Walmartization of education

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Walmart founders' foundation has spent more than $35M on NY charter schools since 2009: advocacy group

The Walton Foundation has given an additional $80 million to national education reform groups, according to the Alliance for Quality Education.



The Walton Foundation has spent more than $35 million to promote charter schools and other education projects in New York state since 2009, including $4.6 million to Eva Moskwitz’s Success Academy Charter Schools network, according to an analysis of tax forms by a progressive advocacy group.

The Waltons have provided an additional $80 million to national education reform groups headquartered in New York since 2009, the analysis of tax forms by Alliance for Quality Education also showed. The labor-backed group has teamed up with WalmartFreeNYC to investigate the non-profit.

“The Walmartization of education means a corporate-style approach, like more harmful charter school co-locations, testing, teacher-bashing and neglect of public schools,” said Alliance for Quality Education advocacy director Zakiyah Ansari.

But Marc Sternberg, the Walton Foundation’s director of K-12 investments, said the charity is proud of its work.

http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/education/walmart-founders-spent-35m-ny-charter-schools-advocates-article-1.1934595

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No Metaphor Here: The WalMartization of Public Education

Although the more overtly political spending of the Koch brothers has received much more attention, the Walton Family Foundation has, not surprisingly, been one of the major supporters of right-wing think tanks and public-policy experiments. Long a major donor to the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research and the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, the Walton Family Foundation has also become the major source of private funding supporting the development of charter-school alternatives to public schools, contributing more than $1 billion to charter schools over the past decade. Nationwide, more than one-quarter of the new charter schools have received “start-up” grants from the Walton Family Foundation. In the April 25, 2014, issue of the New York Times, Motoko Rich reveals these facts, among many others, about the Walton Family Foundation’s funding of what amounts to extensive Far-Right social engineering. [The full article is available at: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/26/us...schools.html.]

This funding has insured that some of the charter schools have been tremendously successful—for instance, the four schools operated by D.C. Prep in the nation’s capital. But studies are now providing much concrete evidence that there is a very substantial gap between the performance of the most successful and selective charter schools–typically highlighted in materials promoting charter schools–and the majority of the charter schools, which are operated by for-profit corporations rather than by non-profit foundations. These would include most of the charter schools that now educate about half of the students in Washington, D.C. (There is a parallel, here, in the advertising for on-line for-profit universities, which typically features already successful professionals seeking additional credentials though those students are hardly typical of the majority of students at those institutions, who are seeking certificates and associate degrees.)

The Walton Family Foundation funds not just the charter schools themselves but activist groups that promote charter schools at the expense of public schools. For instance, when the Chicago School District recently created a furor with the announcement of plans to close 50 public schools, the Walton Family Foundation provided almost a half-million dollars in grants to support community meetings at which the closures could be justified and charter-school alternatives could be promoted.

And in case there is any doubt about the broader agenda that the Walton Family Foundation is promoting, its “education program officer” was previously employed by the American Legislative Exchange Council.

Indeed, the Walton Family Foundation is providing financial support for everything from training teachers to staff charter schools to promoting research that justifies the privatization of public education. The Walton Family Foundation is the largest private donor to Teach for America, which now places about a third of its corps members in charter schools. And the Foundation funds a research institute at the University of Arkansas that is dedicated to scholarship supporting the concepts of charter schools, school vouchers, and other mechanisms for privatizing public education.

Critics of the Walton Family Foundation have compared its strategies to promote charter schools and the impact on public schools to those employed by WalMart superstores and their impact on the communities in which they are located. Kevin G. Welner, director of the National Education Policy Center at University of Colorado in Boulder, provides this succinct assessment: “’When lots of charter schools open up, it’s like a new Walmart store moving in. You could look at it and say, “Well, the schools in a community are losing families because of healthy competition the same way that the hardware store is losing customers because of healthy competition.” But that doesn’t take into account the long-term harms to the community, which are probably greater than any short-term benefit.’”

