[Vision2020] Selling Schools Out ! ! !

[Tom Hansen]

Courtesy of the December 5, 2011 edition of The Nation (in publication
since February 1861 - that's right EIGHTEEN HUNDRED SIXTY ONE)

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How Online Learning Companies Bought America's Schools
By Lee Fang

This article was reported in partnership with The Investigative Fund at
The Nation Institute.
  
If the national movement to “reform” public education through vouchers,
charters and privatization has a laboratory, it is Florida. It was one of
the first states to undertake a program of “virtual schools”—charters
operated online, with teachers instructing students over the Internet—as
well as one of the first to use vouchers to channel taxpayer money to
charter schools run by for-profits.

But as recently as last year, the radical change envisioned by school
reformers still seemed far off, even there. With some of the movement’s
cherished ideas on the table, Florida Republicans, once known for
championing extreme education laws, seemed to recoil from the fight. SB
2262, a bill to allow the creation of private virtual charters, vastly
expanding the Florida Virtual School program, languished and died in
committee. Charlie Crist, then the Republican governor, vetoed a bill to
eliminate teacher tenure. The move, seen as a political offering to the
teachers unions, disheartened privatization reform advocates. At one
point, the GOP’s budget proposal even suggested a cut for state aid going
to virtual school programs.

Lamenting this series of defeats, Patricia Levesque, a top adviser to
former Governor Jeb Bush, spoke to fellow reformers at a retreat in
October 2010. Levesque noted that reform efforts had failed because the
opposition had time to organize. Next year, Levesque advised, reformers
should “spread” the unions thin “by playing offense” with decoy
legislation. Levesque said she planned to sponsor a series of statewide
reforms, like allowing taxpayer dollars to go to religious schools by
overturning the so-called Blaine Amendment, “even if it doesn’t pass
to
keep them busy on that front.” She also advised paycheck protection, a
unionbusting scheme, as well as a state-provided insurance program to
encourage teachers to leave the union and a transparency law to force
teachers unions to show additional information to the public. Needling the
labor unions with all these bills, Levesque said, allows certain charter
bills to fly “under the radar.”

If Levesque’s blunt advice sounds like that of a veteran lobbyist, that’s
because she is one. Levesque runs a Tallahassee-based firm called Meridian
Strategies LLC, which lobbies on behalf of a number of
education-technology companies. She is a leader of a coalition of
government officials, academics and virtual school sector companies
pushing new education laws that could benefit them.

But Levesque wasn’t delivering her hardball advice to her lobbying
clients. She was giving it to a group of education philanthropists at a
conference sponsored by notable charities like the Bill and Melinda Gates
Foundation and the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation. Indeed, Levesque
serves at the helm of two education charities, the Foundation for
Excellence in Education, a national organization, and the Foundation for
Florida’s Future, a state-specific nonprofit, both of which are chaired by
Jeb Bush. A press release from her national group says that it fights to
“advance policies that will create a high quality digital learning
environment.”

Despite the clear conflict of interest between her lobbying clients and
her philanthropic goals, Levesque and her team have led a quiet but
astonishing national transformation. Lobbyists like Levesque have made
2011 the year of virtual education reform, at last achieving sweeping
legislative success [1] by combining the financial firepower of their
corporate clients with the seeming legitimacy of privatization-minded
school-reform think tanks and foundations. Thanks to this synergistic
pairing, policies designed to boost the bottom lines of
education-technology companies are cast as mere attempts to improve
education through technological enhancements, prompting little public
debate or opposition. In addition to Florida, twelve states have expanded
virtual school programs or online course requirements this year. This
legislative juggernaut has coincided with a gold rush of investors
clamoring to get a piece of the K-12 education market. It’s big business,
and getting bigger: One study estimated that revenues from the K-12 online
learning industry will grow by 43 percent between 2010 and 2015, with
revenues reaching $24.4 billion.

In Florida, only fourteen months after Crist handed a major victory to
teachers unions, a new governor, Rick Scott, signed a radical bill that
could have the effect of replacing hundreds of teachers with computer
avatars. Scott, a favorite of the Tea Party, appointed Levesque as one of
his education advisers. His education law expanded the Florida Virtual
School to grades K-5, authorized the spending of public funds on new
for-profit virtual schools and created a requirement that all high school
students take at least one online course before graduation.

