Who Is DeRay Mckesson of Black Lives Matter?: The Man Who Won't Say Where His Money Comes From Appears To Be A Front Man for Privatizing Public Schools

I reached Mckesson by phone soon after he announced his candidacy for mayor. When I asked him how he funded all of his travel despite not having a job, he initially replied, “I don’t have an answer to that. There’s an answer in the New York Times article.”

After being informed that the Times offered no such answer, Mckesson stated, “You know, people ask me this, and I haven’t even had to answer this. I, you know, me and you don’t have a relationship. You know, you’re a reporter to me, you know—I’ve answered it many times. I will put that on my list of things and try to double back with you.” Several hours later, Mckesson texted me the link to a Tweet from last spring claiming that his excursions were funded by unnamed “family and friends.”—Drew Franklin

DeRay Mckesson (Screen capture from YouTube video)

By Drew Franklin
For those who’ve never paid much attention, Teach For America sounds like a benevolent and benign idea: recruit bright college grads, give them some teacher-training and place them in some of the nation’s neediest schools for a two-year commitment to teach kids.

The reality behind TFA’s sunny exterior is somewhat more sinister. Education policy experts today consider the nonprofit founded by Wendy Kopp in 1990 to be at the vanguard of the school privatization movement. TFA is also a media juggernaut in its own right, known for deploying a sophisticated public relations arsenal to advance an agenda focused on crushing teachers’ unions and privatizing public school systems. TFA's funders, including the Waltons, Bill and Melinda Gates and top Fortune 500 corporations, all have plenty to gain from the commodification of public goods and the destruction of public service unions, and its 11,000 corps members provide a valuable service to that end.

Teach for America’s peculiar brand of social justice was on bold display at its 25th Anniversary Summit the weekend of February 5. The confab drew 15,000 corps members, alumni and supporters to Washington for three days of seminars on lofty issues like, “Allies, Co-Conspirators and Coalition Building: Showing Up for Justice Across Lines of Power.” But one of the biggest draws was the discussion on “The New Civil Rights Agenda and Education,” co-headlined by DeRay Mckesson, the TFA alum and 30-year-old Black Lives Matter activist who received a $10,000 award from TFA last year.

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When Mckesson announced his campaign for mayor of Baltimore this month, his name topped the list of trending topics on Twitter for several hours. Even without outlining a strategy to defeat better-known, more entrenched candidates, Mckesson received nearly $130,000 in online donations, met with President Barack Obama (who said Mckesson and associates “were better organizers than I was”), and secured his status as one of the country’s most closely watched political outsiders. Headlines appeared across national media, from Slate to the Guardian to the Washington Post, with the progressive online magazine Truthdig proclaiming Mckesson "Truthdigger of the Week."

With his candidacy for a city whose public schools are a key target of the education reform movement, the time seems right to scrutinize Mckesson’s relationship with Teach for America more closely. His high-profile appearance at the TFA gala only days after filing his last-minute bid to enter the race was only the latest collaboration with the organization spearheading a sustained attack on teacher's unions and traditional public schools.

Promotion From TFA, Shade From Local Organizers

DeRay Mckesson is a prolific Twitter personality who first came to national prominence during the uprising of 2014 in Ferguson, Missouri. His live-tweeting of protests in the wake of Michael Brown’s death quickly garnered a massive following, and as a wave of protests swept the United States, Mckesson was consistently among the first on the scene, making him and his Twitter feed an invaluable source of information for journalists.

With his rapid emergence, Mckesson developed a well-tailored image as a media darling, known in equal measure for his ubiquitous blue Patagonia vest and composed attitude, holding his own in interviews with the most confrontational cable news hosts. The name “DeRay” became synonymous with the Black Lives Matter protest movement, boosted by features in mainstream news magazines and promotion from international celebrities like Beyonce. His influence emanates from Twitter, where he maintains over 300,000 followers, mixing live updates from demonstrations against police brutality with commercial-style promotions of corporations like McDonald's and Spotify.

As Mckesson rose to prominence, TFA was there to provide promotion through its powerful PR apparatus.

Mckesson had no connection to Ferguson when he first arrived on Aug. 16, 2014, according to an interview he gave Huffington Post later the same year. But it didn’t take him long to connect with another protester named Brittany Packnett, with whom he began working the same day. The fact that Packnett is executive director of TFA’s St. Louis chapter likely contributed to their immediate rapport.

