Ads for charter schools never feature wealthy white men. The charter school advocacy group Families for Excellent Schools (FES) always claimed to represent urban minority parents anxious for better educational opportunities for their children. But four of its five original board members were Wall Street billionaire Wall Street hedge fund and private equity tycoons. Its major donors include the Bill and Melinda Gates, Walton Family, and the Broad Foundations. Politically, it was tied, probably controlled, by the Success Academy Charter School Network and its hedge fund sponsors, Joel Greenblatt, Daniel Loeb, and Julian H. Robertson Jr. Other hedge fund giants financing the charter school industry and connected to the FES network include its board member Bryan Lawrence, Paul Tudor Jones II and Whitney Tilson.
Families for Excellent Schools recently announced it was going out of business. It fired co-founder and CEO Jeremiah Kittredge, who had been accused of unspecified “inappropriate behavior.” But according to a report in the New York Times, the actual reason the group is closing its doors is because of financial troubles. The group was fined almost a half million dollars last September for violating Massachusetts elections laws. It was forced to disclose its previously confidential donors list, which probably made its billionaire supporters unhappy. It also agreed to refrain from fund-raising and electoral politics in Massachusetts for four years.
In 2014, Families for Excellent Schools spent almost $10 million on a television and lobbying campaign that promoted a vast expansion of charter schools in New York State and attacked public schools and public school teachers as inadequate. FES and its backers, including the Success Academy Charter School Network, developed close ties with Governor Andrew Cuomo and state legislators who approved its legislative agenda. Money kept pouring into FES and in fiscal year 2016, it reported revenue of more than $19 million.
According to a spokesperson for Success Academy, it ended its relationship with FES as soon as it learned of “the investigation into Jeremiah Kittredge’s actions and his termination.”Success Academy CEO Eva Moskowitz has her own political action committee, the Great Public Schools PAC, which contributed $65,000 to Andrew Cuomo election committees in 2011-2012 and another $50,000 in 2017. Success Academy Board Chairman and hedge fund mogul Daniel Loeb and his wife contributed directly to Cuomo’s campaigns and to the Moskowitz PAC. Carol Burris, Executive Director of the Network for Public Education estimates that the charter school/hedge fund cabal backing FES also contributed close to $2 million to Cuomo campaigns.
Kittredge’s rise and decline were meteoric. In 2012, when he was just 26 years old, he was named to the Forbes list of 30 under 30 as an educational “entrepreneur.” On his resume, Kittredge claimed to have been a former public school teacher and a labor organizer for the public service workers’ union. One problem is how he had time to acquire all of this professional experience between graduating from Brown University with a major in modern culture and media in 2008 and co-founding FES in 2011. Before co-founding FES, Kittredge also briefly worked for Democracy Prep Charter school as a “coordinator of civic initiatives”, and was dismissed by Democracy Builders, another pro-charter school group, where he was “Executive Director.” The billionaire’s club apparently thought he and his group was a safe investment and they made him a rising star in charter school circles.
IMPORTANT DE-CHARTER UPDATES: The charter school and school privatization industries are also taking big hits in other parts of the world. In New Zealand, the government recently introduced a bill in its Parliament to eliminate the country’s charter schools. The bill is supported by the vast majority of education stakeholders. Minister of Education Chris Hipkins argued that “charter schools were driven by ideology rather than evidence . . . The Government’s strong view is that there is no place for them in the New Zealand education system.” The bill would also repeal New Zealand’s national educational standards and return authority over to curriculum to localities, schools, and teachers.
In Uganda, sixty-three Bridge Schools (formerly Bridge International Academies) were denied the right to operate by the Ministry of Education when the nation’s schools reopened at the beginning of February. According to the Wall Street Journal, investors have poured more than $100 million into the company. They include Bill Gates of Microsoft, E-Bay founder Pierre Omidyar, textbook publisher Pearson PLC, and $10 million from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. A partner at the California-based venture-capital firm Learn Capital LLC is Bridge’s largest shareholder. It also receives funding and support from the World Bank and the UK Department for International Development (DFID). DFID, while a government agency, has suspiciously close ties to the global edu-company Pearson.
And back in New York, the State Education Department and its Board of Regents are taking charter school allies to court challenging a decision by the State University of New York Board of Trustees to allow charter schools to hire uncertified teachers and create their own in-house certification programs. They argue the decision violated state education law and that the approval process itself was illegitimate.
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