Walmart, the Walton Foundation, and New York City Schools
The conservative Walton Foundation’s education spending has been in the news quite a bit this summer — including recent announcements of a $49.5 million dollar contribution to the expansion of Teach for America and the release of a list of how the Foundation distributed over $157 million in grants to education groups in 2010.
Overall, the Foundation’s largest grants last year went almost exclusively to organizations which support vouchers and charter schools, including over $2 million dollars to two New York state organizations with the most explicit commitments to supporting for-profit corporate charter schools and weakening teachers unions — the New York Charter Schools Association and the Brighter Choice Foundation. And interestingly enough, the $1.3 million that Eva Moskowitz’s Success Charter Network received from Walton almost exactly matches the amount the Network spent on advertising her schools last year — an average of $1,300 per new student:
