Who's behind National School Choice Week?

Launched five years ago by the Gleason Family Foundation—which spent more than $4.3 million on the project in 2014, Nat'l School Choice Week has grown rapidly through the backing of advocacy groups and deep pockets of funders focused on promoting charters, vouchers, and tax credits that aid private schools, including religious and for-profit ventures. -- Dustin Beilke at PR Watch

According to the Center for Media and Democracy:

"The National School Choice Week website’s Partners page provides a who’s-who gallery of Koch network groups, corporations, and billionaires promoting privatization," said Lisa Graves, CMD’s Executive Director, adding: "although the week features many local events, it is backed by national entities, some of which are hostile to the idea of public schools and whose goals have included full privatization. No story about National School Choice Week is complete if it does not mention the special interests behind the choice agenda."

NCSW’s website lists numerous partners, including the Walton Family Fund, ALEC, SPN, the Freedom Foundation, FreedomWorks, Cato Institute, Reason Foundation, the Heritage Foundation, the James Madison Institute, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce—many of which have ties to the Koch brothers’ political network. David Koch ran for Vice President in 1980 on a platform that included privatizing public schools, and his brother Charles started pushing school choice in the 1960s. Together they have funded an array of groups that spread that agenda.

As CMD has documented, the charter school industry has been fueled by more than $3.6 billion from the federal government over the past two decades in addition to billions from states and from wealthy choice advocates like the billionaire Walton and DeVos families. This surge in cash has created a league of lobbyists urging legislators to send more tax dollars to this industry.

North Carolina's star charter hustler, Baker Mitchell

His model for success embraces decreased government regulation, increased privatization and, if all goes well, healthy corporate profits.

ProPublica reporter Marian Wang, lays it all out there on Moyers' blog ("Charter School Power Broker Turns Public Education Into Private Profits"). She turns over a rock in N.C. and finds another big charter school hustler, a businessman named Baker Mitchell making millions by operating his chain of schools.

Baker Mitchell

People still ask me, how is it possible to make lots of money operating charters? I keep telling them, it's all about vertical integration. Take Mitchell's operation as a case in point.

Wang writes:

The schools buy or lease nearly everything from companies owned by Mitchell. Their desks. Their computers. The training they provide to teachers. Most of the land and buildings. Unlike with traditional school districts, at Mitchell’s charter schools there’s no competitive bidding. No evidence of haggling over rent or contracts.

The schools have all hired the same for-profit management company to run their day-to-day operations. The company, Roger Bacon Academy, is owned by Mitchell. It functions as the schools’ administrative arm, taking the lead in hiring and firing school staff. It handles most of the bookkeeping. The treasurer of the nonprofit that controls the four schools is also the chief financial officer of Mitchell’s management company. The two organizations even share a bank account.

 Did I mention that Mitchell is part of Koch Bros. and ALEC networks? He also hangs out with conservative kingmaker Art Pope with whom he sits on the board of the John Locke Foundation. It's where he gets his political juice to operate regulation-free.

In Mitchell's defense, he claims his schools produce higher test scores. But they have comparatively low percentages of needy students and focus totally on test prep and rote learning.

Writes Wong:

Mitchell’s schools are also distinguished from public schools by their different tone. Staff and students pledge to avoid errors that arise from “the comfort of popular opinion and custom,” “compromise” and “over-reliance on rational argument.” Students must vow “to be obedient and loyal to those in authority, in my family, in my school, and in my community and country, So long as I shall live.”

The schools also use a rigid instructional approach in which teachers stick to a script and drill students repeatedly through call and response

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 last honeypot for Wall Street'

Venture capitalists and for-profit firms are salivating over the exploding $788.7 billion market in K-12 education, writes Lee Fang at The Nation.

“It’s really the last honeypot for Wall Street,” says Donald Cohen, the executive director of In the Public Interest, a think tank that tracks the privatization of roads, prisons, schools and other parts of the economy.

