Colorado vote this weekend: does it signal that DFER is on the decline and the Democratic Party has regained its soul?

Amidst the bad news of abusive state testing and stagnant student achievement, a ray of sunshine broke through the clouds yesterday when the news broke that members of the Democratic party in Colorado voted by a huge margin to dissociate themselves from Democrats for Education Reform and demand they take the word "Democrats" off their name.

After booing down the head of the education reform organization, who described herself as a lifelong Democrat, delegates voted overwhelmingly Saturday to call for the organization to no longer use “Democrats” in its name. While it’s unclear how that would be enforced, the vote means a rejection of DFER is now part of the Colorado Democratic Party platform.

Even though the Los Angeles County Democratic Party demanded DFER "remove all reference to the Democratic Party...from your name" in 2012 and the California Democratic party passed a similar resolution denouncing the organization the next year,  this is a far more momentous event since Colorado for many years has been a stronghold of corporate education reform. Senator Michael Bennet, Rep. Jared Polis and State Senator Michael Johnson are all true-believers, adhering to the tenets of charter school expansion, school closings and high-stakes testing with near-religious obeisance, and until recently, the Denver school board has been made up of members who unanimously supported these policies and were elected with the help of DFER "dark money."

In a speech quoted by Chalkbeat, Vanessa Quintana, a political activist and a fromer student at Manual High School, described her experiences as a victim of school reform.  The school was restructured and broken up into three separate high schools with funding and a push from the Gates Foundation, and then closed by Michael Bennet when he was Denver superintendent:

She said that before she finally graduated from high school, she had been through two school closures and a major school restructuring and dropped out of school twice. Three of her siblings never graduated, and she blames the instability of repeated school changes.

“When DFER claims they empower and uplift the voices of communities, DFER really means they silence the voices of displaced students like myself by uprooting community through school closure,” she told the delegates. “When Manual shut down my freshman year, it told me education reformers didn’t find me worthy of a school.”

Since its founding in 2005 by NYC hedgefunder Whitney Tilson, DFER has been very influential.  Led by former Daily News reporter Joe Williams, the organization was an early supporter of Barack Obama when he was running for Senator in Illinois, and directed Wall Street money to candidate Andrew Cuomo when he was a candidate for Governor of New York.  The organization had a strong hand in developing the pro-privatization, market-base agenda of both men, as well as the positions of far too many other Democratic officials across the country.  Here is the story of the marriage of convenience between DFER and Cuomo, as recounted in the NY Times:

When Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo wanted to meet certain members of the hedge fund crowd, seeking donors for his all-but-certain run for governor, what he heard was this: Talk to Joe.

That would be Joe Williams, executive director of a political action committee that advances what has become a favorite cause of many of the wealthy founders of New York hedge funds: charter schools.... Hedge fund executives are thus emerging as perhaps the first significant political counterweight to the powerful teachers unions, which strongly oppose expanding charter schools in their current form.

Perhaps the vote in Colorado this weekend results from the fact that the battle lines are clearer in the age of  pro-privatization Trump and Betsy DeVos.  Or perhaps the corrosive damage done to our public education system by charter expansion, high -stakes testing and school closures has become even clearer with the passage of time.  Joe Williams himself left DFER in 2015, and now works for the Walton Family Foundation, funded by the conservative billionaire heirs to the Walmart fortune. The NAACP passed a well-publicized resolution in 2016 and again in 2017, calling for a moratorium on charter expansion. Popular support for charters has fallen precipitously in the polls.

Yet Andrew Cuomo, running for a third term as Governor, still gets big contributions from the the charter lobby ($30,000 from Coalition for Public Charter Schools PAC and $50,000 from the Walton family in 2018 alone ) and predictably retains his political preference for charter schools.  Daniel Loeb, head of the board of Success Academy charters, and his wife have donated more than $170,000 to Cuomo in recent years, according to the NY Times.

In any event, let's remember how Whitney Tilson explained the founding of DFER in a film called "A Right Denied"  (reported previously on this blog):

“The real problem, politically, was not the Republican party, it was the Democratic party. So it dawned on us, over the course of six months or a year, that it had to be an inside job. The main obstacle to education reform was moving the Democratic party, and it had to be Democrats who did it, it had to be an inside job. So that was the thesis behind the organization. And the name – and the name was critical – we get a lot of flack for the name. You know, “Why are you Democrats for education reform? That’s very exclusionary. I mean, certainly there are Republicans in favor of education reform.” And we said, “We agree.” In fact, our natural allies, in many cases, are Republicans on this crusade, but the problem is not Republicans. We don’t need to convert the Republican party to our point of view…”

Lets hope that the Colorado vote is a turning point, and that it is no longer politically or ethically acceptable for progressive Democrats to act like Republicans when it comes to education policy.

Is the tug of war on education policy between liberal "reform proponents" and the unions, as the NY Times argues, or the 1% and nearly everyone else?

NY Times ran a front page article on Wednesday, focused on the tug of war for Hilary Clinton’s soul, supposedly between the teacher unions and the big donors, mostly hedge fund operators, who want to privatize public schools and ramp up high-stakes testing, weaken teacher tenure and base their evaluations on student test scores. Value-added test based teacher evaluation has proved to be highly unreliable, and many expert groups, including the American Statistical Association and the National Academy of Sciences, have concluded that it could have damaging impact on morale and the quality of education.   

In the article, the hedgefunders make it clear that they will threaten to withhold their contributions if Hillary does not adopt their positions:

“This is an issue that’s important to a lot of Democratic donors,” said John Petry, a hedge fund manager who was a founder of the Harlem Success Academy, a New York charter school. “Donors want to hear where she stands.”

Yet in the process of writing about this ideological battle, the reporter, Maggie Haberman, characterizes Democrats for Education Reform, one of the principle hedge fund-backed lobby groups as a “left of center group,” which is absurd.  For some reason, DFER has managed to persuade reporters that it has any liberal credentials, despite the fact that as Diane Ravitch pointed out, the California Democratic Party has repudiated it.  

Parents Across America wrote an open letter to the NPR ombudsman in 2011, objecting to the fact that Claudio Sanchez, the NPR reporter, had called DFER a “liberal” organization, while quoting their criticism of the progressive participants in the anti-corporate reform Save Our Schools march in DC.   

We also pointed out that DFER’s founder, hedge fund operator Whitney Tilson, admitted that the only reason he put “Democrats” in the organization’s title and focused on convincing Democrats to adopt their pro-privatization agenda was that GOP leaders were already in agreement with most of their positions.  The following is an excerpt from a film made by Tilson called “A Right Denied”:

“The real problem, politically, was not the Republican party, it was the Democratic party. So it dawned on us, over the course of six months or a year, that it had to be an inside job. The main obstacle to education reform was moving the Democratic party, and it had to be Democrats who did it, it had to be an inside job. So that was the thesis behind the organization. And the name – and the name was critical – we get a lot of flack for the name. You know, “Why are you Democrats for education reform? That’s very exclusionary. I mean, certainly there are Republicans in favor of education reform.” And we said, “We agree.” In fact, our natural allies, in many cases, are Republicans on this crusade, but the problem is not Republicans. We don’t need to convert the Republican party to our point of view…”

In addition, by characterizing the struggle on education policy as being a conflict primarily between the teacher unions and big donors, the reporter misses the boat.  Indeed, the only mention of parents in the piece implies that they are allied with the DFER privateers: “Reform proponents include donors, but also a cross section of parents and business advocates.”   

Hopefully NY Times readers and especially Hillary will smart enough to reject this claim, if they merely looked at Governor Cuomo’s plunging popularity.  Cuomo’s poll numbers are dropping like a stone, largely because his positions on education are in thrall to his big donors in the DFER/hedgefund crowd.  He has pushed hard on test-based teacher evaluation and other favorite talking points of the corporate reform contingent.   

According to the latest Quinnipiac poll, Cuomo’s approval ratings on education are at a tepid 28% - while 63% of voters reject his views on school reform.  65% of voters reject the notion that teacher tenure should be based on student test scores; 71% reject the idea that teacher pay should be based on scores, and 55% trust the teacher unions on education, compared to 28% who trust Cuomo. 

