Parents whose children are enrolled in public schools across in the United States have traditionally joined the PTA—affiliated with the national Parent Teacher Association—or an unaffiliated PTO—a Parent Teacher Organization, but few would have had the opportunity to join the National Parents Union. PTAs and PTOs embody the principle that parents and teachers are together responsible for the well-being of the school’s students.
On first glance, you might notice how the name of the National Parents Union is different from the names of the more traditional parents’ organizations. First, “teachers” are not named as collaborators. And the National Parents Union is called a “union.” Those two features of the organization’s name might make you suspicious that this is some sort of parents’ group against teachers unions. And, it seems you might be correct.
The National Parents Union is an Astroturf organization founded in 2020. Astroturf organizations pretend to represent the grassroots, but instead they advocate for the interests of their big funders. It is helpful to know who these groups are, so that you can keep straight about what they stand for and who they really represent.
Maurice Cunningham, a professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, has thoroughly researched and exposed the abuses by Astroturf organizations in the past, most notably the New York dark money group, Families for Excellent Schools Action, CONTINUE READING: Why Is Cardona’s Department of Education Partnering with an Astroturf Parent Organization? | janresseger
The Koch Network is getting with the times and launching an edu-reform substack. Yay.
The substack is co-hosted by Lisa Snell, director of K-12 education policy for Stand Together, aka the Charles Koch Institute. Previously she spent 23 years as Director of Education at the Reason Foundation. Her co-host is Adam Peshek, who is part of the same Kochtopus, having arrived Jeb Bush's ExcelinEd (formerly FEE). Peshek also works at Yes, Every Kid, a rebranding of some standard reform ideas.
Their new platform is called "Learning Everywhere," and so far, they're playing all the hits. "Time to scrap the factory approach to education" is the first... issue? ...post? What are we going to call these substack things? The subheading is "Individualization, not standardization, empowers learners to thrive," which kind of captures one of the odd whiplashes in the reform movement; I'm betting that while he was at ExcelinEd, Peshek spent a lot of time advocating for the Common Core standards, the one-size-fits-all standardization that Jeb Bush backed right into a conservative buzzsaw. But standardization is no longer where it's at.
The piece starts out with an unintentionally apt story about the Air Force's discovery of the problem with averages. In the early 1950s, the Air Force was having problems with pilots who had trouble flying--turns out that a cockpit built to "average" specs doesn't actually fit anyone, so they changed their approach to cockpit seat design (you can thank this development for the adjustable seat in your car).
This is meant to be a story about how individualization is the key to everything, and I think it works, but I want to point out that while the Air CONTINUE READING: CURMUDGUCATION: More Koch Ed Privatization
By Thomas Ultican 4/8/2021
The Education Week Advertiser just notified me about an opportunity to be indoctrinated into the Cato Institute’s culture and education views. The ad proclaims, “The Cato Institute and the Sphere Education Initiative are excited to announce the return of Sphere Summit: Teaching Civic Culture Together for the Summer of 2021!” They generously offer impressive full scholarship programs for educators and administrators.
The money for all this comes from Charles Koch and associated libertarians. It is funneled through the Cato Institute which was originally called the Charles Koch Foundation, Inc. when he and fellow libertarian Edward Crane founded it in 1977. It is one of the many organizations and businesses that Charles Koch uses to advance his personal interests which are often referred to as the Kochtopus.
Ryan Bourne – According to libertarianism.org, he is “the R. Evan Scharf Chair for the Public Understanding of Economics at Cato.” Bourne writes about fiscal policy, inequality, minimum wages, infrastructure spending and rent control.He is a contributor to the Daily Telegraph and the UK website ConservativeHome.
Arnold Kling – A Senior Affiliated Scholar at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University to which the Charles Koch Foundation contributed a total of $29,156,700 in 2017 and 2018 (EIN: 48-0918408). He specializes in housing-finance policy, financial institutions, macroeconomics, and the inside workings of America’s federal financial institutions. He also is an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute in Washington, DC.
