Billionaire Control, Part 4: Diane Ravitch's Billionaire Friends in Nebraska

The Blog of Harvard Education Publishing reported that Warren Buffett, who is “ranked among the four or five richest people in the world,” has given about $28 billion to charities, including nonprofits. Sounds great, right?

The blog post continues: “Anxiety about large transfers of concentrated private wealth taking place with little public accountability has been an issue in American policy for close to a century. The ‘charitable deduction’ clause in our tax code, which was legislated in 1917, enables donors to hold on to much of their wealth if they donate a minimum amount (roughly 5 percent) to legitimate nonprofit organizations and causes. However, relatively little accounting is required to show exactly how the funds are disbursed, which has been alarming to people regardless of their political orientation.”

The Sherwood Foundation IRS 990 form from 2014 lists Warren Buffett as the foundation’s sole contributor. He funded Sherwood’s 2014 operations with 1,160,981 shares of Berkshire Hathaway Inc Class B, which totaled $149,743,329. As we’ve seen from previous posts on this topic, a billionaire is controlling education in Nebraska in a major way. And in this post, we’ll see how a national education figure who regularly blames education issues on the “Billionaire Boys Club” has latched onto Nebraska as a pet project and a source of support.

Diane Ravitch’s NPE Organization
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Ravitch founded the anti-choice Network for Public Education in 2013, and she also runs Network for Public Education Action Inc., which is listed as a 501(c)4 organization on its 2016 IRS 990 form. According to the IRS, 501(c)4 organizations cannot publicly endorse or overtly support or oppose political candidates.

In spite of the clear IRS rules governing 501(c)(4) organizations, NPE Action has been endorsing plenty of candidates in a very public way.

In March, Diane Ravitch posted the following statement on her blog:

In fact, the Network for Public Education Action website posted its November 6 endorsements with the disclaimer, “we cannot endorse in every state and in every race because we are a 501(c)(4), not a Political Action Committee.” We haven't seen any statements from the IRS explaining that 501(c)(4) organizations can endorse candidates in some states and some races but not in others (we're parents, not attorneys, but this seems fairly straightforward).

NPE Action also “officially endorses” Andrew Gillum, who is running for Governor of Florida. Gillum has served on the Board of Directors of the Schott Foundation (2013, 2014, 2015), which co-produced “Grading the States: A Report Card on Our Nation’s Commitment to Public Schools” (along with Ravitch’s NPE Action) and paid for activists to attend NPE’s conference in 2015. This report has been highly touted by the Nebraska Department of Education and by Sherwood-funded nonprofits that are desperately trying to hang on to top-down control of Nebraska’s K-12 education.

According to IRS reports, the Schott Foundation for Public Education has working operating funds of many millions of dollars every year while Ravitch’s Network for Public Education operates on far less. The “Grading the States” report ranked Nebraska #1 in the country for “commitment to democracy,” which is beyond ironic given the study’s methodology. In other words, the authors of this study held up a small state controlled by a billionaire as a bastion of democracy while it awarded last place to Georgia, Florida, and Arizona, where parents have many different educational opportunities to choose from for their children’s educations.

The Schott Foundation for Public Education's board of directors include Antonia Darder, who founded “a member-supported radical teachers organization committed to an educational vision of schooling intimately linked to social justice, human rights, and economic democracy” and whose mentor, the Brazilian Marxist Paulo Freire “profoundly shaped the direction of her early work” (unbelievably, these quotations come directly from the Schott Foundation for Public Education’s 2015 IRS 990 form); Alvin Louis Starks, who “aspires to expand and stretch the untapped possibilities of social justice advocacy” and worked at Open Society Institute, founded and funded by billionaire George Soros; Deborah LaBelle, a Senior Soros Justice Fellow; and Baishali Rinku, also known as Rinku Sen, who is an expert on “intersectionality organizing.”

The authors of the “Grading the States” report are Tanya Clay House, a strategist for the Schott Foundation; Carol Burris, Executive Director of NPE; and Darcie Cimarusti, Communications Director of NPE. They're activists, not academics, and yet, many in Nebraska treated this report as if it were peer-reviewed research about student outcomes.

The report doesn’t grade the states on any of the metrics that matter to parents: proficiency in core subjects, college readiness, ACT scores, or success beyond K-12. Instead, the authors of the study rank the states on degree of government control over education. And, of course, Nebraska wins! How could it be otherwise? Where else in America are so few people flooded with so much money aimed at sustaining the bureaucratic status quo? Which other state has one of the “four or five world’s richest people” eager to implement his vision for society? And what is that vision?

In 2014, Gene Glass from the National Education Policy Center at University of Colorado wrote the following in a blog post: “What if I said to you that the solution to the problems in our education system would be to ‘make private schools illegal and assign every child to a [state] school by random lottery’? That’s the view not of Karl Marx or the Chinese Communist Party but of the billionaire US investor and philanthropist Warren Buffett.”

Is it any surprise that Sherwood Foundation nonprofits are working with the Marxists at the Schott Foundation to try to affirm the stranglehold a billionaire has on Nebraska’s education system? Nebraska is an easy target, a petri dish for those who would love to try out their unAmerican ideas on American students. And our Nebraska school administrators and elected officials are playing right into their hands.

Diane Ravitch and Susie Buffett
On November 18, 2015, Diane Ravitch visited Omaha at a gathering billed as Metropolitan Omaha Educational Consortium event. Susie Buffett paid for Ravitch’s trip, and during the visit, Ravitch appeared in a NElovesPS film. In 2014, Sherwood Foundation had given $698,353 to an Omaha company called Just Jump Films, Inc, which appears to be NElovesPS, according to Brittany Mascio’s LinkedIn profile. In 2015, Just Jump received over $1,000,000 from Sherwood, and in 2016, Sherwood spent over $2,000,000 on Just Jump.

Diane Ravitch often talks about billionaire influence on the school choice movement, but she doesn’t talk about her own billionaire connections. She works hand-in-hand with both the Schott Foundation for Public Education and the Sherwood Foundation to prevent low-income students from having the education options that their wealthier peers have. The crowd Ravitch works in also enjoys some pretty nice benefits that are unthinkable for parents who can’t afford options outside of the traditional public schools. Did you know that her colleagues at the Schott Foundation for Public Education get reimbursed by the nonprofit for their $75/month health club memberships (according to the 2015 Schott Foundation 990--Part III, Supplemental Information)?

Stand For Schools as Local Partner for NPE

Stand for Schools, which is funded by the Sherwood Foundation, is listed as a local partner for Diane Ravitch’s NPE. Additionally, Stand for Schools president Ann Hunter-Pirtle served as a speaker at the NPE convention.

This is an important connection between Diane Ravitch and the Sherwood Foundation. Ravitch can hold Nebraska up as a bastion of no choice, and Stand for Schools and other Sherwood nonprofits can get national attention from Diane Ravitch. This national attention, including documents like the “Grading the States” report, help Nebraska educators and even some parents to accept the increased government control (think about the forays into early childhood by the Buffett Institute). Everyone enjoys accolades and recognition, especially when it comes from national sources.

Ravitch and the Billionaire Girls Club
Diane Ravitch relentlessly accuses Bill and Melinda Gates and the Walton Family of undermining public education because they donate to all kinds of education options rather than just to traditional public schools. Perhaps these other philanthropists recognize the fact that kids are all different, and what works for one child won’t necessarily work for all of them.

In the same breath, Ravitch is working with billionaires to make sure children are treated as a collective whole instead of as individuals with unique challenges, strengths, and dreams. Based on the latest batch of Nebraska ACT scores, the time to diversify education options in the state is long past due. Will Nebraska legislators prioritize children over billionaires this upcoming session? Time will tell.

In the meantime, parents and concerned citizens should be careful about the people they elect to the unicameral. Are any of the candidates in your district funded by the Sherwood Foundation? Do any of them work for Sherwood-funded nonprofits? It’s also important to hold school board members and school administrators accountable. Watch to see who slavishly retweets propaganda produced by NElovesPS, NPE, NCSA, Open Sky, Nebraska Appleseed, Stand for Schools, and other arms of the billionaire octopus.

We parents and citizens may not have the money to compete with billionaires, but we can vote for freedom and choice and we can hold our lawmakers accountable if they’re loyal to billionaires at our expense.

Catch up on the Series:
Part One: NCSA and Affiliates
Part Two: Elected Officials
Part Three: Activism in the ESUs