Leo Casey at Edwize has a post up this morning about the conflict over charter school expansion in New York state.  He cites some of my work (and has added some wrinkles himself).  I’ve already documented the New York Charter Schools Association’s involvement with the Atlantic Legal Foundation in efforts to train charter school managers in union busting. Atlantic Legal is part of the State Policy Network (SPN), a nationwide group of state-based anti-tax/anti-public service groups.  They promote vouchers, pension privatization, spending limits like TABOR and attacks on unions.

The main New York state branch of SPN is the Foundation for Education Reform and Accountability (FERA-NY). As far as I can tell, its chief tenets are support for tuition tax credits and a hatred of NYSUT.  FERA-NY is the direct successor of the more conventional anti-tax/anti-public spending group Change-NY.  It is led by Tom Carroll, who formerly led Change-NY. FERA-NY’s money comes in large part from foundations associated with Virginia Manheimer and Richard Gilder. Manheimer and Gilder are pillars of the Club for Growth.  When I write about the charter school movement being a vehicle for right wing attacks on public services generally, I have these people and their work to point to.

Why do I bring this up? After all, the New York Charter School Association (NYCSA) is not a part of the SPN and is a distinct organization that supports expansion and improvement of charter schooling. But I want to connect a couple of dots using Guidestar, which is an online service that keeps track of the tax returns of non profit organizations. FERA-NY is located at 4 Chelsea Place, in Clifton, NY. When you type that address into Guidestar (free subscription required) you get both FERA-NY and the NYCSA as hits. It turns out that NYCSA's books are being kept at FERA-NY’s address. Change-NY, the School Choice Scholarship Foundation (a private voucher group), the New York Charter School Resource Center and the Brighter Choice Foundation also come up in the search results. Brighter Choice is associated with the single-sex Brighter Choice charter schools in Albany. Although NYCSA doesn’t receive Manheimer money and FERA-NY doesn’t receive Walton money, all of the groups in this cluster receive money from some combination of foundations associated with Gilder, Manheimer and the Walton family.

We don’t know what the exact relationship is among these groups, but when the Charter School Association's books are housed at Change-NY headquarters, my eyebrows go up, particularly when those books show they are funded mostly by the right. There is also a lot of cross pollination between boards of directors and staff, similar missions and common funders of these groups.  To what extent is the NYCSA an extension of the anti-tax/anti-union infrastructure of the right-wing in New York state? I have some guesses. Take Peter Murphy for example. Prior to coming to NYCSA, he was an officer of the New ork Charter School Resource Center, which has transferred funds to FERA-NY. It’s a little bit like the Kevin Bacon game, but for right-wing nuts. (What’s your Richard Gilder number?).

And when I read this sort of article, that quotes representatives from both FERA-NY and NYCSA as if there is no relationship, I don’t know what to make of it.  Given that New York Sun publisher Roger Hertog is a board member of the School Choice Scholarship Foundation, which is part of this cluster of folks, I’m left with some questions about this sort of thing as well. I mean couldn't Tom Carroll just get his own blog and cut out the middlemen?