Writing for Truthout, the authors explain how National School Choice Week is a “school privatization PR stunt ” that is a “pet project of the Gleason family and Koch family fortunes.”
The last week of every January, right-wing groups like Charles Koch’s Americans for Prosperity promote “National School Choice Week” (NSCW). Unlike other commemorative national weeks or months — such as Black History Month or Pride Month — NSCW did not emerge from an organic grassroots movement. Though touting a misleading notion of equal access to education, its billionaire-backed policy agenda pulls money away from universal public schools.
National School Choice Week is the pet project of a superrich family, the Gleasons, whose fortune dates back to 1865 when William Gleason created a machine shop to make gears in Rochester, New York. By 1999, the business was valued at $332 million. As of March 2022, a 501(c)(3) private foundation funded by that industrial fortune, the Gleason Family Foundation, had net assets of nearly $140 million on hand. Its primary activity is promoting National School Choice Week.
“School choice,” or efforts to funnel public tax dollars to privately managed alternatives to public schools via vouchers or other means, began as a way for white supremacist parents to avoid the racial integration of schools following the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in 1954 against racial segregation in Brown v. Board of Education. The Gleason family’s charitable foundation is said to have been launched in the 1950s, but publicly available records do not show when it started funding school choice, which appears to be more recent.
In its oldest IRS forms available online, the Gleason Family Foundation reported no income or assets in 2006 and 2007. It was then infused with nearly $170 million in 2008, when it spent $4.8 million on grants, giving nearly a million to groups pushing school privatization, as well as to individual — largely privately managed — schools. It stated then that “most new grants awarded relate to improving public schools.”
Studies show that the school choice policies can increase racial segregation and widen inequality, while generally failing to improve outcomes for students. In contrast to the underserved communities they often target, many of the organizations promoting school privatization schemes are backed by individuals who have vast expendable generational wealth to influence public policy.
At a rare public speech at a gala for the Center for Education Reform, a major beneficiary of the Gleason Foundation, Tracy Gleason explained the mindset of the foundation she is using to inject tens of millions of dollars into glossy PR campaigns: “It’s not enough to be right,” she said, adding, “We actually have to sell the notion of school choice … and bring everyone around to our way of thinking.”
Publicly available records do not indicate if Tracy Gleason attended private prep schools or public schools before enrolling at Princeton University to study French. There is nothing in her job history before her role directing money to groups trying to move money out of public schools that indicates any formal training in education policy or the methods of teaching children with different learning needs or styles.