At the time, Mckesson was senior director of human capital for Minneapolis Public Schools. He says he commuted to Ferguson on weekends before eventually quitting his job to protest full-time.

A Twitter search query produces a clear timeline of Mckesson's subsequent transition from human resources manager to social justice talent, aided by promotion from Teach For America. It begins with a post to TFA’s official blog, in which Mckesson pontificates on his activities in Ferguson. TFA tweeted a link to that post on Aug. 21, 2014, at which point Mckesson would have been in the besieged midwestern town for five days.

The next item on the timeline, dated October 29, is an advertisement for a “national conference call featuring TFA alumni @MsPackyetti [Packnett] and @deray.” Two weeks after that, the Washington Post published a profile of McKesson and TFA promoted it on social media, identifying him again as a “TFA alumnus.” On Dec. 10, Time Magazine named him along with a handful of peers, collectively referred to as the “Ferguson protesters,” as runners-up to its 2014 Person of the Year, and TFA promoted that too.

Mckesson’s big break, however, was a cover story for the May 4 issue of the New York Times Magazine, with the headline "Our Demand Is Simple: Stop Killing Us." The 6700-word article profiles McKesson and fellow overnight celebrity Ferguson protester Johnetta Elzie, as they drop in to demonstrations in cities across the United States over the course of nine months.

Post-strategy session and training. TFA love. @MsPackyetti and I. #Ferguson pic.twitter.com/fBYDDYkL75

— deray mckesson (@deray) October 6, 2014

I reached Mckesson by phone soon after he announced his candidacy for mayor. When I asked him how he funded all of his travel despite not having a job, he initially replied, “I don’t have an answer to that. There’s an answer in the New York Times article.”

After being informed that the Times offered no such answer, Mckesson stated, “You know, people ask me this, and I haven’t even had to answer this. I, you know, me and you don’t have a relationship. You know, you’re a reporter to me, you know—I’ve answered it many times. I will put that on my list of things and try to double back with you.” Several hours later, Mckesson texted me the link to a Tweet from last spring claiming that his excursions were funded by unnamed “family and friends.”

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The Cory Booker Effect: How A Republican Operative Turned Black Democrats Into Shills for Public School Privatization (Video)

The Cory Booker Effect:

How A Republican Operative Turned Black Democrats
Into Shills for School Vouchers, Charter Schools
and Public School Privatization

An exposé by activist and journalist Glenn Ford

Illustration by DonkeyHotey.

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Defending the Indefensible: Teach for America/Black Lives Matter Leader Tries and Fails

Stung by growing public recognition of Teach For America's heinous role in destabilizing communites and destroying public education, CampaignZero/BlackLivesMatter activist & TFA's Brittney Packnett took to Huffington Post last week to defend herself and TFA's mission. But school privatization is so unpopular she had to resort to misdirection and mumbling about her St. Louis orgins and supposed conspiracy theories against her instead.



By Bruce A. Dixon, BAR Managing Editor
As the pivotal role of Teach For America in the elite bipartisan drive to privatize public education comes more sharply into public view, it's natural that TFA operatives and apologists will try to defend their missions and careers. That's what Brittney Packnett's sad and disingenuous “Let's Get Back To Work” piece in Huffington Post last week was about.

Packnett's problem however, and Teach For America's too is that their mission so clearly indefensible that they can't really talk about what Teach For America actually does, and why it does those things.

TFA, whose St. Louis director is Ms. Packnett, cannot just come out and say they spend hundreds of millions a year in corporate and government funds replacing experienced, qualified, mostly black public school teachers with undertrained and mostly white temps to facilitate the policy goal of their corporate funders, which is the privatization of public education.

Organized public school teachers used to be the backbone of civic life in black communities... they were well-educated and decently paid, had roots in the communities where they worked, and their short commutes gave them plenty of time to take part in local affairs. Now that's history, in good part thanks to the work of Brittney Packnett, Deray McKesson and their mentors and corporate funders. TFA's part in transforming the public school workforce has served three purposes....

