Emails Show Bush-Led Organization’s ALEC-Like Role in State Policymaking - In the Public Interest

Foundation for Excellence in Education and Chiefs for Change Records Requests - In the Public Interest

Foundation for Excellence in Education and Chiefs for Change Records Requests

Emails Show Bush-Led Organization’s ALEC-Like Role in State Policymaking

Emails between the Foundation for Excellence in Education (FEE), founded and chaired by former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, and state education officials show that the foundation is writing state education laws and regulations in ways that could benefit its corporate funders. The emails, obtained through public records requests, reveal that the organization, sometimes working through its Chiefs For Change affiliate, wrote and edited laws, regulations and executive orders, often in ways that improved profit opportunities for the organization’s financial backers.

“Testing companies and for-profit online schools see education as big business,” said In the Public Interest Executive Director Donald Cohen. “For-profit companies are hiding behind FEE and other business lobby organizations they fund to write laws and promote policies that enrich the companies.”

The emails conclusively reveal that FEE staff acted to promote their corporate funders’ priorities, and demonstrate the dangerous role that corporate money plays in shaping our education policy. Correspondence in Florida, New Mexico, Maine, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, and Louisiana paint a graphic picture of corporate money distorting democracy.

Correspondence files and summaries for individual state findings are available at the links below:

Florida

Louisiana

Maine

New Mexico

Oklahoma

Rhode Island

Foundation for Excellence in Education and Chiefs for Change Records Requests - In the Public Interest

Education Matters: Greene is a fox in the hen house, joins Jeb Bush's anti-public education club

Education Matters: Greene is a fox in the hen house, joins Jeb Bush's anti-public education club

Greene is a fox in the hen house, joins Jeb Bush's anti-public education club

In case you were wondering why Greene had been such a disappointment, it turns out it is by design as she has joined Jeb Bush's Chiefs for Change, a group that pushes corporate reforms, i.e., high stakes testing, punish the teacher evaluations, and scabs as teachers, and privatization, the expansion of charter schools and vouchers. Friends, we have met the enemy, and it is Greene.

The Jacksonville Public Education Fund, i.e., a way station for Teach for America alumni, congratulated her on joining the Chiefs for Change, just proving a tiger can't change its stripes, once for privatization, always for privatization. 

From in the Public Interest,

Emails between the Foundation for Excellence in Education (FEE), founded and chaired by former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and state education officials, show that the foundation is writing state education laws and regulations in ways that could benefit its corporate funders. The emails, obtained through public records requests, reveal that the organization, sometimes working through its Chiefs For Change affiliate, wrote and edited laws, regulations, and executive orders, often in ways that improved profit opportunities for the organization’s financial backers.

“Testing companies and for-profit online schools see education as big business,” said In the Public Interest Executive Director Donald Cohen. “For-profit companies are hiding behind FEE and CONTINUE READING: Education Matters: Greene is a fox in the hen house, joins Jeb Bush's anti-public education club

Voucher tax money follows the grift, not the child: a case study - Public Enemy Number 1

Voucher tax money follows the grift, not the child: a case study - Public Enemy Number 1

Voucher tax money follows the grift, not the child: a case study

A "Sparrow Academy" experience demonstrates why the Step Up for Students voucher school "marketplace" needs a grand jury, a Grady Judd task force, and fundamental reform -- not an expansion.

I’ll be referring to the mother in this article by her initials, CS. And I’m using the pseudonym “Terry” for her son.

On April 1, CS received a strange note about her son’s “McKay” special needs voucher from the school secretary of Lakeland’s Sparrow Academy. Sparrow is a voucher school with 100 percent special needs/ESE enrollment that Terry had formerly attended. You can see some of Sparrow’s marketing content above.

Good morning, I was about to put [Terry’s] packet in the mail when the scholarship checks arrived. If it would be OK when you come to sign the check can I give you his packet?  There isn't school tomorrow, Good Friday.

