After being fired by KIPP for sexual misconduct, Feinberg is back in business.

Mike Feinberg was fired from KIPP in February over allegations of sexual misconduct with a child. Somehow, it took 14 years for KIPP to discover that one of its co-founders had been sexually involved with former students.

But now Feinberg is back in the school privatization swing. After a quick rehab job, underwritten by the the Texas School Venture Fund (Feinberg's own creation) he has teamed up with veteran school voucher warrior Howard Fuller to start a new consulting group whose stated goal is, "helping educators create new schools and assisting single-site schools and existing networks of schools in opening new campuses." Feinberg says, he wants to work at least in part with KIPP alumni who want to start their own schools.

Feinberg is launching the new organization with Texas billionaire, a self-described "conservative communitarian," and long-time charter school supporter, Leo Linbeck III.

Howard Fuller

This will also be Fuller's attempt at a comeback since his right-wing patrons pulled their funding from his anti-union, pro-voucher group, Black Alliance for Educational Options (BAEO).

Feinberg was fired after being accused of sexually abusing a student in the late 1990s, but the allegation didn't surface until 2017, according to KIPP.

KIPP Houston Public Schools and an independent law firm hired by the network investigated the claims, and found "the allegation to have credibility". During the course of the investigation, the law firm, WilmerHale, turned up two other misconduct allegations against Feinberg by adult employees of KIPP Houston, both of whom were former students of the charter network. One reached a settlement, while the other allegation could not be corroborated, according to KIPP officials at the time.

Fuller calls BAEO's collapse, 'a magical moment'. Really?

The collapse of The Black Alliance for Educational Options (BAEO) raises some interesting questions. The right-wing funded, anti-union, pro-voucher group started 17 years ago by '70s civil rights activist turned Bush-supporter, Howard Fuller, has gone belly-up just at the moment in time when you'd think they would be rolling in dough.

With Trump-appointed Betsy DeVos sitting atop the DOE and billions of federal and foundation dollars flowing to astroturf  school "choice" groups, why does BAEO, the only such group specifically targeting African-Americans, suddenly find itself out in the cold?

Fuller started BAEO with heavy backing from the far right-wing groups, like the Bradley Foundation. Bradley became infamous for its underwriting of the racist "Bell Curve" book by Charles Murray. They hired Fuller as a token pitchman for school vouchers. He claimed them as an "underground railroad" freeing black students from the "slavery" of public education and teacher unions.

But with Trump in the White House, it appears the chickens have come home to roost so far as BAEO's foundation support is concerned.

Fuller is now offering muddled and confusing messages about his organization's demise. On his BAEO blog, Fuller tries to place the collapse in a positive light, calling it a "magical moment" and a "new path forward". But in an EdWeek interview, he complains that the school choice advocacy world has become too crowded, and that means more competition for visibility and funding.

According to EdWeek,

The writing has been on the wall. A year and a half ago, BAEO started shedding some of its state chapters and launched a national competition to reimagine and redesign the organization. But that fizzled out, said Fuller, when the effort didn't yield ideas that were "transformative" enough.

Aside from helping pass charter school laws in Alabama and Mississippi, and voucher laws in Louisiana and the District of Columbia, Fuller said BAEO's impact is seen in the pipeline of African-American talent it helped develop in the world of education reform advocacy.

Fuller talks about BAEO like it was a canned good or jar of peanut butter.

"Some organizations, and ours is one of them, have a shelf-life. And we just reached a point where we had done great work but didn't see the ability to continue to do that work going forward."

But that still doesn't really answer the question. Why has BAEO's funding dried up just at a time when school voucher and charter school advocates control the reins of power?

The answer may have something to do with...

• The fear of many "choice" advocates and activists that they will be viewed as Trump/DeVos supporters and discredited if they back BAEO. This is especially true for black community activists and those tied to the Democratic Party, like Democrats for Education Reform (DFER).  
• Support for charters is shrinking nationally in the wake of widespread financial scandal and more data showing that charters generally show little in the way of increased measurable student achievement. 
• Pro-choice groups and think tanks have been thrown into a dither with some like BAIO endorsing DeVos while others, distance themselves for fear of being associated with the Alt-Right.
•  An even wider divide in reaction to Trump/DeVos budget cuts for public education and shifting of resources over to charters and vouchers. 
• Demoralizing power struggles within the organization itself, which may account for the mixed messaging. 

More food for thought...White, anti-union, charter and voucher supporters, from Nina Reese to Peter Cunningham are singing Fuller's praises and expressing sympathy over BAEO's fall from grace among the big funders. But none have offered to step up and offer the group financial support. 

No tears coming from me. I'm sure Fuller will have a soft landing somewhere in Trumplandia. 

Howard Fuller's flight from the civil rights movement to darling of the racist conservatives

In 2012, Rachel Tabachnick, a researcher and writer on issues pertaining to the Religious Right, put together a comprehensive analysis of the current school privatization movement, "The Right's "School Choice" Scheme" on Publiceye.org.  It began with Milton Friedman's 1995 treatise, "Public Schools: Make Them Private," and continues with the right's attempt to re-frame it's attack on public education as a "civil-rights reform".