K12 Inc.’s lobbyists helped author model legislation to develop sweeping voucher laws through the American Legislative Exchange Council, a conservative group that provides state lawmakers with template legislation. Though state by state lobbying figures are difficult to come by, given the patchwork of varying laws, K12 Inc. has hired dozens of local officials to ensure that these voucher laws are quickly passed with few amendments. “We have incurred significant lobbying costs in several states,” K12 Inc. noted in a filing with the SEC.

The Mis-Education Campaign of the Climate Change Deniers

Today’s big People’s Climate Marches in New York City and 150 countries around the world, mark a new stage in the fight to save the planet from what Naomi Klein calls "the raw terror of ecocide." One of the greatest challenges faced by the movement is taking on and countering one of the greatest propaganda and mis-education campaigns in history, underwritten by the biggest and most reactionary corporate defenders of unregulated global expansion of capital. Since school curriculum and education profiteers play a major role in this campaign (see Bill Bigelow's excellent piece on Scholastic Magazine's prettification of the coal industry), a good part of the responsibility for taking on this challenge falls on us educators.

Bill Moyers reports:

Slick public relations and advertising campaigns are underwritten to fool the public and smear the truthtellers. Foundations and think tanks have been created by industry just to create doubt and hammer away against the overwhelming evidence of climate disruption. Last year, the British newspaper The Guardian reported that between 2002 and 2010, via two right-wing groups, Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund, billionaires had given nearly $120 million to more than 100 anti-climate change groups. And the progressive Center for Media and Democracy revealed that a web of right-wing think tanks called the State Policy Network, affiliated with the notorious American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and funded to the tune of $83 million by companies including Facebook, AT&T and Microsoft, was pushing a had right agenda that includes opposition to climate change rules and regulations.

A new study from two groups, Forecast the Facts Action and the SumOfUs.org, says that since 2008, businesses have given campaign contributions to the 160 members of Congress who have rejected climate change that amount to more than $640 million. That includes Google, eBay, Ford and UPS; in fact, 90 percent of the cash came from outside the fossil fuel industry.

Klein's new book, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate, is a powerful antidote and provides educators with a great resource on the new environmentalism – one that focuses on systemic change rather than just go-green lifestyle choices.

According to Klein, climate change is not a problem that can be solved simply by markets or industry. Instead, it will require a massive reorganization of our political, economic, and social systems – one that, by both practical and moral necessity, must be driven by popular movements.

IFT leader claims ALEC leader Dillard as his champion -- "A strong voice for teachers." Really?

Dillard (left) and Rauner. They're both worse. 

The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) represents the most reactionary, anti-people, anti-teacher, racist sector of the corporate establishment. They are the architect of  Stand Your Ground and a host of recent legislation aimed at restricting the voting rights of black and Latino voters and increasing the black prison population. Then there's Arizona’s punitive SB1070 immigration bill. They are strongly anti-union and have pushed legislation nationally to dis-empower teacher unions and take away collective bargaining rights of all public employees.

The Arizona-based Goldwater Institute and the Michigan-based Mackinac Center between them successfully shepherded five model bills through ALEC’s Commerce, Insurance, and Economic Development Task force — all targeting public sector unions.

The list goes on and on.

The Illinois Charter Quality Act, passed in 2011, expanded the authority to approve charter schools from school districts to an appointed state commission. On ALEC’s website, a similar bill is filed under “model legislation.” ALEC helped fund the effort to pass the Illinois Charter Quality Act. After the act was signed into law, the state created the Illinois Charter School Commission, which was then given authority to approve charter school applications. The rest is dismal history.

Republican gubernatorial candidate Kirk Dillard, until quite recently, was ALEC's state chairman and is still an active member and supporter of ALEC. ALEC once named him “Legislative Member of the Year.” While he voted recently against the pension-busting SB7 bill in exchange for support from the IEA in his run against even-worse(?) union-buster Bruce Rauner, he is still on record supporting pension-cutting measures, like placing salary caps on pensions, raising the retirement age for teachers, and replacing the pension system entirely with 401K stock-market investment plan.

