Tag Archives: NewSchools Venture Fund

California Charter School Movement Update

25 May

By Thomas Ultican 5/25/2025

Charter schools continue grabbing larger percentages of California students and have surpassed 700,000 in total enrollment. Their existing in California for more than 30-years means it is probable that some charter school students have parents who went to charters. None of this is because charter schools are superior to public schools or that many California public schools are bad. It is the right wing ideology of “school choice” and massive spending by billionaires driving charter growth. Sadly, it means we are undermining democracy and increasing segregation.

California enrollment data documents the continuing charter school growth. This first chart is of the percentage of charter school students in the state over the past decade.

As the chart shows, charter school students now make up 12.5% of publicly financed students in California.

This next chart is of charter school growth in the 12 largest California counties. It provides insight into where the growth is occurring.

The four counties with more than 16% charter school students are Los Angeles, San Diego, Sacramento and San Joaquin. LA and San Diego are the two largest counties in the state but Sacramento is number six in size and San Joaquin is 11th. The third largest county in California is Orange and it only has a 6% charter enrollment. County population is not a good indicator for where charter schools will spread.

The growth in San Joaquin seems to have two important causes. The largest city, Stockton, is close to charter promoting organizations in Oakland and Sacramento. More importantly, Don Shalvey has always lived on his small ranch near Stockton. During his long education-centered career, he worked with billionaires including Reed Hastings, Bill Gates and Helen Schwab, to privatize public education. In 1993, Don’s San Carlos Learning Center became the first charter school in California and second in America. After retiring from his job at the Gates Foundation, he went to work for a small non-profit, San Joaquin A+, and turned it into a large well financed charter school promoting organization.

Massive Continuous Funding

Soon after legal means were provided for “school choice” by chartering, two organizations were developed to accelerate and sustain California charter schools; NewSchools Venture Fund (NSVF) and California Charter Schools Association (CCSA).

The history tab at the NSVF website states:

“NewSchools Venture Fund was created in 1998 by social entrepreneur Kim Smith and venture capitalists John Doerr and Brook Byers.” (Byers and Doerr are colleagues from the Kleiner Perkins venture fund.)

“We were among the first and largest investors in public charter schools and the first to identify and support multisite charter management organizations, which launch and operate integrated networks of public charter schools.”

Philanthropy Magazine notes that Reed Hastings helped “launch the NewSchools Venture Fund.”

Bill Gates and the Walton Family Foundation are the largest individual donors to NSVF with $226,881,394 of grants documented in Organized to Disrupt. However, this is only a fraction of the total billionaire largess. Besides receiving help from Reed Hastings over the last 20 years, billionaires John Doerr, Laurene Powell Jobs and John Sackler also served on the board.

CCSA is a charter school industry membership and support organization. In 2017, Executive Director of the Network for Public Education (NPE), Carol Burris, published Charter and Consequences. In this yearlong study of the charter school industry, she noted:

“CCSA does not disclose its funders on its website nor on its 990 form, but given its Board of Directors, who makes the list of big donors is not difficult to guess.

“The 2017 Board of Directors include New York’s DFER founder, Joe Williams, a director of the Walton Education Coalition; Gregory McGinty, the Executive Director of Policy for the Broad Foundation; Neerav Kingsland, the CEO of the Hastings Fund; and Christopher Nelson, the Managing Director of the Doris & Donald Fisher Fund. Prior Board members include Reed Hastings of Netflix and Carrie Walton Penner, heir to the Walmart fortune.

“The real power, however, sits in CCSA’s related organization, CCSA Advocates, a not-for-profit 501(c)(4) whose mission is to increase the political clout of charter schools on local school boards, on county boards, and in Sacramento.”

Beyond creating and financing organizations like NSVF and CCSA, a quick peek at any of the non-profit foundations these billionaires own reveals page after page of donations to individual charter schools and charter organizations.

Let’s not forget the $440 million federal dollars ticketed for charter school growth. Last year California’s share was $93 million and this year Secretary of Education, Linda McMahon, has raised that bribe to $500 million. California’s share will likely top $100 million.   

Buying Politicians

This morning the San Diego Union ran Kristen Taketa’s article about insider concerns over a small California charter school network, Elite Academic Academy. Former teacher Eric Shirley who taught home-school students there said he left after 5 years because he found several things fishy about the administration. That included Elite’s CEO, Meghan Freeman, living in a Montana resort town being paid more than $380,000 while founder Brent Woodward was still profiting from the academy.

