UPDATE ON THE MICHIGAN FAMILY BUYING INDIANA, FLORIDA, AND OKLAHOMA EDUCATION

By Doug Martin,  the author of Hoosier School Heist (find it on Facebook)

cross-posted at the Hoosier School Heist Blog

Without a doubt, Betsy DeVos and her family members are some of the biggest players behind school privatization in Indiana (and several other states, so see the end of this piece).

Betsy DeVos is the wife of Richard (Dick) DeVos, Jr., the Christian Right leader of Amway and Right-to-Work  supporter who ran for governor of Michigan in 2006 and almost won.   As I explain in my book  Hoosier School Heist, Richard, in a video a few years back, detailed the family plan for Indiana public education and school privatization across the country.

Betsy DeVos’ brother Erik Prince founded the Christian military force Blackwater, known for its massacre, threats to a U.S. investigator, and big government payouts in the War on Terror.

Along with Walmart’s Walton family, Betsy DeVos heads the American Federation for Children, a front-group operating in several states, which funneled money into the Hoosiers for Economic Growth PAC which in turn handed tons of campaign donations to Indiana Republicans to pass anti-public education bills to benefit for-profit charter operators and rightwing Christian schools.

Besides giving Tony Bennet $10,000 directly, the DeVos family has handed $940,000 to the American Federation for Children.

Mike Pence has received just $20,000 in campaign donations from the DeVos family.

In 2014, the group gave the Hoosiers for Economic Growth PAC (now the Hoosiers for Quality Education PAC) $175,000.

The American Federation for Children is still very actively raising money in Indiana through Citizens United lawyer James Bopp, Jr.’s Terre Haute office, with Jim Walton giving close to $40,000 this year alone.  So far, the school privatization money is flowing into Florida and Oklahoma, but it’s a sure bet it  will find its way to the Indiana statehouse doorsteps soon, too.

IPS, Marian, and the Free-Market Jesus

by Doug Martin

With the hedge fund Democrats for Educational Reform’s Mary Ann Sullivan, the Marian Academy for Teaching and Leadership-trained LaNier Echols, and others mentioned in my book Hoosier School Heist now on the IPS School Board, the profiteers are gearing up to cash in on even more tax money in Indianapolis.  On Tuesday, the IPS School Board will vote on placing Marian University –trained leaders in various schools in Indianapolis. 

Marian and IPS leaders plan a $2 million deal with Marian University’s Marian Academy for Teaching and Leadership to train up to 90 “school leaders” in three years for IPS.  IPS will pay $50,000 yearly to the program, which will run from January 2015 to December 2018,  The rest of the money will come from unnamed private investors.

Marian University’s Academy for Teaching and Leadership has been funded and supported by shady millionaire-sponsored school privatizing groups from day one.  The Kern Family Foundation started the funding for the Marian leadership program and worked hand-in-hand with the Sagamore Institute, a group promoting school privatization and religious work which used to be led by Mitch Daniels’ sister. 

I wrote about the Kern Family Foundation several years ago.  Based in Waukesha, Wisconsin, the Kern Family Foundation is the product of Robert and Patricia Kern, owners of Generac Power Systems, a generator company. The Kern Family Foundation has pumped money to the Black Alliance for Educational Options (BAEO), Betsy DeVos’ Alliance for School Choice (which, in turn, bought Indiana Republican lawmakers), and several other corporate school reform projects. It is also known for Friedmanite Greg Forster’s directed American History, Economics, and Religion grant program supporting free-market, religious indoctrination with the American Enterprise Institute.  In laymen terms, the Kern Family Foundation is a  right-wing Christian, free-market Jesus propaganda machine which has played a national role in in corporate/theocratic/work force training school reform movement for years.

And let's not forget:  Marian University is ran by Dan Elsener, a state board of education member, former employer of Tony Bennett's wife, and past worker for millionaire Christel DeHaan whose charter school's grade was changed by Tony Bennett. 