And the overwhelming rejection of Cuomo's views is shared among rural, suburban, urban voters, Republicans and Democrats alike.

Interestingly, instead of citing any of the many polls that show voters overwhelmingly reject the corporate reform/hedgefund education agenda,  the NY Times article uncritically links to a leaked “memo” from Joe Williams of DFER, to “Board members and Major Donors,” citing polling results that supposedly show that “voters agree with our policies.”  

But in the memo, Williams fails to reveal the actual questions – or what it might actually mean that 69% of voters feel that education is on the “wrong track”.  After a decade or more of increasingly severe test-based accountability, many voters are indeed weary of the focus on testing and test prep, and the disruption and damaging cycle of closing neighborhood schools, and so reject the DFER agenda that is based on more of the same.

Another recent poll from GBA Strategies, conducted for In the Public Interest and the Center for Popular Democracy went unmentioned by the NY Times. Unlike the DFER survey the full questions and answers were released, revealing that most voters do indeed reject the corporate reform agenda. Voters see lack of parental involvement as their biggest education concern, followed by too much testing, funding cuts and overly large class sizes. School choice came in last on a list of their priorities.

Let’s hope for more accurate and less biased education reporting from the mainstream media in the future.  The tug of war on education is not primarily between liberal reformers and the teachers union – but between the 1% and nearly everyone else.

How DFER and the charter lobby hijacked our politicians, who are allowing them to hijack our public schools in an "inside job"

Today, hundreds of parents and teachers stood in the rain, protesting the first day of Camp Philos conclave, at the aptly named Whiteface Lodge.  This shindig was organized by Democrats for Education Reform, with Governor Cuomo the honorary “host” for a meeting of deep-pocketed hedge funders and other financiers who support charter expansion, test based accountability, and other privatization schemes. 

Though at the last minute Cuomo cancelled his plans to attend, presumably because of the protests, several  bloggers have written about how ridiculous and insulting is DFER’s spiel, comparing this meeting to the “philosopher’s retreat” that took place in the 19th century between Ralph Waldo Emerson, Russell Lowell, and Horatio Woodman.  While the website says that the nation’s “thought leaders in education reform” will be there, instead they cite M. Night Shmayalan, movie director, and others of a less luminary stature.  Check out the inspired critiques of Prof. Daniel Katz and teacher Patrick Walsh.

The schedule for the gathering features panels with absurd names like  “Rocketships, Klingons and Tribbles: Charters' Course to Where No Schools Have Gone Before” and “Adequacy, Fairness and Equity: School Finance in the Age of Austerity” – a fitting discussion since Gov. Cuomo has made sure that NY public school funding is neither adequate nor equitable, and is instead steering more funds into the charter schools backed by his hedge fund contributors.  

In the latest state budget, Cuomo engineered one of the biggest corporate giveaways in history – to require NYC provide free public space to all new or expanded charters going forward or pay for their private space.   This is despite the fact that NYC already has the most overcrowded schools in the state – and the most expensive real estate.  No doubt Cuomo’s generosity on their behalf (while making NYC taxpayers foot the bill) and his willingness to host this shindig was influenced by the fact that DFER has given him at least $65,000 since 2010. DFER board members have also given him another $100,000, including those who also serve on charter boards like Success Academy, which will profit the most from the new law.   

Mayor de Blasio was re-elected overwhelmingly on the need for a moratorium on co-locations and charging charter schools rent.  But when he reversed three of the decisions pushed through in the last months of the Bloomberg administration, to give Success Academy free space in already public school overcrowded buildings – decisions made by Deputy Marc Sternberg just weeks before he left to work for the Walton Foundation, which helps fund these charters, the charter lobby went mad.   

Then, the Walton Foundation as well as some of these same hedgefunders helped pay for a $5 million ad campaign to push them through.  Because of the new law, the DOE is now being forced to rent three parochial schools for Success Academy charters, and pay for renovations to suit the specifications of their CEO, Eva Moskowitz. Yet the Success chain has more than $30 million in assets and raised more than $7.5 million in one night a couple of weeks ago, with headliners like Jeb Bush and Campbell Brown, and lots of Wall Street financiers like Dan Loeb, as well as  Erik Prince, the disgraced former owner of the mercenary company Blackwater in attendance.  

