Philip Anschutz and Walden Media: What Kind of Agenda?

One of the key players in the distribution of Waiting for 'Superman' is Walden Media, a film company owned by Philip Anschutz.  Barbara Miner touches on him (and many other players) in her recent article, but I've yet to see anyone look at how Anschutz uses his family's foundation to push a conservative/libertarian agenda.

As I'll lay out below, the Anschutz Foundation, chaired and financed by Philip, is quite fond of some of the biggest players in conservative education advocacy: the Manhattan Institute, Heritage Foundation, Cato Institute, Hoover Institution, and the American Enterprise Institute.  The foundation also gives to the Freedom Works Foundation, Washington Legal Foundation, and various other influential think tanks/organizations.  I won't really get into it here, but it's fair to say this foundation uses their philanthropic arm much the way the Koch brothers do: to further their own conservative agenda while creating a climate that is more friendly for their businesses.

Many left-leaning moviegoers will believe the film must be true: it's produced by that great curly-haired fellow who made 'An Inconvenient Truth.'  Never mind his misunderstanding of NAEP cut levels, his misrepresentation of tenure, and his refusal to provide even a slight bit of nuance about charter schools - the public comes away from this flick not even know what they don't know (yes, I've seen it).  And, as far as someone like Philip Anschutz is concerned, that's just fine and dandy - it fits right in with the school reform agenda pushed by the think tanks he funds.

Before reading the list below, do know this is not a full list of the foundation's donations - but it is a pretty good summary of the donations to free-market think tanks involved in education policy/reform (with a few other donations tossed in for extra spice).  You can see the full list of donations from the last three years here.  The foundation also supports Evangelical organizations (Young Life, National Prayer Committee, etc) and other religious groups; the rest of the donations go to community organizations that many people support (Mercy Corp, Boys and Girls clubs, hospitals, Susan G. Komen Foundation), but I'm focusing on the organizations that are explicitly trying to shape public policy.

Without further ado, here's the list of donations made by Anschutz's foundation:

2008:

$75,000 to Alliance for Choice in Education

$10,000 to AEI

$10,000 to American Spectator Foundation (Anschutz owns AS)

$15,000 to Americans for Prosperity

$100,000 to Association of American Educators Foundation

$75,000 to Cato Institute

$50,000 to Claremont Institue

$15,000 to Evergreen Freedom Foundation

$10,000 to Freedom Works Foundation

$100,000 to Heritage Foundation

$15,000 to Hoover Institution

$75,000 to Manhattan Institute

$10,000 to Mercatus Institute

$65,000 to Pacific Research Institute

$50,000 to Washington Legal Foundation

2007:

$100,000 to Alliance for Choice in Education

$10,000 to American Spectator Foundation

$15,000 to Americans for Prosperity

$45,000 to Cato Institute

$25,000 to Claremont Institute

$7,500 to Freedom Works Foundation

$175,000 to Heritage Foundation

$40,000 to Independence Institute

$10,000 to KIPP Sunshine Peak Academy

$50,000 to Manhattan Institute

$15,000 to Mountain States Legal Foundation

$15,000 to National Right to Work Legal Defense

$30,000 to Pacific Research Institute

$50,000 to the Washington Legal Foundation

2006:

$7,500 to AEI

$10,000 to American Spectator Foundation

$5,000 to Americans for Prosperity

$5,000 to Freedom Works

$50,000 to Independence Institute

$20,000 to National Right to Work Legal Defense

$20,000 to Pacific Research Institute

2005:

$10,000 to AEI

$5,000 to Americans for Prosperity

$25,000 to Clarement Institute

$50,000 to Manhattan Institute

$5,000 to Mercatus Center

$25,000 to Pacific Research Institute

$35,000 to the Washington Legal Foundation

2004:

$5,000 to AEI

$7,500 to Americans for Prosperity

$50,000 to Manhattan Institute

$10,000 to Mercatus Center

$10,000 to Pacific Research Institute

$25,000 to the Washington Legal Foundation

2003:

$10,000 to Alliance for Choice in Education

$15,000 to Heritage Foundation

$100,000 to Manhattan Institute

$15,000 to Mercatus Center

$15,000 to National Right to Work Legal Defense

2001:

$20,000 to Heritage Foundation

$10,000 to Pacific Research Institute

$10,000 to America's Future Foundation

$250,000 to Denver School of Science and Technology for capital grant

$25,000 to Free Congress Research and Education Foundation

$20,000 to Heritage Foundation

$5,000 to Independent Institute

$10,000 to Leadership Institute (training conservative leaders)

$10,000 to Mercatus Center

$5,000 to Pacific Research Institute

$10,000 to Young America's Foundation

2000:

AEI - $7,500

$10,000 to Heritage Foundation

$5,000 to Independent Institute

$40,000 to Mountain States Legal Foundation

$15,000 to National Right to Work Legal Defense

$7,500 to Pacific Research Institute

1998:

$10,000 to the Heritage Foundation

$3,000 to the Heritage Foundation to support a lecture series (Heritage 25: Lecture Series)

$5,000 to Independent Institute

$5,000 to Leadership Institute

$15,000 to Mountain States Legal Foundation

$20,000 to National Right to Work Legal Defense for "Operation Liberty Bell" to "alert thousands of Americans of their right to stop union officials from using compulsory dues to elect candidates and support causes that employees oppose."

$10,000 to Washington Legal Foundation

Charles Murray and the Racist Think Tanks That Made Him

In an era that seems determined to pursue a neo-eugenic policy of mis-educating the poor right into compliant Christian soldiers or, failing that, into customers for the prison industry, it is worth examining once more the origins for the contemporary pseudo-science whose once-shadowy backers are now front and center in the highly lucrative pay-to-say research industry known as think tanks.

When MSNBC spends hours and hours a week having the oily John Siegenthaler de-sensitizing the public to the human rights horrors of prison life, and when pretty Paula Zahn brings on skinheads, as she did last evening, to share their views in a forum on segregation, then it is, indeed, time for those who care about civil rights to take a deep breath and look back in order that they may look forward. A couple of clips from Eric Alterman at Media Matters (ht to Media Transparency):

Perhaps the most successful publishing foray into the world of ideas by a combination of right-wing funders and their compatriot intellectuals is the amazing public relations achievement undertaken on behalf of the work of the formerly obscure Charles Murray. How many 800-plus-page nonfiction books featuring over a hundred pages of graphs and source materials have managed to sell upwards of 300,000 copies in hardcover in recent years? How many have inspired Vanity Fair-type celebrity coverage in virtually all major news magazines, as well as a special issue of The New Republic, which featured no fewer than seventeen responses? How many authors of such books have been featured in major Hollywood films, carried by characters wishing to demonstrate intellectual toughness? [1] The answer to all of the above is precisely one: Murray's The Bell Curve. [2] Back in 1982, however, Charles Murray, was still a "nobody" in the words of William Hammett, president of the Manhattan Institute, and about to be Murray's chief patron. Murray's ascendancy would never have been possible without the patient, far-sighted investments in his work by a conservative network of funders and foundations, including the reclusive billionaire, Richard Mellon Scaife, the Olin Foundation, the Manhattan Institute, the American Enterprise Institute, and, perhaps most significantly, Milwaukee's Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. They not only supported Murray when he needed time to research and write his books, they funded elaborate publicity campaigns to ensure that Murray's argument would dominate media discourse.