Clark Neily – He is vice president for criminal justice at the Cato Institute. Neily served as co-counsel in the District of Columbia v. Heller case in which the CONTINUE READING:
Maurice Cunningham is a professor political science at the University of Massachusetts who has developed a unique talent for exposing the workings of Dark Money in education. The usual source of Dark Money is the multi-billionaire Walton Family, but they are not alone. In this post, he reviews the remarkable story told by the media in Rhode Island. A group of ordinary moms got together to demand charter schools. They set up a website and commissioned a poll done by President Biden’s pollster. Where did the money come from? The media forgot to ask that question. The media’s lack of curiosity about the funding behind this group of moms is curious.
On February 25, five “frustrated mothers” organized to raise money for their passion: charter schools.
What we see here is quite common, a front purporting to be parents but actually funded and acting for wealthy CONTINUE READING: Maurice Cunningham: How Did Ordinary Moms in Rhode Island Get the Money to Pay for a Poll? Hint: Dark Money | Diane Ravitch's blog
Maurice Cunningham watches the flow of “Dark Money” into the privatization of public funding for schools. A professor of political science, he has recently followed the money trail of the “National Parents Union,” which he points out is neither “national,” nor “parents,” nor a “union.”
NPU markets itself as if it were a “grassroots” group, but it is funded by the Walton Family Foundation and Charles Koch and enjoys the high-priced assistance of Mercury Communications LLP to get its anti-public school, anti-union message into the national media. Mercury currently represents Teach for America and at one time represented Eva Moskowitz (who fired them).
With this expensive marketing, NPU presents itself as an authentic voice of parents.
Cunningham writes:
Here’s an example of the coverage from the New York Times: “National Parents Union, a collection of 200 advocacy organizations across 50 states representing parents from communities of color.” But there is no CONTINUE READING: Maurice Cunningham: The Marketing of the “National Parents Union” | Diane Ravitch's blog
Two of the important props of the far right in America are Christian conservatives and economic royalists like the Waltons and Charles Koch. Those ties are becoming evident in school privatization including in financial support the Massachusetts Parents United has offered to a Christian right group and in National Parents Union’s funding from a Koch-Walton joint venture that partners with a far right Christian home schooling network.
Here’s the Massachusetts Parents United $1,000 “sponsorship” from its Form 990 tax return for 2017:
Here are some headlines about National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference and its leader Pastor Samuel Rodriguez from Right Wing Watch:
Samuel Rodriguez: New General in Global Anti-Gay Culture War
Samuel Rodriguez: Getting Conservative SCOTUS Trumps Immigration Reform
The Preachers on Trump’s Inaugural Podium (Pastor Rodriguez prayed at Trump’s inaugural).
Samuel Rodriguez Says Trump’s Supreme Court Will Save Religious Liberty
Sam Rodriguez Has ‘Disagreements’ With Harsh Anti-Immigrant Bill but Calls It a ‘Positive Development’ (also identifying Rodriguez as a “promoter of the Libre Initiative,” the Koch political outreach program to Latinos).
Samuel Rodriguez Joins Bid to Rebuild GOP Power in California
In short, Samuel Rodriguez and his National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference are cogs in the religious right’s alliance with the Republican Party.
The religious right-economic right connection is a component of conservative political power, as Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson recently argued in Let Them Eat Tweets: How the Right Rules in an Age of Extreme Inequality. The Waltons and Charles Koch fund MPU’s allied organization National Parent Union through a joint venture called the VELA Education Fund. VELA announced a grant to NPU on August 3, 2020, NPU having established a track record of nearly seven months. VELA has also given CONTINUE READING: Massachusetts Parents United, National Parents Union, and the Christian Right
If you have a few minutes to do some research, you might wonder about the connections among these three links:
First is from the extreme rightwing group called the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), funded by DeVos, Charles Koch, and major corporations. ALEC has 2,000 members who are state legislators. They get a free trip every year to a posh resort, where ALEC gives them model legislation to introduce in their state to promote the libertarian, anti-regulation, anti-government agenda.
Second is an article in the conservative journal Education Next about “reimagining civic education for the digital age.” It promotes the organization iCivics, a digital platform to teach civics.