On social issues, he's Tea Party all the way, supporting concealed-carry gun laws and capital punishment and opposing marriage equality for gay couples. You name it.

OK, enough said about ALEC and Dillard, most of which is old news anyway. But yesterday, the IFT leadership followed the lead of the IEA in endorsing Dillard in the Republican primary and dropping lots of money ("six figures") into his campaign coffers. That alone should be shocking to IFT's own union members, who unlike the mainly suburban and rural IL teachers in the IEA, are nearly all urban democrats.

I wasn't shocked by the IFT's decision to back Dillard. I hate it but expected it and can even understand their rationale. It's basically the lessor-of-two-evils theory (on crack). After all, there are many compromises and tactical diversions that union leaders have to make, hopefully with the understanding and support of their rank-and-file members, especially if they truly believe that Rauner is qualitatively worse or more of a threat than Alec Dillard. I'm not so sure.

Montgomery applauds SB7, calls it a "model."

IFT President Dan Montgomery says the endorsement of Dillard "comes not only with significant resources, obviously, but the hearts and minds of our members who will work, have conversations with families and colleagues around the state to hopefully have Sen. Dillard be the winner in the Republican primary."

But even if you accept the Rauner-is-worse proposition, Montgomery goes way over the line in calling Dillard a "strong voice for teachers and retirees." 

That's not just about a lessor-of-two-evils tactical approach. It's a statement that is not only misleading and dishonest, but a sellout of everything teachers here and throughout the state of IL have been fighting for and against.

Shame on him.

Media Matters nails WSJ and ALEC on "Parent Trigger"

According to Media Matters:

The Wall Street Journal this morning failed to report ties between the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and controversial "parent-trigger" legislation that would allow parents to take over and convert public schools to charter schools. They also failed to report that the Journal's parent company, News Corp, is a member of ALEC. The Journal's treatment of the legislation also cited no criticism of the proposal, which has been described as an effort "to manipulate parents into letting [the charter school lobby] privatize more public schools."

WSJ's parent company, New Corp. is owned by international publishing criminal Rupert Murdoch whose chief henchman is Joel Klein. Klein, the former New York City schools chancellor, is recognized as one of the godfathers of corporate school reform and school privatization.

The MM piece quotes Leonie Haimson, Executive Director of Class Size Matters, who calls the parent trigger "an underhanded trick by the charter lobby to manipulate parents into letting them privatize more public schools."

New video exposes ALEC's ed task force

 Here's a great tool you can use in meetings and classrooms to educate about ALEC's role in privatizing public schools, curriculum and testing. The video has a good critique of cyber-schools, the Virtual Schools Act currently being pushed in several states by ALEC,  and companies like, K12 Inc. which are making millions in profits even while being currently under federal investigation.

Charter authorizers group slips quietly out ALEC's back door

No sooner had I posted about the National Association of Charter School Authorizers (NACSA) relationship with ALEC, then I received this NACSA press announcement via Business Wire.

Our work with ALEC has been focused entirely on promoting excellent charter schools. As part of our annual review processes, however, we determined that alternative strategies would be more effective in achieving these policy objectives. Thus we will not be renewing our membership in ALEC when it expires next month.”

If there ever was a more cowardly statement or a more unethical stand taken by an education group, I haven't seen it. When first questioned by Huffington writer Ziad Jilani, about NACSA's current participation in ALEC, using public school money to pay their ALEC bills, director Greg Richmond refused to comment. The implication being that the charter school group's affiliation ended long before the recent exposure of ALEC as a far-right, racist, and anti-union consortium of corporate interests.

Instead of leaving ALEC in protest, and not wanting to offend the corporate patrons who pay his salary, Richmond opts for the tepid statement above and letting his now-admitted membership in ALEC run out in June.

If any more evidence was needed to show that the current network of  private charter school operators and their lobbyists are little more than conduit for corporate interests, as opposed to serving the interests of public education, here it is.

