Charles Koch’s 2019 Agenda for Privatizing Public Education

The Koch Bros. have been reduced to one in 2019 as David Koch, for health reasons, has formally stepped away from the Koch business empire and its corporate, political, social, and privatization agenda. Now the Koch program is in the hands of his older brother, Charles, who is taking the corporation and its philanthropic outreach in a new direction.

At the first of its biannual meetings last week at an opulent resort in Indian Wells, California, Charles announced that he is “turning away from partisan politics in an effort to focus more on policy priorities that cut across ideologies.” Among Koch’s new emphases will be an escalation of its attacks on public-sector unions and the promotion of for-profit charter schools and charter school organizations designed to further privatize public education. This is a kinder, gentler version of Koch initiatives.

At the three-day meeting, company representatives also went out of their way to praise the work of teachers, acknowledged their strikes and picketing, and promised to push for new investment in teachers, technologies for individualized learning, and increased funding for resources at the classroom level. They also heaped praise on Van Jones, a CNN liberal show host and former Obama administration official, whom they earlier subjected to harsh criticism. Koch-funded groups had worked with him and other liberals on the recent passage of the “First Step Act” on prison and juvenile justice reform that President Trump signed into law last December.

Jones also recorded a video with Koch Industries general counsel, Mark Holden, about their efforts to pass the “First Step Act” in which he criticized the NAACP and the ACLU. He accused them and other liberal organizations of playing politics with the bill, saying it did not go far enough, noting that their primary objection was that they did not want Trump to have a victory.

As a further example of multi-racial comity and connection to the mass African American community, the black NFL Hall of Famer, Deion Sanders, addressed the retreat’s first-time attendees and received a warm embrace from Charles Koch afterwards. Koch has invested heavily in the Urban Specialists pro-privatization of public education group in South Dallas, Texas with whom Sanders is associated.

Also highlighted was criminal justice reform where ex-cons who had been released from prison after serving long terms for non-violent crimes had been hired by members of the Koch network. Instead of engaging in pitched battles with its adversaries, Koch Industries is now aiming to co-opt them with money, shared agendas, and by highlighting issues of concern to them.

What is occurring is a consortium of systematic attempts to convert liberals, moderates, and minorities to support a conservative, right-wing agenda that will lead to the privatization of public entities—especially public education—the deregulation of corporate entities and public safety standards, tax cuts, conservative judicial appointments, the relaxation of occupational licensing requirements, and the acceptance of global warming and the denial of climate change. By using the velvet glove rather than a steel fist, Koch Industries, foundations, and nonprofits are poised to control significant portions of the public sector while maintaining, with its Cartel of corporate allies, a firm grip on influence in the private sector.

Teachers are in many instances unaware of and/or ill-informed about the methodical undermining of their professional lives. Irrespective of the recent successful teachers’ strike in Los Angeles and teachers’ picketing of North Carolina’s Republican-controlled Legislature, there appears to be no overarching strategy for forestalling the advance of the privatization of K-12 public education. Koch groups have targeted five states, not yet revealed, where they will push for government funding of a myriad of school choice alternatives for individuals and organizations.

The target is 16 million public school students, overwhelmingly minority, where the experiments will take place. Koch is also funding state-level politicians to pass legislation to enable high wealth cities and towns in Alabama, North Carolina, and South Carolina to secede from majority-minority school districts and establish what in effect become nearly all-white and upper class charter school districts where minorities are barred due to their economic circumstances, the inability to afford homes or rents in these gentrified enclaves. (This process is happening de facto in other states.)

Koch and his Cartel of super rich education reformers are basically implementing the 1956 southern manifesto, the “Declaration of Constitutional Principles,” which was designed to defy the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education which desegregated the public schools and to mandate continued separation of the races. However, they are doing so without the public acrimony and violence that accompanied it.

Although Charles Koch declined to financially support Trump in 2016 and plans to continue that stance in 2020, he is supportive of most of his policies. Many of the 634 attendees at the conference, who each contributed $100,000 to the Koch project, also contribute to and embrace Trump’s agenda.

But what is even more disconcerting is that many of the most powerful Democratic allies of teachers and public education are supportive in whole or in part of the Koch education agenda even as they publicly profess otherwise. This reality will make 2019 a very interesting year.