Archive | February, 2024

Stalled California Charter Schools

29 Feb

By Thomas Ultican 2/29/2024

In California, from 2021 to 2023, 31 new charter schools opened but 63 closed. Since inception in 1994, charter school enrollment grew ever year until 2021. For the first time, charter school enrollment fell. This December, KIPP SoCal announced they were closing three of their 23 Los Angeles County schools. Alliance for College-Ready Public Schools and Green Dot Public Schools have also closed LA area schools.

The charter industry is struggling…

California State Enrollment Data

Los Angeles Unified School District

Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) charter petitions used to arrive by the dozens but there were none this year. The 74 reported:

“Enrollment in the schools peaked in 2021, when the city’s charters enrolled nearly 168,000 students. Since then admissions have declined by nearly 11%, although not as fast as district schools.”

The “although not as fast as district schools” remark is disingenuous. In 2016, LAUSD enrollment was 639,337 and by 2023, had fallen to 538,295. This was a drop of almost 16% but over a much longer time period.

Since 2019, student enrollment in California declined by 5% and in Los Angeles County, the drop was 8.5% (California Data).

Howard Blum, reporting for the LA Times, stated:

“Twenty years ago, L.A. Unified had close to 740,000 students and was building schools as fast as it could. District-operated schools currently enroll about 420,000 students — a decline caused by reduced immigration, families moving out of L.A., lower birthrates — and, until recently, the growth of charter schools.”

Carol Burris and Network for Public Education (NPE) published Broken Promises in 2020. A stunning find was that almost 50% of charter schools had closed their doors within the first 15 years of operation (Broken Page 19).

About 50% of Charter Schools Closures by Year 15

Parents, sold a story about superior charter schools, often end up dismayed. A typical response to the closing of KIPP Poder comes from parent Gina Alonzo:

“I was very angry — very, very upset — disappointed, because we didn’t get a warning. We didn’t get a notification of what was going on — the issues that they were having.”

“We were grown as a community here. Everybody knows each other. This is all my son knows. So I’m upset and I’m thinking about the trauma that this is going to cause him.”

Besides new state policies and falling student populations, people in the choice community see the LAUSD board as hostile to charter schools. In 2022, Rocio Rivas won the district-2 seat in a tightly fought battle, not called until two weeks after the election. With a pro-public school board member, replacing termed-out Monica Garcia, the board shifted away from school choice.

In 2017, billionaires (Hastings, Broad, Rock, Fisher and, multiple Waltons) poured huge dollars into the LAUSD election, outspending their opponents 2 to 1 in America’s most expensive school board election ever. They spent more than $6 million in just the 2020 district-7 race to maintain control of the board. The 2022 results flipped the script and billionaires lost control.

John Angeli is executive director of the Los Angeles Coalition for Excellent Public Schools, a group that represents some of the city’s largest charter operators. He points out that in 2024, two incumbent school board members are running for reelection with two retiring board members, leaving open seats. Angeli believes the board could tip back to his favor in November.

School Choice – A Bad Choice

Some charter schools are abominations but most of them are reasonable. Like public schools, they are staffed with excellent or mostly decent teachers and a few who should not be in the profession. Their standardized testing results are similar to those of public schools with two deficiencies. They are likely to close their doors anytime while a public school never closes mid-school year, with no notice. Also public schools unify communities while charter schools divide them.

Birthed in the bowels of the 1950’s segregationist south, school choice has never been about improving education. It is founded on white supremacy, profiting off taxpayers, cutting taxes, selling market based solutions and financing religion. School choice ideology has a long dark history of dealing significant harm to public education.

Steve Suitts’ book, Overturning Brown, provides overwhelming evidence for the segregationist legacy of “school choice.” “Brown v Board” has been effectively gutted with “choice” as the white supremacists’ most potent strategy. In the 21st century, choice is being wielded to maintain segregation and destroy separation of church and state.

Southern segregationists often condemned “integration as the work of communists” (Suitts 32). Adopting the language of University of Chicago libertarian economist, Milton Friedman, they began denouncing the “monopoly of government schools”, calling it “socialism in its purest form” (Suitts 59). This is the basis of so-called school choice.