If all of this is not enough to send warning signals to IPS teachers, parents, and students, Marian Academy later picked up support from the George W. Bush Institute’s Alliance for Reform in Educational Leadership, which promotes the school privatization agenda nationally, as well. 

The IPS/Marian/private $2 million program is vague in the least.  Here are a few things the plan doesn’t answer:

1.  It does not say how student learning and achievement gains are going to be assessed.  Will this include more testing? 

2.  How is teacher effectiveness going to be assessed and what specific formula will be used in the IPS/Marian plan?   

3.  In the IPS/Marian document, discipline assessment is mentioned on several occasions, but there are no details on what specific discipline is going to be assessed and if the data will be broken down by race, sex and income.  

4.  With the tracking of new data which the IPS/Marian plan calls for, will students, parents, and teachers' personal information be protected?  Will parents be able to opt out of data collection on their children?

Cash-strapped IPS doesn’t need to join a Catholic university program supported by right-wing free-market millionaires.  If IPS leaders need trained, do it in-house.  IPS parents, students, and teachers should be outraged that IPS is even considering handing over money to a Catholic University ran by Dan Elsener, one of the main players behind the corporate/theocratic assault against public education in this state. 
 

Member of FBI-Raided School Funds Todd Rokita AFTER the Raid

by Doug Martin

I mention Todd Rokita, the Indiana US congressman from the 4th district, in my book Hoosier School Heist because of his role with the Muslim Gulen charter schools recently raided by the FBI (see more on this at the end of this article).

Since Rokita is up for election this year, I decided to peek into his campaign funding ("peek" because I merely touch the surface with what is below). 

Unsurprisingly, Rokita and Tony Bennett have a lot in common.  Rokita is tight with the main players who have turned our schools over to privatizers in Indiana.

First off, in 2010, Fred Klipsch, Walmart and Amway’s main school privatizing operative in Indiana, rolled $1,000 into Rokita’s campaign.  

Simon Property Group’s Herbert Simon gave $1,000 to Rokita in 2011.  Simon Property Group, as I note in Hoosier School Heist, helps run dozens of public schools in its shopping malls across the US so students can incorporate consuming into their course loads.  

George Bush partner and Tony Bennett donor Al Hubbard, who works for Simon Property Group, funded with millionaires IPS board member Caitlin Hannon, and orchestrated many parts of the public school takeover in Indiana with Jeb Bush and Amway’s Betsy DeVos, gave Rokita $2,000 (see here and here for his funding in 2010 and in April of this year).

Then there’s scandal-ridden Mitch Daniels’ buddy Jerry Slusser, who is also in my book.  Slusser loaded Rokita’s campaign chest with $6,600 in 2010 (see here, here, and here). 

When online K12, INC’s founder Bill Bennett wanted to hang out in Indiana to promote his various corporate school projects, Tony Bennett attempted to use Slusser to fly him to a Jeffersonville fundraiser. 

Slusser, besides being very rich, is best known for being fined “$600,000 by federal regulators for defrauding German investors in the late ‘90s.”

Tony Bennett donor and popcorn prince Michael Weaver, also mentioned in Hoosier School Heist, gave Rokita $2,000 (here and here) a few years ago.

Another Tony Bennett mega-donor, Dean White, gave Rokita $5,200 in 2013.
   
And let us not forget the Muslim Gulenists from Turkey who wine, dine, and buy lawmakers across the country and get millions of our tax dollars.  They operate several charter schools in the Midwest (Indy, too) that have recently been raided by the FBI. 

Hasan Yerdelen, who once ran the Gulenist American Turkish Association of Indiana, handed Rokita $1,000 in 2010. 

In 2010, the Indiana Math and Science Academy’s Aynur Aytekin’s slid Rokita $1,000.

Unbelievably, this year on June 30, Gulen’s main man in Indiana, Bilal Eksili, who has or still sits on several Indiana Math and Science Academy charter school boards in Indianapolis (including its North campus,*) slipped Rokita $2,500.  The FBI raided Gulen's Indiana Math and Science Academy North campus school in Indy on June 4^th. 

Indy RTV's Derrik Thomas wanted to interview me about the FBI raid but backed out. We wouldn't want the public to know too much, now would we?

NOTE: 

* The Indiana Math and Science Academy North board of directors, according to the group's website, also lists Brenda Shaheed as a member.  Brenda is the mother-in-law of another Indiana Gulen-lawmaker, Andre Carson.

Tony Bennett's Chewytrain Lands in Camden

by Doug Martin

One of the most embarrassing moments of Tony Bennett’s rein as Indiana’s corporate school chief (and there were many) was when his partner Dale Chu (better known as @chewytrain), happy as a teenage girl at a Jonas Brothers' concert (one of the Jonas Brothers, by the way, loves to perform at for-profit school Rocketship events), tweeted his admiration of the filthy rich out to privatize education at a Jeb Bush/Rupert Murdoch shindig in San Francisco.

The Ivy Leaguer and former charter school principal who resigned with Bennett in Florida after it was revealed that Bennett changed the grade of a donor’s charter school in Indiana, Chu is at it again, this time in Camden, New Jersey, where the corporate school takeover has been in full swing, as Jersey Jazzman has detailed, since Chris Christie, a former Edison Schools lobbyist, and Chris Cerf, Tony Bennett’s con man at Jeb Bush’s Chiefs for Change, has made it an agenda.

In fact, there is a possible investigation brewing in nearby Newark, thanks to Christie and Cory Booker, the former corporate Democratic mayor and waterboy for Walmart and the Bradley Foundation's Black Alliance for Educational Options.  

Chu is now pulling in $160,000 ($10,000 more than he made in Florida) as the project director of the Camden City Schools  (page 83 in PDF box) where he’s doing “teacher talks” this month because, according to Chu, only three high school students in the entire city of Camden are college-ready. 

So that Jeb Bush would know about this Camden student "failure," Chu tagged him in one of his tweets.  As I recently mentioned to the good folks in Clay County Indiana, Jeb Bush was really the Indiana supt. of education when Chu was here, inviting friends at Charter Schools USA and Edison Learning to take over so-called "failing" schools and lobbying for online learning outfits like Pearson’s Connections Academy which invaded a community-led rural charter school to rake in millions.

As Rutgers professor Stephen Danley has pointed out, Camden "parents and residents must choose between crumbling district schools and shiny charter schools" in "a manufactured crisis caused by the refusal to fund repairs of district buildings."

Chu must be happy.  The powers-that-be in the Christie/Jeb Bush clan have at least opened up the bridge for Chewytrain to come, cash in, and weep in admiration of the 1 percent again.

The Daniels-Lumina-ALEC-Sallie Mae-Purdue-Gallup Index: What Everyone Needs to Know

by Doug Martin

As a means to hold Purdue and other universities “accountable,” Mitch Daniels, in late December, announced the Purdue-Gallup Index which will track how well students in higher education fit into the US workforce.  Anyone who followed Daniels' corporate school agenda while he was governor (or anyone following the corporate school leaders anywhere, for that matter) understands that using false measurements is a way to slash art teachers’ jobs and classes, fire teachers to create a temporary teaching workforce, turn schools completely over to private companies, and train workers for an imaginary workforce so that those who do land jobs will be paid pennies because of a flooded market. Now Daniels, Barack Obama, and others are starting to use the same disaster capitalism tactics on higher-education.  One only needs to look at the Lumina Foundation for Education, the main group funding the Purdue-Gallup Index to get a clue what this is all about.  

The Indianapolis-based Lumina Foundation for Education has $1.4 billion in assets and is a major player in the quest to completely privatize higher education across the country. A private outfit, Lumina promotes the skills-gap myth nonstop so that the public schools at all levels can be turned into workforce training grounds so corporations don’t have to pay their own money to train workers. 

But the group has even more sinister motives. Lumina was founded when the USA Group sold one billion dollars of student loan debt to Sallie Mae.  Lumina's board chair is John Lintzenich, USA Group's former CEO and former CEO of Sallie Mae. Part of Lumina’s Goals 2025 plan is to have 60 percent of Americans acquire college degrees, which will no doubt increase the profit of student loan lenders like Sallie Mae, which is still a funder of Lumina (watch at 13:46 here).

And Mitch Daniels, Purdue's president, has many ties to Lumina.

MITCH, MUTZ, AND THE INDIANA CORPORATE SCHOOL COMPLEX

From 2002-2010, John Mutz chaired the Lumina Foundation, now still sits on its board, directs the for-profit Clarian Health Ventures, and is on CID Equity Partners’ advisory board in Indiana. Mutz has spent over $100,000 funding the campaigns of Mitch Daniels, Daniels' Aiming Higher PAC, Tony Bennett, Todd Rokita, and Indiana Republicans, and in 2011 handed $5,000 to Mike Pence.

A past trustee for the Friedmanite and former-Indianapolis-based Hudson Institute, former lieutenant governor of Indiana, previous Conseco official (Conseco has had its fair-share of corruption, as I point out in Hoosier School Heist), and one-time president of PSI Energy, Mutz was Lilly Endowment’s president from 1989-1993. He was also a director at the rightwing GEO Foundation’s 21^st Century Charter School (tons of good dirt in my book on GEO), an Indianapolis Charter Schools Board member, and co-chair and funder of the billionaire Betsy DeVos-run front-group, All Children Matter, in Indiana. In 2006, All Children Matter was fined $5.2 million for funneling corporate school reform cash into Ohio, but that didn’t stop them from using Citizens United and Terre Haute lawyer James Bopp, Jr. to do the same dirty work to buy out legislators in Indiana and several other states a few years ago. 

And that was when the attack on Indiana schools truly began.

Alongside hedge fund managers calling themselves Democrats and Daniels and Bush family operative and current Lumina board member Al Hubbard (who used Jeb Bush and Betsy DeVos to write the corporate school agenda in Indiana before even Tony Bennett was aware of it), John Mutz helped buy out the Indianapolis Public School board race, so that the rich could carry on their school privatization in Indianapolis, regardless.
 
In October 2012, along with Eli Lilly, the Joyce Foundation (the school privatization outfit where Obama used to work), and Enron’s Arnold family, the Lumina Foundation financed Indy Mayor Ballard’s corporate school blueprint What’s Possible. 

Lumina Foundation and Eli Lilly both have operatives at Indiana University’s Tobias Center for Leadership Excellence, named after our good buddy Randall.  Randall Tobias, a big Mitch Daniels funder and one-time Eli Lilly chairman emeritus, is best known for his role in George W. Bush’s administration promoting a religious right anti-AIDS and anti-prostitution public policy while he himself was sleeping with prostitutes.  Tobias is a dear friend of multi-millionaire Christel DeHaan and helped raise money for her charter school franchise.  One of DeHaan’s charter schools recently received an “F” grade even though Tony Bennett rigged it the year before to make DeHaan, his campaign lady, happy. 

LUMINA AND ALEC; THE FUNDING, THE PROPAGANDA, THE PLAN 

Recently, the Lumina Foundation gave $150,000 to the Aspen Institute, which has Koch Brothers’ David Koch and Condi Rice, among others, on its board.  The Aspen Institute made its name as an anti-public school mega-rich outfit when Stand for Children’s Jonah Edelman bragged at an Aspen event about using hedge fund managers to buy out Democrats in Illinois to throw teachers and students under the bus.

This year, Lumina slid $75,000 to Mitch Daniels Leadership Foundation’s Arc Leadership Award, too, and Lumina has  funded the Bill Clinton-privatization spin-off think tank the New American Foundation and dozens of shady groups involved in higher education. 

In order to land a seat on its Education Task Force in 2008, Lumina gave $300,000 to the American Legislative Exchange Council, better known as ALEC, to kick in gear the complete privatization of state universities across America.  The Badger Democracy Blog (in an article worth reading in its entirety) points out that Lumina’s talking points of making it possible for every American to get a good college education is just a smokescreen.  Lumina’s “Four Steps to Finishing First” is a scheme to tie university performance to state funding, run universities like businesses, make faculty and staff pay more for their health plans, and spread online learning onto campuses.

Recently, Governor Scott Walker used Lumina to map the University of Wisconsin System's new online learning program, among other things, to beef up the “ALEC and neo-con, corporatic agenda to create a crisis" and "defund public education.”  

By founding and funding the Institute for Higher Education Leadership & Policy (IHELP) located at Sacramento State University in order to disseminate negative and false data and reports to the media, Lumina was also behind the corporate-driven California Community College Board of Governors task force on Student Success report, which led to a bill signed into law by Governor Brown recently.

Writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education in July 2012, Eric Kelderman says that

“Lumina's change in focus doesn't mean that the organization will be spending less money, he [Lumina’s leader Jamie P. Merisotis] said. In fact, the foundation will expand its efforts by convening business leaders, lawmakers, higher-education groups, and faculty members to build consensus on specific policy measures.

In addition, he [Lumina’s leader Jamie P. Merisotis] said, Lumina will draft model policies for states, including legislation. The group is already working with the American Legislative Exchange Council, a conservative-leaning organization, to write and introduce bills in statehouses.”

We all know how the ALEC-corporate party went down in Indiana's public schools, and now it's time for the universities to be dismantled.

Sarah Blaskey and Steve Horn sum up best the Lumina plan for Purdue and other universities:

NCSL [National Conference of State Legislatures} has received over $1 million since 2007 from the Lumina Foundation to push the higher education privatization effort in the states. By contrast, ALEC has received $595,000 since 2008 from Lumina, all according to Lumina's web site's section on grants.

The funding stream behind Lumina's existence speaks volumes about the higher education agenda it is pushing. "Lumina Foundation is a conversion foundation created in mid-2000 as USA Group, Inc., the nation's largest private guarantor and administrator of education loans, sold most of its operating assets to Sallie Mae," explains Lumina on its web site.

Sallie Mae, lo and behold, gave nearly $21 billion dollars in student loans in fiscal year 2009, feasting on skyrocketing student tuition fees, which are directly linked to the "flexibility" efforts the foundation Sallie Mae bankrolls is pushing through NCSL (and ALEC).

In the meantime, scores of students are defaulting on these student loans.

PREORDER DOUG MARTIN'S HOOSIER SCHOOL HEIST HERE

   

 

 

 

Mike Pence's Secret Santas

by Doug Martin

As we enter an election year here in Indiana, it is time for all of us to start peering in on the campaign records of our beloved state politicians and the front groups that are their publically-secret Santas.  So here are a few of Gov. Mike Pence’s, and they are many of the same people and corporations who funded former Indiana and Florida supt. of education Tony Bennett.

ELI LILLY: SWINGING BOTH WAYS

Eli Lilly’s PAC, this October, gave Govt. Mike $10,000. Lilly, in its various shapes and forms, has been a big player in privatizing Indiana public schools and claims to support gays and lesbians fighting against Pence’s quest to hammer a ban on gay marriage into the state constitution.

Former Eli Lilly bigwig, Randall Tobias paid family man Mike Pence $10,000 in May (see page 2 in the PDF).  Best known for his role in George W. Bush’s administration promoting a religious right anti-AIDS  and anti-prostitution public policy while he himself was sleeping with prostitutes, Tobias is a friend of Christel DeHaan who runs the now-graded “F” charter school Tony Bennett rigged an earlier grade for.

ANGIE, AIN’T IT GOOD TO BE ALIVE?

William S. Oesterle—Angie’s List’s co-founder and CEO—has loaded Mike Pence’s campaign chest with $300,000 (see pages 2 and 3) recently.

If you support Indiana public schools, steer clear of Angie’s List and its corporate “word-of-mouth wisdom.” A mega-donor to Tony Bennett, Oesterle is a former partner of the venture capital firm, CID Equity Partners and helped manage Mitch Daniels’ 2004 campaign. In the 1980s, he led the right-wing Hudson Institute, a then Indy-based pseudo-research group closely tied with ALEC and funded by the anti-worker Koch brothers.

