None of the Above by Shani Robinson & Anna Simonton

Author:Shani Robinson & Anna Simonton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Beacon Press

As the fabric of APS frayed, education profiteers descended on the city, perhaps sensing opportunity in the mistrust much of the public now felt toward the public school system. That November, while the Garrity hearings were underway, Atlantans were tasked with electing new school board members for the first time since the cheating scandal broke. Unlike any local election in the city before it, this school board race became a feeding frenzy for investors and education reform advocates from across the country who swooped in to stack the board with their preferred candidates.

Alumni of Teach for America were running for four of the nine seats on the school board. In 2008, shortly after I joined their teacher training boot camp, TFA spawned an offshoot called Leadership for Educational Equality (LEE) to help corps members get elected to public office once they completed two years in the classroom. It was part of TFA founder Wendy Kopp’s original vision that people in powerful positions would have the experience of teaching at impoverished schools, making them more likely to enact policies and decisions that benefited those schools. But TFA alumni brought more than their classroom experience to these positions; they were imbued with an ideology about education reform that favored corporate interests. Even if TFA alumni like me questioned parts of the organization’s philosophy, LEE brought them further into the sphere of corporate influence.

At the time of the 2013 Atlanta school board race, TFA’s board included people like Arthur Rock, a California venture capitalist and partner in Rocketship Education, a for-profit charter school chain that relies heavily on computer-based instruction and unsalaried classroom aides instead of traditional teachers. Greg Penner, a member of the Walton (Walmart) family, was on the board too, and so was Joel Klein, former chancellor of New York City public schools, who oversaw an era of rampant charter school proliferation before departing to the private sector to head an education technology company that produced tablets for K–12 schools. All three donated thousands of dollars to the four TFA candidates running for the Atlanta school board. So did numerous other hedge fund managers, investors, and CEOs of major corporations based in New York and California, people with no connection to Atlanta Public Schools other than the TFA and LEE network.13

Altogether, the TFA candidates were able to raise far more than their opponents. One ran unopposed and still racked up nearly $37,000, which was more than that accrued by any of the candidates squaring off against the other three TFA alumni. Courtney English, who was in my TFA cohort, raised over $100,000, outgunning everyone in the race except for Mark Riley, the former school board member and Cousins-affiliated developer who was attempting a comeback. English had gone straight from teaching to running for the school board in 2009 and was now up for reelection. If he realized that one of his fellow corps members was standing trial in the cheating scandal, he never mentioned it.14

The unusual level of outside spending made

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