A Brookings Institute study of segregation in schools reported:

“Charter schools are more segregated than TPS [traditional public school] at national, state, and metro levels. Black students in charter schools are far more likely than their traditional public school counterparts to be educated in intensely segregated settings. At the national level, 70 percent of black charter school students attend intensely segregated minority charter schools (which enroll 90-100 percent of students from under-represented minority backgrounds), or twice as many as the share of intensely segregated black students in traditional public schools”.

This is a big problem concerning all races. Professors Linda R. Tropp and Suchi Saxena along with many other sociologists and educators have conducted research identifying the clear benefit of and need for school integration. They state, “New social science research demonstrates the importance of fostering sustained interracial contact between youth in order to prepare them to thrive in a multiracial society”.

UCLA Professor Gary Orfield coined the phrase “apartheid schools” for schools with a White student enrollment of 1% or less. A personal 2019 study of Washington DC charter schools revealed that 64 of the 116 charter schools could be classified as “apartheid schools”.

Yesterday, Peter Greene posted an insightful article about the coalition-promoting school choice and their splintering. One of the points he made was:

“But what the alliance didn’t produce was results. Choice did not provide a sudden lifting of all boats, despite some data-torturing attempts to show otherwise. Data-driven instruction didn’t improve the data generated by either students or teachers. Underserved communities that were supposed to be rescued from failing schools by charters and choice too often had education policies done to them rather than with them. And then there was the gross miscalculation that was Common Core, which drew attack from all across the political spectrum”.

For the Catholic Church and Evangelical Christians, like Betsy DeVos, publicly provided vouchers for private religious schools open a path to taxpayer support for their organizations. It is lamentable for their cause that every recent large scale study of vouchers showed students perform worse when transferred to voucher schools.

What is the main motive behind mega-rich spending to undermine public education? Professor Maurice Cunningham of the University of Massachusetts claimed they really want “lower state and local taxes.”

John Arnold is the billionaire Enron trader who did not go to prison when that company collapsed. He has joined forces with the billionaire CEO of Netflix, Reed Hastings, to sell the nation on the portfolio model of school management.  To achieve their goal, they created The City Fund. After its founding in 2018, billionaires Bill Gates, Michael Dell and Steve Ballmer all made significant contributions.

In brief, the portfolio model directs closing schools that score in the bottom 5% on standardized testing and reopening them as charter schools or Innovation schools. In either case, they will no longer come under the purview of an elected school board. It is a march to oblivion for public schools because there will always be a bottom 5%.

Two central ideologies behind school choice are markets always make superior decisions and the cost of local control of schools is poor outcomes. Both ideas are demonstrably untrue but big money and power politics keep them alive.

It is good for America that charter schools are starting to struggle but it is heartbreaking for parents, hornswaggled by billionaires. Americans have always had school choice. If taxpayer funded public school are not wanted, there are always private schools, without the choice encumbering taxpayers.

Let’s join with the Network for Public Education and thoughtfully role back choice schools and put them under democratic control.

Stop fleecing taxpayers to finance privatized schools.

Tags: , , , , ,

Time to Leave International PISA Testing

20 Feb

By Thomas Ultican 2/20/2024

February began with Progressive Policy Institute and The 74 teaming up for a Webinar on PISA math test results, declaring “Historically Underperforming PISA Scores are a Call to Action”. 

Dr. Yong Zhao, Foundation Distinguished Professor of Education at University of Kansas and among his many accolades, an appointed Professor of Educational Leadership at University of Melbourne, has a different view, stating:

“Since 2000, our scores on PISA have barely changed. While there’s much chatter about learning from other systems, it has not happened. There is no reason that the U.S. should continue its participation in PISA.”

Zhao sees standardized testing as undermining student creativity. PISA tests stress cognitive skills while noncognitive skills are more related to creativity and entrepreneurship. His book, Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Dragon, describes how in 605 AD the Chinese government developed a testing system known as “keju” to select people for prestigious government positions. That system is now blamed for stifling creativity and scientific development. When westerners showed up in their ships, guided by compasses and using gunpowder, both invented in china, the Chinese could not defend themselves. Zhao writes, “In fact, the keju system has been held responsible for the decline of the Chinese empire.” (Big Bad Dragon page 35)

PISA 2022 Testing Results

A quick peek at PISA’s data presentation reveals average scores in everything have gone the wrong direction since bankers from the Organization of Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) got involved. Furthermore, their baseless use of translating test scores into time is fraudulent.