. . . .

The Bell Curveball, Part II

Despite the success and continuing influence of Losing Ground, Murray soon shifted gears. Race is largely absent from Losing Ground. But Murray had a chance meeting with Harvard professor Richard Hernstein, who had been arguing in various places, including the "liberal" Atlantic Monthly, that "[i]n times to come, the tendency to be unemployed may run in the genes of a family about as certainly as bad teeth do now." [1] Murray was clearly excited by arguments like these, and decided to redirect his own research toward it. In 1990, the Manhattan Institute decided that it did not want to associate itself with this kind of research and informed Murray to find another home for his work on what he termed "the genetic inferiority stuff." [2]

Fortunately for Murray, Michael Joyce, who had been so instrumental in supporting him at the Olin Foundation, had now taken over the Bradley Foundation. Murray's $100,000 grant was moved from the Manhattan Institute to the American Enterprise Institute, after a brief -- and failed -- attempt to place him in the more centrist and establishment-oriented, Brookings Institute. Murray was, once again, extremely fortunate in his choice of sponsors. By the time he completed his second book, he had received more than $750,000 since the Bradley foundation had begun its support, with more than $500,000 coming during the four years he worked on The Bell Curve. [3]

The publicity campaign for The Bell Curve mimicked that of Losing Ground. It is safe to say that most scholarly books containing hundreds of pages of regression analyses and primary source-based historical, economic and sociological claims would first be published, at least in part, in academic quarterlies that vet submissions by scholarly peer review on the part of an editorial board. But Simon & Schuster did not even send The Bell Curve to reviewers in galleys, and neither did its authors. A Wall Street Journal news story reported that the book had been "swept forward by a strategy that provided book galleys to likely supporters while withholding them from likely critics." The Journal suggested that AEI "tried to fix the fight when it released review copies selectively, contrary to usual publishing protocol." Murray and AEI also hand-picked a group of pundits to be flown to Washington at the think tank's expense for a weekend of briefings by Murray and discussion of the book's arguments.[4] This strategy would pay off when the book was released and the publicity machine put into action, long before the scientific establishment could garner a look and form any coherent judgments.

Couched between an endless array of tables, charts and ten-dollar words, the Murray/Hernstein thesis, at its core, was nevertheless disarmingly simple. The book's first sentence is: "This book is about differences in intellectual capacity among people, and groups, and what these differences mean for America's future." The authors blame many of the nation's social problems, including the persistence of an "underclass" characterized by high-levels of crime, welfare, and illegitimacy, on the fact that black people are just not as smart as white people. After all, they argue, all racial barriers to advancement have been removed from American society; hence, we have arrived at a near perfect consequential relationship between IQ and socioeconomic achievement. And because, the authors believe IQ to be largely the product of one's genetic inheritance, it is futile for society to try to boost those doomed to failure beyond their natural stations in life. In addition, high-IQ women are now entering the workforce at record rates and refusing to reproduce a comparable rate to that of poor and stupid women, who rarely work and collect lots of welfare money. These trends are "exerting downward pressure on the distribution of cognitive ability in the United States," with its resultant increases in crime, welfare dependency and illegitimacy. Because those under siege will not simply sit tight and let their society slip inexorably into anarchy, the authors predict a future semi-fascist "custodial state" for America, not unlike "a high-tech and more lavish version of an Indian reservation." Unfortunately, the dumb ones among us will lose such cherished rights as "individualism, equal rights before the law, free people running their own lives," according to the authors, but such measures will become unavoidable lest we taken to address the coming crisis of a national dysgenic downturn. . . .

Manhattan Institute extremists credit anti-racist activists with Marshall Tuck's defeat

"Robert D. Skeels, writing in L.A. Progressive, rips Marshall Tuck for closing down ethnic studies programs and heritage language studies programs while running the Partnership for Los Angeles Schools. He reviews Tuck’s record at Green Dot charter schools and the Mayor’s Partnership and renders a scathing judgment." — Professor Diane Ravitch

Right-wing reactionary Ben Boychuk's profound disdain for public education is somewhat legendary, and his tenures at the fringe-right think-tanks Heartland Institute, and now Manhattan Institute are testament to that. When he's not cheerleading for book banning, hosting privatization forums with the Walton Foundation funded Parent Revolution and its former Executive Director Ben Austin, or solidifying the vile Parent Trigger as ALEC template legislation, he's writing political analysis for his fellow baggers, birchers, and neoliberal corporate education reformers.

Last month Boychuk penned a postmortem on Wall Street banker Marshall Tuck's failed bid in California to join Arizona's Tom Horne and John Huppenthal as an ideologically charged non-educator holding a Superintendent of Public Instruction seat. Amidst his anti-union screed Boychuk admits, somewhat surprisingly, that Tuck's wrongheaded championing of plutocrat David F. Welch's Vergara lawsuit was a major misstep. Boychuk then makes a statement that is breathtaking inasmuch as he places the blame for Tuck's loss squarely on the anti-racist crowd. My commentary to follow, but let's look at his statement and my November comment in response.

The teachers’ unions and their surrogates, such as Diane Ravitch, used Tuck’s charter school ties to paint him as a racist, a bigot, and a tool of “the power elite.” Their attacks bordered on defamation, but they worked.

Addressing his misinformed and churlish assertions regarding defamation, I responded thusly:

Robert D. Skeels November 13, 2014 at 2:47 PM
There was no need to 'paint [Marshall Tuck] as a racist, a bigot, and a tool of “the power elite”', since an honest account of his actual record did just that by itself. No one was more forthcoming about Tuck's record than I was, because as a law student I am well aware that truth always serves as an affirmative defense to defamation, and every statement I made about Tuck was a well documented truth.

I, for one, think it's wonderful that the fringe-right wants to credit anti-racists with Marshall Tuck's defeat. Even more so because corporatist Tuck would have defended, in Boychuck's words, "charter schools and public [sic] school choice." While Boychuck uses Professor Ravitch's name, it's irresponsible and inaccurate to say that she made all the comments that he credits her with. What is true, and the link he provides is a good example of it, is that Professor Ravitch was sure to disseminate all of the wonderful essays and articles about Tuck that weren't going to be published in the corporate media. The RedQueeninLA, Ellen Lubic, Cheryl Ortega, Dr. John Fernandez, Jose del Barrio, and many other social justice activists wrote about Tuck's abject record, bigotry, and veritable crimes against students.

I too wrote a bit about Tuck. In exposing his bigotry and myriad failures, I had to put up with abuse from his obtuse Hollywood supporters, some profoundly ignorant rich white guys, and even had to block some abusive Tuck supporters on twitter. One of the more intriguing critics of my work was Conor P. Williams of the right-of-center think-tank New America Foundation. My friends at PESJA forwarded me this tweet by Williams, in which he took issue with an excerpt from one of my polemics against Tuck.

I support dual language programs, but this anti-reform ad hominem is unnecessary and unhelpful: https://t.co/poCfVK6bwg

— Conor P. Williams (@ConorPWilliams) September 18, 2014

Neoliberal corporate eduction reform apologist Williams rarely has anything substantive to say when confronted by facts, and here when the PESJA folks grilled him he went into derailment mode. I'd challenge him to an honest debate in which he could try to make the case that shuttering Ethnic Studies, Heritage Language Programs, and Dual Language Immersion Programs isn't racist, but he isn't the type to engage in actual debate. For example, his laughable straw man arguments against Corey Robin's brilliant 2012 essay. I would hope that Williams would be astute enough to know that Robin's point speaks to the attitudes of the type of well-heeled folks that fund Williams' employer. Williams' big paychecks (despite his persistent whining about still paying student loans), are, of course, derived in large part from the anti-public education plutocracy. By making everything about himself, he effectively deflects the conversation about the neoliberal corporate elite he works for.

