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Wednesday, July 18, 2018

Billionaires are boosting charter schools across America - CBS News

Billionaires are boosting charter schools across America - CBS News

Billionaires are boosting charter schools across America



SEATTLE - Dollar for dollar, the beleaguered movement to bring charter schools to Washington state has had no bigger champion than billionaire Bill Gates.
The Microsoft (MSFT) co-founder gave millions of dollars to see a charter school law approved despite multiple failed ballot referendums. And his private foundation not only helped create the Washington State Charter Schools Association but has at times contributed what amounts to an entire year's worth of revenues for the 5-year-old charter advocacy group.
All told, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has given about $25 million to the charter group that is credited with keeping the charter schools open after the state struck down the law and then lobbying legislators to revive the privately run, publicly funded schools.
It's an extreme example of how billionaires are influencing state education policy by giving money to state-level charter support organizations to sustain, defend and expand the charter schools movement across the country.
Since 2006, philanthropists and their private foundations and charities have given almost half a billion dollars to those groups, according to an Associated Press analysis of tax filings and Foundation Center data. The review looked at 52 groups noted by a U.S. Department of Education website as official charter school resources in the 44 states plus Washington, D.C., that currently have a charter law, as well as the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools.















Most of the money has gone to the top 15 groups, which received $425 million from philanthropy. The Walton Family Foundation, run by the heirs to the Walmart (WMT) fortune, is the largest donor to the state charter advocates, giving $144 million to 27 groups.
"We ought to be paying more attention to who these organizations are, and what kind of vision they have, and what drives them. A lot of these organizations have extraordinary influence, and it's often pretty quiet influence," said Jon Valant, an education policy expert at Brookings.
Charters aren't subject to the same rules or standards governing traditional public schools, but they're embraced by Gates and other philanthropists who see them as investments in developing better and different ways to educate those who struggle in traditional school systems, particularly children in poor, urban areas. Studies on academic success are mixed.
The charter support groups, as nonprofits, are typically forbidden from involvement in political campaigns, but the same wealthy donors who sustain them in many cases directly channel support to pro-charter candidates through related political action committees or their own contributions.
In one indication of the philanthropy's success in asserting its priorities, Georgia's lieutenant governor was recorded saying he was motivated to support school choice laws to curry the Walton foundation's favor for his gubernatorial campaign. The Walton family has denied any connection to the candidate.
Nationwide, about 5 percent of students attend charters. They have become a polarizing political issue amid criticism from some, notably teachers unions, that they drain resources from cash-starved schools and erode the neighborhood schooling model that defines communities.
The Walton foundation notes the groups it funds have resources that often pale in comparison to the war chests of teachers unions, the usual foes in their battles over state education policy.

"The philanthropic support is essential for a small group of schools" that represents disadvantage families without their own political power, said Robin Lake, director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education, a University of Washington-affiliated think tank that has in the past been funded by the Gates Foundation to do work supporting charter schools.















But John Rogers, an education policy expert and UCLA professor, said it's a problem for democracy that billionaires who back a certain model of education reform can go toe-to-toe with a critical mass of professional teachers.
"A handful of billionaires who are advancing their vision of education reform is very different than having 200,000-some odd teachers across the state representing their understanding of public education through their union representation," Rogers said.

In California, the Waltons are the biggest backers of the powerhouse California Continue reading: Billionaires are boosting charter schools across America - CBS News




Big Education Ape: U.S. Treasury Restricts Donor Disclosure Requirement for Some Nonprofit Groups - WSJ - http://bigeducationape.blogspot.com/2018/07/us-treasury-restricts-donor-disclosure.html

Right-Wing Money Is Greasing the Anti-Teachers Union Skids | The Range: The Tucson Weekly's Daily Dispatch

Right-Wing Money Is Greasing the Anti-Teachers Union Skids | The Range: The Tucson Weekly's Daily Dispatch

Right-Wing Money Is Greasing the Anti-Teachers Union Skids


Teachers, here's a pop quiz. How will you receive information trying to convince you to drop ties with the teachers union? (a) Email. (b) Snail mail. (c) Phone call. (d) Knock on your door. The correct answer is (e) Any or all of the above.

The Public School Wrecking Crew scored a huge win when the Supreme Court decided public-employee unions cannot make nonmembers contribute to collective bargaining in its recent Janus v. American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees decision. The ink was barely dry on the written arguments when right wing money began pouring into campaigns to persuade teachers to walk away from their unions.



