Mass. DESE Helps Jeb Bush Sell Out Public Education

Education Trust Massachusetts held a virtual event last Thursday featuring Russell D. Johnston, the acting commissioner of the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education and Lindsey Henderson of ExcelinEd. ExcelinEd was originally created by Jeb Bush as the Foundation for Excellence in Education (FEE) which, according to education historian Diane Ravitch, “actively promotes vouchers, charter schools, for-profit charter schools, virtual learning, and for-profit online corporations, as well as testing and accountability tied to test scores.”[i]

In 2015 the Washington Post reported that FEE

forged an unusual role mixing politics and policy — drafting legislation and paying travel expenses for state officials, lobbying lawmakers, and connecting public officials with industry executives seeking government contracts.

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(FEE) has been criticized as a backdoor vehicle for major corporations to urge state officials to adopt policies that would enrich the companies.

The foundation has, for instance, pushed states to embrace digital learning in public schools, a costly transition that often requires new software and hardware. Many of those digital products are made by donors to Bush’s foundation, including Microsoft, Intel, News Corp., Pearson PLC and K12 Inc.

The foundation has helped its corporate donors gain access to state education officials through a committee called Chiefs for Change, composed of as many as 10 officials from mostly Republican-led states.

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In most of the states where the education chiefs have worked closely with the foundation, K12 and Pearson have established virtual charter schools, in which students take their courses online and tax money flows to the companies.

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Among the top donors in 2014, giving $500,000 to $1 million, was News Corp., which owns a company called Amplify that markets tablets, software and data analysis to school districts. News Corp. chief executive Rupert Murdoch delivered a keynote speech at the Bush foundation’s annual meeting in 2011 …

According to Sourcewatch of the Center for Media and Democracy, ExcelinEd is “a member of the American Legislative Exchange Council and an associate member of the State Policy Network (SPN).” “ALEC is a corporate bill mill. . . Through ALEC, corporations hand state legislators their wishlists to benefit their bottom line.” Sourcewatch identifies The State Policy Network is “a web of right-wing ‘think tanks’ and tax-exempt organizations in 50 states, Washington, D.C., Canada, and the United Kingdom.” (Boston’s Pioneer Institute is a member). As you surely recall from reading my book Dark Money and the Politics of School Privatization,  ALEC and SPN are two legs of the Koch network’s three legged political stool, the third being Americans for Prosperity.

ExcelinEd’s funders include the Charles G. Koch Foundation, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Donors Trust (a conduit for Koch network dark money), far-right Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation, the Dick and Betsy DeVos Foundation, the Walton Family Foundation, and a host of others.

Jeb Bush is still chairman of the board of ExcelinEd. Joel Klein is also on the board. He was Chancellor of the New York City Public Schools when Michael Bloomberg (also a FEE donor) was pushing charter schools. It was Klein who orchestrated dark money contributions in support of charter schools in New York city in 2010. Later he went to work for Rupert Murdoch’s corporate holdings which included Amplify, one of FEE’s corporate donors. As you will also recall from reading Dark Money and the Politics of School Privatization, Murdoch was salivating at the idea of school privatization of K-12, which he saw as $500 billion market ripe for the picking.

You might ask yourself why the state’s commissioner of DESE, in a Democratic administration no less, was sharing the stage with an organization that seeks to privatize public schools for private profit. That seems like a very good question.

Once corporations privatize public schools and turn them into profit centers, we lose them forever.

Addendum: Thank you to Christine Langhoff for informing me that Boston Schools superintendent Mary Skipper joined Chiefs for Change in 2024. And thank you to James Horn, who provided a more detailed account of the pay for play approach of Jeb Bush’s Foundation for Excellence in Education/ExcelinEd/Chiefs for Change network, including that FEE’s lobbying for Florida to adopt the services of a company called SendHub may have benefited Bush personally, as he was an investor in the company.

“One thing big money typically lacks is credibility, which is why those who deploy it work so hard to cover their tracks.”—Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson

[Full disclosure: as a (now retired) educator in the UMass system, I am a union member. I write about dark money, democracy, and oligarchy. My book, Dark Money and the Politics of School Privatization, is available.]

[i] Ravitch, Diane. Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America’s Public Schools (p. 26). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.