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| Stefan Pryor is Gov. Raimondo's pick to run RI's Commerce Department. He presided over a string of charter school disasters while Connecticut Education chief. |
A
teacher in Connecticut, signing in as Linda, wrote the following comment:
Brace
yourself Rhode Island…it is worse than you think. Hide your children and warn
the teachers. [Stefan Pryor] is coming to charterize, privatize, monetize your schools as
the following research from Jonathan Pelto shows:
Gina
Raimondo’s husband Andy Moffitt was Cory Booker’s roommate.
Moffitt is a member Stand for Children Board of Directors.
Moffit
is a Senior Practice Expert and member of core leadership team for McKinsey
& Company’s Global Education Practice.
He
co-authored a recent book, Deliverology 101: A Field Guide for School System
Leaders (Corwin Press, 2010), which describes key success factors and steps in
driving results in global school system reforms.
Before
joining McKinsey, Andy was an elementary school teacher in an inner-city school
in Houston, Texas as a corps member of Teach For America.”
From
my recent article in the Progressive:
The
Corporate Education Reform Industry effort to buy control of Public Education
This
year’s election season provided a series of textbook examples of how corporate
education reformers used their personal fortunes to contaminate the democratic
process.
Let’s
begin with the little state of Rhode Island, where former hedge fund owner and
charter school champion, Democrat Gina Raimondo was elected governor with 40
percent of the vote in a three-way race—one in which there was an unprecedented
level of campaign spending.
Raimondo,
who as Rhode Island’s state treasurer won national acclaim from conservatives
for successfully dismantling the state employee pension fund, raised hundreds
of thousands of dollars from donors associated with funding the education
reform movement and profiting from the charter school industry.
Her running
mate, Cumberland Mayor Daniel McKee, one of the state’s most vocal supporters
of charter schools, was elected lieutenant governor with help from many of the
same donors.
Over
the course of her gubernatorial campaign, Raimondo collected checks from many
of the major players in the charter school and “education reform” movement,
including donations from billionaires Eli Broad and members of the Walton
Family. (The Broad Foundation and Walton Foundation, along with Gates
Foundation, are the primary funders behind the overall education "reform" movement.)
Another
billionaire, former Enron executive John Arnold along with his wife, not only
donated directly to Raimondo’s campaign and her political action committee,
called Gina PAC, but the couple’s $100,000 check made them the largest donors
to the American LeadHERship Council, a Super PAC affiliated with Raimondo. The
second largest donor to the Super PAC was Eli Broad with $15,000.
A
proponent of doing away with public employee pensions, Arnold also donated as
much as $500,000 to an advocacy group called Engage Rhode Island, which spent
approximately $740,000 lobbying for Raimondo’s successful assault on public
employee pensions.
Over the past three years, the John and Laura Arnold
Foundation has donated more than $100 million in support of charter schools and
entities involved in the corporate education reform industry, including being
one of the largest contributors to Jeb Bush’s Foundation for Educational
Excellence.
Raimondo’s
success in raising funds from the charter school industry includes at least
$50,000 from the members of the board of directors of Achievement First, Inc.,
the large charter chain that recently opened a school in Rhode Island, adding
to their existing schools in Connecticut and New York.
Jonathan
Sackler, an investment manager and heir to the Purdue Pharma fortune, is not
only a founding member of Achievement First, Inc, but a founder of a national
charter school advocacy group called 50CAN. One of 50CAN’s related entities,
50CAN Action Fund, dumped $90,000 to run TV commercials to help Raimondo’s
running mate win his primary race.