In the spring of 2012, Spenser Johnson, a junior at Highland Park High School in Topeka, Kansas, was unpacking his acoustic bass before orchestra practice when a sign caught his eye. Do you want to make money? it asked. The poster encouraged the predominantly poor students at Highland Park to enroll in a new, yearlong course that would provide lessons in basic economic principles and practical instruction on starting a business. Students would receive generous financial incentives including startup capital and scholarships after graduation. The course would begin that fall. Johnson eagerly signed up. In some ways, the class looked like a typical high school business course, taught in a Highland Park classroom by a Highland Park teacher. But it was actually run by Youth Entrepreneurs, a nonprofit group created and funded primarily by Charles G. Koch, the billionaire chairman of Koch Industries. The official mission of Youth Entrepreneurs is to provide kids with business and entrepreneurial education and experiences that help them prosper and become contributing members of society. The underlying goal of the program, however, is to impart Kochs radical free-market ideology to teenagers. In the last school year, the class reached more than 1,000 students across Kansas and Missouri. Lesson plans and class materials obtained by The Huffington Post make the courses message clear: The minimum wage hurts workers and slows economic growth. Low taxes and less regulation allow people to prosper. Public assistance harms the poor. Government, in short, is the enemy of liberty. Though YE has avoided the public spotlight, the current structure of the program began to take shape in November 2009, documents show, when a team of associates at the Charles G. Koch Foundation launched an important project with Charles Kochs blessing: They would design and test what they called a high school free market and liberty-based course with support from members of the Koch familys vast nonprofit and political network. A pilot version of the class would be offered the following spring to students at the Wichita Collegiate School, an elite private prep school in Kansas where Koch was a top donor. First, the Koch team chose its mascot: a golden eagle holding a knife in its beak. They also assigned each other nicknames: Ol Mucky Terrahawk, Mighty Killer, Big Gay Mule, Midnight Bandit and the Erratic Assassin. The group dubbed itself the Wu-Teach Clan. Over the next six months, members of the Wu-Teach Clan exchanged hundreds of emails with one another and with Koch lieutenants. They hashed out a strategy to infiltrate public schools after surveys showed that the wealthy prep school students largely failed to absorb their libertarian message. We know all this because the Wu-Teach Clan used a Google group that it had left open to the public. The emails show that Charles Koch had a hands-on role in the design of the high school curriculum, directly reviewing the work of those responsible for setting up the course. The goal, the group said flatly, was to turn young people into liberty-advancing agents before they went to college, where they might learn harmful liberal ideas. The Koch Foundation did not respond to requests for comment. Charles Koch founded Youth Entrepreneurs in 1991 with his wife, Elizabeth Koch, who serves as chairman of the groups board. For much of the past two decades, YE offered little more than a pilot program teaching basic business skills -- and seemed an afterthought compared to the Kochs massive investments in the political sphere. But the Kochs have renewed their focus on YE in recent years, pumping millions of dollars into it, expanding it considerably and molding it to project their worldview. In 2007, YE reported assets of just over $450,000. In 2012, its assets topped $1.45 million. The lions share of this growth was fueled by Koch family foundations. During the 2012-2013 school year, YEs credit-bearing class reached more than 1,000 students in 29 schools in Kansas and Missouri, according to the groups annual report. Vernon Birmingham, YEs director of curriculum and teacher support, told HuffPost that the course will be in 42 schools in the coming school year. An offshoot in Atlanta, YE Georgia, reported being in 10 schools in the 2011-2012 school year. Since 2012, YE has also launched three major new initiatives: an online version of its course, an affiliate program to help rural schools access the class, and an after-school program, YE Academy, which served more than 500 students in its first year. With spending on public education under heavy assault -- in large part by Koch-funded organizations and politicians they support -- the nations poorest school districts are in desperate need of resources, making the free Koch curriculum an attractive alternative to nothing. While the Kochs are perhaps best known for their support of conservative political candidates and causes, they have a longstanding interest in education. Charles and his brother David Koch were longtime supporters of the Libertarian Party before becoming Republican kingpins. David Koch won the partys nomination for vice president in 1980. That year, its platform proposed a drastic revision of the American education system: “We advocate the complete separation of education and state. Government schools lead to the indoctrination of children and interfere with the free choice of individuals. Government ownership, operation, regulation, and subsidy of schools and colleges