Why would anyone pay attention to their views on education?

Progressive Policy Institute

Going into the 1984 Democratic convention, several politicians, not happy with the party’s direction, met in a San Francisco hotel room but did not take action. After Walter Mondale’s thumping by Ronald Reagan, the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) was created based on a plan developed by Al From who believed that being independent from the Democratic Party would allow them to be more “entrepreneurial”. Current PPI Director, Will Marshall, was hired to be policy director (Left Behind Pages 43-45).

To drive their policy strategy, From and Marshall decided to establish a think tank. Seeing the way Heritage Foundation, American Enterprise Institute and Cato Institute had driven the conservative revolution in the 1970s and 1980s, they created a new idea-generating center called Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) (Left Behind Pages 112-113).

Early on, PPI came out with articles opposing minimum wages which many people saw as anti-union. Later, a PPI fellow, David Osborne, famously campaigned for an entrepreneurial government to meld public and private to maximize productivity and effectiveness. Lily Geismer said, “Osborne developed these ideas into a book cowritten with Ted Gaebler, called Reinventing Government: How the Entrepreneurial Spirit Is Transforming the Public Sector; which was released in 1992” (Left Behind Page 117).

Geismer continued:

“Under Osborne’s guidance, the DLC became one of the first political organizations to explore charter schools as a means of improving public education. Charters, along with the other programs, became a critical part of the new approach that DLC promised it would provide as the nation was starting a new decade.” (Left Behind Page 118)

It is no surprise to see PPI joining with The 74 to trash public education. Their “third way” agenda has a lot in common with the GOP driven school choice and anti-labor agenda.

For this Webinar, the PPI expert panel included Dr. Peggy G. Carr, Commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) in the U.S. Department of Education, Andreas Schleicher, Director of the Directorate of Education and Skills at the OECD and Jonathan A. Supovitz, Professor in charge of Organizations, Leadership, and Systems Division at University of Pennsylvania, Graduate School of Education. The moderator was PPI’s Tressa Pankovits, Co-Director of Reinventing America’s Schools.

Peggy Carr served in NCES for more than 20 years before Biden appointed her Commissioner. She is undoubtedly a gifted mathematician but knows little about America’s classrooms. Carr recently made headlines when the charter school she founded, Children’s Village Academy in North Carolina, was charged with paying exorbitant interest rates on a 15-year old loan she gave the school.

Andreas Schleicher is a fine mathematician but, just like Peggy Carr, he knows nothing about good education. His personal PISA involvement blinds him to how little value standardized testing is for evaluating student learning.

I really don’t want to say anything mean about moderator Tressa Pankovits because she is a fellow Aztec, unfortunately her resume reveals no training or experience as an educator. Still she is PPI’s “Co-Director of Reinventing America’s Schools, which researches innovations needed to create a 21st century model for public education that is geared to the knowledge economy.” It is hard to understand how her background qualifies for the position. Before she got this job she worked 10 years for Paul Vallas who hurt public schools in Chicago, Philadelphia, New Orleans and Bridgeport. He also has no training or experience as an educator.

The only educator in this group is Jonathan A. Supovitz. His values look shaky, based on the company he keeps.

PISA and the OECD

OECD was formed in 1961 as a follow-on to the Marshall plan, run by bankers and economists. Market Business states:

“All OECD member states claim to be market economies that are committed to democracy. The organization says it provides a platform where they:

  • Share and compare policy experiences.
  • Identify good practices.
  • Coordinate members’ international and domestic policies.
  • Seek answers to common problems.”

In 2014, German writers, Sija Graupe and Jochen Krautz, wrote “From Yardstick to Hegemony”, using OECD documents:

“The OECD Conference documentation of 1961 declares unequivocally: ‘It goes without saying that the educational system must be an aggregate of the economy, it is just as necessary to prepare people for the economy as real assets and machines. The educational system is now equal to highways, steel works and chemical fertilizers’”.