“I’ve never seen it like this in ten years,” remarked Ron Packard, CEO of
virtual education powerhouse K12 Inc., on a conference call in February.
“It’s almost like someone flipped a switch overnight and so many states
now are considering either allowing us to open private virtual schools” or
lifting the cap on the number of students who can use vouchers to attend
K12 Inc.’s schools. Listening to a K12 Inc. investor call, one could
mistake it for a presidential campaign strategy session, as excited
analysts read down a list of states and predict future victories.

Good for Business; Kids Not So Much

While most education reform advocates cloak their goals in the rhetoric of
“putting children first,” the conceit was less evident at a conference in
Scottsdale, Arizona, earlier this year.

Standing at the lectern of Arizona State University’s SkySong conference
center in April, investment banker Michael Moe exuded confidence as he
kicked off his second annual confab of education startup companies and
venture capitalists. A press packet cited reports that rapid changes in
education could unlock “immense potential for entrepreneurs.” “This
education issue,” Moe declared, “there’s not a bigger problem or bigger
opportunity in my estimation.”

Moe has worked for almost fifteen years at converting the K-12 education
system into a cash cow for Wall Street. A veteran of Lehman Brothers and
Merrill Lynch, he now leads an investment group that specializes in
raising money for businesses looking to tap into more than $1 trillion in
taxpayer money spent annually on primary education. His consortium of
wealth management and consulting firms, called Global Silicon Valley
Partners, helped K12 Inc. go public and has advised a number of other
education companies in finding capital.

Moe’s conference marked a watershed moment in school privatization. His
first “Education Innovation Summit,” held last year, attracted about 370
people and fifty-five presenting companies. This year, his conference
hosted more than 560 people and 100 companies, and featured luminaries
like former DC Mayor Adrian Fenty and former New York City schools
chancellor Joel Klein, now an education executive at News Corporation, a
recent high-powered entrant into the for-profit education field. Klein is
just one of many former school officials to cash out. Fenty now consults
for Rosetta Stone, a language company seeking to expand into the growing
K-12 market.

As Moe ticked through the various reasons education is the next big
“undercapitalized” sector of the economy, like healthcare in the 1990s, he
also read through a list of notable venture investment firms that recently
completed deals relating to the education-technology sector, including
Sequoia and Benchmark Capital. Kleiner Perkins, a major venture capital
firm and one of the first to back Amazon.com and Google, is now investing
in education technology, Moe noted.

The press release for Moe’s education summit promised attendees a chance
to meet a set of experts who have “cracked the code” in overcoming
“systemic resistance to change.” Fenty, still recovering from his loss in
the DC Democratic primary, urged attendees to stand up to the teachers
union “bully.” Jonathan Hage, CEO of Charter Schools USA, likened the
conflict to war, according to a summary posted on the conference website.
“There’s an air game,” said Hage, “but there’s also a ground game going
on.” “Investors are going to have to support” candidates and “push back
against the pushback.” Carlos Watson, a former cable news host now working
as an investment banker for Goldman Sachs specializing in for-profit
education, guided a conversation dedicated simply to the politics of
reform.

Sponsors of the event ranged from various education reform groups funded
by hedge-fund managers, like the nonprofit Education Reform Now, to ABS
Capital, a private equity firm with a stake in education-technology
companies like Teachscape. At smaller breakout sessions, education
enterprises made their pitches to potential investors.

Another sponsor, a group called School Choice Week, was launched last year
as a public relations gimmick to take advantage of the opportunity for
rapid education reforms. Although it is billed as a network of students
and parents, School Choice Week is one of the many corporate-funded
tactics to press virtual school reforms. The first School Choice Week
campaign push earlier this year featured highly produced press packets,
sample letters to the editor, a sign in Times Square and rallies for
virtual and charter schools organized with help from the Koch brothers’
Americans for Prosperity. The blitz got positive press coverage, providing
“grassroots” cover for newly elected politicians who made school
privatization their first priority.

