For those who need an explanation, in the old TV show featuring George Reeves as Superman, we were constantly reminded of the superhero's dedication to Truth, Justice and the American Way.
Diane Ravitch has, in her book The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education and in subsequent essays used the phrase "Billionaire Boys Club" to describe the big money interests behind school "reform" as the groups distorting American education by a variety of endeavors label their efforts.
In "All the President's Men" (book and movie) Woodward and Bernstein were admonished to "follow the money."
Barbara Miner has followed the money. She has identified the members and interests of the Billionaire Boys Club. And while this may be The American Way today, there is little truth and even less justice in what is happening to our schools.
A little background. Rethinking Schools is an important publication for those interested in knowing the reality of education. Those behind this important publication decided to push back against the organized effort to push out Waiting for "Superman" as the dominant meme in discussions about education, so they set up Not Waiting for Superman as a means to talk back to the film and support efforts by teachers, students, and parents to improve and preserve public education."
Barbara Miner has done investigative journalism for Rethinking Schools. If you have not already followed the link for the piece above the fold, its title is Ultimate $uperpower: Supersized dollars drive "Waiting for Superman" agenda and it was posted online on Wednesday, October 20.
More than a few of the reviews of the movie have made reference to some of those involved either in funding the film or in promoting it and associated events, such as NBC's Education Nation. Miner has done a service by examining in detail the funding behind the film and some of those whose ideas and organizations are promoted, most notably those of Geoffrey Canada.
Miner's piece is not that long. You can read it for free online, and if you want, there is a downloadable PDF of it as well.
In her intro, Miner offers this:
This year’s must-see documentary, Waiting for Superman is an emotional, painful look at the U.S. educational system, especially the bleak options for poor children in inner cities. Even its critics admit that it shines a light on educational disparities. At the same time, its admirers concede the film oversimplifies complicated issues, uncritically hypes charter schools and vilifies teacher unions.
What’s less obvious is how the film serves a coordinated and well-funded intervention in a polarized national debate over educational policy. What’s at stake is not just whether this debate will lead to better schools. More fundamentally, it involves public control and oversight of a vital public institution.
In education, as in so many other aspects of society, money is being used to squeeze out democracy.
As we approach an election where, due to the SCOTUS decision in Citizens United and the ability of Republicans to block the DISCLOSE Act, we are seeing a distortion of our electoral process by unidentified funding sources, we should consider ourselves fortunate that - at least currently - the efforts of those attempting to take over public education to their own ends and for their own purposes is still discoverable through examination of public records required by various laws. What is shocking is that with all the resources at their disposal no major media organization had previously done what Miner has accomplished in this article.
Miner also properly reminds us of what is happening with these words:
Two decades ago, challenges to public schools were spearheaded by groups such as the Christian Coalition, a grassroots, church-based phenomenon that sought to abolish the U.S. Department of Education and to elect religious conservatives who could take over local and state school boards. Today’s bipartisan corporate reformers tend to sidestep democracy altogether by abolishing school boards, promoting mayoral control, and hiring corporate-style CEO’s who answer to a city’s power elite. No longer preoccupied with abolishing the U.S. Department of Education, they instead use their wealth to effectively control it and to dictate reform.
This developing alliance is evident in Waiting for Superman.
There is so many interlocking connections among the participants. Bill Gates, somehow featured as an education expert in the film (which does not include an interview with a single teacher, as Miner reminds us), is connected with previous actions, such as "Get Schooled," launched by Viacom, parent of Paramount (whose Paramount Vantage division is one of the sponsors of the film) in conjunction with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation with the intent
"leverage consumer-oriented media and brands" to raise awareness about the education crisis, with the goal of supporting the work "of the broader education reform community by leveraging the creative talent, digital and media assets and resources of the country’s top media and consumer brands."
Davis Guggenheim and the film are featured on the home page of Get Schooled.
Also involved with sponsoring are Walden Media and Participant Media. Participant was founded by Jeff Skoll, whose billions come from E-Bay. It is directed by Jim Berk,
who before joining Participant in 2006 was chair and CEO of Gryphon Colleges Corporation, a for-profit chain of post-secondary schools. At Gryphon, Berk was responsible "for the formation, platform acquisition and establishment" of the for-profit schools.
And under Berk, there is some "interesting" financing and activities:
Two years ago, for instance, Participant received $250 million in financing from Imagenation, owned by the government of the oil-rich Emirate of Abu Dhabi, which is focused on transforming the country into a cultural and financial hub.
