Americans for Prosperity in Ohio: What is the Koch-Funded Buckeye Blueprint’s Education Plan?

We ought to suspect that someone has been investing heavily to push school privatization in Ohio. Last summer our legislature passed a budget that radically expanded state funding for private school tuition vouchers, allocated more money for charter schools, made every one of the state’s 610 school districts eligible for charter school operators to open schools, and allocated so much money for school privatization and tax cuts that legislators felt they couldn’t pass a stand alone bill that would have established the full six-year phase in of the Cupp-Patterson public school funding plan.

I cannot name all of the far-right organizations investing in the promotion of school privatization in Ohio, but one new initiative, launched in February, is Americans for Prosperity-Ohio’s Buckeye Blueprint.

The Buckeye Blueprint, describes itself in overblown hyperbole as, “a new grassroots campaign that seeks to build a bolder and better state by bringing people together to build bottom-up movements around policy priorities at the state and local levels. This will be accomplished by empowering concerned citizens to participate in the legislative process by building greater awareness of critical legislative opportunities for change…. Americans for Prosperity-Ohio is driving long-term solutions to the country’s biggest problems.”

In Advancing Educational Opportunities for Everyone, the Buckeye Blueprint campaign announces the campaign’s education agenda—beginning with a celebration of the Ohio Legislature’s expansion of publicly funded private school tuition vouchers last summer: “Governor DeWine, Speaker Cupp, and, most notably, Senate President Huffman, deserve credit for steps taken in the most recent Budget that increased educational opportunity through vouchers.”

Advancing Educational Opportunities for Everyone also plugs Ohio’s Backpack Bill, HB 290, a bill being discussed in the legislature to establish a universal Education Savings Account voucher program that would give every Ohio family public dollars to choose a school or spend the public dollars on any so-called educational activity the family prefers including home schooling. The Buckeye Blueprint website explains: “Passage of universal Education Savings Accounts… would put more parents in a better position to make the best choices for their kids.” Americans for Prosperity-Ohio wants us to follow the lead of our neighbors, Indiana and West Virginia, by expanding all kinds of vouchers: “Hoosier & Mountaineer families are feeling the benefit of bold reform in the last 12 months while Buckeye families seeking opportunity are currently under attack in our courts.”

Glowing language frames an individualistic agenda that claims its purpose is to expand educational opportunity, but the buzzwords show that Americans for Prosperity-Ohio is not a bit concerned about the needs of our state’s 1.8 million students in the public schools. Instead the Buckeye Blueprint demands that Ohio’s citizens pressure the legislature to: “Fund students, not schools,” for the purpose of unlocking “each individual’s unique potential.” The Buckeye Blueprint prescribes that, as an alternative to a system of public schools, the Ohio Legislature should offer, “credit for learning, wherever it occurs; (provide) the freedom to enroll in a variety of courses inside and outside of a child’s school; (provide) funded accounts that can be used for a variety of educational uses; (and ensure) public schools of choice.”

The Buckeye Blueprint refers parents and education advocates to another website: Yes. Every Kid, where we can find the “yes. policy framework”: “Does this policy contribute to a diversity of solutions?” “Does this policy empower families to choose what works best?” “Does this policy allow students to customize their education?” “Does this policy ensure funding is attached to the student?”

To refute this sort of slick, individualist appeal, it is helpful to remember that public education is designed to balance our society’s obligation to meet the needs of each particular student with the public responsibility for maintaining a system that secures the rights of all of our state’s students. Public schools are not only publicly funded, but they are expected to be universally available and accountable to the public by law and through the oversight of locally elected school boards.

In Consumed, the late political philosopher, Benjamin Barber explains precisely where campaigns like the Buckeye Blueprint go wrong in their individualist ideology and why school privatization will undermine our society and inevitably disadvantage the most vulnerable children:

