Behind the big money flowing into Common Core

The Common Core market is booming, especially for the tech companies and textbook and testing companies. Perhaps that is why self-interested and connected companies as well as power philanthropists like Bill Gates, are investing so heavily in it.

In the Dec. 10th Answer Sheet column in the Washington Post, ("Millions in private money poured into Common Core promotion") award-winning Principal Carol Burris of South Side High School in New York, documents the flow of private funding being used to promote Common Core Standards.

Among its biggest financial backers is The Committee for Economic Development (CED), a business-led, non-profit think tank that has education reform as a project. According to its website, CED exists to deliver “well researched analysis and reasoned solutions to our nation’s most critical issues.”

OED CEO Steve Odland

The CEO of CED is Steve Odland. Odland committed the organization to a two-year pledge to make sure that everyone understands the Common Core standards and to ensure that business leaders have what they need to support their implementation.

Writes Burris:

Mr. Odland, the former CEO of Auto Zone (2001-2005) and Office Depot (2005-2010), resigned from Office Depot in 2010, a week after the company announced it settled a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission investigation for more than a million dollars. Odland himself agreed to pay a $50,000 fine without admitting or denying the findings. As the CEO of the Committee on Economic Development he now advises the nation on issues like the Common Core and teacher quality. Odland also blogs for Forbes about what to do on a “staycation,” and to express his concern for the people he sees who do not look healthy when walking around the malls.

As for Gates,

...The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation gave the CED $865,593 to promote the Common Core. To put this donation in perspective, in 2012, the Committee for Economic Development received a little more than $3.5 million in total contributions for their work. For this think tank, this contribution from Gates (and it is not the first that they have received) is a substantial infusion of cash. The CED is hardly alone.  The Gates Foundation has given in excess of $173.5 million to promote the Common Core standards to an astounding number of organizations.  In New York, the Gates Foundation has contributed $3.3 million to the Regents Research Fund to support a think tank known as the Regents Fellows. 

Chancellor Merryl Tisch

Other contributors to the fund include the foundation of Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch ($1 million), Regent Charles Bendit ($100,000) as well as millions from the General Electric, Tortora Sillicox Family and Ford Foundations.  Others donors to the Regents Research fund that supports the Fellows are New York City charities, The Robin Hood Foundation and the Tiger Foundation. Robin Hood and Tiger generously give to charter schools, including Uncommon Charters, the chain formerly led by New York State Education Commissioner John King.  The National Charter School Authorizers made a $135,000 contribution to the Regents Research Fund as well.

N.Y. Chancellor Tisch spends millions on Race-To-Top 'advisers"

Chancellor Tisch

Power philanthropy rules the schools

“Private people give money to support things they’re interested in.” -- Roger Tilles, member of the Board of Regents.

Chancellor of the New York State Board of Regents, Merryl Tisch, is contracting 13 research fellows  to advise the education commissioner and the 17-member board on how to spend its $700 million Race To The Top grant. The fellows will  be paid as much as $189,000 each, in private money; to date, $4.5 million has been raised, including $1 million donated Tisch herself. She is a member of one of New York’s multi-billionaire families.

Donors to the program will include Bill Gates ($892,000), who is leading the charge to evaluate teachers, principals and schools using students’ test scores; the National Association of Charter School Administrators ($50,000) and the Robbins Foundation ($500,000), which finance charter expansion; and the Tortora Sillcox Family Foundation ($500,000), whose mission statement includes advancing “Mayor Bloomberg’s school reform agenda.”

Tisch's bankrolling of the program is another indication of a new trend in ownership society schooling where representatives of the billionaire class directly run public institutions themselves and use tax-exempt private investment, either directly, or thorough their private foundations) to do an end run about the democratic process.  Earlier this month, Mayor Bloomberg announced that he would be running a city youth program with $30 million of his own foundation money.

NYT's Michael Winerip writes:

Public education has never been so divided, between those like Dr. Tisch, Commissioner John B. King Jr. and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg who support the Obama administration’s signature Race to the Top initiative and its emphasis on standardized tests and charter schools; and dissenters on the board, who call it a Race to the Bottom and put their faith in teachers as well as traditional public schools. The Race to the Bottom folks warn that the supposedly free fellows come at a stiff political price.

Race to the Top requires states to develop student-data collection systems. Recently the Education Department awarded a $27 million no-bid contract to Wireless Generation, a company owned by Rupert Murdoch and overseen by a former New York City chancellor, Joel I. Klein. Mr. Klein is a good friend of Dr. Tisch. The state comptroller’s office is investigating whether it was proper to award the contract without bidding.