Participant has also launched TakePart.com, a "social action website" that, in its education initiatives, bemoans teacher tenure, promotes Teach for America, and idealizes charter schools as the Promised Land: "Maybe the public school in your area stinks. Maybe it’s a dropout factory staffed by burned-out teachers and you’re looking for an alternative.... What you’re looking for is a charter school.
As for Walden Media, it is the brainchild of billionaire Philip Anschutz. MIner quotes from business website Portfolio.com's portrait of the billionaire:
More than just a businessman, that’s for sure. He’s active in Christian fundamentalist and Conservative political causes, including funding a campaign to support Amendment 2, Colorado’s 2006 ballot initiative to overturn gay rights, the Institute for American Values, the Center for Marriage and Families, and Morality in Media.
She also adds this:
An old-fashioned economic and social conservative, Anschutz holds little faith in science. He is a major supporter of The Discovery Institute, which challenges Darwin’s theory of evolution and promotes a theory of intelligent design.
And for those who don't know, Senator Michael Bennet of Colorado, before he headed Denver's public schools, worked for Anschutz.
Some of the most interesting information comes from Miner's examination of the intersection of hedge funds and charter schools in New York. After noting that
(There is a more than a little irony that New York, home to one of the fiercest battles for community control of schools in the 1960s, is now a prime example of rich white billionaires controlling the education of low-income children of color.)
Miner offers this:
Take the board of trustees of the Success Charter Network. Of its nine members, seven are involved in hedge funds or investment companies. The eighth is CEO of the Institute for Student Achievement, and the ninth is a managing partner at the NewSchoolsVenture Fund, involved in both for-profit and non-profit charters across the country. No community, parent or teacher representatives sit on the Success Charter Network board of trustees
I think I need to make a point that is often overlooked. People talk about charters as if they were public schools. They are not. They may be described as public charter schools, but it would be better to identify them as
(at least partially) publicly-funded charter schools
Note the parenthetical beginning of that statement. Yes, they receive funds from public sources, but they operate very differently than do regular public schools. As the description of the board of Success demonstrates, they are not answerable to publicly elected (or appointed by elected officials) school boards. In some states individual schools are supposed to have boards including parent or community representation, but often these are controlled by the charter organization, and Imagine Schools has been cited several times for forcing off boards people it could not control, replacing them with more compliant people.
Of greater importance is the role played by hedge funds.
Hedge funds are not regulated by the SEC, and thus lack transparency in their operations.
Charter schools are the type of entrepreneurial initiative that "electrifies" hedge fund managers, according to Whitney Tilson, a finance capitalist, founding member of Teach for America and board member of the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP). "With the state providing so much of the money, outside contributions are insanely well leveraged," he told the New York Times.
Charter schools provide incredible cash flow which of course attracts the interest of hedge funds.
There is networking, such as the annual event of the Robin Hood Foundation, founded by a hedge fund manager with charter schools at the top of its agenda. Their dinner last May was Wall Street's biggest charity event, the 3,000 people present raised $88 million, and one of the hosts was NBC's Brian Williams - who, I remind people, was the moderator of the teacher event that kicked off NBC's Education Nation.
Or how about Harlem Children's Zone. It's 2008 report listed $194 million in net assets, of which $128 million was invested in a hedge fund.
Those running the charters also benefit personally.
the boards of directors of charter schools pay their charter managers extremely well. At least three charter school leaders make more than New York City’s Schools Chancellor—with Deborah Kenny of the Village Academies Network leading the way with $442,000 in compensation in 2008, according to the group’s 990 tax form.
Not a single charter network in the nation has anything close to 100,000 students. Yet many charter school leaders make much more than the superintendents of the school districts from which they draw students, some with well in excess of 100,000 students. In general, according to a study by Western Michigan University, charters and their networks spend far more on administration and management and significantly less on teachers salaries and instruction than do traditional public schools.
Not all charters are non-profit ventures. As of 2008-09, there were, according to the article, more than 725 for-profit charter schools around the country, in 31 different states.
And consider this:
And, it turns out, one of the hedge funds most involved in post-secondary education is Maverick Capital—whose founder chaired the Robin Hood Foundation fundraiser. What’s more, the same hedge fund is involved in Education Reform Now, the nonprofit arm of Democrats for Education Reform, the PAC that routinely hits up Wall Street for contributions to promote charter schools, mayoral control, and voucher programs that provide public dollars to private and religious schools and that, in essence, serves as the political arm of the pro-corporate education reformers. The group is involved in elections and campaigns across the country, with branches in eight states: Colorado, Michigan, Missouri, New York, New Jersey, Ohio, Rhode Island and Wisconsin.
There is more, but by now you should have enough of a sense of the article. I hope you are encouraged to read it.
