By
Doug Martin
With
the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropies, the Walton
Foundation, and others, the Laura and John Arnold Foundation is pumping
millions of dollars into Indianapolis, and former Mind Trust executive vice
president Ken Bubp now is
the Arnold Foundation’s director of education.
For the 2016-2019 years, the Arnold Foundation plans to hand the Mind
Trust $11,075,000 and the
Indianapolis Public Schools Education Foundation, Inc. $1,256,250 for the “expansion
and replication of high-quality schools.”
As
Lindsey Erdody and Hayleigh Colombo noted a few days ago, Arnold, the Texan and former
Enron millionaire turned hedge fund billionaire, in a YouTube video says “If Indianapolis is successful in doubling the number of kids
that are attending high-quality schools, it will be one of the best investments
that the Arnold Foundation has made.” Arnold continues “Indianapolis has this
great chance and opportunity to show the nation what can be done.”
It’s no surprise that Arnold is
teaming up with the Dell Foundation in Indianapolis, for promoting edtech is
one of his many favorite pastimes. In
2012, the Arnold Foundation handed $10,000 to Innosight Institute, Inc. to
promote digital learning, almost $600,000 to the North American Council for
Online Learning Ltd. in 2011 and 2012, $6 million in 2012 to the PowerMyLearning,
Inc. (Computers for Youth Foundation, Inc.) to support blended learning, $3.5
million to the American Institutes for Research in the Behavioral Sciences to “advance
evidence-based policymaking and promote the use of longitudinal data in
education research,” $60,000 in 2016-2017 to the Data Quality Campaign, Inc. to
“support the development and distribution of materials that capture the growth
of the current data systems in education and share lessons for other sectors,”
and over $8 million to the edtech charter school investors NewSchools Venture
Fund, whose CEO Ted
Mitchell later went on to become Obama’s
undersecretary of education, just to name a few. The Arnold Foundation stresses so-called
personalized learning, recently giving a $2.7
million grant to the personalized learning OpenStax College project that Rice
University researchers
are working on. The Arnold Foundation is
helping develop digital textbooks for college students, investing in EdX,
an online platform for high school and college courses, and Arnold’s foundation has given $6 million to the Silicon
Schools Fund, Inc over the last few years, “which
is supporting the development of schools where face-to-face
instruction is combined with online, self-guided
activities, collaborative projects, and innovative classroom models.” This is just a small fraction of the money the
Arnold Foundation is pouring into corporate school reform.
Arnold
is steeped in the school privatization movement. In 2011, the Arnold
Foundation gave (PFD) $100,000 to the hedge
fund-operated Education Reform Now, $2.1 million to Stand for Children (who
used hedge fund money that same year to buy Illinois Democrats, as I detail in Hoosier School Heist), $5 million to
Teach for America, and $52,500 to the Thomas
Fordham Institute, the rightwing organization whose quest with the fake liberal
Center for American Progress is to entirely eliminate elected school
boards across the country.
Arnold, like all billionaires and
edtech titans, hate publicly elected school boards. Alongside Lauren Powell Jobs, Apple’s Steve
Jobs’ wife, and billionaire corporate school reformer Eli Broad, and others,
John Arnold in 2014 attempted
to buy the California State Superintendent of Public Instruction race,
supporting Democrat Marshall Tuck of Los Angeles, who was up against another
Democrat. Tuck, in favor of using test
scores to evaluate teachers, had started L.A. charter schools and was the CEO
of “the
Partnership for L.A. Schools, a nonprofit he ran (created by [once-mayor] Villaraigosa)
that is working to fix 17 failing schools.” The “Enron
commodities trader and hedge fund manager John Arnold gave $300,000 to
a pro-Tuck PAC” and “has
jumped into California union battles before, donating $200,000 through his PAC
to help place on the state ballot a government employee pension reform plan by
San Jose's Democratic mayor, Chuck Reed,”
as L.A. Weekly’s Matt Fleming
points out.
Arnold
has thrown money across the U.S. to influence the so-called pension reform of
public workers, and a whole book could be written about that alone.
PAY FOR SUCCESS, OR PROFIT FROM A RIGGED GAME
The new and international corporate gimmick
to wipe out public education and every other public investment that aids or
monitors minorities and people from low-income households is known as “social
impact investing,” and the Arnold Foundation is on the forefront. One version of “social impact investing,” a scheme to invest
private money in social programs for a profit, is known as Pay for Success, now
written into the Every Student Succeeds Act.
As
researcher Alison McDowell writes:
The John and Laura Arnold Foundation has worked
steadily to advance Pay for Success. A 2015 article from Inside Philanthropy notes, “The
Arnolds and Bloomberg Philanthropies both recently received props from the
Obama administration for being “essential partners” in government’s quest to surface the
tools, programs and approaches that will help the country adapt to a changing
educational and economic landscape.” Both are high-profile figures in the
movement to privatize public education, and the Arnolds have also been at the
forefront of pension “reform” efforts. Since 2013, the foundation has poured tens
of millions of dollars into an “Evidence Based Policy and Innovation”
initiative. In 2015, the Coalition for Evidence Based Policy wound down its
operations after 14 years and merged with the Arnold Foundation. Among the coalition’s
accomplishments were successfully lobbying for the creation of the Social Spending Innovation Research program in K12
education as well as Paul Ryan and Patty Murray’s Commission on Evidence Based Policy Making.
McDowell
has posted a map
of Arnold’s Pay for Success plan, noting the Arnold Foundation’s “strategic
investments” for the national “adoption
of Pay for Success and Social Impact Finance,” which includes “investments
in funders, think tanks, lobbyists, data brokers, evaluators, as well as reform
groups like KIPP and Teach for America suited to working within the constraints
of data-driven educational environments.”
On
the Arnold Foundation website, you can find many of these Social
Impact/Pay for Success grants, which include:
New Profit, Inc.
|
2013 - 2014
|
$210,000
|
|
To
help advance Pay for Success Financing.
|
Nonprofit Finance Fund
|
2014 - 2015
|
$343,660
|
|
To
help advance Pay for Success Financing.
|
|||
Nonprofit Finance Fund
|
2014 - 2018
|
$1,080,000
|
|
To
help advance Pay for Success Financing.
|
|||
Nonprofit Finance Fund
|
2016 - 2017
|
$350,000
|
|
To
support the Pay for Success Learning Hub.
|
One Hope United
|
2015 - 2017
|
$672,848
|
|
To
help advance Pay for Success Financing.
|
|||
Partnership for Public Service, Inc.
|
2015 - 2017
|
$184,223
|
|
To
help advance Pay for Success Financing.
|
|||
Partnership for Public Service, Inc.
|
2016 - 2018
|
$800,881
|
|
To
identify measures that can help to improve operations at the Office of
Management and Budget in order to drive better decision making, resource
allocation, and performance at federal agencies.
|
President and Fellows of Harvard College
|
2013 - 2015
|
$551,134
|
|
To
support the Harvard Kennedy School’s Social Impact Bond Technical Assistance
Lab.
|
President and Fellows of Harvard College
|
2016
|
$800,000
|
|
To
support the Center for Public Leadership’s efforts to evaluate a series of
low-cost, high-yield interventions and their impact on student outcomes.
|
|||
President and Fellows of Harvard College
|
2016 - 2018
|
$2,141,762
|
|
To
develop and support a network of government chief data officers that will
collectively use data analytics to solve critical policy problems.
|
Roca, Inc.
|
2016 - 2023
|
up to $1,666,689
|
|
To
support an extension of the Massachusetts Juvenile Justice Pay for Success
Project.
|
Social Finance CT**
|
2016 - 2022
|
$1,000,000
|
|
To
support the Connecticut Family Stability Pay for Success Project.
|
|||
Social Finance NY State Workforce Re-Entry 2013 LLC**
|
2013 - 2019
|
$4,000,000
|
|
To
help advance Pay for Success Financing.
|
|||
Social Finance, Inc.
|
2014 - 2015
|
$148,598
|
|
To
help advance Pay for Success Financing.
|
|||
Social Finance, Inc.
|
2014 - 2017
|
$4,000,000
|
|
To
help advance Pay for Success Financing.
|
Third Sector Capital Partners, Inc.
|
2014 - 2015
|
$159,000
|
|
To
help advance Pay for Success Financing.
|
|||
Trust for Conservation Innovation
|
2015 - 2017
|
$71,971
|
|
To
help advance Pay for Success Financing.
|
University of Utah
|
2015 - 2017
|
$354,143
|
|||||
To
help advance Pay for Success Financing.
|
|||||||
Urban Institute
|
2015 - 2018
|
$8,433,895
|
|||||
To
help advance Pay for Success Financing.
|
|||||||
Urban Institute
|
2016 - 2018
|
$1,191,932
|
|||||
To
support the development of an evidence-based policymaking collaborative,
which will provide actionable strategies for using and building evidence in
public policy.
|
|||||||
Youth Services, Inc.
|
2014 - 2020
|
up to $3,344,350
|
|
To
help advance Pay for Success Financing.
|
For
the Pay for Success scheme to work, the billionaires need data--data, in fact,
to manipulate for a profit, and edtech is ripe to create it. In fact, we have already witnessed a scenario
that will become way too common if John Arnold and the other billionaires get
there way. In a 2015 Salt Lake City preschool
program with a Social Impact Bond (SIB) from Goldman Sachs and the Pritzker
Family, we can glimpse where this road is heading. Here is how education scholar Tim Scott narrates
the story:
Through a $7
million investment from Goldman Sachs, J.B. & M.K. Pritzker Family
Foundation and the United Way of Salt Lake, the SIB financed the expansion of
an existing and highly regarded preschool program. The SIB was aligned with the
program's goal of reducing the number of “at-risk” children identified to be on
a path to special education services in subsequent grades. According to the
Philanthropy News Digest, Goldman claimed, “that of the one hundred and ten
four-year-olds who attended preschools in the program during the 2013-14 school
year that were identified as likely to need special education, only one
required special education services in kindergarten.” This outcome also
guaranteed the first of many large payouts for the notorious investment bank.
“It was, in the vernacular of corporate America, a win-win: a bond that paid
for preschool for underprivileged children in Utah while also making money for
investors.”
A month later,
several early childhood experts interviewed for a New York Times article
reported that they saw a number of substantial irregularities in how the
program's success was measured, leading them to believe that Goldman Sachs and
the state of Utah were able to exaggerate the outcome of the SIB:
...even
well-funded preschool programs — which the Utah program was not — typically
have been found to reduce the number of students needing special education
later by 10 percent or 20 percent, and rarely by more than 50 percent… For
example, the program screened low-income three- and four-year-olds using a
picture-and-vocabulary test known as the PPVT and labeled all those who scored
below 70, a very low score, as being likely to require special education.
According to nine early childhood education experts who reviewed the results
for the Times, however, the PPVT isn't typically used to screen for special
education, especially on its own, and there was little evidence for assuming
that all children who scored poorly on the test — 30 percent to 40 percent of
the children in the program, many of whom did not speak English at the time of
testing — would require special education after preschool.
The NY Times
article went on to report how “Early-childhood education experts said that the
results from Utah should have been viewed skeptically from the start, just
based on the amount of money being spent on the program… the preschool that the
bank had paid for cost $1,700 a year for every student, or barely enough to
cover the cost of part-time day care. Some of the children Goldman paid for
were sent not to preschool but to a local daycare center or Y.M.C.A.
Prior to making
the investment, Goldman Sachs could see that the methodology was leading
significant numbers of children to be labeled as at-risk; and therefore
increasing the number of children that could later be identified as avoiding
special education. Ultimately, according to the Times,
When Goldman
negotiated its investment, it adopted the school district’s methodology as the
basis for its payments. It also gave itself a generous leeway to be paid pack.
As long as 50 percent of the children in the program avoid special education,
Goldman will earn back its money and 5 percent interest — more than Utah would
have paid if it had borrowed the money through the bond market. If the current
rate of success continues, it will easily make more than that.
THE HEAD START SMOKE MIRROR
In 2013, the
national news painted John
Arnold as a Jesus figure when he and his wife announced they were going to
cover the government costs of funding Head Start during the government
shutdown. The Arnolds dished out the
couch-change of $10 million for Head Start as a loan to be paid back.
Actually, the whole thing was merely a publicity stunt meant to digress from what Arnold had been up to lately. When the news broke on the Head
Start funding, David Sirota, noting that
John Arnold is worth $3.8 billion, saw
through the smoke and mirrors:
What do you do after a week’s worth of embarrassing revelations about your craven effort to slash the pensions of
unsuspecting middle-class retirees? If you are a billionaire former Enron
trader, you manufacture a self-congratulatory spectacle by offering a bit of
pocket change to low-income kids – and you get to rest assured that the
national media will suddenly ignore your pension-looting ways and dutifully
portray you as a benevolent hero.
Such is the breathtakingly
cynical P.R. strategy of John Arnold. After a week of revelations about his
scheme to help Wall Street and the conservative movement loot public pensions,
the former Enron trader made headlines yesterday by
handing over a rounding error of his billion-dollar fortune to the federal Head
Start program ostensibly to help float it through the government shutdown.
SPYING
ON YOUR NEIGHBOR
What else should Indianapolis parents,
students, teachers, and citizens know about John Arnold? People in Indianapolis, first, might want to look toward the sky
for any suspicious activity for an answer, for in Baltimore, with no public input, Arnold and his wife’s foundation recently paid $360,000
to Dayton, Ohio’s Persistent Surveillance Systems to fly a surveillance plane
over the city for at least “314 hours, taking more than a million images,”
according to the Baltimore police department which finally acknowledged the
surveillance and Arnold’s role several months after, ironically, Bloomberg Businessweek ran
a story.
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