The influence of Michelle Rhee and Chris Christie: Education reformers’ revolving door
New group probes connections between for-profit education corporations and federal policymakers
A new progressive education group, formed to fight business-backed bipartisan education reform consensus, announced Tuesday it was filing Freedom of Information Act requests regarding for-profit groups’ influence in federal policy. The new group, Integrity in Education, says it’s seeking communications between officials with “known connections to for-profit education corporations,” and “any ethics waivers filed for department leaders and staff.”
“When we see people who are, you know, coming from organizations that are funded by people who can profit from a policy, then serving in an executive role that allows them to carry that out, and then going back to work with the kinds of organizations and the same kinds of funding interests, then that really does concern us,” Integrity in Education executive director Sabrina Stevens told Salon.
Stevens said her group was “troubled by what we’ve seen so far” from the Obama Education Department, citing a 2011 Harvard Business Review essay by Joanne Weiss, Secretary Arne Duncan’s then-chief of staff, which stated that “the adoption of common standards and shared assessments means that education entrepreneurs will enjoy national markets where the best products can be taken to scale.”
Stevens argued that the essay suggested Weiss, who had led Obama’s Race to the Top program, “was so excited about Common Core not necessarily because of its impact on students, but because of the opportunities it opened up for the marketplace, and for for-profit companies that could quickly scale and take advantage of a national market.”
The Department of Education did not immediately respond to a morning inquiry. Addressing a National Assessment Governing Board parent summit Monday, Secretary Duncan said that