Miner reminds us that every state has in its constitution some form of a guarantee of a free public education, but there is not a similar concern for democracy among many charter operators. She gives the example of the NewSchools Venture Fund's 10-year report about its $100 million investment in both non-profit and for profit initiatives, of which she notes
While the words "entrepreneur," "entrepreneurs" or "entrepreneurial" shows up 84 times in the report, the words "democracy" or "democratic" do not appear even once.
Let me interject here as well. One reason I am a public school teacher is that I believe in an ideal that goes back at least to Thomas Jefferson, that a main purpose of public schools is to ensure an educated citizenry prepared to participate in our democratic government. Having schools run or controlled by those who lack that commitment to democracy should be unacceptable, as unacceptable as the idea of having major government institutions controlled by those whose primary motivation is profit, self-aggrandizement and accumulation of unrestrained power. We see that in policies of administrations - Democratic as well as Republican - too beholden to the interests of Wall Street and transnational corporations. We see it in members of our national and state legislatures dependent upon the financial contributions of those sectors of our economy. We see it in the attempts to destroy any organized opposition, which is why the focus on the destruction of the unions representing over 4 million teachers.
Near the end of her piece, Miner poses the following fundamental question: Should the American people put their faith in a white billionaire boys club to lead the revolution on behalf of poor people of color?
Stop and consider that. Consider how the real educational needs of too many of our people are being used as a wedge to privatize a major portion of our commons.
Miner concludes, immediately after those words, with two brief paragraphs:
As educational historian Diane Ravitch notes, the corporate-based reform agenda undermines community and democracy and is subject "to the whim of entrepreneurs and financiers." The obsession with schools as a business, she notes, "threatens to destroy public education.
"Who will stand up to the tycoons and politicians and tell them so?"
Truth - the truth is that Waiting for "Superman" is part of a larger, concerted effort to fundamentally change American education in a fashion that removes it as a truly public endeavor and benefits a narrow slice of society at the expense of the rest of us. The truth is that this is a deliberate and organized attempt to reshape our society in a way that will be irreversible, and only further exacerbate inequities of economics - note our increasing levels of poverty, for example - and political power - where the power of dollars to dominate public discourse including during elections suppresses the ability of the public to have a full and open discussion of the issues facing our society.
Justice - I worry that the arguments of Thrasymachus as presented in Plato's Republic are beginning to dominate. While used as a strawman for the dialog and effectively dealt with by Socrates, we might remember that Thrasymachus argued that justice is the advantage of the stronger, and also injustice, if it is on a large enough scale, is stronger, freer, and more masterly than justice. Our image of justice is that she is supposed to be blind to who comes before her. But her ears are not stopped, and apparently we are to believe that it is acceptable for her to be influenced by the sound of money, be it the clinking of coins or the rustling of paper. Where is the justice that imposes an even more limited version of education upon those who lack power, money and influence while the children of the elite continue to gain advantage in their schooling, because of the wealth and/or income of their parents - who can afford homes in neighborhoods where the schools can offer a far richer educational experience, or perhaps instead go to elite non-public schools whose cost for one student can exceed the family income of a significant portion of our population?
The American Way - what does that mean? Do we truly believe in equality of opportunity and political equality, or are we kidding ourselves? How much of the American Way is the glorification of wealth and our acquiescing to the whims of those who have it? Would the America of today appeal to or repel those who helped organize this country? What of the commitment in 1776 by those signing the Declaration, embodied in these words:
And for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor.
Or should we consider the words of our governing document written in 1787, where the purposes of the new government included that we promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity - can it be the general welfare that we allow the increasing disparity in wealth to be accompanied by those having it imposing their ideas upon the rest of us?
I began with a question. I explored Barbara Miner's thorough examination of the influence of money, the interconnections of players, upon the creation of a movie intended to drive education policy in a fashion that excludes the voices of most of us.
The movie has not been a commercial success. Anyone who has viewed it outside of the previews intended to drive the discussion can attest to the emptiness of the theaters.
That should matter, but somehow it does not, not when the interconnection of media and money and politics serve to exclude other points of view, to drive political discourse in a fashion intended to impose one point of view, that will have as its legacy even more economic and political inequity in this nation.
If this is Truth, Justice and the American Way then this nation is well down a path that will for too many lead not to someplace idyllic, like Smallville, or even redeemable, like Metropolis. Instead they will pass through gates with words from Dante, Abandon all hope ye who enter here.
America's schools should be places of hope. America as a nation should be, as Lincoln said,the last best hope of earth. Hope was the winning message in our most recent presidential election.
Can we still believe in hope? For all of our people?
Or do money and power trump all, including hope?
I no longer know the answer.