Tag Archives: Georgia Family Council

Propaganda for charter school amendment 1 paid for by out-of-state donors

Who can afford to pay for these two glossy mailers pushing
the charter school amendment?
Who are GeorgiaHope2012.org and BrighterGeorgia.org, anyway?
Recipients of millions from Alice Walton and the Walton Family Foundation
to push a bill sponsored in the statehouse by ALEC’s “our state legislators”.
Will we believe Alice Walton and ALEC, or will we believe
our Georgia educators, who overwhelmingly

oppose Amendment 1?


Two glossy mailers pushing the charter school amendment

GeorgiaHope2012.org’s mailer (the big one) says in really light grey type:

Paid for by Families for Better Public Schools Edward Lindsey Chairman

We’ve heard of them before.
They raised

$486,750 by September, about 96% from outside Georgia,
including Alice Walton ($250,000),
K12 Inc. of Virginia ($100,000),
Charter Schools USA of Florida ($50,000),
J.C. Huizenga and National Heritage Academies Inc. of Michigan ($25,000 each).
Their spokesman Bert Brantley (who went to Lowndes County public schools)
claims

the bogus preamble
to the charter school amendment,
the one that uses ALEC
Family Trigger jargon
and asserts things that just aren’t in either of the authorizing bills;
he claims that preamble

is “factual”.
His previous PR campaign was pushing the T-SPLOST transportation tax
that failed by a landslide.

Families for Better Public Schools
is still playing the

charter school bait and switch in their mailer
by pretending Amendment 1 is needed for charter schools:


EVERY CHILD DESERVES A CHANCE!
VOTE YES!
for Public Charter Schools on November 6th.

We don’t need this amendment to create charter schools.
Any local school board can already do that.

BrighterGeorgia.org’s mailer (the smaller one)
says in grey on grey type:

Paid for by Georgia Charter Schools Association

GCSA got $700,000 from the Walton Family Foundation last year,
and is a member of

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Support plummeting for charter school amendment

Support for the charter school amendment,
previously falling, is now dropping like a rock.
Saba Long wrote the Saporta Report 15 October 2012,

Latest polls show the Charter School Amendment vote will be close,
but the actual poll results, when compared to previous polls,
including those before T-SPLOST lost by a landslide,
say Amendment 1 is going down in flames.


Georgia Charter School Polls 2012-10

That poll conducted 4 and 5 October showed 34.2% saying they would definitely
vote no and 18.06% saying probably no.
That’s 52.26% No, which is far higher than

26.2% only a month before.

The pollsters, HEG-GPS, say,

Re: October 4-5 Charter School Amendment Survey,
15.35% responded Probably Yes and only 9.30% said Definitely Yes.
That’s 24.62% Yes,
far down from the 48.3% Yes of a month before.

Yet only 23.12% responded Unsure,
which is hardly changed from 25.5% a month before.
It sure looks to me like this is not just undecideds switching to No.
It looks like a lot of formerly Yes votes are switching to No.

It looks even worse compared to T-SPLOST.
Two weeks before the 31 July Primary election,

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Walton Family Foundation granted $1.05 million towards GA charter schools in 2011

The total amount of Walton family affiliate money backing the Georgia
charter school referendum is far larger than

Alice Walton’s $250,000.

In the Walton Family Foundation’s list of

2011 Education Reform Grants,
there are two Georgia organizations:


Georgia Charter Schools Association Inc. 700,000
Georgia Family Education and Research Council, Inc. 350,000

GCSA has

made the news quite a bit lately,


and its name makes its purpose pretty clear.
According to

the National Association of Charter School Authorizers (NACSA),
GCSA is a NACSA member.
You remember NACSA,

the organization that Zaid Jilani
discovered was an ALEC member, and that bailed out of
ALEC two days later.
That was in May 2012, after the Georgia legislature
passed the bill putting the charter school referendum on the ballot.

Georgia Family Education and Research Council, Inc. (GFERC)
is slightly less obvious. According

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Support for charter school referendum falling?

A recent poll shows markedly lower support

Georgia Charter School Polls
for the November charter school
referendum than polls in March and July, which were already down from January.
At this rate, the charter school referendum can lose as badly in November
as T-SPLOST did in July.
Maybe people are catching on that diverting local taxes to control by
a state appointed body is a bad idea,
especially this time when the money would end up going to private profit.

Georgia Family Council wrote, presumably in January,

Poll Shows Support for Charter School Changes,

On January 24, the Georgia Charter School Association and My School,
My Choice Georgia held a news conference on Capitol Hill to release
the results of a new study regarding public school choice….

The new numbers showed that 52 percent of voters are dissatisfied
with the public system as it currently stands. A whopping 72 percent
feel that a group other than local school boards should be able to
authorize charter schools, the basis for HB 881. Moreover, Georgia
voters tend to support a “money follows the child” approach to
charter school funding.

So there’s a baseline for January for what proponents
of charter schools claimed: 72% support for something very like
the charter school referendum that ended up on the November ballot.

Or not.
That writeup includes a link to

georgiaschoolchoice.com,
but that domain is no longer registered.
This is probably it over on

the snazzy new gacharters.org website.
The gacharters.org writeup doesn’t mention 72%, and does say:

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