Right-leaning think tanks and advocacy organizations have placed anti-union ads on Google and social media and sent targeted emails to teachers across the country. Some plan to go door to door to reach educators during the summer.
One group is trying to uses states' open records laws to get the email addresses of union members to make targeting even easier.

Two groups spearheading the campaign are The Mackinac Center and The Freedom Foundation. Both have strong libertarian, "free market" leanings. That puts them in the same ideological camp, and funding stream, as UA's "Freedom Center," which created the high school course, Philosophy 101: Ethics, Economy, and Entrepreneurship, currently on hold in TUSD, though it's still being taught in other local school districts as well as charter and private schools. (To give you the complete buzz word, dog whistle experience, the center's full name is the Center for the Philosophy of Freedom. It is housed in the recently created Department of Political Economy & Moral Science.)




Let's look at the two groups funding the anti-union push.

First, the Mackinac Center. Based in Michigan, it's one of the largest state-level "think tanks" in the country. It receives direct and indirect funding from the Koch brothers, making it a sucker on the Kochtopus, the gigantic, many-tentacled denizen of the Dark Money deep. It has also received Continue reading: 
Right-Wing Money Is Greasing the Anti-Teachers Union Skids | The Range: The Tucson Weekly's Daily Dispatch




Safety over privacy? RealNetworks to offer free facial recognition technology to K-12 schools – GeekWire

Safety over privacy? RealNetworks to offer free facial recognition technology to K-12 schools – GeekWire

Safety over privacy? RealNetworks to offer free facial recognition technology to K-12 schools
Image result for U.S. schools, but also comes amid a groundswell of concern about the ethical and privacy implications of AI-powered facial recognition technology.


RealNetworks, the Seattle company best known for pioneering streaming media in the early days of the web, is deploying a surprising new product today. The company says it will offer a new facial recognition technology, called SAFR, for free to K-12 schools to help upgrade their on-site security systems.

SAFR can be used with the same cameras that traditional surveillance systems to recognize students, staff, and people visiting schools. RealNetworks says that in addition to security, the tool can also help with record-keeping and “campus monitoring.” The technology is compatible with Mac, iOS, Android and Windows.



RealNetworks CEO Rob Glaser in 2017. (GeekWire Photo / Nat Levy)


“SAFR from RealNetworks is highly accurate facial recognition software powered by artificial intelligence,” the company explains on the SAFR site. “It works with existing IP cameras and readily available hardware to match faces in real-time. Schools can stay focused and better analyze potential threats such as expelled students, and those who pose a threat from within and outside the school.”
The offer follows a series of fatal shootings at U.S. schools, but also comes amid a groundswell of concern about the ethical and privacy implications of AI-powered facial recognition technology.
RealNetworks says the system includes privacy protections and doesn’t seek to identify people by race.
To use SAFR, schools will keep a database with photographs of people authorized to be on campus. If the system doesn’t recognize a face, it notifies a member of the staff. The facial data and images SAFR collects are encrypted as a privacy protection and remain in the school’s possession. The technology is designed to work even in rural schools with limited internet connectivity.
Schools in the U.S. and Canada can download and use SAFR for free starting Wednesday. One Seattle elementary school has already implemented SAFR as part of a pilot program: University Child Development School is using the technology to identify authorized staff and parents and automatically grant them entry.
RealNetworks CEO Rob Glaser is the reason that particular elementary school came to pilot the software. His three children are students. When RealNetworks began developing facial recognition technology, Glaser asked the school about its security measures at the front gate. He found out that they used a security camera monitored by a person and asked if the school would like to test out software to do the job automatically.
The school agreed, and the pilot went smoothly, Glaser said in an interview with GeekWire.
“A lot of the trials were very successful but this one was particularly remarkable for two reasons,” Glaser said. “One, the community loved it and embraced it and it was everything we would’ve wanted in terms of a happy customer, a vibrant community embracing it. That all felt right. Then after about two or three months into the trial, the horrible tragedy of Parkland happened … and the whole question of school  Continue reading: Safety over privacy? RealNetworks to offer free facial recognition technology to K-12 schools – GeekWire

Big Education Ape: Chinese school's facial recognition scans students every 30 seconds - Business Insider - http://bigeducationape.blogspot.com/2018/07/chinese-schools-facial-recognition.html
Facial recognition China
Parent Coalition for Student Privacy -https://www.studentprivacymatters.org/
Parent Coalition for Student Privacy

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Learn how to protect your child's sensitive data.
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Parent Coalition for Student Privacy - https://www.studentprivacymatters.org/