CURMUDGUCATION: The New Koch Ed Reform Rebranding Astroturducken

CURMUDGUCATION: The New Koch Ed Reform Rebranding Astroturducken

The New Koch Ed Reform Rebranding Astroturducken

The billionaire Charles Koch has launched another adventure in astroturf, this time aimed at rebranding ed reform while still pushing reformy ideas, playing the reform greatest hits and-- well, it's a little unclear what else is going on. But every layer is more special than the last.

This has been coming for a while. Back in January Koch announced that they were going to  increase their level of meddling involvement with K-12 causes. You may have caught an inkling back at the end of June when EdWeek noted that the Kochs were going to team up with the Waltons to throw a pile of money-- a great big honking pile of money-- at incubating schools, programs and what-have-them across the country. In that same article, EdWeek noted the creation of Yes Every Kid, "a group that intends to find common ground between groups that typically have disagreed vehemently over issues such as labor protections and school funding." It's a social-welfare organization, which means it can lobby and work on political campaigns and ballot measures.

Looks totally real

This week, AP's Sally Ho put out a very widely reprinted story that looks at Yes Every Kid in more detail, and those details seem like a grab bag of all the best reform details, right up to the use of "task" as a verb:

The Yes Every Kid group is tasked with monitoring statehouses where it can be influential on school choice, said Stacy Hock, a Texas philanthropist who is among hundreds of donors each contributing at least $100,000 annually to the Koch network's wide-ranging agenda.

Hock and officials with the Koch network said it's too early to provide specifics about what policies the group is pushing.

"The priority is to go where there is a political appetite to be open to policy change and lean in there," said Hock, who also leads the Texans for Education Opportunity advocacy group that supports charters and other education alternatives.

Texas, West Virginia and Florida are high on their list, apparently. Randi Weingarten calls the whole thing a publicity stunt, saying "To date, the Koch strategy has been to profit from and compete with public schools, while trying to 'defund and defang' anyone who got in their way." Ho also talked to CONTINUE READING: CURMUDGUCATION: The New Koch Ed Reform Rebranding Astroturducken