A combination of factors has made this year what Moe calls an “inflection
point” in the march toward public school privatization. For one thing,
recession-induced fiscal crises and austerity have pressured states to cut
spending. In some cases, as in Florida, where educating students at the
Florida Virtual School costs nearly $2,500 less than at traditional
schools, such reform has been sold as a budget fix. At the same time, the
privatization push has gone hand in hand with the ratcheting up of attacks
on teachers unions by partisan groups, like Karl Rove’s American
Crossroads and Americans for Prosperity, seeking to weaken the
union-backed Democrats in the 2012 election. All of this has set the stage
for education industry lobbyists to achieve an unprecedented expansion in
for-profit elementary through high school education.

>From Idaho to Indiana to Florida, recently passed laws will radically
reshape the face of education in America, shifting the responsibility of
teaching generations of Americans to online education businesses, many of
which have poor or nonexistent track records. The rush to privatize
education will also turn tens of thousands of students into guinea pigs in
a national experiment in virtual learning—a relatively new idea that
allows for-profit companies to administer public schools completely
online, with no brick-and-mortar classrooms or traditional teachers.

* * *

Like many “education entrepreneurs,” Moe remains a player in the education
reform movement, pushing policies that have the potential to benefit his
clients. In addition to advising prominent politicians like Senator John
McCain, Moe is a board member of the Center for Education Reform, a
pro-privatization think tank that issues policy papers and ads to
influence the debate. Earlier this year, the group dropped $70,000 on an
ad campaign in Pennsylvania comparing those who oppose a new measure to
expand vouchers to segregationist Alabama Governor George Wallace, who
blocked African-American children from entering white schools.

Moe isn’t the only member of the Center for Education Reform with a
profound conflict of interest. CER president Jeanne Allen doubles as the
head of TAC Public Affairs, a government relations firm that has
represented several top education for-profits. Allen, whose clients have
included Kaplan Education and Charter Schools USA, served as transition
adviser to Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett on education reform.

Corbett, a Republican who rode the Tea Party election wave in 2010,
supports a major voucher expansion that is working its way through the
state legislature. The expansion would be a windfall for companies like
K12 Inc., which currently operates one Pennsylvania school under the
limited charter law on the books. According to disclosures reported in
Business Week, Pennsylvania’s Agora Cyber Charter School—K12 Inc.’s online
school, which allows students to take all their courses at home using a
computer—generated $31.6 million for K12 Inc. in the past academic year.

Thirteen other states have enacted laws to expand or initiate so-called
school choice programs this year. Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels has
pushed the hardest, enacting a law that removes the cap on the number of
charter schools in his state, authorizes all universities to register
charters and expands an existing voucher program in the state for students
to attend private and charter schools (in some cases managed by for-profit
companies). Critics note that Daniels’s law allows public money to flow to
religious institutions as well. Twenty-seven other states, in addition to
Pennsylvania, have voucher expansion laws pending. And states like Florida
are embracing tech-friendly education reform to require that students take
online courses to graduate. In Idaho this November, the state board of
education approved a controversial plan to require at least two online
courses for graduation.

“We think that’s so important because every student, regardless of what
they do after high school, they’ll be learning online,” said Tom Vander
Ark, a prominent online education advocate, on a recently distributed
video urging the adoption of online course requirements. Vander Ark, a
former executive director of education at the influential Bill and Melinda
Gates Foundation, now lobbies all over the country for the online course
requirement. Like Moe, he keeps one foot in the philanthropic world and
another in business. He sits on the board of advisors of Democrats for
Education Reform and is partner to an education-tech venture capital
company, Learn Capital. Learn Capital counts AdvancePath Academics, which
offers online coursework for students at risk of dropping out, as part of
its investment portfolio. When Vander Ark touts online course
requirements, it is difficult to discern whether he is selling a product
that could benefit his investments or genuinely believes in the virtue of
the idea.

To be sure, some online programs have potential and are necessary in areas
where traditional resources aren’t available. For instance, online AP
classes serve rural communities without access to qualified teachers, and
there are promising efforts to create programs that adapt to the needs of
students with special learning requirements. But by and large, there is no
evidence that these technological innovations merit the public resources
flowing their way. Indeed, many such programs appear to be failing the
students they serve.

A recent study of virtual schools in Pennsylvania conducted by the Center
for Research on Education Outcomes at Stanford University revealed that
students in online schools performed significantly worse than their
traditional counterparts. Another study, from the University of Colorado
in December 2010, found that only 30 percent of virtual schools run by
for-profit organizations met the minimum progress standards outlined by No
Child Left Behind, compared with 54.9 percent of brick-and-mortar schools.
For White Hat Management, the politically connected Ohio for-profit
operating both traditional and virtual charter schools, the success rate
under NCLB was a mere 2 percent, while for schools run by K12 Inc., it was
25 percent. A major review by the Education Department found that policy
reforms embracing online courses “lack scientific evidence” of their
effectiveness.

“Why are our legislators rushing to jump off the cliff of cyber charter
schools when the best available evidence produced by independent analysts
show that such schools will be unsuccessful?” asked Ed Fuller, an
education researcher at Pennsylvania State University, on his blog.

The frenzy to privatize America’s K-12 education system, under the banner
of high-tech progress and cost-saving efficiency, speaks to the stunning
success of a public relations and lobbying campaign by industry,
particularly tech companies. Because of their campaign spending,
education-tech interests are major players in elections. In 2010, K12 Inc.
spent lavishly in key races across the country, including a last-minute
donation of $25,000 to Idahoans for Choice in Education, a political
action committee supporting Tom Luna, a self-styled Tea Party school
superintendent running for re-election. Since 2004, K12 Inc. alone has
spent nearly $500,000 in state-level direct campaign contributions,
according to the National Institute on Money in State Politics. David
Brennan, Chairman of White Hat Management, became the second-biggest Ohio
GOP donor, with more than $4.2 million in contributions in the past
decade.

The Alliance for School Choice, a national education reform group, set up
PACs in several states to elect state lawmakers. According to Wisconsin
Democracy Campaign, American Federation for Children spent $500,000 in
media in the lead-up to Wisconsin’s recall elections. AFC shares leaders,
donors, and a street address with ASC. Bill Oberndorf, one of the main
donors to the group, had been associated with Voyager Learning, an online
education company, for years. A few months ago, Cambium Learning, the
parent company of Voyager, paid Oberndorf’s investment firm $4.9 million
to buy back Oberndorf’s stock. Cambium currently offers a fleet of
supplemental education tools for school districts. With the recent
acquisition of Class.com, a smaller online learning business, the company
announced its entry into the virtual charter school and online course
market.

Allies of the Right

Lobbyists for virtual school companies have also embedded themselves in
the conservative infrastructure. The International Association for Online
Learning (iNACOL), the trade association for EdisonLearning, Connections
Academy, K12 Inc., American Virtual Academy, Apex Learning and other
leading virtual education companies, is a case in point. A former Bush
appointee at the Education Department, iNACOL president Susan Patrick
traverses right-leaning think tanks spreading the gospel of virtual
schools. In the past year, she has addressed the Atlas Economic Research
Foundation, a group dedicated to setting up laissez-faire nonprofits all
over the world, as well as the American Enterprise Institute in
Washington.

Two pivotal conservative organizations have helped Patrick in her
campaigns for virtual schools: the American Legislative Exchange Council
and the State Policy Network. SPN nurtures and establishes state-based
policy and communication nonprofits with a right-wing bent. ALEC, the
thirty-eight-year-old conservative nonprofit, similarly coordinates a
fifty-state strategy for right-wing policy. Special task forces composed
of corporate lobbyists and state lawmakers write “template” legislation
[see John Nichols, “ALEC Exposed,” August 1/8]. Since 2005, ALEC has
offered a template law called “The Virtual Public Schools Act” to
introduce online education. Mickey Revenaugh, an executive at
virtual-school powerhouse Connections Learning, co-chairs the education
policy–writing department of ALEC.

At SPN’s annual conference in Cleveland last year, held two months before
the midterm elections, the think tank network adopted a new push for
education reform, specifically embracing online technology and expanding
vouchers. Patrick opened the event and led a session about virtual schools
with Anthony Kim, president of the virtual-school business Education
Elements.

SPN has faced accusations before that it is little more than a
coin-operated front for corporations. For instance, SPN and its affiliates
receive money from polluters, including infamous petrochemical giant Koch
Industries, allegedly in exchange for aggressive promotion of climate
denial theories. But SPN’s conference had less to do with policy than with
tactics. Kyle Olson, a Republican operative infamous in Michigan and other
states for his confrontational attacks on unionized teachers, gave a
presentation on labor reform in K-12 education. Stanford Swim, heir to a
Utah-based investment fortune and head of a traditional-values foundation,
ran a workshop at the conference on creating viral videos to advance the
cause. He said policy papers wouldn’t work. Tell your scholars, “Sorry,
this isn’t a white paper,” Swim advised. “You gotta go there,” he
continued, “and it’s because that’s where the audience is.” “If it’s
vulgar, so what?” he added.

