The Walton family effort to redesign publicly financed schools in their image — they prefer essentially privatized operations unanswerable to elected school boards and stripped of teacher association representation, preferably with "out-counseling" of difficult students to the remnant real public schools — is familiar by now in Arkansas.

But the Billionaire Boys Club is at work nationally.

That effort gets a rip on this blog in Massachusetts.

You see, here in Massachusetts, the annual occasion on which politicians and advocates for children spend the day bepraising teachers rather than besmirching them just happens to fall right smack in the middle of cap-raising season. For non-excellence lovers: the “cap” is the artificial limit on excellence and innovation that is prohibiting our children from reaching their fullest 21st century workplace skills and prosperity potential. But who among us has the enormous wealth to fund the grassroots movement well-oiled lobbying machine necessary to at last remove the constraints on excellence (and also sneak in a sneaky provision that will force public school districts to hand over “underutilized” property to privately operated charter operators at “rent controlled prices”)? Meet the generous hosts of today’s event, the Waltons: John-Boy, Zeb, Grandma and Olivia Alice, Jim, Rob and Christy. On this special day, we lift our caps to them!

It turns out that Walmart money is paying for virtually every aspect of the campaign to eliminate the cap on charter schools in Massachusetts. Millions in Walmart dough is being steered to the groups that advocate for charter school expansion, finance the construction of new charters, conduct the polls showing growing public support for more charters and place strategic op-eds calling for more charters. Some $2 million of that money, by the way, goes to individual academies of excellence and innovation, like MATCH and Excel, whose students are transformed into junior lobbyists come cap raising season. Breaking news: a new poll finds that support for excellence rises as voters learn more about its excellence.

All the lobby groups and tactics outlined in Massachusetts are fully deployed by Walton money here, including a Walton-financed arm at their wholly owned university in Fayetteville (nominally known as the University of Arkansas) designed to turn out "research" to validate their view of education.

How best to improve schools? The Billionaire Boys Club way, by tearing down real public schools and creating dozens or even hundreds of individual school districts in the form of charter schools, virtual schools and private schools powered by public vouchers? Or the way proposed by the Arkansas Opportunity to Learn Campaign, with key ideas shown in the flyer below. See the whole mailing here.

RELATED SCHOOL REFORM NOTES:

* OUR WAY OR THE HIGHWAY: A story in Tennessee outlines how charter school backers are trying to gut the regulatory law there, as the Waltons and other billionaires are attempting to do in Arkansas. It's about control above all, with quality a secondary issue. From an Education Law Center memo:

The Republican super-majority in the Tennessee legislature introduced legislation to strip away the the power of the school boards in Memphis (Shelby County) and Nashville to authorize charter schools. The power would be moved to a state authority.

This move is retaliation against the Metro Nashville school board, which rejected an application from the Great Hearts charter school academy of Arizona. The school board rejected Great Hearts four times! The problem was that Great Hearts wanted to open in a mostly white, affluent neighborhood and had inadequate plans for student diversity.

In an exposé in the Arizona Republic a few months ago, Great Hearts was singled out for dubious financial self-dealing. ...

Nashville’s insistence on turning down this particular application infuriated State Commissioner Kevin Huffman (whose prior experience is limited solely to TFA). Huffman withheld $3.4 million that the state owed to Nashville. The governor and legislators were angry too that Nashville acted to exercise local control. They are now talking about vouchers.

... Question: why are the Republicans in Tennessee so determined to destroy public education in their state? Has anyone in the state read the research on charters and vouchers? Or are they taking marching orders from ALEC?

Those last questions may be posed in Arkansas, too.

* CHEATING: More from Tennessee to illustrate how power and structure are more important to the billionaires and Republicans than results:

A for-profit school that was hyped by Republican lawmakers as a solution to Tennessee’s education problems recently admitted deleting bad grades to “more accurately recognize students’ current progress.”