ALEC finds a friend in the charter world

The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) is an  extreme right-wing, anti-union, corporate front group that has worked successfully to pass pro-corporate laws in state legislatures across the country. They have been especially active in pushing legislation that supports school vouchers, privately-managed charter schools, and the outlawing of collective-bargaining rights for teachers.

Following the outcry over the group's pushing of  "Stand Your Ground" laws and racist voter-suppression acts, at least 15 major corporations, foundations, and other organizations have decided to end their funding commitments to ALEC.

Richmond

But ALEC has another way of financing itself that doesn't involve private corporations at all, writes Huffington's Zaid Jilani.  He reports that The National Association of Charter School Authorizers (NACSA) is one of ALEC's members at least through 2009 and may well still be a member and is using public school money to support NACSA's work. NACSA's president and CEO Greg Richmond joined ALEC's Education Task Force around 2009.

Richmond's response:

 NACSA has worked with Democrats for Education Reform, the Progressive Policy Institute, the Black Alliance for Educational Options, the Aspen Institute, ALEC, and the National Governors Association, among many others, to impact charter school policy and practice.

Jilani writes:

"I followed up to ask if NACSA was currently an ALEC member. NACSA gave me no response."

Richmond is no stranger to Chicago where he worked under Paul Vallas. Vallas then brought him and NACSA to New Orleans to help establish a privately-run charter system there in the wake of Hurrican Katrina. I wrote about him and NACSA last December when they ran this great charter school hustle in Illinois.

BOYCOTTING ALEC

Meet the Three ALEC Supporting Corporate Giants Who Dare You to Boycott Them

As the ALEC boycott continues to grow some corporations are not getting the message. Executives from Pfizer, Reynolds American, and Procter & Gamble are daring you to boycott them. Beneath the good news that Kraft and Pepsi have joined Coca-Cola in deciding to stop supporting ALEC, there are some companies who just don’t get it. According to Reuters, Pfizer, Reynolds American, and Procter & Gamble have all came out in support of ALEC. Tobacco maker Reynolds American said, “ALEC provides a valuable forum for sharing of ideas and fostering better understanding of a broad range of both legislative and business issues.” --Read the rest here.

By: Jason Easley, April 5, 2012
See more posts by Jason Easley

Also see this story in today's L.A. Times: 

Coca-Cola, Kraft leave conservative ALEC after boycott launched

Coca-Cola Co. and Kraft Foods Inc. bowed to consumer pressure this week and cut ties with the American Legislative Exchange Council, a conservative lobbying group that has recently backed controversial voter ID and so-called “stand your ground” laws.

Brother Fred would boycott ALEC companies if he could, but he first would have to start using their products. 

Who's behind 'Stand Your Ground' and school privatization? -- ALEC

Krugman

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman shines his light on the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the force behind the so-called "Stand Your Ground" law in Florida and other states. The law is now being used as the basis for the defense in the murder of Trayvon Martin. When you turn the rock over on the current wave of union-busting, anti-immigrant, and school privatization legislation being pushed in states like Virginia and Arizona, there you will find ALEC.

Writes Krugman:

Many ALEC-drafted bills pursue standard conservative goals: union-busting, undermining environmental protection, tax breaks for corporations and the wealthy. ALEC seems, however, to have a special interest in privatization — that is, on turning the provision of public services, from schools to prisons, over to for-profit corporations. And some of the most prominent beneficiaries of privatization, such as the online education company K12 Inc. and the prison operator Corrections Corporation of America, are, not surprisingly, very much involved with the organization.

Times editorial reveals legislative power of ALEC

An editorial in Sunday's New York Times exposes the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) founded in 1973 by the right-wing activist Paul Weyrich; its big funders include Exxon Mobil, the Olin and Scaife families and foundations tied to Koch Industries. Many of the largest corporations are represented on its board.

Lawmakers who eagerly do ALEC’s bidding have much to answer for. Voters have a right to know whether the representatives they elect are actually writing the laws, or whether the job has been outsourced to big corporate interests.

