Wal-Mart The Beneficient?

Over at The Quick and The Ed, Kevin Carey is defending an Education Sector puff piece on the educational giving of the Walton Family Foundation of Wal-Mart fame, “Big Box: How the Heirs of the Wal-Mart Fortune Have Fueled the Charter School Movement.”

It seems that the AFT’s Ed Muir upset Kevin by suggesting that Wal-Mart’s “philanthropy” in the educational sphere might actually have something to do with its political and economic agenda, that there might be some connection between its relentless advocacy of the most extreme anti-union, anti-public sector, and laissez-faire market policies, on the one hand, and its foundation’s support of organizations promoting educational vouchers, educational privatization, charter schools and anti-union “right to work” legislation, on the other hand.

“It’s perfectly reasonable to wonder if Walton Family Foundation is pursuing an anti-union agenda through its philanthropic activities,” Kevin allows. But apparently ‘wonder’ is all one is allowed to do, and don’t spend too much time in thought either. For a sentence later Kevin tell us that he finds “the idea that [Wal-Mart's educational philanthropy] is all just a stealth anti-union campaign to be ludricous and unserious.” To suggest otherwise, he goes on, is to commit philosophical crimes against empiricism, and to indulge in psychological sins of narcissism: in one brief post, the AFT’s Muir seems to have offended intellectual thought from Locke to Freud, if Kevin is to be our guide.

Teachers, unionists, and public school advocates were born, Kevin. It just wasn’t yesterday.

We understand that the charter movement is a politically heterogeneous movement, and that broadly speaking, it contains progressives who are supportive of teacher voice and open to working with teacher unions, as well as reactionaries who are involved with charters for the express purpose of undermining public schooling and teacher unionism — including those who would drop charter schools for vouchers in a flash if they saw more of an opportunity to win vouchers. That is why the UFT distinguishes between the two currents, and why we have joined with the progressives, who remain true to the vision of charter schools Al Shanker originally developed, in starting our own charter schools. It is also why we do not shirk from opposing the reactionaries in the charter school movement who are self-avowed foes of public schools and their teachers. There is a battle to be fought for the hearts and minds of the charter school movement, and we intend to be part of that fight.

We also know where the Walton Family Foundation stands in that fight. That is no more an open question than where we stand in that fight. It simply begs credulity to suggest otherwise.

We will limit ourselves here to a few examples that come straight out of the Education Sector report, although the context that would give them meaning there is generally missing. [Edwize has written on Wal-Mart before, so we will spare our readers the full nine yards of the record of this "educational giver" on such issues as its repeated violations of child labor laws in the US.] The Waltons and their foundation have supported political campaigns on behalf of voucher legislation and expansion in Washington DC, Milwaukee, and Michigan, to cite the most well-known cases. John Walton gave $50 million to a privately-financed voucher fund he put together with Wall Street financier Theodore Forstmann. The Walton Family Foundation provides support for organizations which have been the most strident advocates of educational privatization, from Jeannie Allen’s Center for for Educational Reform to Howard Fuller’s Black Alliance for Educational Options.

There are, however, a few questions that are worth pondering:

Why did Education Sector feel it important to produce this apology for Wal-Mart?

What does a charter school do to its integrity when it takes Wal-Mart’s blood money?

Tagged: Wal-Mart