non-Catholic parents will brush aside theoretical qualms and will do what they need to do to get their kids properly educated.
Thanks, Matthew Ladner. On the ground, in the schools, more kids will receive better education in Arizona if ESAs win. And that is, in large part, because local Democratic leaders here think the quality of the theory matters more than the legitimacy of the practice.
Just another way for the thieves in Phoenix to steal our taxes. I can’t believe even rich parents are willing to hand over 10% right off the top! Plus the numerous examples like when Yarborough’s wife gets close to 100% of the money that flows through their online charter school – our state legislators are the ones who REALLY should move back to Mexico – the way they steal from our state looks more like Mexico than America!
The Koch brothers are both listed as two of the ten wealthiest people in the United States. What kind of mental midget would you have to be to get involved in anything other than enjoying life and doing everything you ever wanted to do. The Koch’s obviously inherited the same neurotic paranoid schizophrenic mentality that possessed their father and are carrying on with his legacy.
One only needs to pay attention to how kids communicate with one another; and even how their parents communicate with them to understand that we have created a totally disengaged society where all of our information comes from social media; even our relationship platforms. The Koch Brothers and their sycophants are merely hitching their wagons to a medium where actual thought and innovation has been eschewed for immediate gratification. I fear we are quickly becoming a country where it will be increasingly easy to manipulate people with the agendas of the super rich and where our children and grandchildren will increasingly become pawns in however the kleptocrats which to maneuver them. All these groups mentioned are merely the seedlings of mass brain washing. The good news, if there is any good news; is that the Kochs will eventually be gone with many of their comrades who have subscribed to the stealing of thoughts, emotions, compassion, and all the other qualities that used to make us whole and good human beings.
Ladner Goldwater Bush Koch blah blah blah
ALEC Walton DeVos blah blah blah
“Why go on?” David asks.
Why indeed. Safier has slapped a bunch of names his readers don’t like onto ESAs, so they will certainly want to vote against them, when “Arizona Proposition 305, the Expansion of Empowerment Scholarship Accounts Referendum, is on the ballot in Arizona as a veto referendum on November 6, 2018.” You can read more about what the Referendum actually is here:
https://ballotpedia.org/Arizona_Proposition_305,_Expansion_of_Empowerment_Scholarship_Accounts_Referendum_(2018)
But why would anyone bother to investigate or debate the merits of the proposition, rather than rehearse the villainies of the standard-issue list of wealthy “bad dudes”? Safier has told his readership that ESAs are BAD in his special code language. (KOCH, DEVOS, etc.!) Jane Mayer told a terrifying, book-length “liberal” bedtime story about the Kochs, complete with Stalin and Nazi nannies and all kinds of villainous nastiness, and the NYTimes has made DeVos a regular target of their mockery, so what more does anyone need to know?!?! (No need to mention what a man some have called “the most influential journalist of the 20th century,” a smart guy with genuine liberal bona fides, Walter Lippmann, thought of the NYTimes’ approach to journalism, except to say that some believe his doubts about the legitimacy of the NYTimes’ conception of its role are as valid today as they were when Ochs ran the rag that has recently been taken over by the 6th member of his esteemed family.)
CERTAINLY there is no need to bother to find out what conditions are in local public schools, conditions that might make parents want to go to the considerable trouble of providing time consuming and expensive transportation to alternative schools, filing quarterly reports documenting how they spend the 90% of their tax-derived per-pupil funding transferred from the public system to an alternative, and paying whatever remains of tuition, fees, and expenses over and above what the 90% of their transferred per-pupil funding covers.
Whyever would any reasonable parent want to DO that, especially once they know that David Safier has connected ESAs with Ladner Goldwater Bush Koch ALEC Walton DeVos?
I wonder.
Matthew Ladner, it may be that I’m too kind. I admittedly have a soft spot for your style and wit — I recognize talent when I see it — though not for your destructive contribution to the privatization movement. But I don’t think I’m being kind to acknowledge the amount of impact you’ve had on your side of the education debates. Your “Aw shucks, little ol’ me?” pretense, that you don’t deserve much recognition, doesn’t hold up against your substantial resume or your influence.
As for the NAEP scores, I know about them and have seen you refer to them repeatedly. I also remember when you used similar repetition of Arizona’s low 4th grade reading scores to show how miserable Arizona’s public education system was, especially compared — by you, repeatedly — to Florida’s 4th grade scores. You have an eye for the one stat that reinforces the point you want to make. It’s part of your M.O., right alongside your penchant for starting with the conclusion you want to reach and working backwards from there to find the facts that fit your conclusions.
Ah, Matthew, if only you used your gifts for good instead of evil.
What if neither Ladner’s nor Safier’s universalizing ideological system will work everywhere?
What if actually serving students well depends on an analysis of the characteristics of each particular place and its strengths and weaknesses?
Some degree of choice policy will be necessary in places with massive, reform-proof, troubled districts like TUSD. Introducing choice / voucher policy will work better if there is a well-organized, extensive, high functioning, non-profit alternative school system like what the Catholic system is in Tucson and if that alternative system has open seats and / or the capacity to expand services. Might not be needed in places without a problem district like TUSD, might not improve the number of students getting good educational services if there is no robust alternative system willing and able to receive them.