Many of us worked tirelessly to keep Marshall Tuck from being elected. My first semester of law school suffered mightily until, ostensibly, after the election. With money flowing in from the wealthiest white men in the world, Tuck had every advantage except the truth. We told the truth about Tuck, and if Tuck's fringe-right supporters like the Manhattan Institute want to say that "worked", then it makes it all worth it.

2014 was a wonderful year in which bigots Marshall Tuck, Tom Horne, and John Huppenthal all lost their elections.

Education and Free Thought Under Siege: The Dots Connected

If you read nothing else this weekend, read this piece published yesterday at Inside Higher Ed on the linked path from Leo Strauss to Margaret Spellings--and more. Please pass it on, and on, and on:

Connecting the Dots

By Alan Jones

By all objective measures, the dawning of the 21st century should be a golden era for American higher education. A recent issue of The Economist described America’s system of higher education as “the best in the world” and provided convincing documentation for its claim. A recent review article by Jonathan Cole, provost at Columbia University, meticulously documents the preeminence of U.S. higher education in the world today as an established fact.

Perhaps sensing the current domestic political climate, however, Cole uses his analysis as the basis for sounding a strong cautionary note. “The United States paid a heavy price when the leaders of its research universities in the 1950’s failed to defend the leader of the Manhattan Project J. Robert Oppenheimer; the double Nobel Prize chemist Linus Pauling; and the China expert Owen Lattimore. But a wave of repression in American universities today is apt to have even more dramatic consequences for the nation than the repression of the Cold War.”

This broad-based and even global acclaim for higher education in the United States is strangely at odds with the concentrated political attacks that Cole warns us about and that the academy is currently experiencing. It is particularly out of step with the dark and dysfunctional picture of the academy painted by David Horowitz and his Center for the Study of Popular Culture. If Horowitz were simply a disaffected political crank, as many have hitherto regarded him, then his views on the academy could be easily dismissed. Such dismissal would seem to be all the more in order following his disastrous testimony before the legislative subcommittee in Pennsylvania in which he was forced to recant as unsubstantiated several of the cases that he had been widely circulating as documentation of alleged malfeasance in the academy.

Oddly, however, his campaign goes on. Horowitz, with assistance from Karl Rove and the former House majority whip, Tom DeLay, has briefed Republican members of Congress on his Academic Bill of Rights campaign and DeLay has even distributed copies of Horowitz’s political primer The Art of Political Warfare: How Republicans Can Fight to Win to all Republican members of Congress. Rove refers to Horowitz’s pamphlet as “a perfect pocket guide to winning on the political battlefield.”

In a more recent development, last fall, Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings appointed a Commission on Higher Education. Spellings, described as a protégé of Rove, gained considerable attention as the principal architect of President Bush’s controversial “No Child Left Behind” initiative. Among the proposals being discussed by Spellings’s new commission is one that calls for scrapping the current system of accreditation, which is done by independent regional bodies, in favor of a National Accreditation Foundation that would be created by Congress and the president.

The current system of institutional review through independent accreditation boards is one of the hallmarks of American higher education and is one of the most important structural safeguards of the academy’s ability to ensure academic quality and intellectual excellence. The introduction of oversight by an inherently partisan political body in lieu of the currently independent accreditation process is a peculiar remedy if the perceived ailment in the academy is political bias. Carol Geary Schneider, president of the American Association of Colleges and Universities, has said that “the commission is sending out firebolts, one after another.” To chair this extraordinary committee Secretary Spellings chose Charles Miller, a former chairman of the University of Texas Board of Regents and, historically, a large contributor to the President’s election campaigns.

The question of why the academy is under such focused and persistent attack by individuals like David Horowitz and his political supporters despite the fact that it appears to be an extraordinarily successful enterprise and an unrivaled resource for the nation is a question that many Americans are asking. In understanding the origins, scope and staying power of this attack it is crucial to understand not only the political relationships that Horowitz enjoys, but the sources of funding that created and sustain his Center for the Study of Popular Culture and its Academic Bill of Rights campaign. It is also critical to understand that the same funding sources that brought Horowitz’s organization into being, also created and sustain a large and integrated network of ideologically defined think tanks and centers both outside of and within the higher education establishment.

When Michael S. Joyce died in February 24, his death received scant attention in the mainstream press. Although very few people in academic circles are familiar with his name, he was, nonetheless, one of the foundational pillars of the current ideological attacks on the academy. A tribute to him by Peter Collier was published in FrontPage, Horowitz’s Web site. Joyce and his intellectual muse — the late University of Chicago political philosopher Leo Strauss — would have been pleased by the level of anonymity that he maintained during his lifetime. Joyce’s ability to maintain such anonymity despite the enormous influence that he wielded in shaping and developing the infrastructure of the neoconservative movement in this country is quite remarkable.

Although The Atlantic Monthly, as early as 1986, was describing Joyce as “one of the three individuals most responsible for the triumph of the conservative political movement,” he nevertheless adhered rigorously to the secretive and profoundly antidemocratic principles advocated by the enigmatic Strauss. As characterized by Jeet Heer in The Boston Globe, Strauss held that “the best regime is one in which the leaders govern moderately and prudently, curbing the passions of the mob while allowing a small philosophical elite to pursue the contemplative life of the mind. Such a philosophical elite may discover truths that are not fit for public consumption.... For Strauss the art of concealment and secrecy was among the greatest legacies of antiquity.”

In 1979, Michael Joyce entered the world of large-scale philanthropy with assistance from his mentor Irving Kristol, when he assumed the reins of the John M. Olin Foundation from the retiring president, William Simon. At Olin, one of Joyce’s first projects was to organize support for the launching of the Federalist Society. Joyce’s work in creating and fostering the development of the Federalist Society is instructive and foreshadows the role that he has played in current efforts by neoconservatives to restructure American higher education. The Federalist Society, with Joyce’s ongoing support, not only fostered the development of ultra-conservative legal scholars and politicians such as Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, Robert Bork, Samuel Alito, John Ashcroft, Alberto Gonzales and Kenneth Starr (all of whom are members) but organized them into a powerful force for reshaping American jurisprudence in support of a larger neoconservative agenda.

Also significant in this regard is a report by Jerome Shestack, former president of the American Bar Association, that the Federalist Society is being increasingly being used as a platform from which to launch ideological attacks on the mainstream legal community. Through the device of the Federalist Society publication, ABA Watch, the society has launched a vicious attack on the ABA. In a special edition of the Watch, U.S. Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), co-chair of the society, announced that he would no longer invite the ABA to participate on a pro forma basis in the Senate judicial confirmation process. Employing rhetoric eerily parallel to that being used in the current attacks on the academy, Justice Clarence Thomas openly denounced the ABA, declaring “I am doubtful that the ABA can ever reform itself.”