“What this unrealistic worldview setting in turn impedes is any critique or will to change because rather than being understood by the public as a theoretical construct it is, according to the neoliberal economist August Hayek, accepted by most as an immediately evident truth. Whether they are true or false, economic theories and all assessments based on these (such as PISA) determine reality. … As long as people believe having more PISA points is better than less in order to be successful economically they will, of course, do everything they can to acquire more. Education is then forced to uncritically yield to the pressure of comparative assessment, even if it is based on pure assertion.”

The meaningfulness of PISA testing results are pure assertion based on bad science.

Noel Wilson’s famous 1997 peer-reviewed thesis, “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” fundamentally states the error involved in educational testing is so great that validity is compromised. In other words, standardized tests are not refined enough to make more than generalizations and are bunk for measuring learning or teaching.

Yong Zhao shared research showing an inverse relationship between test scores and economic development:

“In fact, a correlational analysis done in 2007 showed a negative correlation between international test scores and economic development (Baker, 2007). That is, countries with higher scores in the first international study did worse than countries with lower scores.” 

Because America does not filter students from the academic system before high school, tested populations do not compare well internationally. However, since 2010, in the yearly International Math Olympiad, the USA team has come in first four times and never finished lower than fourth … out of over 100 entrants.

So why are we still bothering with meaningless PISA exams???

Tags: , , , , , , , ,

School Moms Battle for Public Education

11 Feb

By Thomas Ultican 2/11/2024

Leading into the 2020-2021 school year, I started hearing about parents protesting mask mandates. It did not make sense. Soon, open schools now protests started in San Diego County. News came that Florida had mandated in-class school. These events turned out to be part of a new right-wing attack on public education. Journalist, Laura Pappano, explores this recent history in her book School Moms: Parent Activism, Partisan Politics, and the Battle for Public Education.

War Moms

Visiting the Marriott Tampa Bay in 2022 for first-ever Moms for Liberty (M4L) national gathering, Pappano described the conference rooms as “white, far-right Christian world”, adding:

“As I listened to keynote speeches and strategy session after strategy session, I saw speakers lay a foundation of a distorted groupthink. Then, like an ideological conveyor belt, the speakers carried the moms to ever crazier places, stirring fears that their children were being brain washed and indoctrinated into Marxist ideology and that they were being groomed by teachers to want to transition from one gender to another.” (Page 2)

Before COVID vaccines, Tina Descovich, who just lost her Brevard County school board seat, became angry about school mask mandates. M4L grew out of this anger. She joined Indian River County school board member, Tiffany Justice, and Sarasota County school board Director, Bridget Ziegler, to legally found M4L.

The first speaker at the Tampa rally was Florida Governor, Ron DeSantis, wanting people to recall that in July, 2020 Florida’s education department declared schools would return to in-person learning. He did not mention Florida Education Association’s Safe Schools Report that disclosed 46 COVID-related teacher deaths, 10 student deaths and 200,834 student-positive tests in school year 2020-2021. Knowing how much that last statistic spread COVID is impossible but it was a lot.

At the conference, DeSantis claimed:

“While they were infringing freedoms, we were lifting people up. We made sure that every single kid in this state had the right to go to school in person five days a week.”(Page 3)

A quick peek at data from the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) shows little to no advantage for Florida students academically.

Pappano shared the drumbeat of fear in Tampa with:

“Parents were told that public schools are rooted in ‘Marxist ideologies’ and seek to brainwash their children—and not ‘brainwash in some cute way,’ said one speaker, the far-right cultural critic James Lindsay. ‘I mean brainwash in the sense of ‘she-now,’ which is Mandarin, which is literally what the Maoist prisons referred to as their program of thought reform.”’ (Page 6)

DeSantis told his audience about drawing “a line in the sand” with the “Don’t Say Gay Law”, prohibiting discussion of sex and gender identities in grades K-3. He claimed it lets parents send kids to school “without having woke ideology” and “have some first-grader be told that yeah, your parents named you Johnny and were born a boy, but maybe you are a girl.” (Page 7)

This has never happened in an American elementary school … but reality was not the point.

