Former Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction, and longtime Bush education advisor, Lisa Graham Keegan, is currently rounding up Arizona lawmakers to join her at the 2015 8th Annual National Summit on Education Reform, in Colorado this October. It appears that a bounty has been placed on lawmakers’ heads and the reward is a scholarship to Jeb Bush’s Foundation for Excellence in Education annual event.
In an email to Graham Keegan, Tom Greene, the Foundation’s Regional Advocacy Director for Western States reveals the deal:
From: “Tom Greene (Tom@Excelined.org)” <Tom@excelined.org>
Date: July 23, 2015 at 4:37:31 PM MST
To: Lisa Graham Keegan <lgkeegan@aol.com>
Subject: FW: Join us for the 2015 National Summit on Education Reform in DenverHi Lisa –
I am writing to share a scholarship opportunity for our National Summit in Denver, CO this October. You can find the details around participation below.
Our goal is to ensure all interested elected officials in Arizona receive scholarship invitations for our 2015 National Summit on Education Reform, and we would like your help. We will offer your group one scholarship for every three new scholarship-eligible people recruited to attend.
To be eligible for a scholarship, the recruited person must be: state-level only, elected or appointed policymaker involved in policy in 2015 (includes DOE high-level staff, including legislative leadership staff & the governor’s office as well).
The following event invitation link is exclusive to A for Arizona: http://www.eventbrite.com/e/2015-national-summit-on-education-reform-scholarship-application-registration-17738531425?aff=AArizona (this has been hyperlinked in the below included invitation’s “Apply Now” link).
For every three scholarship-eligible people who register using your link, we will send you a “promo” code good for one scholarship for a member of A for Arizona.
Please let me know if you have any questions.
All the Best,
-Tom
Graham Keegan, a strident Common Core promoter, has served several governors including Bush, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Chris Christie, Jan Brewer, and currently advises Arizona’s Governor Doug Ducey. She also served former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, and acted as a senior policy advisor on education for Senator John McCain in his failed presidential bids.
Graham Keegan raised eyebrows during Arizona’s 2015 regular legislative session, when she told state senators that of they passed HB2190; a Common Core repeal and replace bill, Arizona educators would be prevented from using phonics as a teaching tool. Despite her bizarre testimony, she and her chambers-of-commerce team managed to kill the bill at the last minute.
Graham Keegan heads up A for Arizona, an initiative led by the Arizona Chamber Foundation in partnership with the Arizona Chamber of Commerce. A for Arizona is focused on ensuring that Common Core is safe and secure in Arizona’s classrooms. Common Core, otherwise known as Arizona’s College and Career Ready Standards is designed to turn classrooms into corporations’ human resources departments and thereby decrease their overhead.
According to an article in the Washington Post, Bush’s “foundation has forged an unusual role mixing politics and policy — drafting legislation and paying travel expenses for state officials, lobbying lawmakers, and connecting public officials with industry executives seeking government contracts.” As Lyndsey Layton notes in her article, the foundation “has been criticized as a backdoor vehicle for major corporations to urge state officials to adopt policies that would enrich the companies.”
Those policies include a heavy emphasis on computer hardware an software sales for “digital learning” in the classroom. While the foundation’s chief executive, Patricia Levesque, told Layton that the group only promotes policies and is “neutral on the providers,” the sponsors of the summit include online learning product companies. Pearson, Amplify, Intel, Edgenuity, and Renaissance Learning are among the Summit’s underwriters.
Neither Graham Keegan nor Green responded to our emails requesting information about the scholarship offer.
Kisten Lombard, founder of Resounding Books and education activist summed up the bounty program: “The recruitment efforts that the Foundation for Excellence in Education (FEE) has been pushing in Arizona–and undoubtedly across the nation–to ensure the attendance of high-level elected and appointed state officials at its 2015 conference on education reform is, sadly, illustrative of how the voice, will, and proper authority of the citizenry is repeatedly undermined in the political process. Such efforts occur in all sorts of policy areas, but there is certainly no shortage of time and money being invested to co-opt educational policy. While unsurprising, these efforts deeply undermine true representative government. Policy conferences, such as the one FEE holds annually, are essentially well-financed marketing campaigns targeted to public officials. They necessarily present such officials with a one-sided and highly slanted view of key ‘problems.’ The perspective provided always sounds reasonable, but on close examination, it neatly suits the agenda of those doing the marketing, while frequently failing to align to the needs of the official’s actual constituency or the citizenry overall. Once the hook has been baited with a slanted framing of the ‘problem,’ a ready-made ‘solution’ is subsequently presented. Uneducated officials invited to such events all too often swallow this marketing whole. It’s little more than lobbying outside of the state house. Unfortunately, dressed up as a conference, it looks to many like an opportunity for honest and serious policy consideration. Legislators and other state officials would do well to steer clear of these kinds of events and get their information elsewhere if they wish to maintain their credibility.”
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