In her testimony before Pennsylvania’s Select Committee on Academic Freedom in Higher Education, which convened in Philadelphia, Anne Neal, president of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, expressed a similar sentiment as to the ability of the academy to reform itself. “Faced with growing legislative pressure on this issue, the higher education establishment issued the American Council on Education statement, figured it would pretend to have a quick conversion, endorse intellectual diversity, get those yahoo legislators off their backs and go back to business as usual. DO NOT LET THEM GET AWAY WITH THIS CHARADE.”

In 1985, Michael Joyce left the Olin Foundation to assume the presidency of the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, in Milwaukee. During this time, he not only built the Bradley Foundation into the largest and most influential right-wing foundation in the country, he also forged a formidable alliance among a small group of the nation’s largest, far right-wing foundations so that their resources could be more strategically deployed in support of the developing neoconservative agenda. Included in this alliance are the Koch Foundation (either directly or through its subsidiary the Claude Lambe Foundation), the Castle Rock Foundation (Coors) and the Sarah Scaife Foundations (either directly or through its subsidiaries the Carthage Foundation and the Alleghany Foundation) which, together with Olin and Bradley, have collectively financed the rise of the neoconservative movement in this country and have done so with an impressive display tactical precision.

It is a telling marker of the ideological cohesiveness and extremism of this core group of philanthropies that three of the five founding members, Joseph Coors, David Koch and Harry Bradley, were members and financial supporters of the John Birch Society. The Scaife foundations, headed by Richard Mellon Scaife, are also involved, albeit in less direct ways.

In the past 20 years this core group of funders has, by many reports, built and strategically linked an impressive array of almost 500 think tanks, centers, institutes and “concerned citizens groups” both within and outside of the academy. It is particularly telling to observe the funding sources of these organizations during the first 10-15 years of their existence, when their ideological identities were being established. A small sampling of these entities include the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, the Manhattan Institute, the Hoover Institution, the Claremont Institute, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, Middle East Forum, Accuracy in Media, and the National Association of Scholars, as well as Horowitz’s Center of the Study of Popular Culture.

The absence of formal organizational linkages between the entities within these networks creates an illusion of independent analytical voices reaching similar conclusions about strategic policy issues, a technique known in the public relations industry as “astroturfing.” This network has developed an enormous capacity to generate “data” consistent with the targeted political agenda and world views of its core group of funders to quickly and redundantly represent these issues in the mainstream press by what appear to be the voices of independent analysts and to translate these viewpoints into public policy that serves the focused ideological agenda of this core group of funders. The Bradley Foundation under Michael Joyce’s leadership has even established a publishing house, Encounter Books, to ensure that grantees like Horowitz have a quasi-academic outlet for their viewpoints.

The degree of interconnectedness within this network of organizations is considerable but almost invisible to the casual observer. For example, when ACTA’s president, Anne Neal, introduced herself to the Select Committee on Academic Freedom in Higher Education in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, she presented ACTA as “a bipartisan network of college and university trustees and alumni across the country dedicated to academic freedom.”

Full disclosure should have required some mention of the fact that ACTA (see funding sources above), which changed its name from the National Alumni Forum in 1998, was established by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute in 1994. The Intercollegiate Studies Institute in turn evolved from William Bennett’s Madison Center for Educational Affairs and the Institute for Educational Affairs founded by Irving Kristol, Michael Joyce’s mentor, and William Simon, the first president of the John M. Olin Foundation. Bennett and Kristol also sit on ACTA’s Board of Directors. The remarkably consistent record of funding across all of the incarnations of this organization and the high degree of redundancy with Horowitz’s own, highly partisan Center for the Study of Popular Culture is not consistent with Neal’s definition of ACTA as an independent, non-partisan organization.

Another example illustrative of the quietly incestuous nature of this network is presented by an article by the Boston Globe columnist Cathy Young. The article is entitled “Liberal bias in the ivory tower” and by all appearances is an independent opinion piece written by a regular Globe columnist. At the end of the article Young identifies herself as “a contributing editor at Reason Magazine.” What is undisclosed in the article is that Reason Magazine is the publication of the Reason Foundation, whose funding sources are virtually the same as those funding Horowitz’s “Academic Bill of Rights” project and Neal’s ACTA.

Young’s premise for the article is stated in her opening sentence: “Yet another study has come out documenting what most conservatives consider to be blindingly obvious: the leftwing tilt of the American professoriate.” The study that she references was conducted by Stanley Rothman, now emeritus professor at Smith College; S. Robert Lichter, emeritus professor at George Mason University; and Neil Nevitte of the University of Toronto, and was published in the online journal Forum. This study was also cited by Neal in her testimony in Pennsylvania. Young does not inform her readers that Rothman is director of the Center for the Study of Social and Political Change, a center with funding sources that are remarkably redundant with Horowitz’s Center for the Study of Popular Culture. Lichter is also president of the Center for Media and Public Affairs, which again has funding sources that are redundant with those referenced earlier.

In addition, a recent article in Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting is highly critical of Lichter’s research methodology. Another example of such conflicted interests is provided by Professor Thomas Reeves. When Reeves writes in strong support of Horowitz’s proposals on the History News Network, he fails to note that he is a spokesman for the California Association of Scholars, a branch of the National Association of Scholars (see funding sources above) and that he is director of the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute, which was, again, brought into being by the Olin and Bradley Foundations.

This manufactured drumbeat against “academic bias” is amplified by Stanley Kurtz of the Hoover Institution (see funding sources above), Heather MacDonald, a John M. Olin fellow at the Manhattan Institute (see funding sources above), and Brian C. Anderson, editor of the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal and a former research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (see funding sources above).

The relentlessness with which columnists and experts with direct funding relationships with Olin, Scaife, Bradley, Koch and Coors level charges of academic bias and assert the need for legislative reform of higher education is remarkable. The goal of this narrowly focused and ideologically driven public relations campaign can only be understood in terms of its fostering of a political climate in which federal regulatory “reform” of what is universally recognized as the finest system of higher education in the world, will be tolerated.

Indeed, as has been discussed, such regulatory oversight may already be in the offing. The academy stands today as one of the last spaces in America where the democratic ideas that shape the social, economic and political fabric of the nation can be openly and independently debated on the basis of their merits and without coercion or distortion from vested economic and political interests. It is certainly in the national interest that it remain such.

Alan Jones is dean of the faculty and professor of psychology and neuroscience at Pitzer College.

Low Prices for Education the Walmart Way

In 2005, Doug Smith with the Arkansas Times had an in-depth piece on the vast sums going from the Walton family to the University of Arkansas. Smith focused on the millions that the Waltons forked over to found the Department of Education Reform within the College of Education and Health Professions. Chaired by Manhattan Institute conservative propagandist, Jay P. Greene, the department has five faculty members, each of whom occupies an endowed chair as full professor, and each of whom shares Greene's commitment to vouchers, charter schools, high-stakes tests, bonus pay for test scores--the low-prices-every-day model of school reform. You have to love it: the Endowed Chair of School Choice and the Endowed Chair of Education Accountability. Wow.

Now Jennifer Barnett Reed has picked up the story for the Arkansas Times where Doug Smith left off. In Reed's piece, we get a closer look at how the Walton millions are performing political miracles in Arkansas and elsewhere. Do read it all, but here are some choice clips:

Published 4/10/2008
For good or for ill, it's safe to say that the educational landscape in Arkansas would be drastically different today if Sam Walton hadn't been born in Bentonville.