Taketa shared,

“But Shirley’s biggest concern was that Elite was paying millions of dollars a year to an obscure third-party corporation — one created by Woodard. This corporation not only employs family members of Elite administrators in high-level jobs but also has paid him six-figure sums each year as a consultant.”

Shirley is one of three former Elite teachers who believe their charter network is the latest example of an operator of charter schools exploiting lax charter laws to misuse taxpayer funds.

In 2019, a San Diego Grand Jury indicted A3 charter school leaders for fraud and theft. The A3 Charter School conspirators fraudulently collected $400 million from the state of California, misappropriated more than $200 million and according to the Voice of San Diego’s Will Huntsberry outright stole $80 million. However, no effective measures have been taken since to remediate California’s laws.

Taking advantage of the Supreme Court’s 2010 ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission case, billionaires have poured huge sums of money into California’s state and local elections. Most of this money hides in independent expenditure groups like EDVOICE FOR THE KIDS PAC; CALIFORNIA CHARTER SCHOOLS ASSOCIATION ADVOCATES INDEPENDENT EXPENDITURE COMMITTEE; CA CHARTER SCHOOL ASSOC INDEP EXP COMMITTEE; EDVOICE INDEPENDENT EXPENDITURE COMMITTEE; KIDS FIRST, SUPPORTING KELLY GONEZ, NICK MELVOIN, AND MARIA BRENES FOR LAUSD SCHOOL BOARD 2022 and KIDS FIRST, SUPPORTING TANYA ORTIZ FRANKLIN FOR LAUSD SCHOOL BOARD 2020.

Most of this Money went to LA School Board Elections

In 2019, James Walton of Arkansas made contributions to 29 California legislative candidates plus Reed Hastings provided contributions to 69 local and state political candidates. These are examples of billionaires buying influence.

A New Effort

California Assembly Bill 84 sponsored by Robert Garcia [D] and Al Muratsuchi [D] was voted out of the Assembly Committee on Education by a party line vote and forwarded to the Appropriations Committee on Friday (5/23/2025). The Assembly Appropriations Committee analysis summarizes:

“This bill establishes new requirements for charter schools and nonclassroom based (NCB) charter schools regarding auditing and accounting standards, and the funding determination process. This bill adds requirements to the contracting process, limits authorization of NCB charter schools by small school districts, makes changes to the authorizer oversight process, and clarifies that charter schools are subject to specified teacher credential and salary expense requirements.”

Since the criminality of the A3 charter organization, bills to solve the lack of charter school oversight in California have been proposed regularly. This time around, The Assembly Committee on Education Analysis lists almost 200 charter schools dutifully opposing the new bill.

The billionaire backers of “school choice” dislike lawmakers working to safeguard taxpayer supplied education dollars. Will the plutocrats win again or will Californians finally be protected from criminal education enterprises?

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Have California Charter Schools Stopped Growing?

20 Nov

By Thomas Ultican 11/18/2023

Last year, John Fensterwald reported in EdSource, “A new chapter for charter schools in California as enrollment drops for first time in 3 decades.” The 2023 charter movement showed, year over year, attendance growth but it was not half that of previous years and 5,104 students less than 2021.

Has the bloom come off the charter school rose?

Looking at some board of directors for EdSource adds significance to Fensterwald’s article. Don Shalvey founded California’s first charter school, partnered with Reed Hastings CEO of Netflix and Microsoft founder, Bill Gates, is on the board. Then there is Robert Sheffield, President of CORE, a pro-testing billionaire funded organization. Jannelle Kubinec, the CEO of WestEd, and Mary Jane Burke, on the WestED board also serve on the 10-member EdSource board.

EdSource is a big-wealth supported pro-charter school publication.

Fensterwald noted,

“Not since the first charter school opened in San Carlos, south of San Francisco, in 1994, has charter school enrollment fallen year over year.

“In 2020-21, the first full year of the pandemic, total enrollment statewide fell 4.4% while charter school enrollment actually increased 3.4%. But this year, enrollment in TK-12 school districts and charter schools both fell 1.8%: 110,000 students in district schools, 12,600 in charter schools, as measured as of Census Day last October.”

Why Charter School Growth Cooled

Corruption, instability and segregation are endemic to charter schools, developing a reputation for avoiding special education students and English language learners. Researchers and organizations, like the Network for Public Education (NPE), have made sure these issues stay in front of the public.