In any case, Ladner’s policy program is the one that has better prospects for helping more students receive better services in Tucson, given the state and composition of our education systems here. Whether or not we like every item on the broader Koch/libertarian/neo-liberal policy agenda (I know I don’t), some of us hope the Kochs will recruit enough funds through their network to get ESAs passed in Arizona.
And that is because of what we have observed directly and know will be the conditions for some time to come in TUSD, a district still, after its massive attrition rates, underserving thousands — perhaps tens of thousands — of students every year.
The real story on ESAs is how few students took advantage of them in Arizona. If you look at the internal quality measures of major school districts, you can readily see why. Some states have as many as 18% of their parents rating their child’s school a D or an F grade.
Our major school districts are down to less than 2% with such a rating.
Our district school system is much less vulnerable to new competition than any other system in the nation as a result of 24 years of competition.
In Stanford’s Sean Reardon’s recent and great research study of academic gains, Arizona did not have a single school district below the tenth percentile. Massachusetts, supposedly the state with the best schools in the nation, had 19 school districts below the tenth percentile.
Response to Beneal Good
“The Koch brothers are both listed as two of the ten wealthiest people in the United States. What kind of mental midget would you have to be to get involved in anything other than enjoying life and doing everything you ever wanted to do. The Koch’s obviously inherited the same neurotic paranoid schizophrenic mentality that possessed their father and are carrying on with his legacy.”
The Koch brothers father was an oilman who went to Russia in the 1930s to sell refinery technology and consult. What he saw horrified him. His communist friends first purged from the communist party and then shot in the back of the head in the middle of the night. The wholesale economic carnage similar to what we see now in North Korea and Venezuela.
Communists bragging to him that they were going to infiltrate the U.S. and take us over from the inside.
Russia archives reveal notes by Stalin on reports of tens of thousands being murdered “not enough”.
The Koch family just care about their country and they know what you morons had in store for us if you had been given the opportunity.
Safier (usually) refuses to discuss how bad conditions are in TUSD because he’s trying to defend his political affiliates who are involved in district-level governance and administration from justifiable charges of mismanagement.
Ladner and Huppenthal tell us the techniques used to manage Arizona’s public school system, which at the state level include underfunding so severe that we cannot get qualified faculty to work in Arizona’s schools…
http://tucson.com/news/local/we-continue-to-worsen-nearly-arizona-teaching-jobs-remain-vacant/article_1c8d665a-a422-5c7b-95b9-98afe0cb0c6f.html
…have actually “improved” our public schools so much that they are “leaders” in the nation.
What CROCKS OF CRAP, on both sides of the political fence. People who have had kids enrolled in TUSD schools in recent years know that the district suffers both from disastrous underfunding (including criminally low levels of compensation for teachers) and from crippling mismanagement which compounds the problems caused by underfunding.
ESAs are needed to get as many refugees as possible out of dangerously malfunctioning “educational” institutions which both the left and the right have betrayed with their politically motivated lies and toxic “public policy.”
When I talk to parents of children attending charter schools, they are very certain and proud that they have placed their children in these schools. How can they be that sure that the public schools are not as good?? Have they visited classrooms, examined the laws that guide public education, or done other due diligence??? Also, consider that their children will spend more years of their lives living with those who graduated from public schools. A common background of those of us who attended public schools is the diversity as well as the common experience.
Education conveys the ability to read with understanding, write persuasively, think critically, use math to solve problems, understand the natural world, play music competently, produce good art…
It is not about “having common experiences” if those experiences do not enable students to LEARN. If parents find that their student’s “common experience” in his or her local public school consists of being dumped in a classroom with a “teacher” unable to teach, either because they have not had the requisite training or because there is not enough administrative support to keep disruptive discipline issues under control, then it should be possible for them to transfer their child to an institution that will provide a good education without losing public funding for their child’s K-12 education.
It’s a simple idea, really, but one that doesn’t seem to have gained much traction in certain circles.
Students may “spend more years of their lives living with those who graduated from public schools”, but their college professors won’t pass or fail them based on what the composition of their K-12 classes was or based on what kind of institution (public / charter / private) provided their instruction. Their success in higher education will depend primarily on how much they learned of reading, writing, math, science, and the arts in K-12. Public funding for K-12 belongs in the institutions that develop those competencies responsibly rather than wasting students’ time in sadly mismanaged, under-professionalized classrooms that produce “common experiences” of stagnation and atrophy. Those who have done their homework and exercised “due diligence” know that far too many of those kinds of classrooms exist in TUSD, and they exist mainly in neighborhoods serving lower-SES populations that cannot afford alternative schools unless the alternative schools are publicly funded or publicly subsidized, hence those elements of education policy our local “liberals” love to hate: charters, tax credits, and ESAs.
If you think charters and privates receiving public funds need better regulation and oversight, then advocate for that, not for depriving charters and privates of public funding, which will have the effect of depriving many students in Southern Arizona of what may be their only chance of receiving a decent education in a context where large portions of the largest public district in town have been allowed (by BOTH factions in our ignorant and persistent political wars) to deteriorate into something that students do need to escape.