Adding to the irony, a 2012 recipient of Students First funding has sponsored fliers touting Fatimah Muhammad's liberal credentials and her willingness to challenge Governor Tom Corbett's "War on Women."  Daniel Denvir wrote in the Philadelphia City Paper,

"This is politics at its most cynical: major funders of the pro-choice, pro-Muhammad ad are anti-abortion Republican extremists."

If you follow the money trail, it shows that Students First has been funded solely by American Federation for Children in 2012.

Gov. Corbett was the keynote speaker at the American Federation for Children's national conference last year. (I was outside with protesters from Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and D.C.) Betsy Prince DeVos' family and that of her husband Dick DeVos, have been leading funders of Focus on Family, Family Research Council, Crisis Pregnancy Centers, Proposition Eight, and other anti-abortion and anti-gay rights organizations.

The surprisingly small core group of funders of American Federation for Children that I've been able to track are generally ultra-wealthy and ultra-conservative, along with a few anti-public education libertarians and school privatization investors. The Black Alliance for Educational Options (BAEO), which has been the core entity for promoting vouchers to African American Democrats over the last decade, was founded with money from the Bradley Foundation and Walton family (Walmart heirs), both significant sources of funding anti-reproductive rights and other right-wing causes.

The Fatimah Muhammad Campaign

American Federation for Children is the sole contributor to Pennsylvania's Students First PAC in its 2012 campaign finance reports, providing 1.25 million in funding. I have been able to track  the individual donors of much of the 2010 and 2011 funding of American Federation for Children PACs, but not the sources of this 1.25 million in 2012. Campaign finance reports show that Students First and its grantees and employees have provided $62,639 dollars of Fatimah Muhammad's total receipts of $76,030 dollars.  See the chart below.  

As reported in the Philadelphia City Paper, the 188th District has been repeatedly blanketed with fliers in support of the 27-year old Muhammad and attacking the 26-year incumbent James Roebuck.  Roebuck is the ranking Democrat on the House Education Committee and an opponent of the proposed  voucher bill that failed to pass in 2011. (See examples of the mailers here and here.) The cost of these mailers is not shown in the above chart, because they were sponsored by the recently formed group Public Education Excellence. The PAC's campaign finance reports are not yet available, but it has been the recipient of at least $7,500.00 from Students First in 2012.  

Public Education Excellence is led by Joy Herbert, reported as follows in the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Herbert said she believed her group received funding from American Federation for Children in Washington and Students First PA, two proponents for school vouchers with political connections to Williams.

"Williams" in the quote is State Sen. Anthony H. Williams, sponsor of the school voucher bill and to date the largest beneficiary of campaign support from Students First. Much of that money was donated by three members of the same Pennsylvania investment firm.

These three mega-donors also gave additional funds directly to American Federation for Children in 2010 and 2011, and smaller amounts ($6,000 each) to the campaign of Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker. The three are members in the right-wing organizations at the forefront of privatization of schools:  Arthur Dantchik, on the board of Institute for Justice; Joel Greenberg, on the board of American Federation for Children; and Jeffrey Yass, on the board of the Cato Institute.  

The trio of Pennsylvanians continued to give money in 2011, including to Make a Difference PAC and to the Indiana American Federation for Children PAC.

Fatimah Muhammad's campaign also shows debts to Barbara Chavous for "Advance to Campaign" and "Direct Mail."  As reported in the Philadelphia City Paper, Barbara Chavous is the mother of Dawn Chavous, the Executive Director of Students First. Students first has contributed $216,000 dollars to Make a Difference PAC, which paid Barbara Chavous $5,500 dollars in consulting fees monthly in February, March, and April of 2012.  

Dawn Chavous married a member of the Philadelphia City Council, Kenyetta Johnson, in January of this year.  Both she and her husband are former employees of Sen. Williams.  

In addition to the list shown in the chart, Students First's 2012 reports also show a $350,000 dollar contribution to  Citizens Alliance for Pennsylvania and the following contributions:

Commonsense 4 the Commonwealth  60,000.00
Grass Roots Urban Political Alliance  20,000.00
Believe Again  $11,500.00
For a Better PA  $25,000.00
Citizens Networking 4 Progress  $8,000.00

The proliferation of American Federation of Children money through Students First and a growing array of smaller entities funded by Students First, provides the appearance of an extensive grass roots movement.

Pennsylvania Privatization Attempts

The effort to privatize Pennsylvania's education system is not new.

The Pennsylvania partner of Focus on Family and Family Research Council, Pennsylvania Family Institute, began courting African American Democratic state legislators to join forces with the school privatization movement in the late 1990s.  The "stealthy" effort is described by Hubert Morken, a biographer of Pat Robertson and former Regent University government professor, who details the early success of the movement in Pennsylvania during the administration of Governor Tom Ridge (1995 - 2001) in recruiting state legislators Dwight Evans and Anthony Williams.  A brief summary on the privatization efforts and the role of Rev. Floyd Flake and Edison Schools, Inc. in Pennsylvania follows in the last section of this article.

Today Pennsylvania has the second largest "private school choice" program in the nation, with millions of state tax dollars diverted to private and religious schools through the Education Improvement Tax Credit or EITC.  The EITC diverts taxes owed to the state to programs including schools using Protestant fundamentalist textbook series that teach creationism, demean other religions, and attack gay rights. (Also see video on the teaching of creationism in Pennsylvania by schools receiving EITC funding.)

The private school choice movement, as they call themselves, is a remarkably centralized effort, financed by a small group of wealthy individuals and foundations. Betsy  DeVos chairs the American Federation for Children, the group of national pro-school privatization umbrella organizations behind the funding and support of over 30 different state-level nonprofits, and funding source for state Political Action Committees (PACs) around the country.

The 2010 Pennsylvania Campaign

In Pennsylvania, a multi-million dollar astroturf campaign was launched in the 2010 election cycle through Students First PAC, the affiliate of American Federation for Children. The PAC shares its name with Michelle Rhee's organization instead of its parent organization, one of many apparent efforts to camouflage the source of the campaign. Chairman Joe Watson bio on the Students First website fails to inform readers that he was an advisor to Pres. George W. Bush or of his role in a Citizens United advertisement attacking presidential candidate Barack Obama.

Students First poured over six million dollars into the 2010 campaign cycle, much of it to the Democratic gubernatorial campaign of Sen. Williams, who had little chance of winning the primary. In 2011, Williams sponsored a school voucher bill, SB-1. The legislation has thus far failed to pass in the Pennsylvania House, but the effort continues.  For more on the movement's 2010 activities in Pennsylvania, see the first in a series of Talk2action.org articles on school vouchers.  Another center of funding in 2010 was the American Federation for Children PAC in Indiana, which disbursed funds to political campaigns in five other states.

Recruiting Democrats in Pennsylvania

In his books and speeches, Hubert Morken, a "school choice" promoter, reveals much of the process through which African American Democrats were recruited into a movement initiated by white, conservative Republicans. Leading the way in Pennsylvania were Dwight Evans and Anthony Williams, in partnership with the Religious Right and "free market" think tanks.

Morken gave a speech in 1999 including the following,

Also, in Harrisburg, the Commonwealth Foundation, a free-market think tank, and the Pennsylvania Family Institute, associated with Focus on the Family and Family Research Council, have close ties with the Pennsylvania Catholic Conference on education issues. The REACH (the Road to Educational Achievement through Choice) Alliance is a clearinghouse and public face for this coalition. Recently, these supporters of school choice formed ties to black legislators based in Philadelphia, including Dwight Evans. This was big news for the Pennsylvania education reform movement because Evans is a powerful legislator and community leader."

Pennsylvania's REACH Alliance, the organization described in Morken's speech has been funded with more than $450,000 dollars from American Federation for Children (previously Advocates for School Choice) and its partner entity Alliance for School Choice. REACH includes a who's who of the Religious Right in Pennsylvania, including the  associate director of the Association of Christian Schools International, the organization which fought the University of California School system over their refusal to provide credit to creationist other coursework taught by member schools.  

The Commonwealth Foundation referenced by Morken is a Scaife Foundation-funded entity.  Richard Mellon Scaife was credited by the late Paul Weyrich as one of the primary facilitators of the partnership between the political and Religious Right to form the "New Right."  Weyrich founded or co-founded the Moral Majority, Heritage Foundation, Free Congress Foundation, Council for National Policy, and American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).  In the words of Richard DeVos, Betsy DeVos' father-in-law, the partnership brought together the donors with the doers.

Morken credits much of the success in accessing Democratic African American communities to the Religious Right's partnership with New York's Rev. Floyd Flake, a former member of the Black Congressional Caucus in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Morken wrote in 2001,

"In addition, while falling short of a full endorsement, the Reverend Flake ostensibly threw some of his support behind the Republican Governor George Bush of Texas for U.S. president.  At an autumn 1999 campaign speech by Bush at the Manhattan Institute, the Reverend Flake introduced the governor as his 'home boy' or compatriot in the politics to change public education in the United States."

In 2000, Flake became the head of the charter schools division of Edison Schools, Inc., at that time the largest for-profit school management in the country.  Morken describes Flake identifying new markets for Edison services and promotion of charter schools.

Morken quotes Flake, saying that Flake "admitted,"

"I was on the phone Thursday with Tom Ridge, who is the governor of Pennsylvania, who worked with me in Congress, where they are taking over the schools and may be taking over the Philadelphia schools.  So I'll be meeting with [Philadelphia] Mayor Street on Wednesday morning.  I've already had telephone conversations with the secretary of state of New Jersey where they are taking over the schools in Camden and Jersey City.  I'm all over the country right now."

Edison did indeed take over some of the Philadelphia public schools.

In 1998, the struggling School District of Philadelphia sued the state for inadequate funding, but the state struck back by taking over the school system and turned management of 38 schools over to private management, including 20 to Edison. [Correction 4/23/12: Article originally stated 45. This was reduced by the time the plan was enacted.]  

As might be expected, there was a huge contrast in how the takeover was viewed, ranging from the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) coverage at one end of the spectrum, to the Heartland Institute at the other. The former emphasized the state's drop in funding since 1975, from providing 55 percent of total funding to schools statewide to 36 percent. The article described Philadelphia as lagging far behind other school districts with larger property tax revenues, and as an example of serious inequity in school funding.   The Heartland Institute, meanwhile, celebrated the damage that would be done to the state's teachers unions and repeatedly quoted Dwight Evans and the leadership of the Commonwealth Foundation.  

The takeover was contested in court by members of the Philadelphia City Council, several state legislators including James Roebuck, and organizations including the NAACP.

Touted as the salvation of failing public schools, Edison's disastrous experiment in management of public schools began to unravel within a few years. By In 2003, after hundreds of  millions in losses, Edison was bailed out by the state of Florida under the administration of Gov. Jeb Bush.  In a cruel irony, the publicly traded company was saved by a buyout of the stock by the Florida's employee pension fund. As described by PFAW, objections from Florida teachers' unions to the risky investment were condemned by Bush as "making decisions based on politics."

Morken described in his 2001 book how Floyd Flake aggressively promote the expansion of charter schools by exploiting fears of school vouchers.  He was aided in this effort by neo-conservative leaders like William Bennett, and financiers of the effort including John Walton, one of the Walton heirs. An extensive report by PFAW describes the role of the Waltons and the Bradley Foundation in the founding of the BAEO, as well as the role of Floyd Flake.

Morken wrote,

... the Reverend Flake focused his appeals on a core group of swing voters in the state legislature.  In particular, he targeted the black and Latino caucuses, comprised of Democrats from the Assembly and the Senate.

...Generally, black and Latino legislators opposed charter schools as a Republican attempt to decrease public investment in public schools and a step toward legalization of vouchers.

...Knowing that most black and Latino legislators were Christians and relied on the backing of Afro-Christian churches for their electoral success, the Reverned Flake made a case to them for charter schools, sometimes even in the pulpits of their churches, by incorporating Scripture and references to the Gospels.

Morken describes Floyd Flake in 1999  as being chosen in a poll as the single most influential figure in the country who could move "school choice" to the national stage. Flake was listed ahead of other significant leaders at that time including Howard Fuller of the Institute for the Transformation of Learning (also funded by the Bradley Foundation and Waltons), William Bennett, and Clint Bolick of the Institute for Justice. Bolick is also the former president of Alliance for School Choice.

Pennsylvania began removing some of the Philadelphia schools from private management by 2008. A Washington Post article at that time described the failure,

"Longtime opponents of the privatization plan immediately said the decision showed that the experiment of turning schools over to private managers and market forces -- an idea popular with pro-school-choice Republicans and pushed at the time President Bush was taking office in Washington -- had run its course."

But the privatization juggernaut lived on, and today has gone to great lengths to disguise its roots.

In the decade since Morken wrote his books on the "school choice" movement, hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent in the pro-privatization efforts, some of it by free market fundamentalists who are apparently willing to accept the price of partnership with the Religious Right in the shared goal of privatizing the nation's school systems.  The movement has been generally successful at hiding its right-wing core and presenting itself as a non-partisan grass roots effort. It's even succeeded in repackaging an effort to drain the funds from public education as the "next civil rights movement" for urban minority students.

Ironically, the state's American Federation for Children affiliate has now chosen to support a gay, Muslim woman, who would be the first openly gay or Muslim member of the Pennsylvania House.  The pro-privatization movement is apparently willing to think long term and make sacrifices along the way in their efforts to dismantle public education and to choose candidates that will be difficult for progressives to oppose.  No doubt they assume that the privatization of education in America and the diversion of public funds to religious schools, will eventually eliminate the competition on all the other issues.

For a summary of the other articles written in the series on the school privatization movement, see http://www.talk2action.org/story/2012/2/14/124357/574.