Public Schools, Billionaire Agendas: The Threat of the 'Parent Revolution' Campaign

[lunasun]

The "parent-trigger” movement is being heavily financed by the conservative Walton Family Foundation, one of the nation’s largest anti-union organizations.
April 4, 2013 |
At first glance, it is one of the nation’s hottest new education-reform movements, a seemingly populist crusade to empower poor parents and fix failing public schools. But a closer examination reveals that the “parent-trigger” movement is being heavily financed by the conservative Walton Family Foundation, one of the nation’s largest and most strident anti-union organizations, a Frying Pan News investigation has shown.

http://www.alternet.org/education/public-schools-billionaire-agendas-threat-parent-revolution-campaign-0



“Why is all this money coming in?” asks John Rogers, director of UCLA’s Institute for Democracy, Education and Access, who has studied the parent-trigger movement. “Itdoesn’t seem to be about educational improvements . . . It seems to be about creating greater pressure to challenge teachers’ unions rather than an authentic way to improve education opportunities.” The parent-trigger law diminishes the influence of teachers’ unions and it allows public schools to be turned into nonunion charters.

The Walton Family Foundation, which is run by the family of Walmart founder Sam Walton, is one of the nation’s largest private donors to charter schools. The foundation has also used its money and clout to fund conservative research groups (including the Cato Institute and Heritage Foundation) whose analysts have then defended Walmart and its anti-union policies on newspaper opinion pages and in testimony to government committees. In education, it is a strong proponent of the expansion of charter schools, school voucher programs and other efforts to privatize public education. It also gives money to the influential trade publication Education Week to write about parent empowerment issues.

Another large donor to Parent Revolution, the Laura and John Arnold Foundation of Houston, Texas, supports charter schools and also has funded conservative efforts to overhaul and limit pensions in California, according to the Center for Investigative Reporting’s California Watch. John Arnold is a billionaire former Enron trader who also founded a successful hedge fund. The Broad Foundation, founded by Los Angeles billionaire Eli Broad and his wife, Edythe, and the Gates Foundation, also are big backers of charter schools and other market-driven education reforms,

[d_r]

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