Dark Money Is Coming for Our Children: Exposing the Right-Wing Agenda to Destroy Public Education – A National Affairs Forum

The Forum’s panel of nationally respected experts will examine and expose the real right-wing, dark money-funded, Republican agenda to dismantle public education, divert public education funding to private education management, take over the multimillion-dollar education market for profit, evade school oversight and accountability, undermine and weaken teacher unions, and eliminate critical thinking and evidence-based curricula from America’s public schools.

This is a free event; donations to FCDC are much appreciated.

Co-Sponsoring Virginia Democratic Committees include: Goochland County, Hanover County, Greene County, Nottoway County, Montgomery County, Madison County, Alexandria, Falls Church City, Washington County Rural, Essex•Richmond County, Powhatan County, Prince William County, Suffolk, Arlington, Isle of Wight, Rappahannock County, Louisa County, Northampton County, Charlottesville, Orange County, Franklin County, Democratic Committee Westmoreland County VA, Radford City, Rockbridge County, Fauquier County, Rockingham County, Warren County, Gloucester, Roanoke City.

Speakers:

• Diane Ravitch has been writing about American education for half a century. She is a historian of education who earned her BA at Wellesley College and her PhD from Columbia University. She has published more than a dozen books, including three national best sellers. She is the author of “Slaying Goliath: The Passionate Resistance to Privatization and the Fight to Save America’s Public Schools.”
• Maurice T. Cunningham, Ph.D., J.D., is the author of “Dark Money and the Politics of School Privatization.” He retired in 2021 as associate professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts at Boston. His work has been distributed through the Independent Media Institute and has appeared in the Boston Globe, Alternet, Tampa Bay Times, The Daily Progress (VA), Idaho Education News, New Hampshire Bulletin, The Detroit Free Press, and The Portland Press-Herald (ME), and at Diane Ravitch’s Blog, dianeravitch.net.
• Jennifer C. Berkshire is the co-author of “A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door: The Dismantling of Public Education and the Future of School“. The creator and co-host of the education policy podcast “Have You Heard,” she teaches in the journalism program at Boston College and the Education Studies program at Yale University. Her writing about education and politics has appeared in the Nation, the New Republic, the Baffler, the New York Times, and other publications.
• Lisa Graves is President of the Board of the Center for Media and Democracy and President of True North Research. She is a well-known researcher, writer, and public speaker. Her research and analysis have been cited by every major paper in the country and featured in critically acclaimed books and documentaries, including Bill Moyers’s “United States of ALEC.” Lisa serves on the boards of CMD and U.S. Right to Know and is on the advisory board of UnKoch My Campus and Free Speech Is for People, and has served as a senior advisor in all three branches of the federal government.

Moderator:
Sandra J. Klassen (FCDC National Affairs Committee Chair)