How Jeb Bush and Tony Bennett Invaded Sullivan County, Indiana

By Doug Martin

Since my last article on the possibility that two schools in tiny Dugger, Indiana may be closed soon by the Northeast School Corporation of Sullivan County, I have unearthed something shocking that residents, teachers, parents, and students should know, and it points to Jeb Bush, the former Florida governor and brother and son of two past U.S. presidents.

As I detail in one chapter of my upcoming book, Hoosier School Heist, Jeb Bush was one of the main players behind school privatization in Indiana, among other things recruiting his pals at the for-profit Charter Schools USA and Edison Learning to take over so-called “failing” schools in Indianapolis and Gary.  In fact, back in 2011, before emails were released to prove what he was up to across the country, I wrote about Jeb Bush’s role in draining money from Indiana public schools in order to hand it to wealthy campaign donors of Tony Bennett and Mitch Daniels. 

One of Jeb Bush’s chief plans was to sell online learning to Indiana, and he succeeded in 2010 when Tony Bennett—Indiana’s former supt. of education and member of Bush’s Chiefs for Change school privatizing front group— used his power at the Department of Education to help dupe the only rural charter school in Indiana, the Rural Community Academy in Graysville in Sullivan County, to enter into a partnership with Connections Academy, the online learning for-profit company operating in 19 states and now owned by testing and book giant Pearson.

The same year Pearson purchased Connections Academy (2011), Bennett’s education department signed a six-year contract with Pearson Education to deliver textbooks to Indiana schools and “Indiana awarded NCS Pearson a $224,720 contract to rewrite the state's teacher standards” to line up with new academic guidelines.  Pearson, in turn, funded the broadcasting of Tony Bennett’s inaugural “State of Education” speech that was broadcasted on radio and TV stations across Indiana.

By all accounts, the Rural Community Academy started off proudly 10 years ago as a community-led charter school after the Graysville Elementary School in 2003 was closed by the Southwest School Corporation.  But somewhere along the line, the billionaire-boys club (as education scholar Diane Ravitch calls it) co-opted the little red charter school on the hill and Jeb Bush’s buddies moved in.

And they won big.

With a budget of $6.6 million in the 2011-2012 school year, the Rural Community Academy put $5 million of taxpayer money (see page 10 in PDF) into the hands of the pilot program run by Connections Academy and Ball State University (which, by the way, collects around $3 million yearly “sponsoring” charter schools in Indiana).

Connections Academy funds Jeb Bush’s school privatizing Foundation for Excellence in Education (a big supporter of Tony Bennett) in order to spread for-profit online learning in numerous states.

Connections Academy is notorious for buying lawmakers across the country, and it has been no different in Indiana. The mega corporation also works with corporate-backed ALEC to pass and write online charter school laws across America.  Connections Academy’s Mickey Revenauge, as Lee Fang writes, co-chairs ALEC’s “education policy-writing department,” where the Virtual Public Schools Act sent to Maine and other US lawmakers debuted and Bush, ALEC, and Connections Academy pulled the same trick, but it didn’t work out as well as it did in Indiana. Indiana had Mitch Daniels and Tony Bennett to help it all along.  Bennett and Revenauge  hobnobbed at Bush's Foundation for Excellence in Education's 2011 summit, where online learning was on the agenda.  Moreover, Connections Academy has handed $19,900 to mostly Indiana Republicans since 2007, with $2,000 finding its way into Tony Bennett’s campaign chest, according to Indiana campaign records. A good majority of Indiana Republicans, too, belong to ALEC, and Mike Pence is scheduled to speak at the corporate group’s next engagement on December 6th.

Connections Academy by law needed to use a brick-and-mortar Indiana charter school to first get state funding for its pilot program to enroll students across Indiana, and the Rural Community Academy was used.  Indiana Connections Academy now has a nonprofit set up whose sole goal is to funnel money to the for-profit company ($4.5 million in 2010—see page 19 in PDF), and tax records are not yet available to show whether or not the rural school is still paying.

Connections Academy also raked in another $637,000 (page 10) from July 2010 to June 2011 from the Rural Community Academy, all the while the poor little rural school was in the hole for $25,000 (see page 1). 

All in all, Connections Academy has made over $10 million from Indiana taxpayers so far, and it isn’t going to end anytime soon.

When residents in Dugger ask why the state doesn’t have any funding or small grants to help keep their two schools in existence, they might want to know that one of the main reasons is Jeb Bush.  Let’s hope it works out in Dugger, and if parents do decide to start a community-led school, they should know that there is one now in existence in Indianapolis, Project Libertas, a private "Freeway School" which opened after the powers-that-be closed its charter school for political reasons.  It is doing great work for its kids, parents, and the community, all without help from the millionaires.   

 

Disaster Capitalism, Dugger, Indiana, and the Fall of Community Schools

By Doug Martin

As Naomi Klein shows in her frightening book Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, for decades the big plan of America’s millionaires and billionaires and the government officials they buy with campaign money has been to slash taxes (“austerity" is their pretty name for it) so that funding is drained from public services across the board.  Not only does this save the oligarchs money they don't hide overseas, it also creates a public crisis where private companies can sneak in, take control of public services, fire workers, and make a healthy profit.

For Indiana education, this was what Mitch Daniels was recruited to put in place.  When Daniels and Republican lawmakers chopped $300 million annually from school funding and mandated tax caps to purposely ensure the destruction of public schools a few years back, they intentionally set in motion a disaster.  As I detail in my upcoming book Hoosier School Heist, the agenda was to drain as much cash as possible from the public schools and funnel money to for-profit charter school operators and school voucher supporters, many who paid for the campaigns of Mitch Daniels, Tony Bennett, and state Republicans. After so-called school choice bills passed in 2011, public schools lost $38 million to private schools in 2012 alone.

So far, the disaster has only hit urban areas, but it is quickly moving into smaller cities, and even rural areas. 

Muncie recently eliminated school busing services to over 4,000 of its children, after a referendum vote to slightly raise property taxes didn’t pass because of Tea Party operatives who misinformed citizens about the school situation.  Now officials are floating the idea of having only one public high school in the city.

But Muncie—with a little over 70,000 residents—may just be one of the first smaller cities to suffer in education.  A November 11^th Indiana Education Insight article claims that if districts don’t start placing corporate advertising on their buses and Republican lawmakers don’t revisit House Enrolled Act 1072, three Indiana school corporations will lose ALL of their capital funding, bus replacement cash, and bus transportation as early as 2014, and 18 other districts will be without 50 percent of that specific funding, as well.  This financial loss could force districts to dip into other funds and set up more schools to fail, making them ripe for school privatizers to move in.  

Muncie is not alone.  The tiny South Montgomery school district outside of Waveland, Indiana, is also taking a financial beating, with the school board contemplating closing one elementary school. Statehouse reporter Maureen Hayden also recently wrote that “Michigan City voters said no to a $5 million request to close a budget gap in their schools’ general fund; Mishawaka voters said no to a $28 million request to repair their aging schools.” 

Taxpayers refusing to accept even slight property tax increases for their schools at the poles was a given, and the Walton Family from Walmart, the Betsy DeVos family of Amway, and the Jeb Bush family in Florida knew this when they worked behind the scenes (as Associated Press-dumped emails attest to) with anti-public school operatives to help dismantle education in Indiana so that for-profit companies running charter schools like Bush’s friend Jon Hage at Charter Schools USA, and Tony Bennett campaign donor Edison Schools in Gary, could cash in.

The wealthy out to make money and/or dismantle our schools also knew that one of the best ways to destroy public education was to turn citizens against one another, and it is working.  In Sullivan County, the Union Jr./Sr. High School and Dugger elementary schools are on the chopping block, and administrators have already canceled many art, music, and PE classes in the district.  Dugger has a population of 900.  If these schools are closed, some kids will have to be bused as far away as Farmersburg, a staggering 20 miles.

Even with money running out, the Northeast School Corporation of Sullivan County school board hasn't proposed trying to raise property taxes in a referendum, saying the money saved from closing these two schools will help with “technology and career-technical education,” even though Sullivan County has few jobs to begin with and an unemployment rate of 13 percent, the second highest in the state.  Training future workers for jobs that don’t exist is the corporate plan behind those out to profit (in one way or another) on so-called school reform, and it has been for decades.  Besides giving cover to overseas-outsourcing by corporations, it perpetrates the myth that American students are dumb and not competing globally.

In Dugger, things have gotten ugly. Two separate facebook groups have popped up, one to save the Dugger schools, and the other to close them.  As the Tribune Star first reported, the group leader calling for the school closures recently filed complaints with the Indiana Department of Environmental Management and state health officials, accusing desperate parents out to save their schools as violating laws because they were repainting classrooms and doing other supposedly unsafe renovations at one school. No violations were found.

Already, some Dugger parents have voiced a desire to start a charter school in the community, but they must be careful.  The true community charter school in Indiana (and other states) is a very rare bird.  It takes a lot of startup money to launch, and community-led progressive charters are prime targets for the wealthy with political ties. 

As I’ve noted before, The Project School in Indianapolis, where I spoke to a frustrated crowd in 2012, didn’t play by the same corporate rules that other Indianapolis charter schools play by.  There were no CEOs of mega corporations on its board.  It wasn’t run by a for-profit outfit with political ties, and its board members didn’t load the campaigns of Mitch Daniels, Tony Bennett, Indy mayor Greg Ballard, or other government officials.  After the Mind Trust’s David Harris (who makes nearly $200,000 a year to promote for-profit charter schools in the city) wrote a letter in the press declaring The Project School faulty, the mayor quickly moved in and closed it down. 

Dugger parents should also know that, by law, the Northeast School Corporation of Sullivan County will  have to offer the closed school buildings to a for-profit charter school operator, who can buy or lease the taxpayer-built building for a mere one dollar.  That is right:  one dollar.  Corporate-driven charter school operators across the state are probably eyeing the Dugger schools as a great way to make money.  They can steal the school, send their operatives into the community and take advantage of the anger and vulnerability of parents, kids, and  teachers in Dugger and promise the moon.  But they will fire veteran educators and replace them with temporary scab teachers who have no connections to the children.  They will, as they always do, put profits over people, and Dugger residents will have one more mess to deal with. 

Dugger, Indiana is a big wake-up call.  Even though 1.3 million voters kicked Tony Bennett out of office in 2012, Bennett was not the main problem.  Bennett was a useful idiot.  Republicans with their wealthy out of state anti-public school funders were the problem.  And people who voted for Ritz turned around and voted all of them right back in.  And believe me, this is not going to end.  Already Mike Pence has announced plans for new corporate-religious run charter schools, and his Republican friends want to eliminate personal taxes on businesses, which means not only are the fire departments, police departments, and the libraries going to take a financial beating, so are the schools.  When the estimated $1 billion from these proposed tax breaks is drained from our democracy, it will be time to sell off your local public services to the lowest bidder, a private corporation that gives you nothing but takes your tax money for its own CEOs' pockets. And then it's going to be too late for anyone to speak up.