THE WHITE KNIGHT

Tony Bennett’s buddy Dean White gifted Mike Pence $250,000 in September of this year.  Now a billionaire, White inherited his father’s mega-billboard business. For fun, White, now in his 80s, dabbles in real estate deals and develops hotels. White earlier gave Mike Pence $100,000 in donations to run for Indiana governor.  White is listed #281 on Forbes’ list of America’s richest.

A BIG AND RICH PAIN IN THE YASS

And Pennsylvania hedge fund manager and national corporate school funder, Jeff Yass, another shady figure in my upcoming book Hoosier School Heist and in my article on Bill Gates in Philadelphia, gave big, big, and big to do his part in privatizing Indiana education, even handing Pence $20,000 in 2012 (see this , and this).  All in all, Yass (who is just one out-of-state hedge fund manager behind the Indiana corporate school movement, by the way), dished out just shy of $1 million recently to destroy Indiana teachers, students, and public schools.

School Choice Indiana’s Fred Klipsch (also a millionaire) gave Mike Pence’s campaign $25,000 in May (page 2 in PDF,) and libertarian national and Indiana charter school operator John Bryan slid Pence $50,000 in June (page 3 in PDF). 

There’s many, many more corporate school people I could expose here who are in bed with Mike Pence, but it is getting late, and I am tired.  Happy New Year.  It's going to be a long and hard one.

 

 

 

 

CECI Email Reveals Charter School Chains: Or What Mike Pence and the Jonas Brothers Have in Common

by Doug Martin

Besides seeking to dethrone Indiana supt. of public education Glenda Ritz from the state board of education, Mike Pence and his Center for Education and Career Innovation (CECI)–in the recently leaked email from James Betley to Claire Fiddian-Green—reveal the government/theocratic/corporate school complex's plan to allow Carpe Diem, Rocketship, and Christel House  to “pool or share funds” and set up a public-private entity to quickly hand empty school buildings to charter schools.

By lending a helping hand to networks of Walmart-type for-profit charter schools in Indiana, the governor will carry on the crony capitalism these charter school chains are known for nationwide. Let us examine the big players.

 

CARPE DIEM: THE MIKE PENCE/JEB BUSH/TONY BENNETT/FRIEDMAN NETWORK

With all the nonsense about parental choice and high-quality schools coming out of the governor’s office, Betley's email proves that what Mike Pence really has up his sleeve is to make it easier for the Tony Bennett-recruited blending learning charter corporation Carpe Diem, among others, to expand in Indiana.  Carpe Diem has political ties in the Hoosier state and even with Pence himself.

Along with the Friedman Foundation’s Robert Enlow and Robert Sommers (a member of the Jeb Bush/Tony Bennett circle), Daryle Doden's family's Ambassador Enterprises got involved in the attempt to land Carpe Diem in Fort Wayne. Daryle gave Pence $10,000 for his campaign for governor. 

Daryle’s brother Eric—who sends his kids to a Christian school where his wife is a board member—heads the Indiana Economic Development Corporation, where he rakes in $149,000 yearly, as Karen Francisco has discovered.  A Christian Hillsdale College grad, Doden used to work for Ambassador Enterprises.

Along with Robert Enlow, Jason Bearce helps run Carpe Diem in Indianapolis.  Bearce is the associate commissioner of the Indiana Commission for Higher Education, run by queen school privatizer Teresa Lubbers, whose campaign was funded by Enlow.  For his role at the ICHE, Bearce is paid almost $94,000 annually.

Carpe Diem didn’t invade Fort Wayne (just yet), but close to the same board members manage the group’s school in Indianapolis.

Carpe Diem fits perfectly the Pence/CECI school privatization agenda: one corporate board to oversee dozens of for-profit charter schools in the state.

 

THE JONAS BROTHERS/BILL GATES/NETFLIX/SILICON VALLEY CHARTER SCHOOL CHAIN

Mike Pence and CECI are praying for a Jonas Brothers/Bill Gates/Silicon Valley for-profit charter school on every block in Indiana, too, since the leaked email discussion highlights Rocketship, another blended learning charter chain.  Given that Bill Gates funds Indiana’s Education Roundtable, this is not surprising.

As Daily Censored's Adam Bessie has noted, Rocketship’s national board has Bill Gates written all over it. Besides Don Shalvey, deputy director for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s US Program Education Initiative, Rocketship’s leadership includes Jonathan Chadwick from Microsoft’s Skype and Menlo Ventures’ Shawn Carolan, managing director of the company which invests in Microsoft’s Hotmail.

Rocketship also has tech business moguls from Silicon Valley that are close to Microsoft, including Microsoft board of directors member and Netflex CEO Reed Hastings, whose online company DreamBox Learning profits from selling its programs to Rocketship.

Although it’s not possible to determine how much Rocketship pays DreamBox, John Danner, in an advertisement for DreamBox says that “there are tremendous cost savings associated with the Learning Lab—about half a million dollars a year—be­cause students are coached by community members rather than teachers, allowing us to run our schools with fewer teachers (see p 4 in PDF)."

No one wants Rocketship around.  Period.  Parents in Milwaukee won’t enroll their kids in a for-profit school that chains their children to computers, ignores the arts, and hires unqualified teachers. A poverty-stricken community in San Jose is so tired of being prey to Rocketship it has set up a website to stop the school chain’s expansion.  The San Jose Unified School District sued Rocketship a few backs back, too.

But Rocketship has been busy marketing to the teen-crowd.  At the grand opening of a Santa Clara Microsoft school, Rocketship used “Joe Montana, one of the Jonas Brothers, and [a] special performance by rock band the Black Keys” to raise funding for more corporate schools.

 
HELPING TONY BENNETT’S MEGA-MILLIONAIRE DONOR’S CHARTER SCHOOL OUTFIT

And yes, the leaked Pence/CECI memo mentions none other than Christal DeHaan’s Christel House as a possible outfit to "network" across the state.  The fact that Tony Bennett changed the grade of DeHaan’s charter school because she was a campaign donor doesn’t faze Pence in the least. 

When DeHaan broke ground for high school students a few years back, naming that section of the charter school after a former Eli Lilly exec., Mitch Daniels (wanting to keep the Indiana GOP campaign funds rolling), Indy Mayor Greg Ballard, and Ambassador Randall Tobias, were there for the photo-op.

Tobias, then Eli Lilly’s chairman emeritus, is best known for his role in George W. Bush’s administration promoting a religious right anti-AIDS and anti-prostitution public policy while he himself was sleeping with prostitutes.  Tobias, for the charter school, went a step further, chairing with DeHaan a $4 million “capital campaign” to raise corporate money for the school.

The school did draw in private investors for a couple of years after Tobias’ “capital campaign,” but the money they gave is chump-change compared to the millions taxpayers are giving.  The mega-millionaire’s charter school got $6 million recently for just one year.  This money isn’t going to paying janitors, since the school outsources those jobs.

The corporatists who donated to the Christel House Academy are the regular suspects: Eli Lilly (deep into the assault on students, teachers, and public schools in Indiana), JP Morgan (making interest on charter school loans in the Hoosier state), Klipsch Audio Technologies (owned by Betsy DeVos’ front man Fred Klipsch),  banks, banks, and more banks, and more corporations.

Finally, as I detailed when the grading scandal broke, the Christel House Academy has spent over $70,000 the last few years travelling.  For the 2009 calendar year, the school spent $12,000 on travel expenses (see page 10). In the 2010 calendar year, the Christel House Academy wasted another $20,500 on travel (see page 10). Even as the Christel House Academy paid out $15,000 on advertising for the 2011 calendar year, it dished out a staggering $40,000 on travel alone (see page 10 in PDF).  No details are given in tax records as to where this travel took place, and it is unclear if this money is coming only from taxpayers or from school fees or other revenue.

We will probably never know.  For the attorney general and the public access counselor in Indiana are too busy ruling against Glenda Ritz to do their jobs and give the people of Indiana some real answers for a change.