Sparrow principal Vance Linholm had kicked Terry out of school via text on March 16, two weeks before that email. I’ll show you that text in a second. Since that day, CS had been struggling to get any documentation of Terry’s performance and discipline record for his 18 months or so with the school. She had been going back and forth with the secretary. Now, the school was saying it would give her a packet of his work “when you come to sign the check” — weeks after the school had dismissed Terry.

The money follows the student. LOL

“The money follows the child” is a well-worn cliche of voucher grifters like Jeb Bush and Kelli Stargel and Richard Corcoran and basically all Republican and a few Democratic CONTINUE READING: Voucher tax money follows the grift, not the child: a case study - Public Enemy Number 1

Jeb Crow, pt. 5: Reformers, you long ago stopped being the good guys -- if you ever were. Will you join us now? - Public Enemy Number 1

Jeb Crow, pt. 5: Reformers, you long ago stopped being the good guys -- if you ever were. Will you join us now? - Public Enemy Number 1

Jeb Crow, pt. 5: Reformers, you long ago stopped being the good guys -- if you ever were. Will you join us now?

Help us end Big Test/Jeb Crow. We could create equity together by rebuilding the capacity you've helped bad people destroy. You may have to swallow some pride; but what's most important to you?

Part 1: Florida's voucher segregation factories imitate pre-Brown American education - only worse

Part 2: What "Jeb Crow" has wrought for FTC, McKay, and Gardiner kids -- and everybody else

Part 3: How to shop in a Jeb Crow voucher marketplace built to cheat and grift and harm your child

Part 4: The dark story of "Failure Factories" and "Schools without Rules" shows how power dominates education journalism, narrative, and humanity

Today is the final installment of this series, which evolved in its focus as I wrote it. And that has led me to change its name from “Segregation Factories” to “Jeb Crow.” That’s the title I want readers to take with them when they leave. I appreciate everyone who has read the first four pieces. I tend to ask a lot from readers in what I write because I respect readers very much; and I know it’s my job to make the complex and long fun to read. I hope I’ve done that here. And I hope this series serves as resource for a long time to come.

Adam Miller was the Florida Department of Education’s Office of Independent Education and Parental Choice for nearly six years until July 2019. That gave him official state government oversight of both voucher schools and charter schools.

I had two substantive conversations with Miller during my time as an elected Polk County School Board member. One was strained because I was asking about the CONTINUE READING: Jeb Crow, pt. 5: Reformers, you long ago stopped being the good guys -- if you ever were. Will you join us now? - Public Enemy Number 1

CURMUDGUCATION: Jebucation Has New Five Year Plan

CURMUDGUCATION: Jebucation Has New Five Year Plan

Jebucation Has New Five Year Plan

Long long ago, when Jeb! Bush still had White House dreams, he cooked up a Floridian reform group, which then scaled up to national status as the Foundation for Excellence in Education, which has now become ExcelInEd. Headed up by Patty Levesque, the organization  remains a clearinghouse for education disruption ideas pushed by well-heeled, well-connected education amateurs. It is hard to pretend any more that these are serious people who have goals other than breaking up public education so that the private market can profit from the pieces. 

Their website is still chock full of carefully twisted stats (Florida is first in AP test participation!) and same old baloney talking points (US students rank 38th internationally in math on the PISA scores--which is of course right where they've always ranked). The message remains as always that public schools are failing and we must open education to the privateers who want access to all those sweet, sweet tax dollars. (It also includes some celebrity bad quotes).

The group is busy-- they push policy ideas out into the states and have been busy filing briefs in support of ESAs (the newest flavor of education voucher) and just generally supporting the privatization agenda whenever they can. And they put on an annual gathering of privatizers and profiteers called, seriously, EdPalooza.

Recently Levesque was interviewed by Rick Hess. As with his recent exit interview with Betsy DeVos, this is Hess being uncharacteristically soft and fuzzy, allowing his subject to spin her tale without ever questioning or challenging her story. The end result is illuminating only because it gives us an unvarnished picture of the alternate reality that Levesque wants to promote.

Levesque's account of what EIE has done is standard reformy fare-- they're "developed policy CONTINUE READING: CURMUDGUCATION: Jebucation Has New Five Year Plan