Since the conference, SPN’s state affiliates have taken a lead role in
pushing virtual schools. Several of its state-based affiliates, like the
Buckeye Institute in Ohio, set up websites claiming that unions—the only
real opposition to ending collective bargaining and the expansion of
charter school reforms—led to overpaid teachers and budget deficits. In
Wisconsin, the MacIver Institute’s “news crew” laid the groundwork for
Governor Walker’s assault on collective bargaining by creating news
reports denouncing protesters and promoting the governor. In March, while
busting the teachers unions in his state, Walker lifted the cap on virtual
schools and removed the program’s income requirements.

State Representative Robin Vos, the Wisconsin state chair for ALEC,
sponsored the bill codifying Walker’s radical expansion of online,
for-profit schools. Vos’s bill not only lifts the cap but also makes new,
for-profit virtual charters easier to establish. As the Center for Media
and Democracy, a Madison-based liberal watchdog, notes, the bill closely
resembles legislative templates put forward by ALEC.

Although SPN’s unique contribution to the debate has been clever web
videos and online smear sites, the group’s affiliates have also continued
the traditional approach of policy papers. In Washington State, the
Freedom Foundation published “Online Learning 101: A Guide to Virtual
Public Education in Washington”; Nebraska’s Platte Institute released “The
Vital Need for Virtual Schools in Nebraska”; and the Sutherland Institute,
a Utah-based SPN affiliate, equipped lawmakers with a guide called
“Thinking Outside the Building: Online Education.” SPN think tanks in
Maine, Maryland and other states have pressed virtual school reforms.
Patrick visited SPN state groups and gave pep talks about how to sell the
issue to lawmakers.

Meanwhile, ALEC has continued to slip laws written by education-tech
lobbyists onto the books. In Tennessee, Republican State Representative
Harry Brooks didn’t even bother changing the name of ALEC’s Virtual Public
Schools Act before introducing it as his own legislation. Asked by the
Knoxville News Sentinel’s Tom Humphrey where he got the idea for the bill,
Brooks readily admitted that a K12 Inc. lobbyist helped him draft it.
Governor Bill Haslam signed Brooks’s bill into law in May. The statute
allows parents to apply nearly every dollar the state typically spends per
pupil, almost $6,000 in most areas, to virtual charter schools, as long as
they are authorized by the state.

SPN’s fall 2010 conference featured the man perhaps happiest with the
explosion in virtual education: Jeb Bush. “I have a confession to make,”
he said with grin. “I am a real policy geek, and this is like the
epicenter of geekdom.” Bush shared his experiences initiating some of the
nation’s first for-profit and virtual charter school reforms as the
governor of Florida, acknowledging his policy ideas came from some in the
room. (The local SPN affiliate in Tallahassee is the James Madison
Institute.)

Bush: Man Behind the Virtual Curtain

Jeb Bush campaigned vigorously in 2010 to expand such reforms, with
tremendous success. About a month after the election, he unveiled his road
map for implementing a far-reaching ten-point agenda for virtual schools
and online coursework. Former West Virginia Governor Bob Wise, a Democrat,
has barnstormed the country to encourage lawmakers to adopt Bush’s plan,
which calls for the permanent financing of education-technology reforms,
among other changes. In one promotional video, Wise says it is “not only
about the content” of the online courses but the “process” of students
becoming acquainted with learning on the Internet.

The key pillar of Bush’s plan is to make sure virtual education isn’t just
a new option for taxpayer money but a requirement. And several states,
like Florida, have already adopted online course requirements. As Idaho
Republicans faced a public referendum on their online course requirement
rule last summer, Bush arrived in the state to show his support.
“Implemented right, you’re going to see rising student achievement,” said
Bush, praising Idaho Governor Butch Otter and school superintendent Tom
Luna, who was elected with campaign donations from the online-education
industry. Bush also claimed that making high school students take online
classes would “put Idaho on the map” as a “digital revolution takes hold.”
Bush was in Michigan in June to testify for Governor Rick Snyder’s suite
of education reform ideas, which include uncapped expansion of virtual
schools, and he was back in the state in July to continue to press for
reforms.