Third, read about the award by the Trump Administration’s National Endowment for the Humanities and Betsy DeVos’s U.S. Department of Education of $650,000 to the curriculum and advocacy group iCivics and several university partners, to design a CONTINUE READING: A Warning: Who Is Paying for Your State’s Civics Courses? | Diane Ravitch's blog
If you have not read Duke Professor Nancy MacLean’s Democracy in Chains, you should. I reviewed it for the New York Review of Books here. It describes in great detail how the Koch brothers created an academic foundation for their extremist libertarian views. In this paper, MacLean goes into new detail about the workings of the Koch network and its efforts to undermine democracy. The Koch network knows that it does not have popular support so it has developed ways to “work around” the will of the majority. Currently, its major project is to block any effort to confront climate change.
The paper is titled “Since We Are Greatly Outnumbered: Why and How the Koch Network Uses Disinformation to Thwart Democracy.” The essay appears in a publication called The Disinformation Age, published by Cambridge University Press.
Thanks to “Unkoch My Campus” for bringing this paper to a large audience.
The Michigan Civil Rights Commission has released a 62-page report describing inequities in Michigan’s K-12 education system and detailing specific recommendations for action that policy makers and educators can implement to make achieving educational equity a priority in all Michigan schools.
The report is the culmination of a series of public hearings and a year-long examination of disparities in K-12 education in Michigan. From May 2018 through the end of March 2019, the Commission held five public hearings around the state and heard from dozens of subject matter experts, school administrators, teachers, parents and students on the ways Michigan is falling short in its obligation to effectively educate all its children.
“This Commission believes that an adequate education is the key to unlocking a lifetime of opportunities and also is a basic civil right,” said Stacie Clayton, Chair of the Michigan Civil Rights Commission. “We learned during our education hearings that not all children receive the kind of education they deserve as their birthright. We urge policy makers, educators and other stakeholders across the state to view this report as a roadmap they can follow to help schools achieve educational equity and give all Michigan children – regardless of household income, race, residency or ability -- the education they need to lead productive and fulfilling lives.”
The Commission became increasingly concerned about educational disparities in 2016 during their examination of the racial implications in the causes of, and response to, the Flint water crisis. What they learned during these hearings led directly to their decision in 2018 to launch an exploration of inequity in Michigan’s education system.
Through the hearing process, Commissioners became increasingly aware that the effectiveness of public school systems is directly determined by the racial and economic makeup of the community. They also found that instead of a cohesive, statewide education system, Michigan is made up of independent systems that operate differently and are resourced in a variety of ways, leading to disparities between high-performing districts and those considered “failing.”
Specific obstacles identified to equity in education include:
To achieve equity, the report says public school systems must recognize differences and distribute resources based on an understanding of how differences impact equitable access. They must also implement strategies to break down biases and barriers to equity, including:
The report concludes with a list of recommendations for action, starting with the expansion of the Council for Government and Education on Equity and Inclusion, an MDCR-led initiative, to include representatives of the Michigan Department of Education, and establish the Council as the entity responsible for implementing and overseeing the following additional recommendations:
Arizona Governor Doug Ducey, who is often called a Koch puppet because the Koch network donated heavily to his elections, denounced Proposition 208, which would increase taxes to raise teachers’ salaries. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos stood by his side, presumably pleased with his attack on higher wages for the state’s teachers. He made his remarks while visiting a charter school and lauding charter schools for innovation.
Gov. Doug Ducey delivered a scathing rebuke of Proposition 208, the Invest in Education Act, while visiting a school on Thursday with U.S Education Secretary Betsy DeVos.
The proposal on November’s ballot would add a 3.5% surcharge on income tax for individuals with taxable income of $250,000 or more or couples making $500,000 or more. The revenue would go largely to raising school staff salaries.
“It would make us the equivalent of Bernie Sanders’ Vermont, or New York state or Washington, D.C.,” he said in response to a question about U.S. Sen. Bernie CONTINUE READING: Arizona: Gov. Ducey Blasts Referendum to Increase $$$ for Education | Diane Ravitch's blog
