Who's Bankrolling Vouchers?

The truth behind vouchers:

There are some very powerful individuals and organizations bankrolling the voucher movement in America - and in New Jersey. They publicly say they only want to provide choices for parents, but their real motives range from the desire to profit from publicly funded vouchers to the outright elimination of public education. Here are just a few.

• Wal-Mart heir John Walton is the movement's most prolific giver. His Walton Family Foundation gives $500,000 a year to E3, the Newark-based pro-voucher organization. He gave $2 million to Michigan's 2000 voucher ballot initiative and bankrolls a massive private voucher program along with financier Ted Forstmann. In 1999, the Wall Street Journal reported that Walton and Forstmann already had a business plan in place to create a chain of private, for-profit schools to capitalize on publicly funded vouchers. He also runs a charter school management company. The Walton Family Foundation supports advocacy groups, think tanks, and legal nonprofits that promote vouchers and tax credits.
• Financier Ted Forstmann recently funded a multimillion-dollar ad campaign attacking public education. He wants to scrap public schools in favor of an ATM-like system that would dispense taxpayer-funded vouchers for tuition at schools run by anyone who wanted to start one.
• The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation in Milwaukee- a staunch, right-wing free-market foundation - supports a broad spectrum of pro-voucher efforts. Bradley money supports Milwaukee's privately funded voucher program, Harvard pro-voucher researcher Paul Peterson, and the Institute for Justice, a pro-voucher legal defense group that argued the Cleveland voucher case before the U.S. Supreme Court. Bradley also paid Charles Murray $1 million to write The Bell Curve, the controversial 1994 book that argued that African-Americans were genetically inferior, and incapable of learning at high levels.
• Richard Mellon Scaife exerts his financial reach through four family foundations which provide core support for think tanks and advocacy groups, private organizations that offer vouchers, and public interest law firms that promote vouchers and tuition tax credits.

NJEA Voucher Task Force, August 2003
_{SOURCE: Rethinking Schools, Fall 2001}