THE MIND TRUST SPIN-OFF IN CINCY AND BEYOND

By Doug Martin 

 

In my book Hoosier School Heist, I expose the Mind Trust, formed by once Democratic mayor of Indianapolis Bart Peterson and his charter school director David Harris.  I have also written on the Mind Trust spin-off formerly known as CEE-Trust (and its ties to Bill Gates, George Bush, and Joe Klein), which now goes by the name Education Cities and is operating in at least 24 cities. 

Before doing a recent NAACP Indy panel on ALEC, the Mind Trust, and school privatization a few days ago, I decided to peek into what Education Cities has been up to. Here are just a few things I found. 

Besides having the Mind Trust’s David Harris and Earl Martin Phalen and corporate school grandfather Howard Fuller (a BAEO/Edison connected operative who played a role in school privatization in Indiana and Philly) as board members, the Mind Trust spin-off Education Cities is being funded by well-known school privatization billionaire organizations like the Walton Foundation, the Dell Foundation, the Gates Foundation, the Kauffman Foundation, and the foundation started by Eli Broad, the Broad Foundation. 

 

The Broad Foundation is noteworthy because of recent events. 

Started by Obama supporter Eli Broad, the Broad Foundation placed its members in Arne Duncan’s Dept. of Education.  Broad, as my book mentions, gave former Indiana supt. of public ed. Tony Bennett a $50,000 campaign gift back in the day.   

Broad is also funding Hillary Clinton’s campaign. As Nancy Bailey a short time ago wrote: 

Education Week recently compared the education platforms of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.  Under “choice,” they mention that Hillary Clinton upset some charter advocates last fall when she stated that they didn’t serve all students.

The Wall Street Journal reported that one education reformer troubled by her comments was Eli Broad. Broad is currently on the move to make all Los Angeles public schools charters. And it is stated that he threatened to withdraw campaign funding if Hillary Clinton didn’t retract her claim—which she did.

In fact, Eli Broad's cozy relationship with the Clintons goes way back, as Ken Derstine highly details is his excellent piece, "Eli Broad and the Clintons: Update of the Update." 

Education Cities is in Massachusetts, too.  The Center for Collaborative Education, which is now carrying the corporate agenda’s water, announced a while back that it had “been designated as an ‘Emerging Harbormaster’ by the Next Generation Learning Challenge and Education Cities to launch a new Personalized Learning Network in Massachusetts.”

Next Gen.’s ultimate goal, which the Mind Trust with Bill Gates’ help has been pushing for years, is to turn schools into complete online learning hubs with a few teachers babysitting students. 

Along with the Gates Foundation and the Ford Foundation, the KnowledgeWorks Foundation—another online-school promoting group--funneled $31.5 million into Ohio in 2002.  

In Cincinnati, Education Cities is represented by Accelerate Great Schools, a private-public set-up which includes the KnowledgeWorks Foundation, the Archdiocese of Cincinnati, the Cincinnati Regional Business Committee,  the Cincinnati Public Schools, the Farmer Family Foundation, and the Haile U.S. Bank Foundation. 

The Cincinnati Regional Business Committee, in 2013, handed Teach for America, the temporary corporate-led teacher group, $300,000, with the Haile U.S. Bank Foundation adding another $20,000 in 2014 and $25,000 to TFA in 2015.

In 2014, Haile also gave the hedge fund-led DFER and Education Cities-affiliated Bellwether Education Partners (a group highlighted in my book Hoosier School Heist) $21,600 for its Cincinnati High Performing Schools Accelerator, which follows the corporate school model to a tee where, as my book shows, the fake progressives, Big Business, and the Catholics and often the Christian Right join hands to put a big dent in public education. 

Corporate school reformers like to swoop into poor cities, promise a moonshot, and set the neoliberal disaster capitalism dominos in place for complete privatization.   Cincinnati is a waiting victim, where 50% of the children live in poverty.

Who is heading the Cincinnati show?  Patrick Herrel, a former Teach for America recruiter and past vice president of recruitment for The Mind Trust, was picked by the corporate powers-that-be in 2015 to lead the Accelerate Great Schools.  (To see how Herrel supports Gates’ public money heist for online learning charter schools, see page 38 in my book.)  

One board member of the Accelerate Great Schools is Cintas’ Scott Farmer (the son of one of George Bush’s 15^th largest fundraisers in 2000) , whose Cintas, according to Forbes, was being investigated by the U.S. Inspector General for violating in 2006 “the federal False Claims Act when it tacked millions of dollars in ‘environmental fees’ on uniforms, mops, mats and towels it cleaned for the [U.S.] postal service as part of a ten-year, $200 million contract.”  

The U.S. postal service “dropped its pursuit of recovering $816,733 in October” 2007 because the Justice Dept. decided not to file criminal charges.  

Forbes also notes that in 2001 an Alabama Circuit Court lawsuit claimed “similar charges on customer invoices were bogus. That suit, originally seeking $175 million, was settled for $14 million. Cintas has stopped imposing such fees.” 

Hoosier School Heist is filled with similar stories, the private-public nightmares you hardly ever read about in newspapers.  The kind the Mind Trust/Education Cities crowd hope you never catch wind of.

As the author of  Hoosier School Heist,  Doug Martin’s research has been used by or referenced in Salon, Alternet, the Washington Post, the Associated Press, PBS, and newspapers and radio shows across Indiana and America.  His newest book project deals with Big Pharma, Big Medicine, the Cancer Industry, hospital fraud, and nursing home and health care corruption in Indiana.

National Threat Alert: The Mind Trust’s CEE-Trust, George Bush, and Bill Gates

By Doug Martin

The Indianapolis-based Mind Trust plays a major part in my forthcoming book Hoosier School Heist, but many people don’t realize that the group founded by former Democratic mayor Bart Peterson and David Harris is a national leader in the school privatization movement through its CEE-Trust (Cities for Education Entrepeneurship). Loaded with Bill Gates/Joyce and Carnegie Foundation money, CEE-Trust actively works for charterization not only in Indianapolis but in Kansas City, Cleveland, Detroit, Memphis, Dallas, Denver, and New Orleans.  In fact, CEE-Trust boasts of 33 affiliates and members across the U.S.*

KANSAS CITY HERE WE COME

Joe Robertson and social justice group More2 recently exposed CEE-Trust’s secret political agenda in Kansas City, Missouri, where shady backdoor dealings, cronyism, an Edison Schools administrator, and government officials helped CEE-Trust land almost $400,000 to help privatize the  school district.

According to released emails, CEE-Trust, funded by the charter school promoting Kauffman and Hall Family foundations, connived with Missouri Education Commissioner Chris Nicastro and her operatives to get the gig, which Kansas City superintendent Steve Green rightfully calls a “conspiracy.”

Aware of a backlash over the inside deal, Nicastro even fed media talking points to Mind Trust-CEE-Trust’s Ethan Gray on how to downplay charter schools for fear that public school supporters would “try to paint" CEE-Trust “as the outsiders, funded with private money, determined to privatize all public education, yada yada.”

FORMER PREZ, CEE-TRUST, AND BILL GATES IN COLORADO

Besides being in bed with E3, whose Rochester, NJ, branch is now led by Rupert Murdock’s corporate buddy Joe Klein, CEE-Trust loves rightwing pseudo research groups like the Fordham Foundation, one of its main partners, which awarded former Indiana supt. of education Tony Bennett a major award a few years ago. 
 

The CEE-Trust/Fordham plan (besides eliminating local and democratically-elected school boards) is to breed Bill Gates-inspired for-profit blended learning schools across the country, as they discussed when the two groups met in December 2011 in Washington D.C.

In Colorado, CEE-Trust is spreading blended learning propaganda, bigtime. In a recent newsletter, the group praises how “Tony Lewis, Executive Director of the Donnell-Kay Foundation and Amy Slothower, Founder and Executive Director of Get Smart Schools this month co-published an op-ed in EdNewsColorado encouraging school leaders in the state to apply for Wave IIIa of the Next Generation Learning Challenges grant.” As I point out in my upcoming book, this is a Gates scheme to hire low-paid aides to watch kids play on school computers, so that CEOs of online schools can pocket more money. 

NCLB father George W. Bush is also involved in this CEE-Trust plot for Colorado, the former US president appearing at “Get Smart Schools (GSS is an affiliate of CEE-Trust member, the Donnell-Kay Foundation) during a visit to Denver in October.” 

CEE-Trust writes that “while President Bush is ‘out of politics,’ he still has a ‘great passion about educational excellence,’ and is working with groups such as GSS to ‘set up a collaborative effort of educational entrepreneurs’ at the Bush Center at Southern Methodist University.” This “collaborative effort” means that GSS signed a contract with George W. Bush Institute's Alliance to Reform Education Leadership (which is also involved in Indiana) to churn out corporate school rules for training and evaluating school principals.

TAKING FRIEDMAN'S DEATH-BED WISH VIRAL

In New Orleans, the CEE-Trust  met with several other corporate school leaders to discuss furthering Milton Friedman’s death-bed wish of turning every single school in America over to rich folk (most schools in New Orleans are, indeed, privatized, at this point: see my article on the Mind Trust's lies about New Orleans here). 

CEE-Trust desires (see page 5 in PDF) to use public money from federal i3 and Race to the Top grants (see page 10) to “incubate” cities with some of the most corrupt private school corporations in the country, including Green Dot, known for first promoting the fake parent trigger bill with the Heartland Institute and ALEC.  The parent trigger bill allows corporate school leaders to send operatives into local communities and dupe parents into signing a form to turn their community schools over to for-profit companies.

For the national job, CEE-Trust wants KIPP (notorious for mental abuse to kids and teachers) and Uncommon Schools, a favorite of Amazon.com’s Jeff Bezos which didn’t have to be a part of the teacher evaluation scheme in NYC, when school commissioner John King let them slide out of it. 

 

IS THERE ANYBODY OUT THERE?

Yes, it’s not just the Mind Trust, folks, with celebrity spokesperson Jane Pauley onboard and mega-donors Eli Lilly.  David Harris (who makes almost $200,000 a year, as I’ve pointed out too many times in writings and on the radio) and Bart Peterson’s CEE-Trust is up to no good.  The question is, is anyone in Indianapolis or elsewhere listening?

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NOTE

Back in June 2012 in a very lengthy editorial in NUVO, I mentioned several other cities that CEE-Trust and Public Impact (who did the Mind Trust Opportunity Plan for Indianapolis) were threatening to invade.