At this event, Eva Moskowitz, the CEO of the Success chain made the risible claim her schools had “faced an existential threat to our existence" and then praised Cuomo for his support of "the most historic package of pro-charter legislation not only that New York State has ever seen but, I would argue, the country has ever seen."  The latter claim is indeed true.  Now she is engaged in yet another fundraiser to raise more, a dubious scheme with the trading company Jefferies, in which “Participating asset managers will pay Jefferies an ordinary commission expense which would not be treated as a charitable donation. Jefferies will match the designated net commission revenue with a charitable donation to Success subject to a tax deduction.” 

How did this happen?  How did our electeds of both parties enable corporate interests to hijack our public schools?  Today, in honor of the Camp Philos conclave, a new website was born called Democrats in Name only For Education Reform, outlining all the connections between DFER and various right-wing and Republican groups such as the organizations run by the Koch brothers and Betsy Devos.  The truth, though, is that DFER has been amazingly successful in hijacking Democratic Party officials as well, through an “inside job”, as DFER founder and hedgefunder Whitney Tilson put it.   

In a self-financed movie called “A Right Denied,” Tilson described how he learned from John Walton of the Walmart billions, that they should focus on the Democrats because Walton and company had already successfully persuaded GOP politicians to adopt his privatization ideology  via big cash donations to their party:

The real problem, politically, was not the Republican party, it was the Democratic party. So it dawned on us, over the course of six months or a year,  that it had to be an inside job. The main obstacle to education reform was moving the Democratic party, and it had to be Democrats who did it, it had to be an inside job. So that was the thesis behind the organization. And the name – and the name was critical – we get a lot of flack for the name. You know, “Why are you Democrats for education reform? That’s very exclusionary. I mean, certainly there are Republicans in favor of education reform.” And we said, “We agree.” In fact, our natural allies, in many cases, are Republicans on this crusade, but the problem is not Republicans. We don’t need to convert the Republican party to our point of view…

So this is how we got here.  A small band of Wall St. billionaires decided to convert the Democratic party to the Republican party, at least on education -- and succeeded beyond their wildest dreams – or our worst nightmares. And now we have electeds of both parties who are intent on helping them engineer a hostile takeover of our public schools, which has nothing to do with parent choice but the choice of these plutocrats.  Their plans to do will be facilitated in NYC, unless this depraved law requiring the inequitable giveaway of public space to charters  is overturned.

The tangled web of influence behind Klein's decision to allow the expansion of Girls Prep charter to go forward

Last week, Joel Klein disclosed he would invoke “emergency powers” to enable Girls Prep Charter School to expand within PS 94, even as it pushes out a program for autistic kids, contrary to the ruling of the NY State Education commissioner, David Steiner.

Steiner had held that Klein's actions violated state law, as Klein had refused to recognize that the autistic program was a school, any change to which required a public process occur beforehand, including informing the parents of the children who would be affected. Klein's actions in invoking emergency powers to displace a school for autistic children on behalf of a charter school has provoked much outrage from parents, elected officials, and special education advocates alike.

Mike Klonsky has pointed out that hedge fund maven Ravenel Boykin Curry IV, subject of a recent NY Times profile, is on the board of Public Prep, the charter management organization (CMO) that operates Girls Prep. But this only scratches the surface of this massively connected charter school.

Also on the board of Public Prep is Eric Grannis, husband of Eva Moskowitz, operator of the Harlem Success chain of charter schools, who has provoked her share of controversy by aggressively expanding within public school buildings, also with the aid and assistance of Joel Klein, to the extent of letting him know which public schools to close for her benefit. Grannis is a founding member of Girls Prep board and former counsel of the board:

Sarah Robertson is also on the Public Prep board and remains head of the Girls Prep board. Sarah is the wife of Spencer Robertson, the founder of PAVE charter school, installed by Klein in PS 15 in Red Hook, Brooklyn. PAVE is the subject of another complaint to the Commissioner, charging that its expansion will have damaging effects on the students with disabilities at PS 15, impacts which were omitted from the DOE's Educational Impact Statement. Unfortunately, in that case, the Commissioner did not see these effects as important enough to require them to be mentioned in the EIS.