Law enforcement has taken down many charter scofflaws, especially in the cyber charter arena. The largest charter school theft occurred in California when A3 Charter School conspirators fraudulently collected $400 million from the state, misappropriated more than $200 million, and according to the Voice of San Diego, outright stole $80 million. This led to a few years of corrupt charter school stories in the media.

For a decade, NPE has been updating “Another Day Another Charter School Scandal.” This searchable site catalogs charter school thefts, school closures, profiteering and more.

The profiteering field takes the user to articles about people like John Helgeson, vice-president at Learn4Life, who according to Voice of San Diego’s reporting, “discovered a way to collect not just one, but two paychecks from California’s cash-strapped public school system.”

In her paper, “Charters and Consequences,” Carol Burris addressed the phenomena of independent learning charter schools:

“There are 225 independent learning charter schools comprising nearly 20% of all charters in California. In San Diego County alone there are 35, including three associated with Learn4Life. The 2014 graduation rate for all of the students enrolled in San Diego’s independent center charters, including the more successful home-school programs, was only 44%. (Page 8) (San Diego Unified graduation rate was greater than 91%)

The infamous A3 Charter Schools were independent learning-centers. Mary Bixby is San Diego’s pioneer of the strip mall charter school business. In 1994, her Charter School of San Diego became the first charter school in the County. By 2015, Mary earned$340,810 from the non-profit she founded and her daughter, Tiffany Yandell, received $135,947.

Burris observed:

“Bixby, a board member of the charters and a full-time employee of one of the schools, also receives compensation for being ‘on-loan’ to two other Altus schools. Such obvious conflicts of interest would be illegal in a public school.” (Page 9)

Julian Vasquez Heilig, Provost and Vice-President for Academic Affairs Western Michigan University, joined T. Jameson Brewer from University of North Georgia and Yohuru Williams from University of St. Thomas to study segregating effects of charter schools. They concluded, “Charters are more likely to be segregated, even when controlling for local ethnoracial demographics” (Page 1) and discovered that “Many of the nation’s charters can even be classified as ‘apartheid schools’” (Page 2)—a term coined by UCLA Professor Gary Orfield for schools with a White student enrollment of one percent or less.

A 2016 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.” (Page 32)

My personal 2019 study of Washington DC charter schools revealed that 64 of the 116 charter schools would be classified “apartheid schools,” using Professor Orfield’s definition.

Since their inception, charter schools have been taking less special education and English language learners than public schools. A look at the data from any section of the country supports this statement. I made the following 2018 graph from San Diego County data.

The most glaring problem for charter schools is instability, closing and going out of business at extremely high rates. Parents sometimes get a Friday notice about a Monday school closing. Carol Burris and team at NPE produced three reports, Asleep at the Wheel, Still Asleep at the Wheel and Broken Promises, detailing this tragedy with significant documentation.

The following graph presents the charter school failure rates within 15 years of opening.

How Charter Schools Continued to Expand

With a well-documented legacy of instability, corruption and segregation, it seems unreal that this privatized system still expands. Boatloads of billionaire dollars keeps it growing along with large incentives from the federal government.

The charter school movement in California was designed to create market-based solutions for public education, cut taxes and develop profit streams. Don Shalvey’s San Carlos Learning Center was the first charter school in California and site of Bill and Hillary Clinton’s 1997 roundtable discussion. At the meeting, Reed Hastings introduced himself to Shalvey; writer, Lily Geismer, claims Hastings needed Shalvey to give his education plans credibility. (Left Behind Page 249)

Two organizations, developed to accelerate and sustain charter schools, are NewSchools Venture Fund (NSVF) and California Charter Schools Association (CCSA).

The history tab at the NSVF website states:

“NewSchools Venture Fund was created in 1998 by social entrepreneur Kim Smith and venture capitalists John Doerr and Brook Byers.” (Byers and Doerr are colleagues from the Kleiner Perkins venture fund.)

“We were among the first and largest investors in public charter schools and the first to identify and support multisite charter management organizations, which launch and operate integrated networks of public charter schools.”

Philanthropy Magazine notes that Reed Hastings helped “launch the NewSchools Venture Fund.”

While there is little doubt Bill Gates and The Walton Family Foundation are the largest individual donors to NSVF, $226,881,394 of grants documented in Organized to Disrupt represents only a fraction of the total billionaire largess. Besides receiving help from Reed Hastings over the last 20 years, billionaires John Doerr, Laurene Powell Jobs and John Sackler also served on the board.

