TFA, Arthur Rock, and The Reformy Campaign Finance Machine

Let's get back to the Reformy Campaign Finance Machine, with an updated scorecard on whose money (so far as I know) is going where:

Jusidiction (level)	Candidate	Greg Penner	Lydia Callaghan	Arthur Rock	Dave Goldberg	Sheryl Sandberg	Alan Fournier	Jennifer Fournier	Kent Thiry	TOTALS
Perth Amboy, NJ (local BOE)	Better Schools Now!	$8,000	$8,000	$8,000	$8,000		$10,400	$10,400	$10,400	$63,200
Oregon (state house)	Tobias Read	$5,000	$5,000	$5,000		$6,000	$2,500	$2,500		$26,000
Colorado (state house/ senate)	Kerr, Newell, Pettersen, Rodosevich, Hamner, Lee, Young, Hodge	$3,175	$3,175	$3,175	$2,775	$2,780	$2,375	$2,375		$19,830
New York (state senate)	Jeffrey Klein	$2,000	$2,000	$2,000	$1,000	$1,000				$8,000
Nevada (state BOE)	Alexis Gonzales-Black	$2,000	$2,000	$7,500	$1,000	$10,000	$1,000	$1,000	$5,000	$29,500
Nevada (state BOE)	Allison Serafin	$2,000	$2,000	$5,000	$3,500	$5,000	$1,000	$1,000	$5,000	$24,500
Indianapolis (local BOE)	Caitlin Hannon	$5,000	$5,000	$5,000	$1,000		$2,000		$3,000	$21,000
Indiana (state senate)	Mary Ann Sullivan and Tim DeLaney	$10,000	$10,000	$10,000	$2,000	$2,000				$34,000
New Orleans (local BOE)	Sarah Usdin	$2,500	$2,500	$2,500	$2,500	$2,500	$1,100	$1,100	$2,500	$17,200
Ohio (state house)	Ryan Jolley	$3,000	$3,000	$3,000	$1,000	$700				$10,700
California (state senate)	Joe Coto	$3,000	$3,000	$3,000	$1,600					$10,600
Atlanta (local BOE)	Collins, Esteves, Dean English, Westmoreland	$4,500		$7,500	$1,500				$500	$14,000
Contribution Totals		$50,175	$45,675	$61,675	$24,375	$29,980	$20,375	$18,375	$26,400

Total Reformy Machine Contributions: $278,530.

I've updated these figures with information about the upcoming Atlanta school board election (which Valerie Strauss over at the Washington Post's Answer Sheet picked up - thanks for that!), but there's no doubt in my mind I'll be adding even more rows to this table soon enough.

I've also decided to highlight a name: Arthur Rock. Thanks to the terrific Stephanie Simon over at Politico.com, we now have reason to believe Rock is the guiding force behind this flow of money to reformy candidates - and that he's using Teach For America as his partner:  

Rock, who sits on TFA’s board, has become a leading financier of education reform. He has made sizable donations to legislative and school board candidates across the country who support expanding charter schools and, in some cases, vouchers. Until recently, Rock also sat on the board of the Children’s Scholarship Fund, which advocates public subsidies to send low-income children to private and parochial schools.

Rock declined to answer questions about whether the TFA fellows share his policy goals. He funds the program, he said, “to give bright and energized young people the chance to experience government first-hand and give back to the country.”

The fellows declined requests for interviews, citing office policies against staff talking to the press. [emphasis mine]

Love that transparency!

TFA’s political arm, Leadership for Educational Equality, has also been ramping up its activity. The group recruits and trains TFA alumni to run for elected office – and helps them out financially with donations from the LEE treasury, which is stocked by both TFA and by private donors.

LEE contributed nearly $20,000 last fall to help elect two TFA alumni to the board of education in Nevada, a state where TFA has been seeking to expand its presence, despite legislative resistance. This fall, LEE has advised four TFA alumni running for school board in Atlanta.

Understand that not every candidate on my table above has a TFA connection - but even the ones who don't (like the Perth Amboy candidates) share TFA's values: charter expansion, the de-professionalization of teaching, increasing privatization, and expansion of a test-based "accountability" regime.

Rock himself is quite the character. An 86-year-old billionaire, he claims to have pulled out of most of his investments to concentrate full-time on "philanthropy." He butted heads with Steve Jobs while at Apple, and is allegedly the inspiration for Big Brother in the famous "1984" Super Bowl ad. He affects a public persona as a guru of business ethics, placing a premium on transparency:

“Innovation and new ventures fuel the global economy but the spark comes from investment. Investment is about trust. It’s about knowing that the people investors entrust with their money are running ethical, transparent, and effective businesses.”

- Arthur Rock, founder with Toni Rembe, of the Arthur and Toni Rembe Rock Center for Corporate Governance [emphasis mine]

Yes, transparency is apparently very important for investors like Rock. But for voters in elections? Meh...   

What about the other 27,000-some-odd people? That’s where Leadership for Educational Equity, or LEE, comes in. LEE was founded in 2007 as a 501(c)4 spin-off of Teach for America to provide resources, training, and networking for alumni who are interested in elected office or other extracurricular leadership positions. Its goals are ambitious: by 2015, as its standard job posting reads, it hopes to have 250 of its members in elected office, 300 in policy or advocacy leadership roles, and 1,000 “in ‘active’ pipelines for public leadership.” If all goes as planned, LEE could shift control over American education reform to a specific group of spritely college grads-turned-politicians with a very specific politics.

LEE functions in part as a network for TFA alumni. In the restricted section of its website, to which I gained access through an existing member, you can find job postings ranging from government relations at the National Education Association to Web Editor for the Heritage Foundation. Members are also encouraged to connect with each other: “[P]erhaps you want to bring some of your fellow LEE members to an education rally in Houston. You could cast a wide net, and search for all LEE members within 100 miles of zip code 77001. Your search returns about 240 LEE members—that’s quite a rally.”

The organization also provides resources for the electorally curious. Besides running two six-month fellowships pairing members with public officials, it offers a variety of webinars and tool-kits on organizing, advocacy, and elections. In a PowerPoint entitled “What School Boards Can Do,” you meet two reformers, one of whom is pushing for “data-driven, outcomes-focused” superintendents, the other “driving debate on pay-for-performance.” In another presentation, charter operator Future is Now advises on getting elected to union office. “New unionism,” in its rendering, means “enabling unions to play a critical role in the development and implementation of new efforts aimed at meeting students’ needs/achievement.” Inspired by Obama’s call to “out-educate” and “out-innovate” the world, Future is Now is in the dual business of “reforming” unions and pushing for new charter schools—in other words, something a little afield from the Chicago Teachers Union, whose reigning Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators has rallied alongside community groups to stop school closings and fight for more resources in district schools.  

Though LEE’s 990 filings are missing from the IRS’ online database and chronically allergic to press attention, executive director Michael Buman says that its budget this year is $3.5 million. While Buman maintains that elections constitute the “minority” of LEE’s work, some portion of that sum has gone toward electing TFA alums to office.

“We provide various kinds of in-kind support,” he says. “If we host a training and the person is a candidate, that’s an in-kind contribution. Sometimes they want us to take a look at a piece of mail that they’re sending out.” On the other hand, “Sometimes the candidate looks at our services and says no thanks.” Furthermore, he says, LEE does not operate independent expenditures campaigns, which support candidates or candidate committees without officially cooperating or consulting with them. [emphasis mine]

Oh, no, they never get involved with the campaigns of TFAers for political office. No, the only thing they do is get Arthur Rock, a member of LEE's board, to pony up money for far-flung, obscure races around the country, and apparently ask his well-heeled friends to do the same.

I know my "tone" is very upsetting to people these days, so maybe I have lost all perspective on this. But you tell me: is it good for democracy and public education to stack boards of education and state legislatures with candidates operating under the aegis of a closed network of TFA alumni? Is it good for democracy to have these local and state-level races inundated by ridiculous amounts of cash coming in from wealthy individuals who have no connection to the state districts they are trying to turn? Is it good for democracy to have local school board elections in small cities where spending ratios between slates are 9-to-1?

Arthur Rock wants to spend his remaining years engaging in "philanthropy" - good for him. But he needs to get something straight: overwhelming down-ticket races with large amounts of cash is, in no way, "philanthropy." It is a distortion of democracy; it leads directly to the disempowerment of local citizens who may have views opposite his own on education - and, for that matter, many other issues.

I think it may be time for the "real" reform movement to start taking up campaign financing reform as one of its primary causes. Yes, people power can overcome the advantages of wealth in many cases - I hope it happens with Sue Peters out in Seattle - but the pollution of our government with these vast sums is still a cause for great concern.

And it's definitely time to start taking a look at the non-profit status of TFA. Political organizations ought not to be getting preferential tax status, let alone government grants.

TFA: America's fastest growing political organization.