This re-framing was left to the likes of power philanthropists and right-wing think tanks like Milwaukee's Bradley Foundation, the Walton (Walmart) Family, ALEC, and the Koch Bros. They in turn, enlisted former civil-rights activist turned George Bush conservative, Howard Fuller and his Black Alliance for Educational Options (BAEO), a group which  tries to portray school vouchers as an effort to help low-income kids and children of color "escape" public schools to the freedom of private and religious schools. Fuller has become a vanguard "warrior" in the right-wing attack on unions and teachers' right to collectively bargain.

Long-time Milwaukee schools activist, teacher, school board member and Rethinking Schools editor, Larry Miller offers a critical perspective on Fuller in his review of Fuller's autobiography,  No Struggle No Progress.

Miller writes:

In the book Fuller uses a variety of arguments to rationalize his alliances. He works closely with the Bradley Foundation and in the past bragged of his close friendship with its deceased president and major architect of the modern conservative movement, Michael Joyce. This is the same Milwaukee-based Bradley Foundation that funds conservative policies throughout the US, has been a major supporter of the Republican Tea Party movement and of ALEC, a group behind Stand Your Ground laws and voter restriction laws, among other reactionary policies. The foundation underwrote the blatantly racist study by Charles Murray resulting in the publication of The Bell Curve, which claims that Black people are intellectually inferior to other races. In his book Fuller describes a group of young people criticizing him for accepting money from the Bradley Foundation. He responded that it is “poetic justice” that they fund his work which he says stands in opposition to Murray’s claims. Fuller has been publicly silent on The Bell Curve.

While Howard Fuller may try to rest on his past militant laurels, in life’s journey where we end up is more important than where we started. An alliance today with the Waltons, the Bradley Foundation, and Tea Party Republicans is an insult to those who have fought in the past and an affront to those fighting today for social justice and who continue to speak truth to power.

As someone who has known Fuller and followed his work for the past 40 years, I couldn't agree more.

Update on Fuller
EdWeek ran a Q&A with Fuller last week in which he eulogizes the late African-American community activist and state legislator Polly Williams, often called, "the mother of school choice" (vouchers). It was Williams who led the way for passage of the nations first district-wide school voucher program, one which by most accounts has been a dismal failure.

Williams herself, later became a critic of voucher expansion and of the direction her movement had taken under the leadership of the right-wing think-tankers.

In the interview, Fuller tries to dance around Williams' and other conservatives' disaffection with the voucher movement and it's turn towards privately-run charters instead. He goes on to deny that he  "ever supported universal vouchers."

What a tangled web we weave...

Polly Williams

Milwaukee columnist Bruce Murphy had this to say about Williams' shift:

Back in 2001, Williams told me she opposed how school choice was expanding. Williams said she supported school choice as an experiment. “Our intent was never to destroy the public schools.” She complained that choice supporters like the Bradley Foundation wanted to expand the program beyond low-income families and she opposed this. More recently she was quoted in a Journal Sentinel story opposing the plans of Gov. Scott Walker and the Republicans to expand the program to middle class families. “They have hijacked the program,” Williams complained.

Murphy documents how Williams was paid handsomely and used by white conservatives until she was supplanted by Fuller. 

From 1990 through 1997, Williams earned some $163,000 in honorariums and expenses, far more than any other legislator in Wisconsin. But after that, Williams saw her extra income drop to almost nothing, as Howard Fuller supplanted her as the moral spokesperson for school choice. “She… could have been the leader of school choice,” Joyce told me. “But she stepped aside and Fuller became the leader.”

Most importantly, writes Murphy, 

...for Williams the goal of choice was to achieve a better education. But in the wake of many studies showing choice students do no better than their public school counterparts, many Republicans now sell vouchers not as a better way, but as a cheaper way to educate children.

In short, the mother of school choice had great misgivings about the program she helped birth. As frank and combative as Williams was, I suspect she would want those reservations to be included in any celebration of her life.

Sinquefield is doing to Missouri what the Koch Brothers are doing to the entire country

Inside Philanthropy shines a light on hedge-fund school "reformer" Rex Sinquefield of Missouri. He's a major funder of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), and bankrolls the Club for Growth. Despite their off-the-charts right-wing extremist views, Sinquefield and his wife Jeanne are powerful and influential forces for privatization of public space and decision-making and pour millions into the expansion of privately-run charter schools in the state. They are leading the charge against tenure and collective-bargaining rights for teachers.

Central to understanding the couple's education philanthropy is Sinquefield's involvement with the Show Me Institute (SMI), which he cofounded and where he serves as president. The institute aims to make big changes to the state's education system, including ending teacher tenure and enacting vouchers in the form of "tuition tax credits," along with other efforts that critics say would privatize education in the state.  

