The New York Times, in piece flowing with condescension for the lower classes, reports that billionaires who once gave charity funds to New York's Fund for Public Schools, have decided they aren't feeling so charitable now:
Denis Calabrese, the president of the Laura and John Arnold Foundation, which gave the fund $1.25 million during the Bloomberg years to finance a pilot teacher evaluation system, said philanthropists who supported charter schools had probably been turned off by Mr. de Blasio’s fight last year with Eva S. Moskowitz, the founder of Success Academy, the city’s biggest charter school network, over space for three of its schools. (The city ultimately gave the schools space.)
“That was the most visible thing that funders saw in terms of gauging the approach,” Mr. Calabrese said.
Peter Sloane, the chairman and chief executive of the Heckscher Foundation for Children, which gave the fund close to $1.2 million between 2006 and 2008 for a free breakfast and lunch program during the summer, said that if the fund were having difficulty raising money, “it may reflect a more basic discomfort with the education agenda of this administration.”
What a bunch of douchebags.
See, now these are the kinds of people that should make everyone understand what is the real motive behind charter schools and the 'school reform' movement. It has nothing to do with children or their education, because fuck them. What this is about is shifting the money spent on childhood education and putting it in thr hands of financiers.
The Fund pays for a variety of extracurricular activities, and even at its most flush collected about $30 million a year, which is a pittance considering New York's astonishing wealth and the extensive needs of its schoolchildren. Those who attended the glossy fundraisers and Park Avenue galas certainly like to tell the public they were doing such wonderful things for the poor children whom would never have even 30 seconds of contact with their own children, of course. But in reality all the fund is really about is keeping Billionaires plugged into super profitable charter school scam.
Luckily, the Mayor is keeping some of the programs going with public money. Soros has chipped in for boys of color as have a few others that actually care about schoolchildren and not education policy:
About half the money counted as raised this year comes from two large, multiyear grants made during the 2012 fiscal year, from the Open Society Foundations and the Wallace Foundation, the first to support programs aimed at improving outcomes for young black and Latino men, and the second for principal development.
...
It is not clear if the slowdown in fund-raising will have immediate consequences. At the board’s most recent meeting, in February, members received a list of “immediate funding needs,” which detailed more than $5 million needed for programs like Summer Quest, which combines academic work with field trips and extracurricular activities, and a new summer program devoted to science, math, technology and engineering.
Ms. Chen said that since the meeting, the Education Department had decided that Summer Quest and the science and technology program would be paid for mostly with public funds. The fund still needs to raise $86,500 by May 31 for another program, the Summer Arts Institute, a monthlong arts intensive for 350 eighth through 12th graders, but Ms. Chen said she had “soft pledges, so I’m pretty confident.”
Fine. I don't have a problem with public money funding the whole goddamn fund, and inviting regular homeowners and other taxpayers to attend the damn galas and black tie dinners. Screw these rich jerks.