A Handy Guide To Privatizers

Maurice Cunningham retired in 2021 from an associate professor of political science post at the University of Massachusetts at Boston. He is an expert in the special art of tracking dark money and political connections, and his book Dark Money and the Politics of School Privatization is a must read for anyone who wants to make sense of how the wealthy stage manage attempts to privatize public education.

Now Cunningham has added another useful guide for folks trying to make sense of this. For the Network for Public Education, Cunningham has created A Citizen's Guide to School Privatization. It's a trim 18 pages packed with lots of information about the money and the organizations working to dismantle public education.

The guide highlights some well known names like the various arms of the Kochtopus and also draws some attention to the under-noticed Council for National Policy. There are regional players here, and that matters--remember that Betsy DeVos was long thought of as just Michigan's problem. So the Wilks of Texas, the Uihleins of Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania's Jeffrey Yass deserve attention even they seem to be operating far away from you.

Cunningham also highlights some of the activist groups (Moms for Liberty is not the only one out there), and some state-level privatization activist groups, like Awake Illinois, Coalition for TJ, Denver Families Action, Idaho Freedom Foundation. And he covers both the conservative side and the neoliberal-dressed-up-as-lefties side.

He offers these words of warning:

Chaos is the product. It’s a lot easier to break something than to build something or to improve upon it.

The guide is useful not only for providing information about these various groups, but for connecting the dots as well. These kinds of connections are important; these days many privatization efforts operate on a local level, and as local folks push back they can feel as if they are alone and isolated when, in fact, the same kinds of battles are going on in other communities across the country. You aren't alone.

The guide is also meant to be dynamic. That is, if you know of another organization that ought to be in the guide, it can be updated to include new information. A handy feature for a guide like this, as groups pop up regularly. Expect to see new configurations in districts that were recently flipped to public school supporting boards; privatizers aren't going to give up or go away, but they may hatch yet another group to implement their newest strategy. Privatizers are loaded with resources; it's only fair that citizens have access to more information to help them recognize the threat to public education when it appears.