Former Education Secretary, Betsy DeVos, used “education freedom,” the new term for “school choice” to promote vouchers. Moms were told it was critical because public schools were a mess. (Page 8)

James Lindsay asked, “If you knew you were sending your children for thirty to thirty-five hours a week to a Maoist thought reform prison, Maoist brain-washing prison, what would you [do] differently?”, saying take “all lines of dedicated action to fix this system to get this crap able to be seen and identified for the crime against humanity that it is and pulled out of schools.”  

He declared: “You are War Moms!” (Page 7)

Not everything following the convention has been positive for M4L. February 3rd, 2024, CNN ran “Moms for Liberty faces new challenges and growing pushback over its conservative education agenda.” The article reported on the January 23rd Brevard County school board meeting, where M4Lstarted, with many quotes similar to this:

‘“Why are we banning books?’ asked Mindy McKenzie, a mom and nurse who is a member of Stop Moms for Liberty, which was formed to counter what it calls a far-right extremist group ‘pushing for book banning and destroying public education.”’

Critical Race Theory

In School Moms, Pappano addresses the headline-grabbing education concerns since 2020. Few issues stirred more animosity and notice than Christopher Rufo’s Critical Race theory (CRT).

Rufo was born August 26, 1984 and grew up in Sacramento, California. His path to fame and power in rightwing politics opened while he was a research fellow at the Christian think-tank, Discovery Institute. This small institute is most famous for promoting “intelligent design” in high school science classes and opposing Darwinian Theory.

While working at Discovery, Rufo lived in Seattle, Washington. When protestors drove police out of a precinct near Cal Anderson Park, erected barricades and established the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, he immediately jumped on the story and wrote pieces for Manhattan Institute’s City Journal, with titles like “Anarchy in Seattle.” (Page 76)

In “Cult Programming in Seattle”, he described a “racial-justice shakedown”, causing white employees to “abandon their ‘white normative behavior’ and learn to let go of their ‘comfort,’ ‘physical safety,’ ‘social status’ and ‘relationships with some other white people.’” He also quoted James Lindsay, the Maoist prison camp guy, calling it “the language of cult programming—persuading members they are defective in some predefined manner.”

Pappano reports:

“On July 18, 2020, he pressed harder. In ‘White Fragility’ Comes to Washington,’ Rufo claimed that diversity trainings at several federal agencies were part of ‘the creation of a new, radical political consciousness.’ He also miss-defined this new consciousness as CRT, writing, ‘Critical race theory—the academic discourse centered on the concepts of ‘whiteness,’ ‘white fragility’ and ‘white privilege’—is spreading rapidly through the federal government.’ The erroneous definition of CRT caught on. Rufo tweeted about it. Then, on August 17, 2020, Rufo was a guest on Fox’s Tucker Carlson Tonight, where he described critical race theory as spreading ‘like wildfire’ across American institutions.”’ (Page 77)

A few weeks later, Rufo, back on Carlson’s show, claimed, “Conservatives need to wake up that this is an existential threat to the United States” and looking into the camera stated:

“The president and the White House, it is within their authority and power to immediately issue and executive order abolishing critical race theory. I call on the president to immediately issue this executive order.” (Page 78)

President Trump complied. Two days later on September 4, 2020, Russell Vought of the Office of Budget and Management wrote to all agencies, “The President has directed me to ensure that Federal agencies cease and desist from using taxpayer dollars to fund these divisive, un-American propaganda training sessions.” (Page 78)

CRT indoctrination was from the beginning a bogus claim. It is a legal theory, developed in the 1970s and 80s, looking at how race is affected by legal structures. This was almost exclusively the purview of graduate school legal debates. Forty years later, it has been drudged up to fuel a McCarthyesque style attack on educators and fight against inclusion. There is no evidence that it has ever been taught in the K-12 environment. Today, CRT is almost forgotten, as Rufo and the hard-right are focusing on destroying diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI).

Those opposing DEI are supporting segregation, privilege and exclusion. Antagonism to DEI indicates support for white supremacy and disapproval of judgments based on merit.

School Moms

Big education issues that appeared over the last three years are covered in this book.

