When it comes to education, Stand for Children has more in common with Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s putsch to eliminate collective bargaining than it does with children. The organization began as a grassroots organization and continues under that aegis, but it long ago abandoned the grassroots for the hardball politics that hedge fund money and philanthrocapitalism can buy.
Instead of buying funding candidates as it did in Illinois, Stand for Children seeks to co-opt education policy by buying a misleading ballot initiative, which, according to Education Secretary Paul Reville, “would set up a distracting and divisive battle, engendering an over-simplified public dialogue that would alienate educators and prevent us from achieving a variety of reform goals.”
A couple of years ago, the Commonwealth created a task force that agreed on regulations to overhaul teacher evaluation and consider MCAS scores. It made news. (I can’t access the Globe article, but I picked it apart here and it has links both to the Globe and the MTA website). Stand for Children had a seat at the table, but offered nothing. No suggestions. No arguments. When it comes to policy-making, Stand for Children stands alone (with a lot of rich folks standing behind it). It doesn’t work with people. It works the room. Or more accurately, the back room. It’s ballot initiative is a costly, unfunded mandate. It won’t help, but it will boost its founder’s speaking fees.
Jonah Edelman, the Director of Stand for Children, is an intelligent, charismatic, Yale graduate. He founded the organization and has taken it from an alleged grassroots organization in Oregon to Machiavellian PAC in Illinois. It is his work in Illinois, and his cold-blooded account of it, for which he is most notable. The account was videotaped and went viral. The video itself is easily found, but the story hasn’t received much attention. Here’s how it goes:
Working with Advance Illinois, a state-level philanthrocapitalist organization funded by hedge fund executives, Edelman set forth to buy the power structure of the Illinois legislature. Mike Madigan, the powerful Speaker of the House, was at odds with the Illinois Teachers Union over cuts in teacher pensions. He was in danger of losing control of the legislature to the Republicans. Seeing this as their opportunity, Edelman and friends stepped into the breech.
[O]ur analysis was [Madigan] was still going to be in power, and as such the raw politics of it were that we should tilt toward him. And so we interviewed 36 candidates in targeted races and essentially, I’m being quite blunt here, the individual candidates were essentially a vehicle to execute a political objective, which was to tilt toward Madigan.
So the press never picked up on it. We endorsed nine individuals, and six of them were Democrats, three Republicans, and tilted our money to Madigan, who was expecting that because of Bruce Rauner’s leadership, and Bruce is a Republican, that all of our money was going to go to Republicans. That was really as show of, an indication to him, that we could be a new partner to take the place of Illinois Federation of Teachers-that was the point.
Thus Edelman and friends secured Madigan’s support. They also went on to corner the market on lobbyists:
We hired eleven lobbyists, including the four best insiders and seven the best minority lobbyists, preventing the unions from hiring them. We enlisted a statewide public affairs firm. We had tens of thousands of supporters. And with Jim’s, and many others stepping up, Paula and Steve, thank you, we raised $3 million for our political action committee between the election and the end of the year. That’s more money than either of the unions have in their political action committees.
After the election,
Advance Illinois and Stand had drafted a very bold proposal we called Performance Counts. It tied tenure and layoffs to performance. It let principals hire who they choose. It streamlined dismissal of ineffective tenured teachers substantially, from 2+ years and $200, 000 in legal fees, on average, to three to four months, with very little likelihood of legal recourse, and, most importantly, we called for the reform of collective bargaining throughout the state. Essentially, proposing that school boards would be able to decide any disputed issue at impasse. So a very, very bold proposal for Illinois, and one that six months earlier would have been unthinkable, undiscussable.
Stand for Children has similar designs on Massachusetts. Instead of buying supporting candidates for office, it’s using our ballot initiative process. There will be a well-financed, misleading campaign in favor of the ballot. It will offer a lot of platitudes about a great teacher in every classroom and a chicken in every pot. It won’t tell you how its initiative will actual accomplish these goals or how much it will cost, but make no mistake about it, its initiative would be an unfunded mandate. (The biggest obstacle to effective teacher evaluation is money).
Stand for Children has an office in Massachusetts, but it’s an outside organization and it is buying ballot access. This isn’t against the law, but nonetheless, it’s a corruption of the referendum process.
“…the four best insiders…” quite chilling and Orwellian … this could be the Casino story….in Massachusetts. Almost. We citizen activists have neither the time (most have to work to run businesses or earn a living as something else, say a teacher or a grocery store produce clerk) and cannot do what Edelman and his mercenaries did. And are doing.
This came up a few posts ago too I think and I was very surprised. I had always seen this as a progressive pro-public education organization. I know I’ve heard speeches by Marian Wright Edelman, who I believe heads or has some connection to this organization, and have agreed with much of what she says. She was a featured speaker at the United Church of Christ General Synod a few years back and it is almost exclusively progressives who speak at those.
It’s her son Jonah. Don’t know whether she’s on board with the organization’s aims, but she’s not directly involved, as far as is evident from the website.
Perhaps from the beginning of Stand in 1996? but certainly in 2005 and 2006. She apparently still supports the group as she headlined a Stand event this past October.
http://wastand.wordpress.com/2011/10/24/changing-the-odds-with-marian-wright-edelman/
I think this is unfortunate as her support lends a lot of legitimacy to the organization.
This is an ugly political trick by crafty politicians to distract the debate in this election.
Instead of talking about wall street, and instead of talking about taxing rich people, they want to make teacher salaries the topic of political debate.
Who will benefit from this attack on teacher salaries and unions? Guess who!
As pointed out – most of the ballot petition was already happening here in MA. Perhaps it is a sort of sleight of hand – we watch what is going on with the petition, and we miss what is going on somewhere else…
When I was leaving a store in Plymouth over the summer I was asked to sign the Death With Dignity, Medical Marijuana, Right to Repair, and Stand for Children ballot questions. When it came to the Stand for Children petition I already knew better than to sign it, but decided to ask a question of the signature gatherer – I asked if Labor was on board with the question. I was told that the Teacher’s Unions were supporting this full on 100%. I knew better and corrected her. Then she couldn’t tell me who was paying her to collect signatures. “I forget” she said.
I tried it again a month later outside a Stop & Shop, got the same answer about Labor from a different person.
I know these are people being paid to collect signatures and that they’ll do anything to get you to sign, but that doesn’t make it right. As I signed off on page-after-page of Stand’s petitions at town hall, I had to wonder how many others were lied to about it.
had Jonah Edelman not bragged about it at the Aspen Institute. It’s his words that are damning, not some supposition. He apologized, but the truth is out.
His mom used to be on Stand for Children’s board, but has since, left it.
Jonah reminds me of Andrew Cuomo, another son of a great liberal who is not cut from the same cloth.
Peter Edelman is the guy who was so disappointed in Clinton’s so-called welfare reform that he resigned his post in the administration . Peter also served as staff to Robert Kennedy, who supported Marion’s work with the poor in Mississippi and then helped her set up the Children’s Defense Fund in Cambridge
Sometimes kids have to go their own way.
Peter Edelman is really a decent human being. This is so disappointing, coming from his son…
is on the board of the National Alliance for Public Charter schools.
He now works for the Bil & Melinda Gates Foundation as the Senior Program Officer for Empowering Effective Teachers. (Huh.) Prior to that he worked in the DC schools as Deputy Director of School Innovation and prior to that in CHicago as Exectuive Officer of the Office of New Schools (Arne Duncan connection) and prior to that he worked for the SEED foundation (charter schools) and principal of SEED school in DC.
So might there be a bias in the family towards public money going to charter schools…
from people who live in cities. (You can’t blame them). It’s possible that the Edelmans encountered this stuff through their urban work. I’m sure they’ve dealt with philanthrocapitalists who are behind all of this stuff.
l
Marian Wright Edelman is more closely connected to the Children’s Defense Fund.
believes that you make it better for children by making it worse for teachers.
It includes the audio from Edelman’s Aspen speech and first hand testimony from former Stand members in Gloucester and Worcester. The person from Philadelphia seems to have a good take on the big picture.
http://education-radio.blogspot.com/2011/12/stand-for-children-or-stand-for-profit_16.html
I was about to post the Education Radio piece on Stand but then saw that Peter already did so.
I too felt that the interview with David Love (former Executive Director of the Pennsylvania Legislative Black Caucus, current Executive Director of Witness to Innocence, and Executive Editor of The Black Commentator) gave a fascinating big picture analysis of the motivations of the folks backing Stand’s program (and similar education “reform” efforts) vis a vis urban education and privatization.
The Education Radio piece is really worth the time it takes to listen. If you don’t have the time or patience, there’s also this piece by David Love, “Profiteering and Union-Busting Repackaged as School Reform.”
In it, he writes of Stand and Jonah Edelman’s efforts in Illinois:
It seems relevant and important to consider this big picture when evaluating Stand’s efforts to push this ballot question here in Massachusetts.
There is also this from Seattle