Koch network poised to scale up efforts to remake K-12 education with a pilot project in five states

Brian Hooks, chairman of the Koch network, and Charles Koch, its main patron, speak to donors Saturday night during the Koch network seminar in Indian Wells, Calif. 

THE BIG IDEA:

INDIAN WELLS, Calif. — The donor network led by billionaire industrialist Charles Koch will launch a new organization next month to focus on changing K-12 education as we know it.

The effort will begin as a pilot project focused on five states with a combined school-age population of 16 million kids, but officials said Monday that they aren’t ready to identify them yet because they’re still finalizing partnerships with some of the country’s leading educational organizations.

The still-unnamed entity purportedly plans to focus on three buckets: changing public policy to address “the root causes” of failing schools, developing new technologies to promote individualized learning, and investing in teachers and classrooms.

The announcement came Monday at the end of a three-day seminarwhere 634 donors who have each committed to contribute at least $100,000 annually to Koch-linked groups gathered under palm trees at a luxury resort in the Coachella Valley.

The Koch team is modeling its amped-up education efforts on its successful overhaul of the criminal justice system, which began in friendly states before moving to the federal level. In that case, Koch World sought out unlikely allies and played the long game for years before any big legislation passed.

In the past, most conversations about education at these twice-annual Koch confabs have quickly turned into bashing teachers unions. So it was notable when Brian Hooks, the chairman of the Koch network, went out of his way to praise teachers and acknowledge that many have been picketing recently.

“For too long, this issue has been framed unnecessarily as us vs. them, public vs. private, teacher vs. student, parent vs. administrator,” Hooks told a ballroom of donors. “The teachers who have expressed frustration in the past several months are good people. I mean, they’re teachers. We all remember the positive impact that a teacher or several teachers have had on our lives. They’re expressing legitimate concerns. But the current approach means that nobody wins, so they need better options.”

Hooks recognizes that many will question their motives, but he said the goal is to “really shake things up” by “coming alongside concerned teachers” to “find a better way.” Teachers union leaders, who are closely aligned with the Democratic Party, have accused the Koch groups of trying to undermine traditional public schools. Koch and his allies say the system is broken and requires wholesale changes. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has been a longtime ally of the network.

“This is a tough one, no doubt,” Hooks said. “It’s a challenge that a whole lot of people look at and say is impossible. But we see a tremendous opportunity to unite people to help ensure that every kid has the opportunity to succeed.”

Philanthropist Stacy Hock of Austin, a major Koch donor who has been funding education efforts at the state level in Texas for years, says that traditional forms of classroom instruction encourage “soul-crushing” conformity, and she has emerged as an outspoken advocate of “personalized learning.”

“Families are getting more and more comfortable with experimenting and taking risks,” she said on the sidelines of the meeting. “Education should be getting way, way better and way, way cheaper, but the opposite is happening.”

Hock said the new Koch initiative, as it ramps up, will identify what’s working at the local level and push for those things to be replicated elsewhere. “What we’re seeing all across the country are little flames,” she said. “What I don’t yet know is how to throw gasoline on all those flames.”

Thousands of teachers march in the rain through Los Angeles earlier this month while striking for smaller class sizes, better school funding formulas and higher teacher pay. 

– The network’s pivot toward education is partly because a personal interest in the subject by Chase Koch, Charles’s 41-year-old son. He is an executive in the family business who has been taking on a more prominent role inside the network his dad began convening in 2003. Chase’s wife, Annie, a neonatal nurse by training, opened a private school in September called Wonder on the campus of Wichita State University. It’s initially for elementary-age children, and the plan is to phase in middle and high school programs. There’s lots of experimentation going on, with the goal of letting children pursue what interests them the most and not follow a strict curriculum.

– Previewing their K-12 push, Koch strategists pointed to research being conducted with their financial support by Ashley Berner at Johns Hopkins University’s Institute for Education Policy. Her main interest is expanding what she calls “educational pluralism,” which is when the government funds all types of schools, including explicitly religious ones, but does not necessarily run them.

“Berner points to examples such as the Netherlands, which funds 36 different types of schools, from Islamic to Jewish Orthodox to socialist,” the Charles Koch Foundation notes in a summary of her work. “Alberta, Canada, funds homeschooling along with Inuit, Jewish, and secular schools. In Australia, the central government is the nation’s top funder of independent schools. Other countries with plural school systems include Denmark, Finland, Germany, and Sweden.”