...A December email obtained by WTVF showed that Tennessee Virtual Academy’s vice principal instructed middle school teachers to delete “failing grades” from October and September.

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• Brian Chilson
• THE BILLIONAIRE SPEAKS: Walmart heir Jim Walton speaking at Capitol, with Jeb Bush waiting in the wings.

Just in time for the charter school rally to be led this morning by Walmart billionaire Jim Walton and Arkansas Democrat-Gazette publisher Walter Hussman, among others, comes a timely news article from, where else, the Democrat-Gazette, on Arkansas's fall in ranking by a charter school advocacy group.

The group emphasizes that Arkansas has fallen to 25th in its ranking of beneficial climate for these quasi-private schools run with public tax dollars. But that's mostly because other states, under the sway of similar fatcat lobbying efforts, have gotten even charter friendlier.

Not to worry, the anti-public school group has a recipe for improving Arkansas's charter school stature that — another coincidence! — happens to be a mirror image of the Walton plan for making another big leap forward in this legislative session toward the privatization of American education. Some of the legislation has already been introduced. More to come.

The group noted that Arkansas could improve its ranking by "creating additional authorizing options, increasing operational autonomy, ensuring equitable operational funding and equitable access to capital funding and facilities, and enacting statutory guidelines for relationships between public charter schools and educational service providers."

More charter schools. Less state oversight. State tax dollars to build buildings, even if they duplicate existing buildings in many Arkansas communities. "Guidelines for educational service providers?" I'm guessing that isn't to facilitate contractual relationships with school teachers.

UPDATE: Twitter photos from the school rally show about 150 people, counting press and assorted bystanders, at the Capitol rotunda this morning. This, after robocalls, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette advertising, incessant Twitter and Facebook messaging, mail appeals and more. The Walton billions haven't fully fertilized the grassroots just yet, apparently.

UPDATE II: David Koon reports on the morning rally. Bush invoked the 1957 school crisis at Central High.

I wish the goal was achieved when those children attended their first class. unfortunately it was not. Inequality just became easily hidden and therefore overlooked, hidden in low-income neighborhoods .... We allowed this to happen because of the soft bigotry of low expectations as my brother talked about.

He said access to quality education was the "civil rights issue of our time." He talked glowingly of the KIPP charter schools in the Delta. "Schools like KIPP show what is possible and they provide depressing evidence of how millions of children have been left behind over the years because they weren't afforded the same opportunities."

He said he hopes people of Arkansas would send a message to "the masters of delay and deferral." Choose, he said. "You have a choice. You can either help the politically powerful groups or you can help the next generation of Americans." Waltons and Bushes are not the politically powerful to whom he referred, of course. Presumably he referred to teacher groups.

• Brian Chilson
• FIELD TRIP: School students in matching shirts (from the eStem charter school) helped swell crowd for the Walton-Bush appearance.

UPDATE III: I'm hearing that a centerpiece of the Billionaire Boys Club agenda — to strip the state Board of Education of regulatory authority over charter schools — is running into stout opposition in the House. Despite all the money and all the tub-thumping and all the campaign spending, it turns out others with interest in schools, particularly people in the ground in small school districts, know how to reach the ears of legislators, too. They'll be talking at a news conference Wednesday afternoon by the Arkansas Opportunity to Learn Campaign.

• JIM COOPER: State Education Board chair weighing participating in charter school rally.

A key speaker will be one of the subsidized faculty members the Waltons have installed at the so-called school of education "reform" at Walton University in Fayetteville. Jeb Bush will lend this support for doing in Arkansas what's been done in Florida (scandal after scandal in charter schools and scant education progress, to name two).

But enough of my usual.

I noticed that Jim Cooper of Melbourne, chairman of the state Board of Education, is on the panel. The billionaires want to jerk control of charter school approval and regulation from the hands of the state board and put it in the hands of a board controlled by appointees of the Republican (read bilionaires') controlled Arkansas Legislature.