SMI is a member of American Legislative Council (ALEC), which advances conservative ideas at the state level, and many of the education initiatives that SMI promotes closely track with ALEC proposals, such as parent trigger legislation, which empowers parents to transform a school into a charter if it is performing poorly. The Sinquefields have been a steady funder of SMI, to the tune of around $1 million annually.

The Sinquefield's have also given least $925,000 to Teachgreat.org, which was organized to attack teacher tenure. Smaller sums have gone to the Missouri Education Reform Roundtable and Howard Fuller's group, the Black Alliance for Educational Options (BAEO).  

According to the Center for Media and Democracy and Progress Now, Sinquefield is doing to Missouri what the Koch Brothers are doing to the entire country. He told The Wall Street Journal in 2012 that his two main interests are "rolling back taxes" and "rescuing education from teachers' unions."

His latest Amendment 3 campaign to take away teachers collective bargaining rights and base teacher pay on student test score, ended in failure last month. 

Sinquefield's racist, off-the-cuff comments have made him an embarrassment even to his right-wing allies. 

"I hope I don't offend anyone," Sinquefield said at a 2012 lecture caught on tape. "There was a published column by a man named Ralph Voss who was a former judge in Missouri," Sinquefield continued, in response to a question about ending teacher tenure. "[Voss] said, ‘A long time ago, decades ago, the Ku Klux Klan got together and said how can we really hurt the African American children permanently? How can we ruin their lives? And what they designed was the public school system.' " 

Sinquefield is also a life trustee of DePaul University.

The right-wing school privatization movement tries to change its image

In June 1995, the economist Milton Friedman wrote an article for the Washington Post promoting the use of public education funds for private schools as a way to transfer the nation’s public school systems to the private sector. "Vouchers," he wrote, "are not an end in themselves; they are a means to make a transition from a government to a market system." 

Rachel Tabachnick, a researcher and writer on issues pertaining to the Religious Right, has put together a comprehensive analysis of the current school privatization movement, "The Right's "School Choice" Scheme" on Publiceye.org.  It begins with Milton Friedman's 1995 treatise, "Public Schools: Make Them Private," and continues with the right's attempt to re-frame it's attack on public education as a civil-rights reform.

According to Tabachnick, voucher supporters recognized the need to reinvent the movement by obscuring its white, conservative support base and cultivating the support of Latino and African-American leaders as the face of the movement.

These leaders have valid complaints about inequality in public education and the failure of public schools to provide quality education to low income Black and Latino children. Having their parents support vouchers--and charters--in the name of improving education is a potent political force.

The most prominent among these leaders is Howard Fuller, the former Black Nationalist who brought vouchers to the Milwaukee school system when he led it in the early 1990s. In August 2000, he launched the Black Alliance for Educational Options (BAEO).  Its major funders included John Walton and the Harry and Lynde Bradley Foundation, based in Milwaukee, which also funded Fuller’s Institute for the Transformation of Learning at Marquette University, founded in 1995.

These funders, as People for the American Way commented in an extensive report on the group, are "better known for supporting education privatization and affirmative action rollbacks than empowerment of the African-American community or low-income families."   

The conservatives had found their standard bearer.

The DeVos Family

Amway, Blackwater all part of the DeVos empire

By now you've surely heard of the Kochs. Meanwhile, the powerful, wealthy DeVos family has remained largely under the radar, while leading a stealth assault on America's schools.

Rachel Tabachnick posting at AlterNet has the goods on the super-wealthy DeVos family. 

The decades-long campaign to end public education is propelled by the super-wealthy, right-wing DeVos family. Betsy Prince DeVos is the sister of Erik Prince, founder of the notorious private military contractor Blackwater USA (now Xe), and wife of Dick DeVos, son of the co-founder of Amway, the multi-tiered home products business.

Dick DeVos is said to have coined the term "government schools" when referring to public education.

Tabachnick  also describes the role of Howard Fuller, the conservatives' hired gun in the African-American community. Fuller, a '60s civil rights activist, is the founder of the Black Alliance for Educational Options (BAEO). The group tries to portray school vouchers as an effort to help low-income kids and children of color "escape" public schools to the freedom of private and religious schools.

But Tabachnick says that a new report explores the money trail behind BAEO, finding that it leads directly to a handful of wealthy right-wing foundations and individuals that have a deep agenda -- not only supporting the school voucher movement, but also backing anti-affirmative action campaigns and other efforts that African American organizations have opposed or considered offensive.”

Free-Market Think Tanks and the Marketing of Education Policy

Kevin Wellner, professor of education and director of the National Education Policy Center (NEPC),writing in Dissent Magazine:

The most engaged in this neoliberal education campaign are organizations focused on school choice: Democrats for Education Reform (and their 501(c)(4), Education Reform Now Advocacy), Education Sector, and the Progressive Policy Institute; as well as service-oriented groups like New Leaders for New Schools, the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) and Green Dot charter networks, Teach for America, The New Teacher Project, Stand for Children, the New Schools Venture Fund, and even the leadership of the Harlem Children’s Zone.