The Seven Mountains mandate, placing the law of God above secular law, is addressed in Chapter 5. Pappano writes, “For Christian Extremists, LGBTQ+ individuals, and especially transgender students, are a deviation from ‘God’s design’ and a clear ‘problem’ in the ‘extremists’ quest for a Christian society.” (Page 116)

The movement to ban books is addressed in Chapter 3, “When librarians Come Under Attack.”

There are heart-wrenching stories from Texas, Tennessee, Minnesota and other states, of popular educators having careers ruined by zealots and racists.

The story of Free Staters, trying to destroy public education in New Hampshire, is included.

Not all is lost!

Pappano says, “In this new environment, everything had a side: masks, books, pride flags, pronouns, history lessons.” Before their children arrived, many mothers were high-functioning employees with skills. She asserts, “So one should not be surprised at the professional-level organizing going on in grassroots public education groups.” (Page 128)

School Moms: Parent Activism, Partisan Politics, and the Battle for Public Education

… is a worthwhile read.

Tags: , , , , , , , ,

Promotion of Education Savings Accounts aka Vouchers

4 Feb

By Thomas Ultican 2/4/2024

Propaganda Rag, The 74, continuously endorses their billionaire funders’ agendas. On January 23, they were passing on lies about Education Savings Accounts (ESA), another name for school vouchers. The hidden deep pocket behind the fraudulent article was Charles Koch.

Christopher Leonard describes Koch’s economic philosophy in his masterpiece, Kochland:  

“Charles Koch became enamored with the thinking of economists and philosophers like Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek, two Austrian academics who did most of their formative work during the 1930s and 1940s. In later years, Charles Koch would be described as a libertarian or a conservative. But these were imperfect labels that didn’t capture his true world view. More than anything, he was an Austrian economist, or a ‘classical liberal,’ as he liked to call it. Hayek, in particular, put forward a radical concept of capitalism and the role that markets should play in society, and his thinking had an enduring effect on Charles Koch.” (Page 42)

As a “classical liberal,” Koch is opposed to Social Security, Medicare and public education. This is probably not a case of billionaire greed but his philosophical belief. He sees being taxed to pay for public schools and medical care for aging people as stealing. Hardcore libertarians believe people should pay their own way and believe children’s education, retirement and health care are individual responsibilities. 

Koch is an extremely bright MIT-trained doctorate in engineering and an astute politician.

Choice Propaganda

On January 23rd, The 74 published “Three Things to Know About National Education Tax Credit Survey.” The three things are (1) most adults support education tax credits, (2) poor people show lowest support for them and (3) parents who support education tax credits also favor education savings accounts, public school open enrollment and part-time public school access.

The subtitle of the article says, “New YouGov poll found education tax credit support from 80 percent of K-12 parents — pointing to a growing interest in school choice options.”

Education tax credits and education savings accounts are new names for vouchers. How could the claims in this article be true if a voucher law has never received a positive vote from the public?

YouGov describes itself as “an international online research data and analytics technology group.” Founded in 2000 and based in the UK, it was apparently hired by Yes. Every Kid. to run a few surveys. The results are opposite from other surveys on the same subject.

A March 2023 survey by Reuters/Ipsos found that 36% of respondents showed some support for vouchers with only 15% strongly supporting them (See Page 11). One reason YouGov got such positive responses may be how the question was asked. The Reuters/Ipsos poll inquired about “Laws allowing government money to send students to private and religious schools, even if it reduces money for public schools?” It is unknown what YouGov asked.

An article posted at 538 explained,

“Complicating the picture further is the fact that several of the survey sponsors, such as EdChoice and yes. every kid., are advocacy organizations that support voucher programs, which means they may be incentivized to word their poll questions in a way that encourages respondents to indicate support for the programs. They may also be less transparent about how their polls are conducted and how their questions are worded. For example, polling from YouGov/yes. every kid. conducted in November and December of last year found a slight majority (54 percent) of Americans support ESAs, though a significant number (33 percent) were undecided on the issue. But the organization didn’t release complete toplines or question wording, so it’s not clear how much this result might have been influenced by the pollster’s framing of the issue.”

Koch Financed It

The 74 noted at the end of the article,

“Disclosure: Yes. Every Kid. operates as part of the wider Stand Together Trust network. Stand Together Trust provides financial support to The 74.