Dioes his presence mean Cooper supports the legislation? I've said before that he and other current members of that board, including numerous charter school advocates, have done a fair and tough job in recent years in approving some charter schools and rejecting others. The rejections seem to stick in the billionaires' craw, however.

I talked to Cooper this morning.

He said he has some conflicts on Tuesday and he said he also had concerns about appearing on the panel if it were interpreted as a political statement. He said he'd agreed only to appear as an "objective" participant to talk about the board's work in the past and future. He said he wasn't prepared to speak for or against any of the billionaires' school package — easier approval of charter schools, state construction funding for charter schools, virtually unlimited transfers between school districts and perhaps easing of teacher licensure rules, among others.

Does Cooper think the Board is doing a good job now in regulation of charter schools?

"I think they are doing a good job. Obviously, we may have made mistakes through the years. There may have been some that got through that shouldn't have, but many were turned down and rightfully so."

He added that it had been time-consuming and hard work for the board. But, "I feel pretty comfortable with the way I've voted through the years."

He said he didn't want to compromise his objectivity as board chairman by participation next week. "I may have to think hard about that the next few days."

UPDATE: I also asked Rep. James McLean, a Democrat, if his participation constituted an endorsement of the billionaires' agenda:

No sir. I am interested in listening to everybody and finding out as much as I can about all viewpoints

• DIANE RAVITCH

Unfortunately, only an abstract is available. I could wish the newly rented Arkansas legislature would get a copy and read it before rubberstamping the Walton/Stephens/Murphy/Hussman lobby's legislative agenda, but no point cluttering up their work with facts on the other side. In short:

Ravitch argues that the reform movement is driven by an exaggerated negative critique of the schools, and that it is mistakenly imposing a free-market ethos of competition on an institution that, if it is to function well, requires coöperation, sharing, and mentoring.

The "reform" movement also - by division of community resources, cream-skimming, playing on prejudice and other means - promotes segregation by class and race, depresses teacher pay, puts publicly financed schools beyond the accountability afforded by democratic oversight and creates a marked divide between winners and losers. Oh, and most of the research shows that, despite some individual examples to the contrary, charter schools generally don't produce better results than conventional public schools among similar populations. I know. Don't confuse Republican legislators with facts.

Maybe the University of Walton in Fayetteville could bring her in for a debate with its Walton-financed "reform" faculty, which, coincidentally, gins out propaganda for the Walton "reform" movement.

• MORE LIKE THIS: LISA Academy in Little Rock, one of the state's first charters, will have more company with billionaires in control.

She links to a report on who put up the $10 million to pass the law. It includes $1.7 million from Alice Walton, heiress to the Walmart fortune built by her father.

It reminds me again about how cheap it is to buy Arkansas. Maybe $2 million bought an Arkansas Republican majority in this year's election.

Much, much less than that was spent by Waltons and other billionaire backers and their agents to buy majorities on critical Arkansas education committees in 2010.

The charterizing of public schools in Arkansas with complete absence of proof of the superiority of the concept and plenty of proof of the perils of lack of accountability for the functional equivalent of publicly funded private schools will come in a torrent in 2013. That's a given.

The only unanswered question is whether a few Republicans, though wholly beholden to the Billionaire Boys Club, will be able with a straight face to say they believe in accountability while stripping accountability from the charter school process by taking regulatory power from the state Board of Education.

The state Board has approved charter schools left and right, but not every single charter school. And it has begun demanding performance on promises from existing charter schools. The billionaires' lackeys and they are everywhere, from the the Walton-controlled University of Arkansas to the Walton-controlled University of Central Arkansas to the private lobbying group they established in Little Rock don't like such rigorous oversight one bit. For example: The Board denied a LISA Academy expansion in Little Rock when a Board member noted that the school after drawing a whiter and more economically privileged student body than the surrounding public school district wasn't demonstrating academic performance any better than conventional public schools.