The Oligarchs’ Education Propaganda Distributor

By Thomas Ultican 3/23/2023

In 2015, the Washington Post reported on the founding of The 74 by former CNN news anchor Campbell Brown along with Michael Bloomberg’s education advisor Romy Drucker. At the time, Brown who supported charter schools, opposed teacher tenure and was convinced schools were full of sexual predators stated,  

“I agree we have a point of view; it’s a ­nonpartisan point of view. It’s a clear point of view, and that is that the public education system, in its current form, is broken, and there’s an urgency to fix it.”

The billionaires funding Brown’s startup included the Dick and Betsy DeVos Family Foundation, the Walton Family Foundation, the Doris and Donald Fisher Fund, and Bloomberg Philanthropies, all of which have opposed teachers unions and supported various school-privatization initiatives. From the beginning The 74 has been a mouthpiece for billionaires out to end publicly financed education.

Hit Piece on a Majority Minority City’s Schools

In February, The 74 published an attack piece on the Stockton Unified School District (SUSD).

Stockton is a small California city of about 322,000 people and is one of America’s most diverse cities. The US census bureau reports the demographics as 44.9% Hispanic, 20.9% Asian, 18.1% White and 11.3 % Black. The city has a 16.3% poverty rate; however, 82% of their 39,800 charter and public school students live in poverty. In Stockton schools, the Hispanic population accounts for 70% of the students while all other demographic groups contribute single digit percentages to the total.

In their headline, The 74 labels SUSD dysfunctional. However, a quick look at the California school dashboard shows a few things that one would not expect in a dysfunctional district. While dealing with chronic absenteeism, a large population of English language learners (24.6%) and a lot of students living in poverty (83.9%), SUSD’s graduation rate is over 83%, they meet all five of the basic standards for California schools and their English language learners are making above average progress. Are their students performing as well as students attending schools in upper middle class neighborhoods? No, but these schools are hardly dysfunctional. In fact, they seem to be achieving against all odds and in the face of an ongoing tycoon financed takeover bid.

This scathing article from the billionaire’s propaganda rag is just the latest in the ongoing raid on public education in Stockton. In 1999, Reed Hastings and his partner Don Shalvey opened Stockton’s first charter school, the Aspire Port City Academy.

Don Shalvey founded California’s first charter school in 1994. When Bill and Hillary Clinton came to Stanford in 1997 to enroll their daughter they held a charter school promotional meeting at Shalvey’s San Carlos Charter Learning Center (Left Behind page 249). It was there that Reed Hastings and Don Shalvey met. Soon after, the pair teamed up to establish Aspire as America’s first charter management organization. There are now ten Aspire schools in Stockton.

In 2018, Stockton Mayor Michael Tubbs who was heavily influenced by Michael Bloomberg pushed the school board to hire disgraced former LA Superintendent John Deasy. This was the beginning of SUSD’s financial problems. In the two years Deasy was in charge, the formerly financially stable district had a negative cash flow of $174 million. Much of this deficit were caused by a hiring binge.

Deasy resigned under a corruption cloud in 2020. That same year, Don Shalvey who went to work for Bill Gates in 2009 left the Gates foundation and became leader of San Joaquin A Plus Inc. (A+) (non-profit tax ID 51-0536117).

Along with Don’s hiring, Helen Schwab, President of the The Charles and Helen Schwab Foundation (Tax ID 94-3374170) gifted A+ $400,000. This low profile organization suddenly became a player in Stockton politics and school policy.  A+ went from reporting $6,000 total revenue in 2019 to $3,176,833 in 2020. Unfortunately, the IRS is backlogged and the complete A+ 2020 form 990 with Shalvey’s salary listed is still not available.

The 74 features Shalvey’s completely unfounded and damaging statement that “I think Stockton Unified might be the worst system in the country.”

In addition to A+, it appears that the Community Foundation of San Joaquin has also become a champion of privatizing public schools. In 2019, The City Fund (Tax ID 82-4938743) gifted them $298,960 and Bill Gates (Tax ID 56-2618866) has also been granting them funds. In their latest tax filing (Tax ID 26-1476916), the foundation lists Don Shalvey’s wife Sue Shalvey as a board member.

The 74 contemptuously states, “But almost three years after the first relief dollars began flowing to school districts, Stockton has spent only a fourth of the $241 million it received, overcome by dysfunction in its central office and deep mistrust among board members.”