Stand Together was founded by Charles Koch in 2003 and, like all of his organizations, it is complicated and divided into six organizations today. The Stand Together about web page says:

“Stand Together was founded in 2003, but our story really started more than 50 years ago. It began with Charles Koch — a Forbes Top-25 philanthropist and the CEO of the largest private company in the country.

Today, Brian Hooks is the chairman and CEO of Stand Together. He is co-author with Charles of Believe in People: Bottom-Up Solutions for a Top-Down World and a 2021 TIME 100 Next honoree, featuring leaders shaping the future of their fields.

In 2013, Stand Together Trust (EIN 46-3508366) was formed. It gifted The 74 $277,000 in 2022 and provided Yes. Every Kid. with $2,010,000.

Looking through the latest non-profit tax filings by Stand Together Trust, Yes. Every Kid. Foundation (EIN 84-3535275) and Charles Koch Foundation (EIN 48-0918408), I noticed many of the board members are the same.

From Stand Together Trust: Brian Menkes Secretary, Derek Johnson Executive Director, Brian Hooks Director, Kara Hartnett Treasure, Charles Koch Director, Henrich Heuer – Keeps the records

From Yes. Every Kid. Foundation: Derek Johnson Director, Brian Menkes Secretary, Henrich Heuer Treasure

From Charles Koch Foundation: Charles Koch Chairman, Brian Menkes Secretary, Kara Hartnett Treasure, Brian Hooks Director

Kochtopus

The graphic above appeared December 13, 2013 on Progressive Collapse. The web site is no longer viable but their image is. It uses an octopus to demonstrate the vast influence Koch has created in areas of public interest. Since then, it has been shared by many. On the occasion of David Koch’s passing in 2019, the Guardian titled its article “The Kochtopus: sprawling network keeps David Koch’s legacy thriving.”

In 2010, the Koch brothers staged one of their twice-yearly programs that became known as “Freedom Partners.” A brochure, accompanying invitations, highlighted a previous event in Aspen. The Guardian’s article reported:

“The most intriguing part of the brochure was a roll-call of names of those lured to previous “Freedom Partner” gatherings. It included the current vice-president, Mike Pence; the Wisconsin politician Paul Ryan, who would go on to become speaker of the House of Representatives; super-donors such as the hedge fund manager Ken Griffin, and most intriguingly of all two conservative justices of the US supreme court, Clarence Thomas and the late Antonin Scalia.”

Koch is known to be a shrewd businessman who supports voucher plans with as little oversight as possible. Education savings accounts are fraught with malfeasance. Peter Greene, reporting at Forbes noted:

“In Arizona, an audit found that parents had spent $700K of ESA money on beauty supplies and clothing. In Florida, where voucher-receiving schools openly discriminate against LGBTQ students, a new bill proposes that audits be performed only every three years. Kentucky’s new ESA bill proposes audits after the state has found evidence of misuse of funds, which seems like a rather late shutting of the barn doors. And the bill that the Iowa senate just fast-tracked in order to establish ESAs includes no call for any audits or oversight at all. (That may be in part why the Iowa Satanic Temple has announced their intention to establish the Iowa Satanic School.)”

For Charles Koch to support this kind of financial chicanery, there must be an ulterior motive. Most likely, the purpose is destroying America’s public school system and ending the voucher mess. His classical liberal ideology would be realized and universal free public education would be ended.

Koch once again extended his octopus-like tentacles when he joined the Walton Family to form the Vela Education Fund. Vela received their 501 C3 determination (EIN 84-4185046) from the IRS December 10, 2020. Stand Together’s latest form 990 filing listed $6,340,018 to Vela and the Walton Families Foundations (EIN-13-3441466) latest form 990 filing showed $5,000,000 to Vela.

It is clear that Vela is a Koch operation. Derek Johnson and Brian Menkes are on the board and Kara Hartnett is listed as Treasurer. These three people are on several Koch organization boards. This is one more weapon in Charles Koch’s quiver for ending public education.

Billionaires like Koch, the Walton family and former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos are intent on using their wealth to defeat democratic support for public schools and end “Democracy’s Schools.” America can no longer afford to put up with billionaires and their non-democratic ways.

Time that voters tax billionaires out of existence.

Tags: , , , , ,