The Waltons, individually and through their various family foundations, are by a large margin the largest donors to conservative education reform causes in the country. They've donated hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars to educational causes nationwide, including the start-up funding that allowed the national private-school voucher movement to get off the ground more than a decade ago.

But they haven't neglected their home state. The two Walton family philanthropies, the Walton Family Foundation and the Walton Charitable Support Foundation, gave at least $390 million to educational causes in Arkansas between 1998 and 2006, according to tax returns and the Walton Family Foundation's web site (2007 figures are not yet available publicly).

That doesn't count individual expenditures, such as the hundreds of thousands of dollars Jim Walton has spent to fund lobbying efforts on behalf of the conservative school reform causes originally championed by his late brother, John.

What's that much money bought? More charter schools, and a looser law to regulate them. Merit pay experiments in Little Rock. The University of Arkansas's Department of Education Reform and its nationally known chair, former Manhattan Institute scholar Jay Greene.

. . . .

Walton money also paid for half the cost of establishing the UA's Department of Education Reform and hiring Greene. The Manhattan Institute, where he was a fellow, is a conservative think-tank and a strong supporter of “reform” measures like charter schools and vouchers.

The department conducts research on education reform projects — including initiatives also funded by the Walton Family Foundation, a situation that, the researchers' claims of objectivity notwithstanding, has raised questions with some critics in the state's education community.

. . . .

n 2006, the Walton Family Foundation proposed a district-wide merit pay pilot program in Little Rock, which it would have both funded and paid to have evaluated by the Department of Education Reform. Little Rock teachers rejected the plan here; in Rogers, the school board ultimately rejected a different merit-pay proposal from the foundation that would have also included an evaluation by the education reform department.

While both those proposals were rejected, the Waltons had more success promoting merit pay at the state level.

Jim Walton is the primary funder of Arkansans for Education Reform and Arkansans for Better Schools, twin organizations whose sole employee is former State Board of Education member Luke Gordy and whose sole purpose is to lobby for causes like charter schools and merit pay at the state level.

In the 2007 legislative session, Gordy worked to get a bill passed that authorized school districts to use state tax money for merit-pay programs. The final bill was a hard-fought compromise that brought business interests together with the Arkansas Education Association to create rules that limited how the programs could work. Districts had to apply to the state Department of Education for approval; only one district and two individual schools had done so by the March 8 deadline.

. .. .

In 2007, charter schools were at the top of Gordy's agenda. He lobbied for a change in the state's charter school law to raise the number of charters allowed from 12 to 24, and to remove restrictions on how many charter schools could open in each congressional district.

One thing that's not on his agenda, Gordy said, is taxpayer-funded vouchers to send low-income students to private schools. It's been a major focus of Walton giving nationwide, but Gordy said he's had “zero” conversations with his bosses about vouchers in Arkansas, and doesn't think he will anytime soon.

“Anything's possible,” he said. “The conversation could be started, but it's going to be a long time before that gets any traction in Arkansas.”

It's hard to get a handle on just how much money the Waltons sprinkle around the legislature — campaign finance reports submitted to the Secretary of State's office aren't searchable by donor, and each legislator submits multiple reports during the course of each campaign.

One lawmaker who's benefited from Walton money, and who's been a reliable friend on their education priorities, is Steve Bryles, a Democrat from Blytheville.

Bryles got $4,000 from Walton enterprises during the 2007 campaign: $2,000 from Jim Walton, $1,000 from Arvest Bank's political action committee, and $1,000 from Wal-Mart. Bryles led the effort to loosen the charter school laws, and is supportive of other school choice issues, but said he'd feel the same with or without those donations.

“I look for allies — I don't care if they're left, right or in between,” he said. “If they can be supportive of what I've outlined to you, then I'm going to latch onto them.”

But state Sen. Jim Argue, outgoing chair of the Senate Education Committee, downplayed the Waltons' influence on education issues in the legislature — especially compared with the influence of the Supreme Court's Lake View decision on school financing.

“I don't think it was the Waltons,” he said. “We've had a tremendous six years in terms of school improvement, but it was all spawned by the court decision in 2002.”

Besides lobbying for friendlier charter school laws, the Waltons have provided crucial financial support through the Walton Family Foundation to charter schools in Arkansas. It provided about two-thirds of the initial $800,000 three-year pledge to start the Arkansas Charter School Resource Center, whose director, Caroline Proctor, helps would-be charter school administrators design their schools, put together their applications, and progress through the sometimes lengthy approval process before the state Board of Education. After the resource center opened, charter school applications jumped from one or two a year to more than a dozen.

The foundation also provides $10,000 planning grants to charter school applicants, and another $10,000 in start-up money to schools that are approved. Once they're up and running, schools can also apply for much larger grants. LISA Academy, for instance, has received more than $150,000 from the Walton Family Foundation; the Arkansas Virtual School, the Benton County School of the Arts and Haas Hall, a Farmington charter school that's faced serious financial problems, have all gotten $250,000. The foundation is also supporting the e-STEM charter schools, set to open in July in downtown Little Rock, although the amount hasn't been made public.

In all, the Walton Family Foundation gave about $1.7 million to proposed and existing charter schools between 1998 and 2006.

Proctor said the money is vital for charter schools — giving them necessary start-up funds, but not enough to operate without other outside support.

“The amount is just perfect,” she said. “No school is going to survive forever on it but it's enough to get somebody started.”

.. . .

Bill Cosby, John McWhorter, and the New Black Racial Classism: Part 2

Even if we grant that everyone must assume a greater degree of responsibility for their lives and spend less time blaming others for their shortcomings, we can never, never, never simply leave it at that. But this is precisely what McWhorter's colleagues at the Manhattan Institute want to do. The New Black Racial Classism gets eaten up by the Manhattan Institute and others like it. If all we have to do is convince poor blacks to quit their whining and assume responsibility for their lives, think of the billions that would be saved!!

It's understandable why conservatives eat McWhorter's stuff up. But it's also eaten up by "progressive" organizations like Teach for America, schools for inner-city kids like the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP), by Democratic politicians like NCLB co-sponsor and architect George Miller, by editorial staffs like The New York Times, and by educational activists like Susan Uchitelle (who helped fight segregation in St. Louis but who now serves on the board of an Edison-run charter school in inner-city St. Louis).

Miller, a staunch liberal and the ranking Democratic member of the House Education and the Workforce Committee, wrote an op-ed with Education Trust’s Russlyn Ali that read:

"Perhaps the most insidious myth being perpetuated is that California's demographics make it impossible to expect much of its kids. This sentiment is more than just collective apathy. It is bigotry. Schools all over the country, in every type of community, have shown that all students--minority and non-minority, rich and poor--can succeed if they are held to high standards and given the requisite resources. It is time to put this myth to rest for good.” (Miller, G. and Ali, R., "The fate of our schools." San Francisco Chronicle, 3/18/03, p. A25)

As evidence of the voracious appetite that white conservatives have for McWhorter's gilded truffles, consider the comments made by Stephan Thernstrom, a white Senior Fellow at Manhattan Institute and the Winthrop Professor of History at Harvard. Thernstrom, along with his wife Abigail, is the author of No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning. "The Thernstroms urge a daunting overhaul where every urban public school becomes a charter school; longer school days, weeks and years are common; and school vouchers are more broadly available to low-income, urban families." (source - The Seattle Times, 10/8/03; "Stop making excuses: Close the learning gap" by Matt Rosenberg) Here is what Stephan Thernstrom had to say when introducing McWhorter: (listen to it here)

(McWhorter's work) helps to explain a very troubling paradox. That is to say, the status of African-Americans in American society has been revolutionarily changed over the past half century or so. My wife Abigail and I published a book several years ago, America in Black and White, which has several dozen tables which indicates that by almost every measurable way enormous, phenomenal progress has been made towards equality on the part of African-Americans since the Civil Rights revolution. And if I were to update those tables today, almost all the trend lines continue upward. And the two areas that were very troubling in the mid-90's, the last data we had available then, have also turned around in a remarkable way. That is, the crime rate has declined precipitously and the disproportionate involvement of African-Americans in committing crimes. And, second, the black family structure, which had been deteriorating sharply since the 1960's when Senator Moynihan first warned of that tendency. In the last several years, that has been turning around a little. The rate of out-of-wedlock births for African-Americans is down two to three points. The percentage of African-American children living in two-parent households is up four or five points. So it isn't a remarkable shift, but it's a very impressive and positive one. So, progress almost unimaginable to people half a century ago. But you wouldn't know it if you listened to what the leadership of that community is saying and doing. Both the civil rights groups, whose mission is supposed to be to improve the welfare of the group, and certainly the political leadership -- the members of the Congressional Black Caucus -- are talking about a totally different world than the one I see. They are talking in hysterical and paranoid terms, finding racism in the most unlikely places. And it almost seems that the greater the progress, the more shrill and despairing the voices of that segment of the black community become. . . Katrina did display that tendency in very vivid terms. . . The question is, "What's going on? How could this have happened?" Some part of it reflects the simple fact that the African-American leadership is almost entirely, monolithically, part of the Democratic party's left wing. And the Democratic party left wing, for reasons I can't fully understand, seems to have been driven totally bonkers by the Bush administration. It has such an acute case of the "Hate Bush Syndrome" that they can't think clearly any more. . . . Another part of it, of course, is the old cliche the "revolution of rising expectations." Groups that are totally down-trodden can appreciate even a few extra crumbs and may feel grateful. Groups that have made the kind of progress blacks have made by the end of the 1960's were now impatient with waiting any longer for full equality. I can't say much more than that by way of explaining it, but I do think that John McWhorter's really interesting book tells us a lot to explain where we are today and what needs to happen for, in fact, the crisis in black America to be resolved.

In our society today, this is as far as a white man can go without being called a racist. In our society today, a white man can't say, "Poor blacks should quit their whining and assume responsibility for their lives." But a black man can. In response to Cosby's speech, Kweisi Mfume, the NAACP president who was on stage with Cosby, said "The issue of personal responsibility is real. A lot of people didn't want him to say what he said because it was an open forum. But if the truth be told, he was on target."

So Thernstrom contends there has been phenomenal progress for blacks. He contends that critics of this notion "are talking in hysterical and paranoid terms, finding racism in the most unlikely places." But phenomenal progress for whom? It's clear that there has been phenomenal progress for blacks entering the middle and upper classes. But for blacks still trapped in poverty, all there is for them to do is pull themselves up by their own bootstraps or shut the hell up. No, there aren't actual signs any more that say "For Whites Only." But these signs still exist. They're just invisible today. Or, even worse, they are simply accepted as "the way things are."

Perhaps most shockingly of all, especially in light of Cosby's choice to vilify low-income blacks on the anniversary of Brown v. Board, public schools in America's largest cities have experienced re-segregation on an unprecedented level. As Jonathan Kozol recounts in The Shame of the Nation,

In Chicago, by the academic year 2002-2003, 87 percent of public-school enrollment was black or Hispanic; less than 10 percent of children in the schools were white. In Washington, D.C., 94 percent of children were black or Hispanic; less than 5 percent were white. In St. Louis, 82 percent of the student population were black or Hispanic; in Philadelphia and Cleveland, 79 percent; in Los Angeles, 84 percent, in Detroit, 96 percent; in Baltimore, 89 percent. In New York City, nearly three quarters of the students were black or Hispanic.

Even these statistics, as stark as they are, cannot begin to convey how deeply isolated children in the poorest and most segregated sections of these cities have become. In the typically colossal high schools of the Bronx, for instance, more than 90 percent of students (in most cases, more than 95 percent) are black or Hispanic. At John F. Kennedy High School in 2003, 93 percent of the enrollment of more than 4,000 students were black and Hispanic; only 3.5 percent of students at the school were white. At Harry S. Truman High School, black and Hispanic students represented 96 percent of the enrollment of 2,700 students; 2 percent were white. At Adlai Stevenson High School, which enrolls 3,400 students, blacks and Hispanics made up 97 percent of the student population; a mere eight tenths of one percent were white.

A teacher at P.S. 65 in the South Bronx once pointed out to me one of the two white children I had ever seen there. His presence in her class was something of a wonderment to the teacher and to the other pupils. I asked how many white kids she had taught in the South Bronx in her career. "I've been at this school for eighteen years," she said. "This is the first white student I have ever taught."

So this is "phenomenal progress"? This is "talking in hysterical and paranoid terms, finding racism in the most unlikely places"? For conservatives like McWhorter and Thernstrom, the answer is "yes."

Media Bullpen; Gleason Family Foundation

Head on over to MediaBullpen.com to check out the new and (likely) obnoxious voice in the education realm.  The Bullpen, a joint project between the Gates Foundation, Walton Family Foundation, Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, an Gleason Family Foundation, will evaluate media coverage of education issues.  It's run by the Center for Education Reform.  The Gates Foundation invested $275,000 in the project; dollar amounts for the others are unknown.

In the edu-field, Gates and Walton are hardly unknown names, even for the casual observer.  The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation is well-known, too, but more for their involvement in funding conservative think tanks and other right-wing causes.  The Gleason Family Foundation, the fourth funder in this attempt at "media accountability," was one I hadn't read much about before.  For interested readers, here's a list of the edu-advocacy orgs they've supported over the years:

Alliance for School Choice
American Enterprise Institute
BAEO
Cato Institute
Center for Education Reform
Center for Union Facts
Coalition for Educational Freedom
Heartland Institute
Heritage Foundation
Institute for Justice (libertarian)
Manhattan Institute for Policy Research
Milton and Rose Friedman Foundation
NCTQ
Pacific Research Institute
Philanthropy Roundtable
School Choice Conference ($305,002 in 2006 - Cabo San Lucas, Mexico)
School Choice Wisconsin

It's not quite a "who's who" in right-wing edu circles (no Fordham?), but it's pretty close.  Readers interested in specific donations can check the foundation's 990 tax forms.  The best way to find them is search "Gleason foundation" through the Foundation Center's 990 finder (they're the Gleason Foundation from New York).  That'll give you all 990s up through 2007.  The foundation's newer 990s can be found here.

Thompson Gives Ravitch Credit for Opt Out Movement

Following NPE's very late “call” for “a national opt,” it is not surprising to see the history of the opt out movement already being revised to give credit to education’s “American Idol,” Diane Ravitch.  John Thompson writes at Huffington Post,

Three cheers for the Opt Out movement! When the history of the collapse of data-driven, competition-driven school improvement is written, the parents and students of the grassroots Opt Out uprising will get much - or most - of the credit for driving a stake through the heart of the testing vampire.

Of course, leaders like Diane Ravitch will be justifiably credited for guiding embattled educators through the dark days of the corporate reform era. . . .

Hearing this speed-of-light revisionism, however, from historian, John Thompson, is both surprising and disappointing.  John is clearly not too young to remember that "during the dark[est] days of corporate education reform,” the few good guys like Susan Ohanian, Gerald Bracey, Kathy Emery, and David Berliner were doing their best to counter the propaganda by “crisis mongers” and voucher/charter advocates like Diane Ravitch and Paul Peterson, who were, at the same time, wining and dining at the Hoover Institute and Manhattan Institute with other doyens of corporate education reform. At a Manhattan Institute soiree in 2000 that featured all the corporate ed rock stars, Ravitch waved off the dire warnings about school privatization that were being offered by Bracey and others:

"Vouchers and charters will not destroy public education. This is an incredible and fantastic fear. There are more than 45 million children in public schools. There are about 12,000 receiving vouchers. There are 350,000 in charter schools. This is like an elephant complaining about the mosquito on its shoulder, saying that that the mosquito is going to destroy it. Why are people so frightened of such an insignificant prospect? It is hard to understand the hysteria stirred by the fear of choice with regard to the public schools."

Apparently, Ravitch could not foresee, or chose to ignore, the deadly virus that the little mosquito carried.  Regardless of whether her innacurate assessment of the threat was due to bad judgment or the kind of stealth duplicity that had earned her a reputation when she was working for GHW Bush, today 18 states have approved school voucher laws and two and half million children are enrolled in charters, with millions more planned as a result of the new federal legislation that Ravitch and her new NEA/AFT patrons supported in 2015.  Of the 90,000+ public schools in the U. S. when Ravitch made that statement above, 7,000 of them are now charter schools.  Quite the mosquito, it turns out.

If Ravitch’s judgment could be relied upon to represent the best interests of children, teachers, and parents, it would matter not if she got credit for a movement that she came to four years after it began and only after it had reached national proportions.  Sadly, however, her judgment cannot be relied upon, as she has shown with her full-throated support for the ESEA reauthorization, ESSA, which will set back education policy by at least a half century, according to civil rights lawyer, Gary Orfield.  

However, Ravitch can be trusted to maintain a blind loyalty to AFT and NEA misleaders, who have an established history of selling their members down the river repeatedly, with support for NCLB testing, charter schools, and value-added teacher evaluation.  It would seem that Ravitch wants everyone under her tent, even if there are well-known arsonists in the crowd.

Ravitch’s epiphany that she had been wrong for so many years about corporate education reform came only after it had dawned on most educators, policymakers, and a sizable percentage of the general public that NCLB was an unsustainable privatization charade from the beginning.  Her quiet contrition and guarded confessions expressed in her two books after 2009 earned her the hero status that she enjoys today as someone who saw the errors of her ways and came over from the dark side.  For teachers it is thrilling to hear, especially from a conservative, that they were right all along about matters felt so deeply. 

No, Ravitch is not the hero of the Opt Out movement, and she deserves credit only for coming four years late to the party that others worked their guts out to make happen.  I would suggest that the historian, John Thompson, dig a little deeper into the history of the opt out movement before he adds another jewel to the Ravitch crown.

Aaron Krager begins Petitioning Progressive Sites to Stop Promoting Michelle Rhee

After I signed the petition, other petitions popped up for me to consider as a member of Change.Org.  One of them was from nation's leading teacher foe, the venomous Michelle Rhee, under the name of her corporate reform schooler astroturf group called Students First. — Dr. James Horn


Schools Matter was the first place I read about the vile and venomous Michelle Rhee and her plutocratic backers scamboozling unsuspecting activists into unwittingly signing petitions supporting reactionary causes dear to the furthest right-wing think-thanks in existence.

Rhee is a favorite among teabaggers and other disciples of Ayn Rand. Rhee collaborates with, and has even worked on the transition teams of the most reactionary right-wing Governors from Florida, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Ohio. All of the ideas Rhee champions have come straight out of the most vile right wing think tanks including Hoover Institution, Hudson Institute, The Cato Institute, The American Enterprise Institute, The Heritage Foundation, The Heartland Institute, Manhattan Institute, and other John Birch Society derivatives.

I'd be curious as to why anyone outside of the deplorable reactionaries mentioned above would support Rhee in any fashion. After all, supporting her is tantamount to supporting the fringe right, whose end goal is not only the destruction of the public commons, but the privatization of our entire education system. So I found the idea that tricking people leaning left of center a little more than nefarious.

Yesterday I received an email from a person who decided to set up petitions on those very same sites, petitioning them to stop supporting Rhee and her astroturf union busting organization. I reproduce it here with the author's permission. Please follow the last two links in his email to sign the petitions against Rhee's deceptive tactics.

Hi,

As an avid user of petition sites such as Change.org and Care2.com I was shocked to see Michelle Rhee's Students First organization utilizing this platform. These sites promote progressive values and push for progressive change. Rhee's organization is anything but progressive. Students First advocates against collective bargaining, teacher unions and contrary to its name, does not put students first. 

I unknowingly signed a petition on Change.org's site from Students First... as a result of this deception I am asking both Change.org and Care2.com to stop promoting Rhee's pro-corporate agenda. Below are the links to my post announcing the actions as well as the links to the petitions themselves.

• Hold Progressive Change Agents Accountable
• Stop tricking progressives into signing Michelle Rhee’s union busting petitions (care2.com petition)
• Stop tricking progressives into signing Michelle Rhee’s union busting petitions (moveon.org petition)

Feel free to contact me at this email if you have any questions.

--
Peace
Aaron Krager

Jay Greene Garbage and the Media That Collect It

With education reporters regularly displaying ignorance and lack of interest in the issues they report on, it is not surprising that the smelly expulsions of the propaganda tanks find their way into, otherwise, legitimate newspapers. And the liberal slant? Well, there are also 10-foot alligators in the New York sewer system. Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) reported last June that the conservatives are, in fact, the go-to guys when it comes to reporting the education "news":

While total think tank citations decreased for the first time in our study, the decline was most precipitous among left-leaning think tanks. Overall, the 27,229 citations that the 25 most widely quoted think tanks garnered in 2005 was a 10 percent decline from 2004, the decline was 23 percent for left-leaning think tanks vs. 8 percent for right-leaning groups and 7 percent for centrists. No left-leaning think tank appeared in the top 10.

It is not surprising, then, that the Cleveland Plain Dealer and the Detroit News are among newspapers that pick up and exhibit, without any warning to the reader, the smelly stuff churned out by Walmart scholars, Jay Greene and his doctoral student, Marcus Winters, both from the right-wing Manhattan Institute. The last piece of "research" to float up is another teacher-bashing propaganda piece intended to rationalize efforts by education privatizers to cut teacher pay and benefits.

Does either the Detroit News or the Cleveland Plain Dealer point out the Manhattan Institute is on a political mission from God, er, Sam Walton? Not in the least. In fact, the Plain Dealer links Greene to the University of Arkansas, where the Walton Family bought him a new department and an endowed chair in hopes of adding some cred to his crud. This current report is so blatantly biased, obviously, that even Greene will not even put the university's name on it. Or maybe that was a university decision.