should be ended.” In recent years, through private charitable foundations, the Koch brothers have funneled tens of millions of dollars to colleges and universities -- most recently, a $25 million donation to the United Negro College Fund. They are also funding advocacy groups that are waging a widespread campaign to fight the Common Core State Standards, a set of benchmarks for public K-12 education adopted by most states. But YE is the most direct example of their growing imprint on American classrooms. Koch-funded think tanks provide many of YEs course materials. Teachers are trained at Koch Industries headquarters and are required to read Charles Kochs book The Science of Success. The focus on high school students is a key part of the Kochs long-term effort to create a libertarian-minded society from the ground up. We hope to develop students appreciation of liberty by improving free-market education, the Koch associates wrote during the programs initial planning stages. Ultimately, we hope this will change the behavior of students who will apply these principles later on in life. From the outset, the Koch associates identified the importance of recruiting teachers who would support the programs goals. Relationships with teachers will be essential, as they will be the key conduits for getting the curriculum into the schools, they wrote in a December 2009 document describing their goals. According to notes from a meeting with Koch associates in January 2010, executives from Koch-funded groups were concerned about how teachers might view the course. What if teachers are unwilling? What incentives do teachers have? associate Bethany Lowe wrote in an email, summarizing the discussion. How will they not be scared of it? To find liberty-minded teachers who might be predisposed to help them, the team reached out to the network of libertarian groups that benefit from Koch family funding. Many of these groups, including the Institute for Humane Studies, the Bill of Rights Institute and the Market-Based Management Institute, host seminars and conferences specifically for teachers, and they were happy to help the team. Send me the language you want, Ill send it to our list! wrote a marketing director at the Institute for Humane Studies in February 2010. A marketing employee at the Bill of Rights Institute said, I would love to chat with you to help in any way possible with your project. In addition, the Koch associates suggested looking for teachers who might be persuaded to teach the course. Younger teachers might be more open to new ideas, Lowe wrote in the January 2010 meeting minutes. Lowe could not be reached for comment for this story. Taylor Davis, the teacher in charge of the YE course at Highland Park High School, was one such Koch recruit. A first-year teacher at the time, Davis had received his public school education in affluent Olathe, Kansas. Motivated by a desire to teach inner-city kids, he earned two education degrees at the University of Kansas before landing a job as a history teacher at Highland Park in 2011. As Davis recalls, YE -- in its earlier, more basic iteration -- had died out at his school. After Davis first year at Highland Park, Vernon Birmingham approached him and his principal about bringing the course back. They [YE] were brought in as a nonprofit to basically pitch and sell the curriculum, Davis said in an interview with HuffPost. Birmingham saw Davis teach, and though he was not a business teacher, Birmingham told him hed be a good candidate for the YE course. When I watched him in a classroom, I could see students respond to him, Birmingham said. I immediately said Taylors our guy -- hes energetic, hes young, students listen, hes garnered respect. We always say within our program ... we dont care if its a music teacher, but if its a teacher who can motivate students, who can move them from point A to B, Birmingham said. Theyre exciting and theyre passionate -- teachers who tell us that if they could teach YE all day, they would. We really look for teachers who are able to motivate and move students, move the needle. Birmingham would become a frequent presence in Davis classroom, keeping tabs on his lessons from the back of the room. He would be out there quite a bit, coming into the classes, Davis said. He was the guru of the Topeka region when I was there. As Davis saw it, the purpose of the course was to teach teens how to become self-sufficient small business owners. He introduced it as giving kids real-world opportunity, Davis said of Birmingham. YE definitely backed that up. It was a very student-centered approach that they brought me, a lot of real-world, project-based activities. Typical lesson plans included developing your business idea and the invention game. Many students reported enjoying the course, according to Davis, and he told HuffPost that he liked teaching it. You see students who are C or D level ... who are so bright and the traditional school system isnt working for them, Davis said, describing the programs appeal. The idea that your actions and creativity could make you money right out of high school was a very sophisticated idea [for them] to latch onto. In fact, Davis liked the program so much that he wants to bring it to Texas where he now works. Before Davis taught the course for the first time in the fall of 2012, he spent an August week in a basement room at Koch Industries in Wichita, where he and about 20 other teachers learned from YE staffers and veteran instructors