“Through vouchers we are able as individuals, through private choosing, to shape institutions and policies that are useful to our own interests but corrupting to the public goods that give private choosing its meaning.  I want a school system where my kid gets the very best; you want a school system where your kid is not slowed down by those less gifted or less adequately prepared; she wants a school system where children whose ‘disadvantaged backgrounds’ (often kids of color) won’t stand in the way of her daughter’s learning; he (a person of color) wants a school system where he has the maximum choice to move his kid out of ‘failing schools’ and into successful ones.  What do we get?  The incomplete satisfaction of those private wants through a fragmented system in which individuals secede from the public realm, undermining the public system to which we can subscribe in common. Of course no one really wants a country defined by deep educational injustice and the surrender of a public and civic pedagogy whose absence will ultimately impact even our own private choices… Yet aggregating our private choices as educational consumers in fact yields an inegalitarian and highly segmented society in which the least advantaged are further disadvantaged as the wealthy retreat ever further from the public sector.  As citizens, we would never consciously select such an outcome, but in practice what is good for ‘me,’ the educational consumer, turns out to be a disaster for ‘us’ as citizens and civic educators—and thus for me the denizen of an American commons (or what’s left of it).” (Consumed, p. 132)

For all the specific reasons our society would be worse off with the expansion of vouchers at the expense of public schools and would be even more damaged by a universal Education Savings Account program like Ohio’s proposed HB 290 Backpack Bill, we can turn to the resources at Public Funds Public Schools, a collaboration of the Education Law Center and the Southern Poverty Law Center.  Public Funds Public Schools has posted a catalogue of research, gathered into eight categories:

• Private School Vouchers Don’t Improve Student Achievement.
• Private School Vouchers Divert Needed Funding from Public Schools.
• Private School Voucher Programs Lack Accountability.
• Absence of Oversight in Private School Voucher Programs Leads to Corruption and Waste.
• Private School Vouchers Don’t Help Students with Disabilities.
• Private School Vouchers Don’t Protect Against Discrimination.
• Private School Vouchers Exacerbate Segregation.
• Universal Private School Voucher Programs Don’t Work.

Public Funds Public Schools summarizes this research into several two-page fact sheets:

• Research Shows Private School Vouchers Don’t Work for Students and Harm Public Schools.
• The Myth of Cost Savings from Private School Vouchers
• Vouchers for Private Virtual Education are Misspent Public Money.

Benjamin Barber precisely defines how privatization damages a society. His words perfectly describe what it will mean if states like Ohio continue to expand, at public expense, private school tuition vouchers and Education Savings Account programs like Ohio’s proposed Backpack Bill:

“Privatization is a kind of reverse social contract: it dissolves the bonds that tie us together into free communities and democratic republics. It puts us back in the state of nature where we possess a natural right to get whatever we can on our own, but at the same time lose any real ability to secure that to which we have a right. Private choices rest on individual power… personal skills… and personal luck.  Public choices rest on civic rights and common responsibilities, and presume equal rights for all. Public liberty is what the power of common endeavor establishes, and hence presupposes that we have constituted ourselves as public citizens by opting into the social contract. With privatization, we are seduced back into the state of nature by the lure of private liberty and particular interest; but what we experience in the end is an environment in which the strong dominate the weak… the very dilemma which the original social contract was intended to address.” (Consumed, pp. 143-144)

Koch Brothers Plan New Scheme Fully to Privatize American Education—at Public Expense

Last Friday, Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank described this year’s wave of strikes and walkouts by school teachers: “Something funny happened on the way to the labor movement’s funeral.  When Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. and his antilabor colleagues on the Supreme Court handed down the Janus v. AFSCME decision last June, unions braced for the worst.”  But, Milbank concludes: “Labor leaders ought to thank Alito—and send chocolates to the Koch brothers for bankrolling the anti-union court case.  Their brazen assault, combined with President Trump’s hostility toward labor, has generated a backlash, invigorating public-sector unions and making a case for the broader labor movement to return to its roots and embrace a more militant style.”

I don’t know about the implications for all of labor, and I’d argue with Milbank’s point that this year’s strikes by teachers have been primarily a response to the Janus decision. The growing wave of teachers’ strikes has instead been a cry for help from a profession of hard-working, dedicated public servants disgusted with despicable working conditions, lack of desperately needed services for their students, and insultingly low pay.

But Milbank is correct that the Janus decision has not undermined membership in the two big public sector teachers’ unions, the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association: “The American Federation of Teachers expected it might lose 30 percent of its revenue after the high court gave public-sector workers the right to be free riders, benefiting from union representation but paying nothing.  Instead, the 1.7 million-member union added 88,500 members since Janus—more than offsetting the 84,000 ‘agency-fee payers’ it lost because of the Supreme Court ruling… The NEA had projected a loss of as many as 200,000 members, based on previous drop-membership campaigns.  Instead, the 3 million-member union is actually up 13,935 members…and the increase in membership among new teachers is particularly encouraging.”

Milbank quotes Lily Eskelsen-Garcia, the president of the National Education Association, identifying the source of the money behind the attack on public sector unions that culminated in the Janus decision: “The Koch brothers and their team… expected us to hide under the bed and shake in our shoes… We stood up on soapboxes and stages and painted picket signs.”

It is a very good thing that the teachers’ unions are geared up for a fight, because on Tuesday, the Washington Post‘s James Hohmann reported: “The donor network led by billionaire industrialist Charles Koch will launch a new organization next month to focus on changing K-12 education as we know it.  The effort will begin as a pilot project focused on five states with a combined school-age population of 16 million kids, but officials said Monday that they aren’t ready to identify them yet because they’re still finalizing partnerships with some of the country’s leading educational organizations.”

The details of the new Koch-driven plan aren’t clear, but there are some hints: “Previewing their K-12 push, Koch strategists pointed to research being conducted with their financial support by Ashley Berner at Johns Hopkins University’s Institute for Education Policy.  Her main interest is expanding what she calls ‘educational pluralism,’ which is when government funds all types of schools, including explicitly religious ones, but does not necessarily run them.”

Hohmann quotes some of the background materials distributed when the new K-12 initiative was announced. These materials describe Berner’s work: “Berner points to examples such as the Netherlands, which funds 36 different types of schools, from Islamic to Jewish Orthodox to socialist…  Alberta, Canada funds homeschooling along with Inuit, Jewish, and secular schools.  In Australia, the central government is the nation’s top funder of independent schools. Other countries with plural school systems include Denmark, Finland, Germany, and Sweden.”

Hohmann quotes Berner, who calls her school choice plan “pluralism” and considers it a middle ground in the debate about the privatization of public education—even though her idea privileges privatized schools and seems entirely to erase the idea of a universal public school system: “It’s the democratic norm around the world.  In pluralism, choice and accountability are two sides of the same coin…  We’ve got to start supporting politicians who are willing to make compromises.  Americans are tired of the battles between charters and district schools; these take up too much energy and resources. A pluralistic system doesn’t pit entire sectors against one another.”

So… Berner steals the word “pluralism” as a new brand for multiple forms of school governance. According to Berner—and apparently the folks at the Koch network—pluralism in school governance seems to mean we’d have all sorts of privately governed and managed schools—all of them paid for with our tax dollars. The Koch Brothers are setting out to help Betsy DeVos realize her dream.

Hohmann quotes a Koch network spokesperson pretending that this new effort will not be anti-public school teacher: “For too long, this issue has been framed unnecessarily as us vs. them, public vs. private, teacher vs. student, parent vs. administrator… The teachers who have expressed frustration in the past several months are good people.  I mean, they’re teachers.  We all remember the positive impact that a teacher or several teachers have had on our lives.  They’re expressing legitimate concerns.  But the current approach means that nobody wins, so they need better options.”

Who are “the country’s leading educational organizations” with which the Koch Brothers plan to collaborate?  I am pretty sure these educational partners will not be the teachers’ unions.  In fact, we’ll be counting on the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers to provide leadership as we try to protect public schools from this new attempt to privatize the common good.

Walmart Has Ruined our Towns: Will We Let the Walton Foundation Destroy our Schools?

Motoko Rich’s recent blockbuster article in the NY Times explores the vast reach of the Walton Foundation to promote and support the privatization of public education.  What has happened in Washington, D.C., writes Rich, is a microcosm of Walton’s investments in the promotion of an education revolution across the country: “In effect, Walton has subsidized an entire charter school system in the nation’s capital, helping to fuel enrollment growth so that close to half of all public school students in the city now attend charters, which receive taxpayer dollars but are privately operated… The foundation has awarded more than $1 billion in grants nationally to educational efforts since 2000, making it one of the largest private contributors to education in the country.”

Rich describes grants of over $1.2 million from the Walton Foundation to DC Prep, a Washington, D.C. network of four charter schools.  Walton also supports Teach for America, the alternative, five-week, Peace Corps-like certification program that has become a primary supplier of teachers for charter schools not only in the nation’s capital but across the country.  Not only does the Walton Foundation support particular privatized charter networks and programs to certify teachers outside the colleges of education, but it also funds the think tanks that have created and promoted the theoretical basis for today’s wave of school privatization including the American Enterprise Institute and the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.  It even “bankrolls an academic department at the University of Arkansas in which faculty, several of whom were recruited from conservative think tanks, conduct research on charter schools, voucher programs and other policies the foundation supports.”

Recently, according to Rich, Walton hired a staff person from the American Legislative Exchange Council as an education program officer. Rich lists Walton’s largest education grant recipients: the Charter School Growth Fund, Teach for America, KIPP charter schools, the Alliance for School Choice, GreatSchools Inc., StudentsFirst—Michelle Rhee’s advocacy group, and the National Association of Charter School Authorizers.  “The size of the Walton foundation’s wallet allows it to exert an outsize influence on education policy…. With its many tentacles, it has helped fuel some of the fastest growing and most divisive, trends in public education—including teacher evaluations based on student test scores and publicly funded vouchers for students to attend private schools.

While Rich acknowledges serious criticism of the Walton Foundation by supporters of public education including Kevin Welner, who directs the National Education Policy Center at the University of Colorado, Randi Weingarten of the American Federation of Teachers, and Dennis Van Roeckel, president of the National Education Association, the stories she tells of high test scores at DC Prep and a father whose son attends Washington, D.C.’s Richard Wright Public Charter School for Journalism and the Arts are from the point of view of particular families and parents who seek school choice for the purpose of meeting their own children’s needs.  The father admits, “Charter schools are a bit of a disservice to the public schools…. But in the meantime, between everyone fighting about it, I did not want my kids to be caught in the limbo.”

One can surely understand the lure of school choice from the viewpoint of individual parents who want to do right by their children, but one wishes Rich had done more to remind us what kind of  disservice to public education the D.C. charter school father may have been thinking about.  She quotes Marc Sternberg, who recently left Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s education department in New York City to become director of K-12 education reform at the Walton Foundation: “The Walton Family Foundation has been deeply committed to a theory of change, which is that we have a moral obligation to provide families with high quality choices,” but Rich does not consider whether it is in fact possible to provide good choices for every child and family.  Rich comments, “While charter schools and vouchers may benefit those families that attend these schools, there may be unintended effects on the broader public school system,” but she does not explore closely what those effects may be.  She extolls the high test scores of DC Prep, but she does not examine, for example,  its attrition rate (an indicator in many places that charters have been known to shed students who will bring down score averages).  Neither does she report on the number of special education students, English learners, and extremely poor children enrolled (or not enrolled) at DC Prep in comparison to statistics for the District’s traditional public schools.

What does the Walmartization of American public education mean for the public education system that developed over two of centuries and that aspired to serve all of our society’s children?  Here we move from from the market world of Walmart to the more abstract principles of education philosophy, political philosophy, and public morality.  How quaint these ideas have come to seem in our corporatized and marketized world.  Our society has traditionally affirmed the principle that public education—publicly funded, universally available, required to accept all children who present themselves at the door, and accountable to the public—is the best way to try to ensure that all children are served.  We have thought of the public schools as the optimal way to balance the needs of each particular child and family with the need for a system that secures the rights of all children.  These goals have been aspirational, and we have made slow but sure progress in expanding the rights of children in marginalized groups to kind of public education that middle class children in the dominant culture have taken for granted.

Even in our corporatized world, there are proponents of a public system of education.  In a stirring address in 2000, at Teachers College, Columbia University, the late Senator Paul Wellstone describes society’s public moral obligation to serve all children.  He critiques the lack of equity in our public schools even as he speaks for public schools as the site where we must work collectively to serve all children: “That all citizens will be given an equal start through a sound education is one of the most basic, promised rights of our democracy. Our chronic refusal as a nation to guarantee that right for all children…. is rooted in a kind of moral blindness, or at least a failure of moral imagination…. It is a failure which threatens our future as a nation of citizens called to a common purpose… tied to one another by a common bond.”  The Rev. Jesse Jackson expresses the same profound ideal in this pithy observation: “There are those who would make the case for a race to the top for those who can run.  Instead ‘lift from the bottom’ is the moral imperative because it includes everybody.”

Wellstone and Jackson remind us of society’s obligation to our collective children, but the idea is not merely that we aspire to equity for the sake of doing the good thing.  Both also believe that society itself benefits when all are prepared to participate actively in our democracy and all are prepared to share their gifts socially, politically, and economically.  Just over a hundred years ago, John Dewey, America’s best known philosopher of education, described this public benefit from universal public education:  “What the best and wisest parent wants for his own child, that must the community want for all of its children…. Only by being true to the full growth of all the individuals who make it up, can society by any chance be true to itself.”

For help thinking about the pervasive consumerism and commercialization of just about everything in our society today, I find myself drawn to Consumed, a fascinating book by the political philosopher, Benjamin Barber. Consider the following passage in the context of Motoko Rich’s article on the Walton Foundation’s school privatization enterprise:  “The transfer of public power to private hands often is associated with a devolution of power; but in fact privatizing power does not devolve but only commercializes it, placing it in private hands that may be as centralized and monopolistic as government, although usually far less transparent and accountable, and also pervasively commercial.”(p. 145)

Barber would worry about turning the privatization of education over to Sam Walton, his descendents and the program officers of the Walton Foundation.  He would caution that these folks are less likely than a deliberative public body to look out for the interests of the children who are being lured into the charter schools in the District of Columbia and America’s other big cities these days: “The idea that liberty entails only private choice runs afoul of our actual experiences as consumers and citizens.  We are seduced into thinking that the right to choose from a menu is the essence of liberty, but with respect to relevant outcomes the real power, and hence the real freedom, is in the determination of what is on the menu.  The powerful are those who set the agenda, not those who choose from the alternatives it offers.  We select menu items privately, but we can assure meaningful menu choices only through public decision-making.”(p. 139)

“Public Schools Shakedown” Website Exposes Privatizers

The forces undermining public education don’t really take the trouble to publicize what they are doing.  It is all very quiet and very well funded. And if, in polite conversation, you mention the likes of ALEC—or Jeb Bush’s Foundation for Excellence in Education—or the role of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, people may look at you as though you are spouting conspiracy theories.

But we must summon the courage to mention what is going on, and we need to get ourselves informed enough to be confident about the facts.  The Progressive, a Madison, Wisconsin magazine, helps us with a new project this autumn,  Public Schools Shakedown. Take a look at the in-depth background resources on this website.

Written by Brendan Fischer, the general counsel for the Center for Media and Democracy, ALEC’s Schoolhouse Rock is one of the best pieces I know about the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).  This is the secretive organization that pairs corporate lobbyists and state legislators to develop “model” laws that can be introduced in any state legislature. Fischer reports: “at least 139 bills or budget provisions reflecting ALEC education bills have been introduced in forty-three states and the District of Columbia in just the first six months of 2013.”  According to Fischer, “ALEC might best be described as a ‘corporate bill mill’ that helps conservative state legislators become a vessel for advancing special interest legislation.”  Fischer covers the agenda promoted by ALEC’s bills: vouchers, tuition tax credits for private education, the authorization of charter schools by appointed—not democratically elected—state agencies, parent trigger laws that permit parents through a petition process to take over their school and exit from the public school district, expansion of on-line blended learning in classrooms with bigger classes per teacher, and alternative certification programs.

Check out, Funding “Education Reform”: The Big Three Foundations.  This in-depth article and info-graphic demonstrate how the Gates, Walton, and Broad Foundations have supported privatization across the states.  Jonathan Pelto, a Connecticut writer explains, “The foundations themselves explain their goals and funding strategies through innocuous rhetoric.  For example, the Gates Foundation opines that: ‘We invest in programs with a common aim to strengthen the connection between teacher and student. To that end, we work with educators, policymakers, parents, and communities to expand and accelerate successful programs and identify innovative new solutions that can help unlock students’ potential.’  But the actual agenda becomes much clearer when one examines their actual list of grantees, which includes most of the country’s charter school management organizations, education reform “think tanks,” and advocacy organizations.”

Barbara Minor’s excellent  The Voucher Boondoggle in Wisconsin may at first seem specific to that state.  However, other states including Indiana, Ohio, and Louisiana have followed Wisconsin’s lead by robbing the state public education budget for allocations to support private school tuition.  Minor is the wonderful writer who recently published the authoritative history of Milwaukee’s schools: Lessons from the Heartland: A Turbulent Half-Century of Public Education in an Iconic American City.  You will also find an excellent info-graphic, Meet the Bullies, that diagrams the influence of particular philanthropists who have been underwriting advocacy for vouchers and privatization.  Many of them are very likely active in your state.