The hundreds of millions of dollars from these billionaires have have financed the startup of many charter schools, including Reed Hastings’ and Don Shalvey’s first-ever charter management organization. It created a continuous inventory of replacement schools for all of the schools that go out of business. To the billionaires, this churn looks like a good thing but it is a nightmare for students and parents.

 CCSA was formed as a nonprofit in 2003 with Caprice Young as CEO. John Walton, head of the Walton family, was an original board member. After John died, his niece, Carrie Walton Penner, joined the board in 2006. The next year Reed Hastings came onto the board. Penner and Hastings served until 2016 when both of them left and were replaced by employees.

Carol Burris conducted a yearlong study of the California Charter School Industry and published a lengthy report called Charters and Consequences, noting:

“CCSA does not disclose its funders on its website nor on its 990 form, but given its Board of Directors, who makes the list of big donors is not difficult to guess.

“The 2017 Board of Directors include New York’s DFER founder, Joe Williams, a director of the Walton Education Coalition; Gregory McGinty, the Executive Director of Policy for the Broad Foundation; Neerav Kingsland, the CEO of the Hastings Fund; and Christopher Nelson, the Managing Director of the Doris & Donald Fisher Fund. …

 “The real power, however, sits in CCSA’s related organization, CCSA Advocates, a not-for-profit 501(c)(4) whose mission is to increase the political clout of charter schools on local school boards, on county boards, and in Sacramento. It is at all three levels that charters can be authorized in the state.”

It is through CCSA Advocates that much of the huge spending on recent Los Angeles Unified School District board elections has been directed.

Opinion

With billionaire funding, it is difficult for the charter industry to fail.

Some people viewed charter schools as an experiment to prove how much better businesses could run schools than the public school system. There is a big lie being told that charter schools soundly outperform public schools. They do not. The fact is this 30-year old experiment has been a damaging and disruptive failure.

Reed Hastings, the Walton family, Michael Bloomberg, Bill Gates and other billionaires may never tire of trying to prove they were right.

It is past time to stop harming public schools.

Join NPE in the call for:

  • An immediate moratorium on creating new charter schools, including no replication or expansion of existing charter schools
  • End the federal charter school program that subsidizes and encourages charter expansion
  • Require certification of all charter school teachers and administrative staff, in accordance with public school requirements

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Organized to Disrupt

10 Jun

By Thomas Ultican 6/10/2020

The New Schools Venture Fund (NSVF) is the Swiss army knife of public school privatization. It promotes education technology development, bankrolls charter school creation, develops charter management organizations and sponsors school leadership training groups. Since its founding in 1998, a small group of people with extraordinary wealth have been munificent in their support. NSVF is a significant asset in the billionaire funded drive to end democratically run public schools and replace them with privatized corporate structures.

1990’s Silicon Valley was a Happening Place

Mark Andreessen had just co-written the world’s first web-browser, Mosaic, before he came to town from the University of Illinois to co-found Netscape. John Doerr left Intel in 1980 to join the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins where his reputation for picking winners became legendary. His wins include Amazon, AOL, Compaq, Electronic Arts, Google, Netscape and Twitter. Internet search engines were in their infancy when in 1999 Doerr convinced his partners to put $12.5 million into Google. Five years later that investment turned into billions.

Like elsewhere in America, every little strip mall in San Jose, California had a Blockbuster video rental store. In 1997, Reed Hastings and Netflix co-founder Mark Reynolds came up with a disruptive idea that put Blockbuster out of business. For a monthly fee, they offered DVD’s by mail with no late charges. Blockbuster did not adapt fast enough and went bankrupt.

In the Valley, everyone was aware that their business could be just one new technology innovation away from being the next Blockbuster.

“DoWopDon” Shalvey was the superintendent of schools in San Carlos, California a bedroom community about a third of the way up the peninsula between San Jose and San Francisco. When California passed its 1992 charter school legislation, Shalvey’s application for a charter turned into California’s first charter school. It officially opened in August 1994.

Apparently, Don Shalvey was an amateur DJ and very into music. His twitter handle is @dooWopDon.

Shalvey joined with Reed Hastings in writing a statewide initiative for the 1998 ballot that lifted the cap on charter schools and eased restrictions on starting one. At that time, Hastings was made president of Technology Network, a bipartisan lobbying group formed by Silicon Valley CEOs. With their support, the initiative quickly amassed more than a million signatures. Opposition from the teachers union ended as they were also fighting against other education proposals coming from Governor Pete Wilson’s office.