In August, at ALEC’s annual conference in New Orleans, the education task
force officially adopted Bush’s ten elements agenda. Mickey Revenaugh, the
virtual school executive overseeing the committee, presided over the vote
endorsing the measure. But when does Bush’s advocacy, typically reported
in the press as the work of a former governor with education experience
advising the new crop of Republicans, cross the threshold into corporate
lobbying?

The nonprofit behind this digital push, Bush’s Foundation for Excellence
in Education, is funded by online learning companies: K12 Inc., Pearson
(which recently bought Connections Education), Apex Learning (a for-profit
online education company launched by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen),
Microsoft and McGraw-Hill Education among others. The advisory board for
Bush’s ten digital elements agenda reads like a Who’s Who of
education-technology executives, reformers, bureaucrats and lobbyists,
including Michael Stanton, senior vice president for corporate affairs at
Blackboard; Karen Cator, director of technology for the Education
Department; Jaime Casap, a Google executive in charge of business
development for the company’s K-12 division; Shafeen Charania, who until
recently served as marketing director of Microsoft’s education products
department; and Bob Moore, a Dell executive in charge of “facilitating
growth” of the computer company’s K-12 education practice.

Like other digital reform advocates, the Bush nonprofit is also supported
by Microsoft founder Bill Gates’s foundation. The fact that a nonprofit
that receives funding from both the Gates Foundation and Microsoft
pressures states to adopt for-profit education reforms may raise red flags
with some in the philanthropy community, as Microsoft, too, has moved into
the education field. The company has tapped into the K-12 privatization
expansion by supplying a range of products, from traditional Windows
programs to servers and online coursework platforms. It also contracts
with Florida Virtual School to provide cloud computer solutions.
Similarly, Dell is seeking new opportunities in the K-12 market for its
range of desktop products, while the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation,
the charitable nonprofit founded by Dell’s CEO, promotes neoliberal
education reforms.

Through Bush, education-technology companies have found a shortcut to
encourage states to adopt e-learning reforms. Take his yearly National
Summit on Education Reform, sponsored by the Foundation for Excellence in
Education.

At the most recent summit, held in San Francisco in mid-October, a group
of more than 200 state legislators and state education department
officials huddled in a ballroom over education-technology strategy. Rich
Crandall, a state senator from Arizona, said to hearty applause that he
had developed a local think tank to support the virtual school reforms he
helped usher into law. Toward the end of the discussion, Vander Ark,
acting as an emcee, walked around the room acknowledging lawmakers who had
recently passed pro–education tech laws this year. He handed the
microphone to Kelli Stargel, a state representative from Florida, who
stood up and boasted of creating “virtual charter schools, so we can have
innovation in our state.”

Throughout the day, lawmakers mingled with education-technology lobbyists
from leading firms, like Apex Learning and K12 Inc. Some of the distance
learning reforms were taught in breakout sessions, like one called “Don’t
Let a Financial Crisis Go to Waste,” an hourlong event that encouraged
lawmakers to use virtual schools as a budget-cutting measure. Mandy Clark,
a staffer with Bush’s foundation, walked around handing out business
cards, offering to e-mail sample legislation to legislators.

The lobbying was evident to anyone there. But for some of those present,
Bush didn’t go far enough. David Byer, a senior manager with Apple in
charge of developing education business for the company, groaned and
leaned over to another attendee sitting at the edge of the room after a
lunch session. “You have this many people together, why can’t you say,
‘Here are the ten elements, here are some sample bills’?” said Byer to
David Stevenson, who nodded in agreement. Stevenson is a vice president of
News Corporation’s education subsidiary, Wireless Generation, an
education-technology firm that specializes in assessment tools. It was
just a year ago that News Corp. announced its intention to enter the
for-profit K-12 education industry, which Rupert Murdoch called “a $500
billion sector in the US alone that is waiting desperately to be
transformed.”

As attendees stood up to leave the hall, the phalanx of lobbyists
surrounding the room converged, buttonholing legislators and school
officials. On a floor above the main hall, an expo center had been set up,
with companies like McGraw-Hill, Connections Academy, K12 Inc., proud
sponsors of the event, providing information on how to work with
politicians to make education technology a reality.

