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The Education Invasion. Joy Pullmann
Читать онлайн.Название The Education Invasion
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781594038822
Автор произведения Joy Pullmann
Жанр Учебная литература
Издательство Ingram
were either former Gates officials or former Gates grantees. One informant noted that, “Once Obama was elected, I mean, Gates literally had people sitting at the Department of Education, both formally and informally.” These officials included Jim Shelton, assistant deputy secretary for innovation and improvement and former program director of the education program at Gates, and Joanne Weiss, director of the Race to the Top competition and a former partner at the NewSchools Venture Fund, a major Gates grantee that served as an intermediary funder for charter school management organizations.48
The new education secretary himself, Arne Duncan, also had Gates connections in his background (as alluded to earlier): while Duncan headed the Chicago Public Schools, the district received more than $47 million from the Gates Foundation.49 Gates officials told Reckhow and Tompkins-Stange that Duncan was “a linchpin in the partnership between Gates and federal policymakers.”50 Duncan’s chief of staff, Margot Rogers, was one of the former Gates employees who needed a conflict-of-interest waiver to join the administration.51 The relationship between the two organizations was so close that Gates staff had regular phone conversations with Duncan and Shelton while the latter ostensibly worked for taxpayers.52
This cabal of former Gates employees and grant recipients basically walked into the White House with Obama, ready to implement the education plan that the foundation, along with employees of the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO), had drafted beforehand. Between Coleman and Wilhoit’s conversation with Gates in the summer of 2008 and the day that Obama assumed the presidency, the Gates Foundation cosponsored a paper titled “Benchmarking for Success: Ensuring U.S. Students Receive a World-Class Education.” Written by employees of the three organizations that would go on to construct Common Core — CCSSO, the National Governors Association (NGA), and a nonprofit called Achieve, Inc. — the paper envisioned how the federal government could establish a national curriculum and tests (notwithstanding the legal prohibition). Federal policymakers “should offer funds to help underwrite the cost for states” to implement “a common core of internationally benchmarked standards in math and language arts,” with new curriculum, assessments, teacher training, and other resources.53 The paper refered to this effort as the “Common State Standards Initiative.”54
The Obama administration ultimately didn’t have to offer funding for Common Core to be written. Gates paid for that. Instead, the administration ponied up the one thing the federal government is uniquely qualified to provide: pressure, verging on coercion. Before we get to federal force-feeding, however, let’s spend a little time talking about the chefs who made this meal of worms. They, too, are part of the shadow bureaucracy.
“Outsourcing a Core State Function”
Who called the shots during the obscure process that brought Common Core into the world? We don’t know. As Alisa Ellis noted, the organizations that wrote and pushed Common Core, funded primarily with Gates money, are private and have no obligation to submit to open-records requests or hold public meetings, as state boards of education must do. No one inside NGA, CCSSO, or Achieve is elected by and accountable to voters and taxpayers. And these organizations have been remarkably unresponsive to requests for more information about the document that is up-ending U.S. education.
This is astonishing, not just because Americans are granted by law and tradition the right to govern our own affairs, but also because Common Core exercises so much power over a $620 billion industry that is mostly financed by taxes. The cost of implementing Common Core itself, according to one of the few estimates made, was between $5 and $12 billion.55 That estimate was made by a Gates-financed organization and reflected its “middle-of-the-road” assessment. The only independent estimate of Common Core’s costs nationwide concluded that its roll-out would stick taxpayers with a bill of $16 billion over and above existing tax support for education.56 Gates assumed the right to direct between $5 billion and $16 billion in tax dollars with very little deliberation on the matter by elected officials in public forums created for that purpose. (Has he ever heard of “No taxation without representation”?)
Common Core was not “written by local school districts,” as Ohio’s governor and erstwhile presidential candidate, John Kasich, incorrectly told a Cleveland radio audience.57 The National Governors Association seems to have been the primary initiator of Common Core, with CCSSO and Achieve doing more of the hands-on work. To use a metaphor, NGA was the Mafia don and the other two its henchmen. A 2013 paper by Dane Linn of NGA, titled “Governors and the Common Core,” reinforces this educated guess.58
Taxpayers have some claim on the activities of NGA, CCSSO, and Achieve, not just because of these organizations’ outsized influence on public policy, but also because taxpayers help fund the organizations directly. That’s right: American taxpayers financially support meetings they cannot attend, where decisions they cannot influence are made about how their tax dollars are spent and how their children are educated.
NGA and CCSSO are basically clubby interest groups for governors and state superintendents, respectively, but states pay dues to belong, said Emmett McGroarty, director of the American Principles Project’s education division. NGA would not release information on member dues to APP, he said. CCSSO did give a generic membership cost, but not what is paid by specific states, a sum that varies.
NGA’s spokeswoman would only say, “we consider all governors members of the association,” but at least five governors in office during the years of Common Core’s emergence and implementation withdrew (or had already withdrawn) their membership publicly and refused to pay dues: those of Florida, Maine, North Dakota, South Carolina, and Texas, all Republicans. Spokesmen for those governors said NGA membership provided too little benefit for the money.
Former governor Rick Perry of Texas withdrew membership in 2003. In 2014 his spokesman Josh Havens said the state’s NGA dues had been running $125,000 to $150,000 per year, and the governor “didn’t feel that active membership was a smart use of taxpayer funds.” Idaho suspended its membership in 2009 for financial reasons, but resumed paying about $40,000 for membership (plus $30,000 for travel to meetings) in 2013, said Jon Hanian, a spokesman for Governor Butch Otter. He explained that the governor “believes states are the laboratory of the republic” and “values sharing his experience as well as sharing the experience of other governors as he crafts public policy.”
When Maine’s governor, Paul LePage, pulled out of NGA in 2012, he told the Bangor Daily News, “I get no value out of those meetings. They are too politically correct and everybody is lovey-dovey and no decisions are ever made.”59 NGA’s communications director told the paper that governors cannot choose to leave; they are all NGA members even if they don’t pay dues. That raises the question why states pay dues at all.
In any case, 38 percent of NGA’s revenue comes from taxpayers, according to its 2014 financial report.60 In 2013–14, NGA’s $25.8 million in total revenue included $5.3 million from the feds, $4.5 million from states, $7.9 million from private foundations, and another $2.3 million from corporate sponsors.61 This has been its general pattern of income distribution for years. In the fiscal year during which Common Core was created, tax dollars provided 50 percent of NGA’s revenue.62 A spokeswoman for NGA referred questions about cash flow to NGA’s communications director; neither of the two responded to several follow-up calls and emails.
NGA offers businesses and advocacy groups access to governors at its semiannual meetings. As governor of Virginia, George Allen attended the meetings largely to recruit IBM into his state, but he said the organization “didn’t have much of an impact on my decisions as governor. . . . Not saying it’s a bad organization, but we had our own agenda.”