Who’s Behind the Big Money Takeover of San Diego County Schools?
Rick Shea versus Walmart and Company
By Dr. Gregg Robinson, President, San Diego County Board of Education,Dr. Jim Miller, Vice President, American Federation of Teachers Guild, Local 1931
Somebody is trying to buy control of San Diego’s education system and few in the local media seem to have noticed until Sunday’s San Diego Union-Tribune finally covered it. The Voice of San Diego has been quiet on this front, perhaps because, as the SDUT article reports, its co-founder Buzz Woolley is part of the action. He and his fellow corporate education reformers have San Diego in their crosshairs and are spending big money to drive their agenda.
As Jeff Bryant recently reported at OurFuture.org, there is a huge amount of money behind this new corporate effort to “disrupt” public education:
As education historian Diane Ravitch explains on her personal blog, “Public education in California is under siege by people and organizations who want to privatize the schools, remove them from democratic control, and hand them over to the charter industry.”
Ravitch points to Eli Broad, who made his money in the home building and insurance industries, Reed Hastings, co-founder and CEO of Netflix, and Michael Milken, of junk bond industry fame, as members in a group of “billionaires” who push legislation to expand charter schools and limit regulation of the industry.
The big money, top-down campaign to expand charter schools in California is well documented in a recent series of articles by Capital & Main. One article in the series adds the Walton Family Foundation, the philanthropy related to the family that owns the Walmart retail chain, to the list of charter “power brokers” who invest billions in creating and expanding these schools.
Big money from these foundations and philanthropists, according to the report, pours into the charter industry to direct fund charter schools, pay for “academic studies” that promote charters, and create “grassroots” organizations that make charter school advocacy look like a parent-led movement.
To influence policy, these same organizations finance “powerful political lobbies such as the California Charter Schools Association (CCSA)” and “contribute millions of dollars to school board elections in order to replace those perceived to be anti-charter with pro-charter board members, as seen in recent elections Who’s Behind the Big Money Takeover of San Diego County Schools? - San Diego Free Press:
