Building an Infrastructure to Take Over the Public School System

By Thomas Ultican / Tultican

Educating children is expensive. Wealthy people like Charles Koch do not mind paying to educate their own children but they detest the idea of being taxed to pay for educating other people’s children.

In the dystopian market driven system libertarians such as Koch espouse, people should only receive what they pay for. They believe almost all government programs should be ended including Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, the FAA, the EPA, the Department of Energy, the FDA, The Consumer Product Safety Commission and more. Libertarians contend that mail, schools and roads should be privatized plus personal and corporate taxes should be abolished (Kochland Pages 113 and 114).

Toward achieving their ends, Koch, Gates, the Walton family and scores of wealthy elites have been building an infrastructure to take over and privatize the public school system. By twisting the laws concerning tax free philanthropic organizations, wealthy moguls are funneling huge sums of money into creating privatized schools; thus eliminating local control by elected school boards. All the while, they illegitimately write off most of their spending to promote public school privatization as charitable giving.

In addition to spending to privatize schools, a key strategy employed to advance their market based agenda is the creation of alternate teacher professional development and certification. It is another new privatized system under their control and not influenced by university based programs or education scholars.

The third leg of their attack on public education is political spending to take over elected school boards and influence legislatures.

The New Schools Venture Fund (NSVF) and Teach for America (TFA) support all three of the ending public schools privatization pillars.

The article “Organized to Disrupt” gives many details about the founding, purpose and lavish financing for NSVF. A former CEO of NSVF, Ted Mitchell, was also simultaneously President of the California State Board of Education. He left NSVF to become Under Secretary of the United States Department of Education. NSVF is generating more than $100,000,000 yearly income which it uses to invest in edtech start ups, charter schools and political organizing.

The TFA story is well known. The post “TFA is Bad for America” gives some details about how through huge financing, TFA is providing its billionaire funders with a privatization army of youthful college graduates looking for a career. These temp teachers – 80% of whom are gone in three years – have no business in a classroom. Real teachers go through a rigorous college teaching curriculum and a year of student-teaching under the supervision of a master teacher. TFA teachers get no teaching curriculum and five weeks of teacher training in the summer.

These unqualified TFA teachers have become the backbone of the teaching core for no-excuses charter schools. They embrace market based reform as a mechanism for reforming schools (Scripting Page 173) and within two to three years after they leave the classroom, their TFA connections put them in good position to became district, state or federal education leaders. TFA also offers political help for corps members to run for school board positions through its associated Leadership for Education Equity (LEE) non-profit. The LEE board of trustees consists of Emma Bloomberg (Michael Bloomberg’s daughter); Steuart Walton (billionaire); Arthur Rock (billionaire) and Elisa Villanueva Beard (TFA-CEO).

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