Silicon Valley Mogul Financed California Lawsuit to End Teacher Tenure
Teacher tenure was found to be unconstitutional today in California, with a judge ruling that students are "unfairly, unnecessarily disadvantaged" by the practice. On its face, Vergara v. California was the case of nine students fighting a practice designed to protect educators' academic freedom that now occasionally entrenches terrible teachers. However, the case was part of a larger shell game orchestrated by one Silicon Valley tech mogul.
Students Matter, the non-profit that funded the multi-million dollar suit, is founded and primarily funded by David Welch. Welch made his fortune in fiber optics, first serving as CTO of SDL when the company went through a $41 billion merger with JDS Uniphase in 2000 and later founding Infinera.
In 2010, Welch founded Students Matter, claiming his "passion for public education arises from his roles both as a parent of three school-aged children and as an employer in two highly successful start-ups in Silicon Valley." Students Matter was unique, as an investigation byCapital & Main discovered, because Welch "had virtually no background in education policy or any direct financial stake in the multibillion-dollar, for-profit education and standardized testing industries."
However, Welch quickly cozied up to organizations and individuals that work to privatize America's once-great education system:
Yet Welch and his nonprofit play a special role among a group of other nonprofits and personalities whose legal actions, school board campaigns, op-eds and overlapping advisory boards suggest a highly synchronized movement devoted to taking control of public education. The David and Heidi Welch Foundation, for example, has given to NewSchools Venture Fund, where Welch has been an "investment partner" and which invests in both charter schools and the cyber-charter industry, and has been linked to the $9 billion-per-year textbook and testing behemoth Pearson. Welch has also supported Michelle Rhee's education-privatizing lobby StudentsFirst, most recentlySilicon Valley Mogul Financed California Lawsuit to End Teacher Tenure: