All across America we are seeing a push for school choice for parents to have an alternative option from traditional failing Public Schools to provide a better education for their kids. Texas currently has over 800+ Charter Schools and is currently ranked #2 in the US for most charter schools behind California with 1,200+ Charter Schools.
The largest charter school network in the state of Texas is IDEA Public Schools. Proponents of charters say they are an alternative to traditional public schools, often with smaller class sizes that can benefit economically disadvantaged or at-risk students. Who would argue against that?
Given that Texas has a wide variety of Charter Schools to pick from you have this false premise of choice. Let’s take a step back to understand what I mean by that to get a full overview picture and to take a peek behind the curtain.
The fastest-growing Charter Schools in Texas are IDEA Public School, KIPP, Yes Prep, and Austin Achieve. These four charter schools have one thing in common. Each Charter founder is a graduate of Teach For America. For those of you who are unaware of Teach For America organization, it is a “non-profit” founded by Wendy Kopp whose stated mission is to "enlist, develop, and mobilize as many as possible of our nation's most promising future leaders to grow and strengthen the movement for educational equity and excellence.”
Wendy also Founded Teach For All which has enlisted over 14,000+ teachers across 60 countries around the world. In 2003 Wendy Kopp became a Schwab Fellow, which is the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship in Partnership with the World Economic Forum
In October 2022 the World Economic Forum started actively recruiting organizations to adopt their Education 4.0 Alliance through K-12 Schools to “Reimagine Education” or “Reskilling Revolution.”
Education 4.0 Framework is built around teaching Global Citizenship (No Borders, Disinformation), Interpersonal Skills (Social & Emotional Learning), Technology Skills (Digital ID, Programming, Digital Responsibility), and Innovation & creativity skills (STEM/DEI).
Wendy Kopp is married to Richard Barth who was appointed CEO of KIPP Foundation in 2005 where he grew it from 45 schools to 270 and from 8,000 to over 110,000 students. He also secured partnerships with over 100 colleges and universities. Richard is one of the founding staff members of Teach For America and was named a Schwab Fellow in 2014.
One of the Co-Founders of KIPP Charter Schools and Teach for America Alum is Dave Levin. Dave has also co-founded Zearn & Together Education which is now nXu (Nexus).
Zearn is a common-core math software platform used in 1 in 4 elementary schools. The CEO, CPO, CMO & CBO of Zearn were all previous employees of Bain & Company which has been a strategic partner for the World Economic Forum for the last 20 years.
Zearn hosts all its data on servers owned by Heroku Enterprise a subsidiary of Salesforce. In 2022 Salesforce partnered with Facebook back dooring their way into the student database. In 2021 Mark Zuckerberg donated $1,800,000 to Data Quality Campaign that has been fighting for over a decade to lift the ban on the national student database which has been primarily funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation totaling over $34,000,000 since 2003 and Jeb Bush’s advocacy group Chiefs for Change since 2013 with an unknown amount donated.
In 2020 Chiefs for Change donated $2,457,500 to Mckinsey & Company a consulting firm that has been a “Knowledge Partner” for the World Economic Forum since 2013. The founder of the Data Quality Campaign, Aimee Rogstad Guidera in December 2021 was appointed Secretary of Education of Virginia by Governor Glenn Youngkin
nXu another company co-founded by Dave Levin focuses on school curriculum around exploring students’ identity, becoming an activist in the community and reinforcing the importance of SEL “Social & Emotional Learning” has a staff of 9 where 5 of the employees are connected to Teach For America along with all 5 of their leadership team members.
Aylon Samouha & Jeff Wetzler are two of the leadership team members for nXu who are responsible for nXu’s development also founded Transcend Education which is directly partnered with nXu. Transcend is focused on catalyzing systemic change within our education system.
Transcend is partnered with Teach for America, Texas Education Agency, The School Superintendents Association, countless Texas School Districts, and Charter Schools.
Transcend Top donors are Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation for $1,865,000 and The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative for $4,505,000. The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative was also the primary benefactor behind Panorama Education software that was pushing Critical Race Theory, Gender Theory & Transformative SEL in schools and was also collecting social and emotional data from students in grades K to 12. Panorama Education was founded by Xan Tanner who is married to Merrick Garland’s daughter. Parents who protested Panorama Education were labeled as Domestic Terrorists.
Though you may not like your public schools there is a benefit of being able to vote out school board members to make changes, unlike Charter Schools who controlled from the top down.