While it appears that there is mistrust amongst the board members between a former pro-Deasy faction and a newer anti-charter school faction, the board is functioning. The dysfunction at the central office was created by John Deasy when he did things like get rid of all senior management in the financial department and replace them with new hires. This destroyed critical institutional memory.

In their extremely biased article, The 74 also states,

“The pandemic was another blow to the region’s economy. Then, just as schools were trying to recover, separate grand juries in 2021 and 2022 issued scathing reports that didn’t inspire confidence in the district’s ability to manage a huge federal windfall.”

There are two internet based news sources in Stockton, the 209 Times with the most readers and Recordnet. Recordnet seems aligned with Stockton’s downtown business interests who appear to have forced these two grand jury investigations and the 209 Times looks like a muckraking publication focused on shenanigans by what they call the “Stockton Cabal.”

Concerning these two grand jury reports the 209 Times headline read “Biased ‘Grand Jury’ Issues Another Attack on SUSD” while the Recordnet headline was “Grand jury finds Stockton Unified trustees failed as district leaders in scathing report.” The fact is the reports were an attack on SUSD but contrary to the 209 Times reporting there was some valuable information there. However, the reports were not scathing condemnations of the SUSD trustees. The information presented did shed a bad light on Superintendents John Deasy and his replacement John Ramirez Jr.

For example, the 2022 Grand Jury report noted

“Selection of the current CBO was made contrary to Board Policy (BP) 4211.2. The CBO was hired without a search, screening process or interviews.” (Report Page 11)

Board member Ray Zulueta said that he assumed when Human Resources brought them a hire recommendation that they had correctly followed the process. Reading through the two reports it appears that the school superintendents who were pushed on the board by local elites were incompetent and had separate agendas beyond running the schools. Before the 2022 report came out, the trustees apparently forced John Ramirez Jr. to resign as superintendent. It is alleged that he was spending more time in Don Shalvey’s A+ office than he was in his own office at the district.

There were no smoking guns in either report and no one was charged with corrupt behavior.

There was one interesting lie in The 74 attack piece, “Since 2017, enrollment has declined from about 44,000 to 36,000 students, contributing to anxiety in a community where over 3,000 people work for the district.”

The following attendance chart was created using data from the California Department of education.

In the last eight years, there has been no change in enrollment anywhere close to equaling an 8,000 student decline. Even with the billionaire funded attack machine operating, SUSD has had an extremely stable enrollment. This is pretty good evidence that this is not a dysfunctional district. The classrooms must be functioning well.

After getting rid of Superintendent John Ramirez Jr. the trustees settled on Dr. Traci E. Miller as interim superintendent. She is a 25-year veteran of SUSD where she has served as middle school counselor, high school counselor, head counselor, Assistant Principal, Principal, and Director. From my perch 450 miles away, it appears she is doing a credible professional job. Isn’t it time to make her the permanent superintendent and bring stability to district leadership?

The 74 hit piece goes on to make several more bogus claims in an effort to denigrate the district. They all range from nitpicking to baloney.

Neoliberal and Libertarian Billionaires Use The 74 to Advance Their Agenda

The graphic above comes from The 74’s website and depicts their financial supporters. It shows billionaires and entities known to be working to privatize or end public education.

I asked ChatGPT, “Is The 74 a biased education publication?” The bot replied,

“As an AI language model, I am programmed to remain neutral and avoid making judgments on political or ideological biases. However, I can provide some general information about The 74, an American news organization that focuses on education policy and issues.

“The 74 describes itself as a non-profit, non-partisan news outlet that seeks to provide in-depth coverage of education issues affecting students and families across the United States. It was founded in 2015 by journalist Campbell Brown, with funding from various philanthropic organizations.

“While The 74 aims to maintain a neutral stance on political and ideological issues, it has been criticized by some for promoting a conservative or pro-charter school agenda. Some critics have pointed to the organization’s ties to conservative donors and its coverage of issues such as school choice and teacher unions as evidence of bias.

“However, others have defended The 74’s coverage as fair and balanced, and argue that the organization provides an important voice in the education policy debate.”

I am not programmed to remain neutral. The 74 is a propaganda rag supported by unbelievably rich people who are a menace. Some of them are neoliberals that have an almost religious belief in free enterprise, business management and the superiority of the market place. Others are libertarians who believe there should be no commons, no social services and no public education. The 74 is a biased publication that they finance out of their spare change.

If we desire democratic governance and quality public education, it is past time to tax billionaires out of existence.

Tags: Campbell Brown, Don Shalvey, John Deasy, Reed Hastings, Romy Drucker, Stockton Unified School District, The 74