The Limits of Free Expression

Heritage Foundation Propagandist Paints Misleading and Partisan Picture of 'School Choice' Debate

POSTED APRIL 23, 2002 --
I doubt that a bigger load of propaganda was ever delivered by the St. Paul, Minnesota Pioneer Press’s op-ed page than "With school choice, every child can win" (March 1, 2002) (http://www.heritage.org/views/2002/ed022502.html), written by the Heritage Foundation’s Jennifer Garrett, and distributed over the Knight Ridder wire.

What Garrett fails to mention is that the real goal of the school choice movement is the breakup one of the last two unionized sectors of US society: Public primary and secondary education, and that most of the school choice movement is led and funded by a small group of wealthy conservative philanthropies. Garrett and her corporate and philanthropic subsidizers would also like to convert to private profit the more than $300 billion that the US spends on public primary and secondary education each year. In short, Garrett paints a highly misleading and partisan picture both of the school choice movement and the “evidence” purporting to show that choice students do better academically. Our website, www.MediaTransparency.org, which tracks the grant making of conservative philanthropies, amply proves these points.

The orchestrator and prime funder of this movement has been the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation of Milwaukee Wisconsin. With assets of over $700 million, the Bradley foundation makes grants of more than $40 million each year, and is obsessed with school choice and school vouchers. It’s no coincidence that the largest voucher “experiment” in the nation is taking place in Bradley’s hometown. In fact, the Bradley foundation and its small group of philanthropic brethren paid for almost every source that positively referenced school choice in Garrett’s column. Her institution, the Heritage Foundation, is the number one recipient of conservative philanthropy money, having received at least $39 million since 1985. It has received $12 million from the Bradley Foundation alone. Howard Fuller, referenced in the article as being from the “Black Alliance for Education Options,” is also funded by the Bradley Foundation, through the Institute for the Transformation of Learning (ITL), which Fuller also heads, at Marquette University. Through the ITL Fuller has received more than $1 million from the Bradley Foundation since 1996. Marquette University itself has received more than $8 million from the Bradley foundation.

Perhaps the most disingenuous aspect of Garrett’s piece was her dressing up of other subsidized conservative movement propagandists in the guise of neutral scientists. The most egregious of these is the propping up of Harvard University professor Paul Peterson’s voucher research. Real scientists have called Peterson’s “research” fraudulent in both intent and execution. When he submitted it for publication in a scholarly journal, it was rejected. In 2000 Peterson’s research on Black children who received scholarships to attend private schools in New York city was quickly repudiated by the very company he had hired to do some of the data collection. And though he is touted as being a professor from Harvard, some of Peterson’s most-cited work was first published in such venerable places as the Wall Street Journal’s op-ed page. He also gets a lot of conservative philanthropy money. Since 1994 Peterson and his program at Harvard have received almost a $1 million from the Bradley and John M. Olin foundations alone.

Another study cited by Garrett was done by the Manhattan Institute, an institution perhaps even more notorious than Heritage. It has received more than $9.3 million from the conservative philanthropies since 1985, and has been the literary home of such right wing giants as the scientific racist Charles Murray, who co-wrote the now-discredited book called “The Bell Curve,” which purported to prove, in “scientific” terms, that Blacks are genetically intellectually inferior to Whites. (Murray is a frequent speaker at the Minneapolis-based Center of the American Experiment – which itself has received at least $276,000 from the conservative philanthropies since 1994). Garrett mentions another Harvard economist, Carolyn Hoxby, who likewise has received at least $82,000 from the Bradley and Olin foundations since 1998. Of course, Garrett never mentions where any of the money behind her movement actually comes from, nor does she mention the fact that all of this is in fact tax-exempt politicking.

The terrible thing about the fog emanating from people like Garrett is that in truth nobody knows how the voucher kids are doing in Milwaukee, this in spite of the program’s rapid growth to include over 10,000 students, and up to $5,553 each – or a possible total of $55 million of public money per year. In the six years since 1996 there has been no evaluation by the state of the academic achievement of voucher students. In Milwaukee a number of voucher schools closed during the academic school year forcing students to switch schools, and a few executives have even gone to jail. In other words, believing that privatizing public education in Milwaukee – or anywhere else, for that matter - has somehow improved kids’ educations really is a matter of faith.

The movement against public schools and public school teachers led by the conservative philanthropies, and participated in by people like Ms Garrett, is also a highly anti-democratic action. Almost every time regular citizens have had the opportunity to vote on vouchers or public school privatization the concept has been resoundingly defeated, most recently in two statewide referenda in California and Michigan in 2000. But the heavy funding provided by the Bradley foundation and other conservative philanthropies guarantees that the attacks upon public education will continue unabated.

Rob Levine, co-editor of www.Cursor.org, tracks the funding of conservative philanthropies at www.MediaTransparency.org.