how to teach the class. YE supplied Davis with a syllabus, timeline and all the handouts that you would need, he told HuffPost. Before the school year started, he was given a thick binder of lesson plans, as well as flash drives containing quizzes and worksheets. There were also videos, PowerPoint presentations and scores of documents in Microsoft Word. Davis posted many of these resources online, offering the public a rare glimpse inside the highly structured curriculum. Teachers participate in a Youth Entrepreneurs training session in 2012. Charles Kochs book The Science of Success is visible on the table. As a history teacher, Davis had no background or accreditation in teaching business. It was overwhelming, he said. So he was grateful for YEs course materials and training. It was always an amazing support that I had, multiple people I could have contacted, he said. Birmingham helped convince the school, Davis recalled, that his teaching the class was cool. (Similarly, Georgias YE offshoot advertises itself to teachers by saying CTAE [Career, Technical, and Agricultural Education] Certification NOT Required.) YEs course materials reflect some of the initial thinking by the Koch associates charged with designing the course. In late 2009, the Koch group made a list of common economic fallacies that they believed should be repudiated. These included: Corporatism v. Free-market Capitalism Deregulation is what caused recession in 80s, Economic problems of today Rich get richer at the expense of the poor FDR/New Deal brought us out of the depression Government wealth transfer programs help the poor Private industry incapable of doing functions that public sector has always done Unions protect the employees People with the same job title should be paid the same amount ... Minimum wage, living wage, laws are good for people/society Capitalist societies provide an environment for greed and materialism to flourish Socialist countries do just fine, people have great lives there (using this as proof that socialism works They aimed to inoculate students against liberal ideas by assigning them to read passages from socialist and Marxist writers, whom they called bad guys. These readings would then be compared to works by the good guys -- free-market economists like Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises. Members of the Koch team viewed their mission as a race against the progressive left. What is the other side doing? How is the left trying to infiltrate the educational system? they discussed at a Jan. 12, 2010, meeting, according to notes in the Google group. We are operating under the assumption that high-school students do not receive an education that gives them an understanding and an affinity toward free markets, the Wu-Teach Clan stated in a project plan on Jan. 21, 2010. Without the knowledge or affinity for free markets, students cannot appreciate the role that free markets play in laying the foundations for prosperity and freedom in society. We dont try to push or drive ideology, Birmingham, the YE official, told HuffPost. From an entrepreneurial standpoint, were big on free markets, of course. Were big on voluntary trade. Were big on property rights. All of those things align with their [the Kochs] thoughts. Those are things that most entrepreneurs believe in. Today, to teach its most controversial lessons, YE often relies on videos provided by the Charles Koch-chaired Institute for Humane Studies, which operates out of George Mason University in Virginia. The videos are produced and marketed under an institute arm called Learn Liberty, which offers dozens of educational videos on libertarian and conservative topics. One such video Davis showed his students defended price-gouging. Anti-gouging laws dont do anything to address shortages, the videos narrator argues. Another video titled Is There a Glass Ceiling? asserts that the gender pay gap is a myth. Women earn around 75 cents for every dollar earned by men, it says, but not because of discrimination in the labor market. Rather, its because of differences in the choices that men and women make. Other Institute for Humane Studies videos on the syllabus inform students that the cost of living isnt actually rising, that minimum wage laws harm workers and that the poor arent really getting poorer. Davis also taught a series of classes based on videos by John Stossel, a lauded journalist turned conservative commentator. He showed his students Stossels six-part series called Greed, which posits that private companies are better at protecting the public than governments and nonprofits. The next time his class met, Davis screened Stossels film Is America Number One? in which Stossel concludes that laissez-faire economics are the key to global prosperity. Davis said he presented these videos as simply one perspective among many. Economics is so complex and I was never an expert on economics, he said. Most teachers are really good at playing devils advocate. We go on both sides of the fence. I was always challenging them to stay on both sides of everything. He supplemented the videos with worksheets and quizzes designed to reinforce the videos claims. If people who make very little money have modern conveniences, are they really poor? one worksheet asked. True or False: International trade should be heavily regulated for the good of a countrys economy, asked a quiz.
Posted on: Thu, 17 Jul 2014 08:03:40 +0000
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