Spencer Robertson, husband of Sarah, is the son of the hedge fund billionaire, Julian Robertson, who controls two influential and deep-pocketing foundations, the Tiger Foundation and the Robertson Foundation, both of which support Bloomberg's agenda to the tune of millions of dollars, through the Fund for Public Schools and other vehicles.

The Robertson Foundation is also among the largest contributors to Education Reform Now, the aggressive pro-charter school organization, and is one of the main funders of the NYC Charter Center, on whose board Joel Klein sits. The head of the board of the NYC Charter Center is Phoebe Boyer, the Executive Director of the Tiger Foundation and Interim Executive Director of Robertson Foundation.

Julian Robertson is in the news recently, not about his efforts on behalf of NYC charters, but because he took the Gates/Buffett billionaire’s pledge to give away most of his money to charity. Why that couldn’t include finding space for the charter schools run by his son and daughter-in-law, so that they wouldn’t have to push out autistic and other high-needs kids from critical space in their public schools is hard to figure out.

Perhaps contributing to his reluctance is the fact that these billionaire hedge fund privateers are intent on “leveraging” their private contributions as much as possible, as one of them, Whitney Tilson, pointed out in the NY Times article:

“It’s the most important cause in the nation, obviously, and with the state providing so much of the money, outside contributions are insanely well leveraged,” he said.

Julian Robertson is also a philanthropist who is awfully good at avoiding to pay NYC taxes, even to the extent of hiring a social secretary to keep track of how many days he should stay out of the city each year.

Why did Girls Prep want to expand in the first place? See the SUNY charter center fiscal dashboard, which shows that this school had recently moved into dangerous territory fiscally speaking, and most likely wanted an infusion of taxpayer funds generated by higher enrollment, without having to dip into the hefty pockets of their board members or Spencer’s generous father.

Klein's confidential email blasting the Times

In an email received by accident today, and sent me by a friendly source, Joel Klein blasts the NY Times coverage of the test score scandal this way: “NYT is outrageous.“

Interesting how he says the Times article is “outrageous.” I thought today’s article was relatively mild myself. Or perhaps he meant yesterday’s piece?

In any case, Klein then adds: “There will be pushback (in addition to today’s DN edit) ahead but the oppos are trying to move their agenda with this.” You bet we are!

When the entire Bloom/Klein agenda has been revealed to be a failure, we’d be fools not to point that out.

The Daily News editorial that he is referring to is even more ridiculous than

ever. These guys have lost all sense of reality. Entitled Way to Go, Kids! it still maintains the fiction, with a straight face, that the progress under Bloom/Klein has been terrific, while ignoring how their house of cards has completely fallen apart.

Klein's email message is

addressed to Whitney Tilson. Tilson is a charter school/ hedgefund privateer, founder of the

pro-charter group Democrats for Education Reform, and writes one of the silliest blogs on the planet (amusingly lampooned by Billionaires for Educational Reform).

Here is their entire exchange.

__

JK wrote:

Put together stuff for him re scale score re ros, big 4 from 02, etc, s-chart stuff, the chart

showing whichever cut scores we moved up, and the naep stuff. Let me see.

From: Whitney Tilson [mailto:wtilson@t2partnersllc.com]
Sent: Friday, July 30, 2010 4:57 PM
To: Klein Joel I.
Subject: RE: test data

Thx for the heads up on the Daily News editorial – I’ll include it in my next email.

Please send me whatever you have on the results.

Thx!

From: Klein Joel I. [mailto:JKlein@schools.nyc.gov]
Sent: Friday, July 30, 2010 4:43 PM
To: Whitney Tilson
Subject: RE: YPO dinner on March 8, 9 or 10th?

Btw, thanks for the shout out today. NYT is outrageous. There will be pushback (in addition to today’s DN edit) ahead but the oppos are trying to move their agenda with this. If you ever want details regarding the results, including strong results in 3 or 4 naeps, i can get to you. Enjoy the weekend.