Patricia Levesque, a Bush staffer speaking at the summit and the former
governor’s right hand when it comes to education reform, does not draw a
direct salary from Bush’s nonprofit despite the fact that she is listed as
its executive director, and tax disclosures show that she spends about
fifty hours a week at the organization. Instead, her lobbying firm,
Meridian Strategies, supplies her income. The Foundation for Florida’s
Future, another Bush nonprofit, contracts with Meridian, as do online
technology companies like IQ-ity Innovation, which paid her up to $20,000
for lobbying services at the beginning of this year. The unorthodox
arrangement allows donors to Bush’s group to avoid registering actual
lobbyists while using operatives like Levesque to influence legislators
and governors on education technology.

Levesque’s contract with IQ-ity raises questions about Bush’s foundation
work. As Mother Jones recently reported, the founder of IQ-ity, William
Lager, also founded an education company with a poor track record. Lager’s
other education firm, Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow, is the largest
provider of virtual schools in Ohio. ECOT schools have consistently
underperformed; though the company serves more than 10,000 children, its
graduation rate has never broken 40 percent. The company was fined for
billing the state to serve more than 2,000 students in one month, when
only seven children logged on during the same time period. Nevertheless,
after Levesque spent at least two years as a registered lobbyist for
Lager’s firm, Bush traveled to Ohio to give the commencement speech for
ECOT. “ECOT proves a glimpse into what’s possible,” Bush said with pride,
“by harnessing the power of technology.”

Levesque is no ordinary lobbyist. She is credited with encouraging the
type of bare-knuckle politics now common in the wider education-reform
movement. In an audio file obtained by The Nation, she and infamous
anti-union consultant Richard Berman outlined a strategy in October 2010
for sweeping the nation with education reforms. The two spoke at the
Philanthropy Roundtable, a get-together of major right-wing foundations.
Lori Fey, a representative of the Michael Dell Foundation, moderated the
panel discussion.

Rather than “intellectualize ourselves into the [education reform]
debate
is there a way that we can get into it at an emotional level?”
Berman asked. “Emotions will stay with people longer than concepts.” He
then answered his own question: “We need to hit on fear and anger. Because
fear and anger stays with people longer. And how you get the fear and
anger is by reframing the problem.” Berman’s glossy ads, which have run in
Washington, DC, and New Jersey, portray teachers unions as schoolyard
bullies. One spot even seems to compare teachers to child abusers.
Although Berman does not reveal his donors, he made clear in his talk that
the foundations in the room were supporting his campaign.

Levesque ended the strategy discussion with a larger strategic question.
She pointed to the example of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg donating
$100 million to Newark schools. She then asked the crowd to imagine
instead raising $100 million for political races where we “could sway a
couple of seats to have more education reform.” “Just shifting a little
bit of your focus,” she added, noting that new politicians could have a
greater impact.

Levesque’s ask has become reality. According to author Steven Brill, ex–DC
school chancellor Michelle Rhee’s new group, StudentsFirst, raised $100
million within a few months of Levesque’s remarks. Rhee’s donors include
Rupert Murdoch, philanthropist Eli Broad and Home Depot founder Ken
Langone. Rhee’s group has pledged to spend more than $1 billion to bring
for-profit schools, including virtual education, to the entire country by
electing reform-friendly candidates and hiring top-notch state lobbyists.

A day before he opened his education reform conference to the media
recently, Bush hosted another education meeting. This event, a private
affair in the Palace Hotel, was a reconvening of investors and strategists
to plan the next leg of the privatization campaign. Michael Moe, Susan
Patrick, Tom Vander Ark and other major players were invited. I waited
outside the event, trying to get what information I could. I asked Mayor
Fenty how I could get in. “Just crash in, come on in,” he laughed, adding,
“so what company are you with?” When he learned that I was a reporter, he
shook his head. “Oh, nah, you’re not welcome, then.”

An invitation had billed the exclusive gathering as a chance for
“philanthropists and venture capitalists” to figure out how to “leverage
each other’s strengths”—a concise way to describe how for-profit virtual
school companies are using philanthropy as a Trojan horse.

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"The Pessimist complains about the wind, the Optimist expects it to change
and the Realist adjusts his sails."

- Author Unknown