Betsy DeVos's old crew is ready to cash in on federal school vouchers.
The American Federation for Children was organized and funded by the DeVos family. It has had a variety of names, including American Education Reform Foundation and Advocates for School Choice, Inc, and has suckled up some other DeVos initiatives like "All Children Matter," a group that was fined for election misconduct in Ohio and Wisconsin. But they settled on American Federation for Children because that is meant to contrast with American Federation of Teachers (because teachers are, as we know, notoriously anti-child).
Their leadership is a clue to their mission. Betsy DeVos gave up her chairman of the board spot to go work for Trump. These days the chair is William E. Oberndorfer, who co-founded the Alliance for School Choice, one of the root organizations of AFC with John Walton and has his own foundation that is busy pumping up charters and groups like Jeanne Allen's Center for Education reform and Jeb Bush's Foundation for Excellence in Education and EdChoice (formerly the Friedman Foundation).
The board also includes John Kirtley (Florida School Choice Fund, Florida Charter Institute), Kevin Chavous (DFER, New Orleans voucher plan, K12), Ann Duplessis (former LA legislator and banker), Stack Hock (investment banking and Texas Public Policy Foundation), Edward McDermott (investment firm and BASIC Fund, a California SGO), and Hera Varmah (Step Up For Students). It's a crowd that is even more interested in managing money than in privatizing education.
AFC has already announced its intention to get in the ground floor of the federal taxpayer-funded school vouchers. The vouchers created under Dear Leader's Big Beautiful Bill are the tax credit scholarship flavor, and as with all such vouchers, there's a middle man. Taxpayers give their completely deductible contribution to a Scholarship Granting Organization (SGO) that in turn passes the money on to students.
But not before they skim off a slice for themselves. The federal plan is still sparse on details, but typically an SGO keeps 5-10% of the money it handles. So lots of folks are getting into the SGO biz, and that includes AFC.
They have announced the man they've hired to run that skimmer for them-- Sean Clifford. They announced:
In his new role, Sean will serve as our primary ambassador and strategist for the scholarship fund, overseeing strategic direction, growth strategy, and partnerships, along with managing the day-to-day operations necessary to ensure the Education Freedom Tax Credit reaches as many families as possible, as soon as possible.
Clifford has been around a few blocks. After interning with the Bush II Council of Economic Advisors, he spent seven years as VP of Baron Public Affairs, a DC PR form that handles clients at "the nexus of politics and business" thereby "liberating innovators from political risk." He went back to school at Wharton for an MBA, then went to Texas for a year at Skills Fund (now Ascent, an education loan outfit). Then in 2018 he founded and led Canopy, the school internet filter company. Then he became an advisor at MonCap, an investment firm, and Chief Strategy Officer at Tikvah, a nonprofit firm that advances "Jewish excellence and Western Civilization through education and ideas." Eliot Abrams is currently chairman of their board of trustees.
So that's the background Clifford brings to running the AFC Scholarship Fund.
In an interview, AFC chief Tommy Schultz explained what the fund will be about. The program will "free up billions of dollars," Schultz says. Frees from what? Being captured by the feds, I guess. He's going to keep pushing the notion that this will give students "access to a better education," which is the central lie of the whole program. Because first, there is no reason to believe that vouchers lead to better education, and lots of reasons to believe that they don't. Second, vouchers systems make sure that private schools retain the right to discriminate against LGBTQ persons, students with the "wrong" religious faith, students who have academic issues, students with special needs, and any students the school just doesn't want to accept for whatever reason. Laws are written to deliberately preserve that power to discriminate.
Schultz notes that "the beauty and elegance" of this new voucher dodge is that it's a change to the tax code, and not, say, a piece of education policy with oversight and accountability attached. "There won't be any nefarious Department of Education strings attached to it." No accountability. No oversight. No rules.
"We are very much invested in making sure that millions of kids can get access to the best education possible..." says Schultz, which is a hell of a hard thing to assert if your program is not going to include any quality control measures at all--will, in fact, include anti-quality control measures. And be run by a guy who does not have the education background to spot the difference between excellence, mediocrity, malpractice, and scammery.
But AFC could make bank. They anticipate billions of dollars going into the new SGO systems, and 5% of even a measly one billion is still fifty million. That's a tidy bonus to get when you're pursuing your goal of dismantling public education.
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