ALEC Education "Academy" Launches on Island Resort

Ritz-Carlton in Amelia Island, Florida.

Yesterday, hundreds of state legislators from across the nation gathered at an "island" resort on the coast of Florida for a so-called "education academy" sponsored by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). There were no students or teachers invited to the Ritz resort. Instead, legislators, representatives from right-wing think tanks and for-profit education corporations met behind closed doors, in the words of PR Watch's' Dustin Beilke , "to channel their inner Milton Friedman and promote the radical transformation of the American education system into a private, for-profit enterprise."

You can learn more about ALEC, an extreme right-wing policy group which received funding from the Gates Foundation, at the Center for Media and Democracy's ALEC Exposed website.

Scott Walker and ALEC plotted attack on AZ unions

Nichols

There's a good piece in the Nation this week by John Nichols, "How Scott Walker and ALEC Plotted the Attack on Arizona's Unions. Nichols writes:

After meeting with former Vice President Dan Quayle, Walker was whisked over to the Phoenician Resort in Scottsdale, where he briefed a thousand Arizona conservatives on how they could attack “the big-government union bosses.” 

“We need to make big, fundamental, permanent structural changes. It’s why we did what we did in Wisconsin,” declared Walker, who told the annual dinner of the right-wing Goldwater Institute that compromising with unions was “bogus.”

ALEC's disturbing level of influence [Video]

Anna Scholl, joins Thom Hartmann in exposing ALEC - the American Legislative Exchange Council. In case you don't know what ALEC is - it's a far-rightwing organization that brings together corporate CEOs and lobbyists with elected lawmakers to come up with custom-made legislation that benefits anti-public school  "reformers", big polluters, job out-sourcers, and banksters, and hurts unions, poor people, and voters. And apparently it's found a friend in Virginia. Gov. McDonnell and the VA General Assembly, where since 2007, over 50 different pieces of legislation have been introduced that are exact carbon copies of ALEC written legislation.



ALEC has apparently found another friend in power philanthropist Bill Gates whose foundation  recently bestowed a $376,635 grant upon this right-wing political action and lobbying group.

Gates bankrolls ALEC right-wing extremists

Founded in 1973 by Paul Weyrich and other conservative activists and currently bankrolled by the Koch Bros., the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) is a critical arm of the right-wing network of policy shops that, with infusions of corporate cash, has evolved to shape American politics. The Gates Foundation has just bestowed a $376,635 grant upon ALEC.

ALEC moves its anti-public school agenda

Founded in 1973 by Paul Weyrich and other conservative activists and currently bankrolled by the Koch Bros., ALEC is a critical arm of the right-wing network of policy shops that, with infusions of corporate cash, has evolved to shape American politics.

Joel Rogers and Laura Dresser, write in Aug. 1-8 issue of The Nation:

GOP leaders, fresh from their blowout victory in November, pushed a consistent message—“We’re broke”; “Public sector workers are to blame”; “If we tax the rich we’ll face economic extinction”—and deployed legislative tools inspired by ALEC to enact their vision. 

This spring, GOP governors or legislatures introduced at least 500 of these and other ALEC-inspired anti-labor laws, including laws to restrict the scope of collective bargaining; to limit or eliminate “project labor agreements” and state “prevailing wage” requirements; and to pre-empt local living wage or other labor standards. Just keeping track of all the antiunion legislation was often daunting. In Michigan, the AFL-CIO was dealing with more than fifty laws aimed at its demise.

Also see Julie Underwood's "Starving Public Schools":

ALEC’s real motivation for dismantling the public education system is ideological—creating a system where schools do not provide for everyone—and profit-driven. The corporate members on its education task force include the Friedman Foundation, Goldwater Institute, Washington Policy Center, National Association of Charter School Authorizers and corporations providing education services, such as Sylvan Learning and the Connections Academy.

 Another good source is ALEC Exposed at the Center for Media & Democracy