A deal was struck making the initiative unnecessary. Legislative leaders passed a bill containing the initiative’s key ingredients and union leader withheld their objections. The new bill green-lighted an unlimited number of charter schools and just as importantly the bill authorized a single board to oversee multiple charter schools. It was the birth of charter management organizations and a massive acceleration in new charter school development.

When Pete Wilson signed the new bill into law in May 1998, Shalvey and Hastings had $403,000 left in their initiative campaign fund. They decided to shift the money into a non-profit and founded what became the Aspire charter school network.

Meanwhile on the other side of the continent, Ann Smith graduated with a degree in political science and psychology from Columbia University in 1989 and started working for Wendy Kopp and the Teach For America (TFA) founding team. In 1993, she moved to the Silicon Valley area and co-founded the Bay Area Youth Consortium – AmeriCorps. In 1996, she left AmeriCorps to pursue a Masters in Business Administration at Stanford University.

Smith was co-chair of the Stanford business school’s entrepreneur club and she wanted to get Amazon founder Jeff Bezos as a speaker for the club. She asked her friend John Doerr to help and he agreed on one condition. In an education session at Al Gore’s house, the name NewSchools had been created. Doerr wanted her to come up with a use for the name.

Bezos spoke at the club and Smith worked on her assignment. She wrote a two page paper outlining the NewSchools Venture Fund. She had been inspired by what Don Shalvey and Reed Hastings had accomplished and thought to herself, “Why couldn’t entrepreneurial philanthropists come together to create networks of entrepreneurial education organizations?” Smith labeled the paper “Creating CMOs — scaling up with quality — with the help of venture-capital-style philanthropic investing.”

The history at the NSVF web-site says,

“NewSchools Venture Fund was created in 1998 by social entrepreneur Kim Smith and venture capitalists John Doerr and Brook Byers.” (Byers is a colleague of Doerr’s from Kleiner Perkins)

“We were among the first and largest investors in public charter schools and the first to identify and support multisite charter management organizations, which launch and operate integrated networks of public charter schools.”

“NewSchools’ work to support digital learning tools began at our inception in 1998.”

Philanthropy Magazine notes that Reed Hastings helped, “to launch the NewSchools Venture Fund.”

Big Money and Political Connections

LittleSis NSVF Map

LittleSis Map of NSVF Massive Funding By Billionaires

While there is little doubt the Bill Gates and The Walton Family Foundation are the largest individual donors to NSVF, the $226,881,394 in grants documented in the map above are only a fraction of the total billionaire largess. Besides receiving help from Reed Hastings, over the last 20-years, billionaires John Doerr, Laurene Jobs Powell and John Sackler have served on the board, but there is no information about any of their monetary contributions.

Kim Smith was the founding CEO of NSVF. The second CEO was Ted Mitchell the former President of Occidental College and a founding board member of NSVF. Mitchell replaced Kim Smith as CEO in September 2005 and held the position until 2014. From 2008-2010, he was simultaneously President of the California State Board of Education.

Mitchell has also served on the boards of New Leaders, Khan Academy, California Education Partners, Teach Channel, ConnectED, Hameetman Foundation, the Alliance for College-Ready Public Schools, Silicon Schools, Children Now, Bellwether Partners, Pivot Learning Partners, EnCorps Teacher Training Program, the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, and the Green DOT Public Schools.

On May 8, 2014 EdSource reported, “Former State Board of Education president Ted Mitchell was confirmed Thursday as under secretary of education, the third-highest ranking official at the U.S. Department of Education.”

NSVF’s 2010 990-tax form had a note that claimed, “To date, the Organization has successfully received support from … the U.S. Department of Education.” From 2003-2007, NSVF reported $5,997,900 in grants from governmental sources. In 2008, the line requiring listing governmental grants separately disappeared from the 990-tax form. There is no longer an easily accessible method for gaining that information.

Contribution Graph

Enormous Grant Amounts Reported by NSVF and Selected Billionaires

In the graph above the billionaire giving in green is for yearly totals from the tax reports by the billionaires in the LittleSis Map above. The 2016 spike occurred because some unknown entity contributed $68,000,000 to NSVF through the donor directed foundation Silicon Valley Community Fund.

