Dear Commons Community,

Following on the heels of one school district on Long Island,  more than 20 districts in the Lower Hudson Valley have pulled out of New York’s participation in the federal Race to the Top initiative, hoping that doing so will allow them to withhold certain data. As reported in The Journal News:

“Since the state has said that this strategy will not work, districts are now writing to inBloom directly and requesting that their student records be deleted.  Local superintendents adopted a document Friday outlining their concerns, including a model letter to inBloom stating that the company’s contract with New York state allows districts to request that their data be erased. If inBloom is unwilling to do so, the letter says, “you should immediately notify us so that we can consider next steps.”

inBloom is the corporation funded by the Gates Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation ($100 million from Gates) to collect personal, identifiable student data. The software was created by Wireless Generation, part of Joel Klein’s Amplify, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation. The data will be stored on a “cloud” managed by amazon.com.”

The New York State Department of Education appears to be in deep trouble trying to stem a growing rebellion by parents and school districts against its reform policies.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

A recent million-dollar settlement in California has stripped back the curtain on how “dark money” is secretly moved in and around electoral politics. Documents and interviews revealed how networks of nonprofits passed dark money — that is, money whose source is not disclosed to the public — from one to another to another to further obscure the original sources. As reported in The Huffington Post:

“Examples of similar financial transfers uncovered by The Huffington Post, in addition to a host of examples reported by the Center for Responsive Politics and NPR, demonstrate that the California case is no isolated incident.

Networks of nonprofits are being created across the country, at the national and state levels, to secretly fund candidate and ballot initiative campaigns, according to tax documents and campaign records accessed through Guidestar, CitizenAudit.org and the National Institute for Money in State Politics. Their tactics are similar to the schemes adopted by the global rich to hide their wealth — except instead of avoiding tax collecting authorities, they’re trying to skirt disclosure laws.

The best known of these networks are those tied to the billionaire Koch brothers. Linking the groups together are two dark money hubs: the Center to Protect Patient Rights, which doled out as much as $182.2 million to other dark money groups from 2010 through 2012, and Freedom Partners, which gave $236 million to other dark money groups, including $115 million to the Center to Protect Patient Rights.”

But dark money networks have also grown at the state level. They played a notable role in the clashes over labor rights in Wisconsin and Ohio in 2011. One of the more troubling examples provided in the article related to Idaho Secretary of State Ben Ysura (R) who forced Education Voters of Idaho to reveal the funders behind its efforts to pass a ballot initiative gutting collective bargaining rights for teachers. A court required the group to disclose its donors, which included New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Wyoming investor Foster Friess. The Republican Governors Public Policy Committee also contributed $50,000.

Big money, big influence, dark results for the American people.   Democracy at its worst!

Tony