• it removed from many school workplaces an entire layer of experienced educators with institutional knowledge and local ties -- teachers and administrators accustomed to working together who know how to run their classrooms and their school without their new “run-the-school-like-a-business” bosses;
• it lowered the quality of engagement and instruction with students in the schools where TFA recruits replaced experienced teachers, making the school less safe and attractive for those parents who could exercise the option to leave;
• it facilitated school management by instability and fear, and with the closing and privatizing of thousands of schools nationwide already a fact, it contributed to a culture of rootless classroom short-timers on their way somewhere else;

These are all indisputable outcomes of Teach For America's practices in African American communities around the country, and Brittney Packnett touches none of them, because she quite simply can't. School privatization, the ultimate goal of TFA's funders, is so indefensible and wildly unpopular that even privatizing politicians dare not utter the word aloud.

Instead Packnett drops a meaningless stat about how many TFA grads stay in education, without telling us that a huge share of these end up not in the classroom but as the six figure a year administrators who do the actual firing of existing teachers, the Department of Education officials who award school funding based on how many teachers are fired and how many schools are privatized, or working for the think tanks the Obama administration allowed to write Race To The Top, its signature education program.

So the only defenses Packnett and those like her can mount are distractions and misdirections, and not even very good ones. Her Huffington Post piece talks about simple minded “conspiracy theories” against her. It reminds us that she lived only a short distance from Michael Brown was shot, and claims she's in it for the kids and the families and all the right reasons. Sure.

Packnett says “It is easy to portray me as the evil Trojan Horse.” She's right. It IS easy to hang that on her and Deray McKesson and the rest of the TFA herd because quite simply it's true. She's one of the black faces whose job it is to sell us just enough of the nonsense to get us all to the polls in 2016 for a pro-privatization Democrat instead of the pro-privatization Republican. This is why leading Democratic contenders bestow the traditional recognition upon the various flavors of BlackLivesMatter.

To be sure, Teach For America is only a part of the privatization juggernaut. Some other parts of the machine include the standardized testing industry, the private firms that certify school districts, and the diploma mills which certify “run-the-school-like-a-business” principals and administrators.

Former Chicago Public Schools chief Barbara Byrd Bennett is pleading guilty to a kickback scheme involving one such “academy” and in the current session of Congress eight members of the Congressional Black Caucus “abstained” from voting on a bill that would have directed the Department of Education to investigate crooks and conflicts of interest in the charter school industry... Packnett's colleagues and sponsors among them. Some of these black congressional reps were doubtless among the boosters of her “braintrust” gathering at the Congressional Black Caucus's annual meeting in DC this September.

And lest one imagine there's a great deal of difference between the two branches of BlackLivesMatter, CBC at the same time was also courting the "official" BlackLivesMatter "co-creators" as well.

The one piece of Packnett's Huffington Post piece that seems absolutely sincere was its “Let's Get Back To Work” title. Certainly Packnett and TFA would like a lot less attention paid to what they actually are, and what TFA actually does, so they can get back to work. But they ain't workin' for us.

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Bruce A. Dixon is managing editor at Black Agenda Report, and a member of the state committee of the Ga Green Party. He lives and works near Marietta GA and can be reached via email at bruce.dixon(at)blackagendareport.com.

 Reprinted with permission from Black Agenda Report.

Slave Tactics Instituted by Charter School: 100 Fifth Graders in Single Classroom Forced To Sit On Floor For Week To 'Earn' Their Desks

Slavery 3. (Illustration by Cliff James)

You may ask yourself what your reaction would be if your fifth-grader came home every day for the first four days of school to tell you that she sat on the floor without a desk.

The Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP) is the largest corporate charter school chain in the U. S, with 141 schools and 50,000 students in 20 states. KIPP was launched in 1994 by David Levin and Michael Feinberg, two former Ivy-Leaguers and Teach for America (TFA) corps members assigned to teach in Houston, where the first KIPP school was created. Since 2000 when KIPP students performed a skit at the Republican National Convention, KIPP has become the poster school model for "no excuses" education, and today it receives hundreds of millions in donations from corporations, corporate foundations, and venture philanthro-capitalists...

Apparently, KIPP sees no irony in requiring the poorest urban children who have received the least in life to earn everything at KIPP, from paychecks for good behavior and working hard, to the KIPP shirt, and, at some KIPPs, even the desks that children must earn their right to sit in for 8 to 10 hours a day.

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