How Can Wal-Mart REALLY Help Improve Our Schools?
How Can Wal-Mart REALLY Help Improve Our Schools? by Peter Dreier
Last month, the Walton Family Foundation, led by heirs to the Wal-Mart fortune, announced an $8 million grant to StudentsFirst, headed by Michelle Rhee, the ousted chancellor of the Washington, D.C. school system. This grant came on top of the $3 million the foundation had already donated to the group since 2010.
Rhee’s tempestuous tenure as head of the DC schools between 2007 and 2010 left behind a legacy of alleged cheating on standardized tests, a demoralized teaching staff with high turnover, and an increased achievement gap between low- and upper-income children. Soon after she left that job, she started StudentsFirst, which is now based in Sacramento, and has operations in 18 states. It recently donated $350,000 to LAUSD school board races, backing candidates who support its agenda of high-stakes testing, private charter schools, and school vouchers. Nicholas Lemann’s devastating profile of Rhee in the current issue of the New Republic exposes her misguided and hypocritical educational agenda.
Rhee has become the public face and top salesperson of a growing corporate-backed effort to privatize America’s public schools. They view Los Angeles as ground-zero. Some of America’s most powerful corporate plutocrats — including Microsoft founder Bill Gates, LA business mogul Eli Broad, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, media mogul Rupert Murdoch, and the Walton family — are using LA’s schools as a laboratory for their view of educational “reform.” They think public schools should be run like corporations, with teachers as
