After the Brown v Board of Education decision in 1954, Southern governors and mayors spent large sums of cash to fix up ramshackle black schools in an attempt to placate African-American communities and, thus, seek to avoid the white nightmare of court-ordered desegregation. Now a half century later, Mayor Karl Dean of Nashville is doing something similar, but this time the effort not only serves segregationists but also the corporations in need of a compliant and positivized work force that is to include a few black and brown faces that can be counted upon to keep their mouths shut.
Mayor Dean has committed almost 10 percent of Nashville Metro’s 4-year school building budget for a new segregated KIPP, Inc. corporate charter school, which lays claim to the exemplary urban penal pedagogy model that has the backing of all the oligarchs of the Billionaire Boys’ Club, regardless of whether they keep Republican or Democratic politicians in their stables.
Meanwhile, Nashville's public schools that serve the poor and the brown use garbage cans to collect water from leaky roofs and cram their kids into overcrowded and damaged classrooms. At Hume-Fogg Academic Magnet, a high-performing integrated public school, kids eat lunch in the hallways and do not have a functioning gym.
Never mind that KIPP has unlimited funds at its disposal and more on the way, thanks to bottom feeders like hedge funder, Whitney Tilson, who beats the Wall Street bushes daily for new philanthro-capitalists looking for big tax breaks and a sure-fire way to behaviorally neuter and culturally sterilize minority schoolchildren. Meanwhile, KIPP, Inc. spares no expense to shuttle children around to Ivy League schools under the pretense that a significant percentage of these kids will someday actually attend college at Ivy League schools.
Nor does KIPP, Inc. spare any expense when it comes to the Disney Orlando Seligman-inspired high-rolling retreats for KIPP staff, which a former KIPP teacher describes as reminiscent of the Nuremburg rallies during the heydays of the Third Reich.
The photo at left is from John Partipilo of the Tennessean, and it features three of Nashville's white KIPP missionaries: Jake Ramsey (former campus recruiter for TFA), Meredith McCoy (TFA alum), and Nikki Miller (TFA alum). KIPP loves TFA alums, er, Corps members, for they have been successfully assimilated into the Family and have learned to teach on poor people's kids. Now they are ready to use their methods to uphold the KIPP brand.
How long will Nashville parents and grandparents allow their schools to be taken over by missionaries from the Billionaire Boys' Club? And allow the Mayor to ignore the needs of public schools, while favoring his high-rolling cronies from Wall Street's corporate foundations?
Here is a list of whales (national partners) from the KIPP website, and this list is just for the ones who want to be named publicly:
Here is a list of whales (national partners) from the KIPP website, and this list is just for the ones who want to be named publicly:
$60,000,000 and Above:
$25,000,000-39,999,999:
$10,000,000-24,999,999:
$5,000,000-9,999,999:
$1,000,000-4,999,999:
Anonymous Laura and John Arnold Family Foundation Reed Hastings and Patty Quillin
Marcus Foundation Miles Family Foundation $500,000-999,999:
Thomas and Susan Dunn
Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation
$100,000-499,999:
Abrams Foundation
All Stars Helping Kids
The Annie E. Casey Foundation
CityBridge Foundation
Credit Suisse
John and Laura Fisher
Robert and Elizabeth Fisher
William and Sakurako Fisher
Goldman Sachs Foundation
Goldsbury Foundation
Kinder Foundation
Koret Foundation
Leon Lowenstein Foundation
The Louis Calder Foundation
Hee-Jung and John Moon
Stephen Jr. and Susan Mandel
National Geographic Education Foundation
Prudential Foundation
Arthur Rock
SAP America, Inc.
Paul Singer
State Farm Companies Foundation
The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation
$50,000 -$ 99,999:
David Goldberg and Sheryl Sandberg
The Jay Pritzker Foundation
The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation
NewSchools Venture Fund
NFL Charities
Peter B. and Adeline W. Ruffin Foundation
Select Equity Group Inc.
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