“It’s the democratic norm around the world. In pluralism, choice and accountability are two sides of the same coin,” said Berner, who wrote a book in 2017 called “Pluralism and American Public Education: No One Way to School.” “We’ve got to start supporting politicians who are willing to make compromises. Americans are tired of the battles between charters and district schools; these take up too much energy and resources. A pluralistic system doesn’t pit entire sectors against one another.”

– Koch will continue to make heavy investments in higher educationas well. The Charles Koch Foundation already provides financial support to more than 350 colleges and universities, which has generated controversy and pushback on many campuses.

John Hardin, the director of university relations for the Koch Foundation, said the network’s investments in education “laid the intellectual foundation” to achieve the public policy changes the donors wanted on criminal justice. For example, the donors helped finance an Academy for Justice conference that convened 120 scholars on criminal justice to talk about their research. “This is how you get it done and change the paradigm,” Hardin told donors during a presentation. “The Academy for Justice is changing the debate.” 

A booklet provided to donors, which outlined some of the network’s major investments, highlighted support for the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, which produces research that is routinely cited by allies in government. “Mercatus scholars are re-shaping the field of regulatory economics and changing the debate over rightsizing the administrative state,” the handbook noted.

– The Koch network is also setting its sights on publishers of pricey textbooks. The foundation, which is part of the network, is supporting OpenStax at Rice University, which produces books that are available for free online to students. Charles Koch put up the money for a series of textbooks about business, including ethics, entrepreneurship, principles of management and organizational behavior. David Harris, the editor in chief of the project, said in an interview that Koch gave his team full editorial independence, that the books are all peer-reviewed and that OpenStax receives financial support from liberal foundations, too, including the one funded by George Soros. About 30 free open-source texts are now available, and more are in the pipeline.

– The goal of all this investment is to change “the trajectory of the country.” Kevin Gentry, a top Koch lieutenant who works for Koch Industries, told donors yesterday that they can have perhaps the greatest impact by focusing on civil society initiatives like these. “Those of you have been coming to these meetings for a long time know we’ve gone through a lot of ups and downs,” he said. “A lot of times we would say, ‘Okay, this was good, but were we really … changing the trajectory of the country?’ … We feel like a couple of years ago we began to turn the corner, but now is the opportunity to scale.”

– One reason the wealthy donors are so amenable to investing so much in education is alarm about the next generation. Recent polling shows younger people have a more favorable impression of socialism than capitalism. “The younger generation is less sympathetic and less understanding of limited government conservatism,” said Art Pope of North Carolina, a fixture of Koch meetings. “They’re more sympathetic or more willing to give not just social justice but outright socialism a chance. … It used to be you didn’t have to have a serious conversation about socialism in American politics. Now you do. So what is the appeal of that? How do you message?”

– Many progressives are dubious and skeptical of the Koch rebranding effort, which I wrote about in yesterday’s Daily 202. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) wrote in: “I’m not convinced by the Koch network’s new charm offensive; nor should your readers be. Until we know how much the Kochs, and the 634 other mega-donors who joined them, are spending on dark-money campaigns to block action on climate change, undermine public unions, confirm obedient judges, and cut their own taxes by billions of dollars, we should view their latest PR effort as more obfuscation. … If Charles Koch’s top goal is ‘uniting with people across the whole spectrum,’ he should unite them around honest facts and science, not deceitful campaigns funded by dark money.”

– While they may still share many of the same goals, especially when it comes to judges and regulations, there is mounting tension between the Koch network and the official GOP apparatus. My colleague Michelle Ye Hee Lee, who covers money in politics and has also been here for the donor meeting, scoops that the data firm aligned with the Republican National Committee does not plan to renew a data-sharing agreement with the Koch network for the 2020 cycle, after years of working in tandem to enrich voter files for GOP campaigns and state parties. Henry Barbour, the chairman of the RNC-backed firm Data Trust, said the split was prompted by the network’s decision not to endorse President Trump for reelection in 2020 or to support Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.) last fall.

“In the past, [the Koch network’s data operation] i360 was a consistent supporter of the Republican and conservative ecosystem, so we have worked with them to help win elections, but that has changed,” Barbour said. “I don’t see a path where we have an agreement with them in the 2020 election cycle.”