In 2016, Reed Hastings created a $100,000,000 fund within the Silicon Valley Community Fund. At the same time, Laurene Jobs Powell was serving on the board of NSVF when her XQ Institute was granted $24,750,000 in 2015 and $57,402,973 in 2016. Either one of them could have made the large contribution or maybe it was someone else.

Every year NSVF hosts a “Summit” in Oakland, California which they state brings together more than 1,200 educators, entrepreneurs, community leaders, funders, and policy makers to share ideas on how to “reimagine learning.” These “Summits” are a must attend for the disrupter community and they drive contributions.

To replace Mitchell as CEO when he left for the Department of Education in 2014, NSVF brought in Stacey Childress from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Childress earned an MBA from Harvard Business School in 2000. Afterwards, she spent a year co-founding an enterprise software sales company and then returned to Harvard where she was a Senior Lecturer and Executive Director. In 2010, Childress became Deputy Director of the Gates Foundation. She has been CEO of NSVF since arriving in 2014.

Both Mitchell and Childress have received NSVF salaries in excess of $500,000. The 2018 NSVF tax-form explanation of their compensation method reads,

“The organization obtained compensation studies from several independent sources to compile information used as a metric for salary increases … A subcommittee of the Board of Directors (BOD) conducts the review of the CEO and develops a recommendation for the full BOD.”

This is similar to the method that has ballooned executive pay in corporate America while line worker wages have stagnated. It is a method that justifies those at the top getting an ever greater share.

Investing in Privatization and Education Technology

NSVF claims they have invested in 117 Ed Tech companies, 187 charter schools and 55 diverse leaders programs.

Among their Ed Tech investments are Class Dojo, EdSurge, LearnZillion, Phet Interactive Simulations and Education Elements. When NSVF makes a major investment in an Ed Tech startup, they require a position on the companies governing board.

One of NSVF’s founding board members, Dave Whorton, is also the founder of Tugboat Ventures. When NSVF invested in Education Elements so did Tugboat Ventures. Dave Whorton was made a member of Education Elements Board of Directors where he efficiently keeps an eye on funds from both Tugboat and NSVF.

When first founded, NSVF invested heavily in Aspire Public Schools because of their plan to create a charter management organization. In 2001, they granted $1,095,000 of their total of $2,468,000 in giving to Aspire.

As their wealth grew the grants to charter schools became very similar to the grants their funders were making. They have funded DC Prep, Phalen Leadership Academy, Rocketship Education, Success Charter Network, Yu Ming Charter School and almost 200 more.

The Yu Ming Charter is essentially a private Mandarin immersion school that has just submitted a material revision to their expansion plan that was rejected in December. It has been alleged the Yu Ming does not want new students above the kindergarten level. A parent comment on the Berkeley Parent Network says, “The teachers seem reluctant to admit kids who aren’t quite up to par in Mandarin as it can be really overwhelming for students to be new and they don’t want to see them struggle and be under water from the get-go.” To which Oakland Educator Jane Nylund responded,

“Real, authentic public education is hard; we deal with struggling students every day as expected, standard educational practice. We don’t find a way to reject them because they are ‘struggling’. This honest assessment by an involved parent is just more evidence of a ‘public school’ in name only, and not in practice.”

NSVF’s diverse-leaders investing is aimed at replacing quality teacher education at universities with for profit organizations that have very limited expertise. It is also aimed at selling the privatization agenda. NSVF invested in Branch Alliance for Education Diversity, edfuel, MindWorks Collaborative, National Charter Collaborative, School Board Partners, TNTP and fifty more organizations.

School Board Partners came out of Education Cities when The City Fund was established. They appear to want influence over school board members by offering training; a function every state already provides. They are a part of selling the privatization agenda.

TNTP was rolled out of TFA by Wendy Kopp and Michelle Rhee. Before the billionaire driven push to privatize public education a “non-profit” company like TNTP would have gotten no consideration for training teachers because they are unqualified.

Final Comments

Kim Smith staid on the board at NSVF and in 2011 co-founded Bellwether Education Partners. The next year she founded the Pahara Institute where she is the CEO. Her 2016 pay reported on tax forms signed by her was $419,576. (Update: Smith recently stepped down as the Pahara CEO.)

DoWopDon (Don Shalvey) is now Deputy Director of the College Ready Team at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

NSVF along with scores of billionaire funded Foundations has been spending staggeringly large amounts of money to privatize public education and monetize it. This spending has been going on for decades now. So, why are about 90% of America’s students still attending public schools? The answer is simple.

The “disrupter” products are bad and Americans are not buying what their selling.

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