Here is Greene's executive summary:

Education policy discussions often assume that public school teachers are poorly paid. Typically absent in these discussions about teacher pay, however, is any reference to systematic data on how much public school teachers are actually paid, especially relative to other occupations. Because discussions about teacher pay rarely reference these data, the policy debate on education reform has proceeded without a clear understanding of these issues.

This report compiles information on the hourly pay of public school teachers nationally and in 66 metropolitan areas, as collected by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) in its annual National Compensation Survey. We also compare the reported hourly income of public school teachers with that of workers in similar professions, as defined by the BLS. This report goes on to use the BLS data to analyze whether there is a relationship between higher relative pay for public school teachers and higher student achievement as measured by high school graduation rates.

Among the key findings of this report:

• According to the BLS, the average public school teacher in the United States earned $34.06 per hour in 2005.


• The average public school teacher was paid 36% more per hour than the average non-sales white-collar worker and 11% more than the average professional specialty and technical worker.


• Full-time public school teachers work on average 36.5 hours per week during weeks that they are working. By comparison, white-collar workers (excluding sales) work 39.4 hours, and professional specialty and technical workers work 39.0 hours per week. Private school teachers work 38.3 hours per week.


• Compared with public school teachers, editors and reporters earn 24% less; architects, 11% less; psychologists, 9% less; chemists, 5% less; mechanical engineers, 6% less; and economists, 1% less.


• Compared with public school teachers, airplane pilots earn 186% more; physicians, 80% more; lawyers, 49% more; nuclear engineers, 17% more; actuaries, 9% more; and physicists, 3% more.


• Public school teachers are paid 61% more per hour than private school teachers, on average nationwide.


• The Detroit metropolitan area has the highest average public school teacher pay among metropolitan areas for which data are available, at $47.28 per hour, followed by the San Francisco metropolitan area at $46.70 per hour, and the New York metropolitan area at $45.79 per hour.


• We find no evidence that average teacher pay relative to that of other white-collar or professional specialty workers is related to high school graduation rates in the metropolitan area.

And here is the smackdown from Lawrence Mishel, President of the Economic Policy Institute:

Greene’s new research on teacher pay claims to show that teachers are well-paid when one looks at their weekly or hourly wage compared to other professionals. This is pretend social science, at best.

Greene’s conclusions are solely based on the only data (National Compensation Survey) that one could point to that show teacher pay above average; he willfully ignores all other data and even all other studies of teacher pay. The use of the NCS data to compare teachers to other professionals using hourly or weekly wage measures is very controversial. This is because these data are fundamentally flawed and inappropriate to use in this way. My co-authors and I showed why these data are flawed in a report released in 2004, on pages 30 to 39; unfortunately, the full text is not on-line). We even present quotes from the chief BLS statistician overseeing these data saying the use of these data for this purpose is inappropriate (see below). Michael Podgursky, one of the few researchers besides Greene who believes teachers are well-paid, has stopped using the NCS hourly wage measure, though he continues to use the weekly measure (both are flawed, though the hourly measure is doubly flawed, as I’ll explain). The controversy over these data was aired in a debate that was given a fair amount of attention.

Let me explain why we said the following in our report: “Our conclusion is that hourly or weekly wage data from the NCS (as given) should not be used to make comparisons between teachers and other occupations.”

The bottom line is that these NCS data are based on employer surveys and the NCS measures scheduled hours. Because teachers do not work the familiar full-year and roughly 9 to 5 schedules that most professionals have the comparisons end up as apples and oranges comparisons. Here’s what the BLS statistician wrote after giving an example:

"The lesson of this example is the futility of comparing salary estimates for periods of less than a year between two occupations with very dissimilar work time requirements over the year and for whom the annual leave entitlements are unknown. In our example the weekly salary difference changed from 140 to 124 percent. Because the published NCS wage estimates do not reflect leave entitlements and the work years of teachers are so dissimilar from most other professional occupations, I would only use the annual salary estimates from NCS to compare teacher pay with the pay of other professionals."

Yet, it is precisely these data, and only these data, that Greene relies on. The bottom line is that the Manhattan reports weekly and hourly wages that rely on information which vastly understates the weekly hours of teachers and the weeks teachers work each year thereby significantly overstating the hourly wage or weekly wage for a given annual wage. Let me explain in more detail.

1. Weeks Teachers Work per year Understated so Weekly Wage Overstated
The NCS relies on the number of official school days to calculate weeks worked (note that weekly wages is annual wages divided by weeks worked). The NCS reports that teachers work 38 weeks each year. However, the NCS reports that other professionals work 51 or 52 weeks (see table 11of our study). This is strange but understandable if you know how the survey measures time worked. Teachers are measured by days worked (say 190 official school days divided by five gives you 38 weeks) while others are measured as days paid (work days plus paid time off: breaks, vacations and holidays). How else can one understand other professional occupations working 51-52 weeks a year? Do they not take Federal holidays (10 of them), enjoy other holidays (day after Thanksgiving?) and have paid vacations or personal leave? Teachers have more than a 38 week work year, unless you believe the summer off lasts 14 weeks (52 less 38), which is saying teachers have more than three months off in the summer. The issue here is that these data don’t count teacher holidays and vacations during the school year (spring and winter breaks, etc) when measuring weeks and don’t take into account paid leave when calculating weeks worked for professionals. To be comparable the occupations would have to have their weeks counted the same way, either by paid weeks or by scheduled/worked weeks.

2. Teachers’ Hours Worked per week Understated so Hourly Wage Overstated
So, teachers are considered to work 36-37 hours per week in the NCS, as measured by the official school day, less lunch, etc. This reflects their scheduled work hours. Other occupations don’t have a regular rigid schedule and employers report that accountants, reporters etc work, not surprisingly, about 40 hours (see table 11in our study). There are several studies that show that teachers work as many, if not more, hours than other white-collar workers. The hours that teachers work at school, either before or after the bell, or their work at home are EXCLUDED in the NCS measure. The hourly wage measure is doubly flawed because it relies on dividing a flawed measure of weekly wages (see #1) by a flawed measure of weekly hours.

If one corrected for the understatement of teachers’ weekly hours and weeks worked per year you wouldn’t find teachers are ‘well-paid’.

Again from the BLS statistician:

Given these inconsistencies, it is not surprising that the BLS chief of the Division of Compensation Data Estimation National Compensation Survey noted, in correspondence,
“We are actively studying which occupations and groups of occupations should not have earnings estimated and published by hour. Flight crews on airlines, outside sales representatives, operating personnel on over-the-road railroads are but a few of the occupations in addition to teachers. The point of this research is to define comprehensive requirements for the estimation systems changes contemplated for 2007. While we cannot change the tables before 2007, we may be able to amend the introduction sections to our local and national bulletins to include a cautionary note in the near future."

A Bit of Fun: If You Believe the NCS Hourly Wage Data Then You Believe:
Based on wage data for 2002:

Economics professors ($61.73) are the second highest paid professionals after pilots and make far more than business professors ($42.58)

English professors ($43.50) make more than dentists ($33.34) or nuclear engineers ($36.16)

Law professors ($51.71) make the same as judges ($51.67) and more than doctors ($50.69)

Physical education professors ($40.06) make more than architects ($26.63), accountants ($23.34) and computer programmers ($24.88)

Sociology professors ($32.39) make more than mechanical engineers ($29.84) and architects ($26.63)