The Walton Foundation has also provided substantial funding to New Leaders for New Schools, ostensibly a more politically centrist organization. But it is worth noting that New Leaders for New Schools is headed by John Schnur, a former advisor to Arne Duncan, who as Secretary of Education has pursued all sorts of initiatives directly or indirectly leading to increased privatization of public education. So, in this context, “center” and “right” are, in many respects, distinctions without much substantive difference. And that’s why this Department of Education is such a profound disappointment—because it has failed to provide a progressive alternative to the mindset that privatization and corporatization are somehow good for public education.

http://academeblog.org/2014/06/04/no-metaphor-here-the-walmartization-of-public-education/

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The Wal-Mart-ization of Education: Wal-Mart Wants Classrooms to Run More Like a Business, Teachers Are Fighting Back


As part of Wal-Mart's back-to-school marketing efforts, the company recently launched a series of teacher appreciation videos, ads, hashtags and discounts. Teachers--who routinely dig deep into their own pockets to pay for supplies and materials for their students--are grateful for appreciation in all its forms. They are understandably less pleased when half-hearted discounts come from a company with a terrible track record for respecting its own employees and are accompanied by a large-scale effort to dismantle our nation's public education system and silence their voice. In fact, teachers are so offended by the so-called education reform agenda promoted by Wal-Mart's owners, the Waltons, that one teacher recently launched a petition calling on his peers not to shop at Wal-Mart this back-to-school season. More than 5,000 teachers have already added their names to his pledge.

A closer look at the Walton family's massive investment in "education" paints a clear picture of why teachers are so upset. Since 2000, the Walton Family Foundation has given more than $1 billion to destabilize public education--draining funds from students and closing neighborhood schools, and instead supporting corporate-style education policies in an attempt to bring Wal-Mart's business model to classrooms across the country.

With a collective $148 billion fortune, the Walton family is using their unfathomable wealth to exert outsized influence on school systems in cities across the country, often in communities where they neither reside nor do business. In Chicago, the Waltons gave $500,000 to support the process that resulted in the closure of nearly 50 public schools in underserved communities. Wal-Mart heir Alice Walton spent $2.25 million in 2012 alone to promote the charter and private school sectors in Georgia, Indiana and Washington--hundreds of miles from her current home state of Texas.

In California, the Walton Family Foundation cheered the recent attack on teachers' due process rights in the Vegara v. California decision, which not only strips teachers of the ability to advocate for their students without fear of retribution, but also suggests that teachers' needs are at odds with students' interests. One family member also contributed $250,000 to defeat a ballot measure that would have instituted public universal pre-K education for the state.

The Walton family's actions in the education realm are very familiar to those of us who know how the company does business. All too often, Wal-Mart fails to consult the communities it enters, drives out existing institutions and leaves those most vulnerable wondering how they'll bridge the gap.

Wal-Mart is a highly profitable corporation, reporting between $16 billion and $17 billion a year in profits. Just six members of the Walton family--the majority owners of the company--have more wealth than 42 percent of American families combined. Yet the majority of Wal-Mart workers are paid less than $25,000 a year.

Wal-Mart's low pay and erratic scheduling keep many of its employees and their families in poverty. Too many Wal-Mart moms and dads struggle to put food on the table and pay for doctor visits. And many Wal-Mart kids suffer because mom and dad don't have reliable scheduling that gets them home in time for homework, dinner or bedtime reading.

We know that poverty is one of the biggest factors affecting student achievement. The Waltons, who claim to have joined the education policy debate in order to provide a world-class education for all of America's children, not only actively work against our nation's public education system, but also contribute to the economic insecurity that keeps so many kids from getting the education they need and deserve.

The Walton's education agenda fails to address the fact that 1 out of every 2 children in our nation's public schools lives in poverty. In fact, as the largest private employer in the world, Wal-Mart chooses to keep the majority of its 1.3 million U.S. workers in poverty despite huge profits.

If the Walton family is truly interested in helping every child achieve a high-quality education, they could begin by committing to pay their own workers a decent wage. Instead of spending their billions to wipe out our nation's public school system, the Waltons could join the effort to reclaim the promise of public education in America--and ensure that we fulfill our collective obligation to help all children succeed by allowing their parents to succeed.

That's the kind of appreciation teachers want. As Amber Rain Chandler, a teacher in New York, said to Wal-Mart: "Don't discount the power of teachers."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/randi-weingarten/the-wal-mart-ization-of-e_b_5760654.html

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Wal-Mart Zombies: