Webinar: Dark Money Is Coming for Our Children: Exposing the Right-Wing Agenda to Destroy Public Education”

The GOP is attacking public education as the spear tip for their war on democrats, and with the turmoil and resonance they are achieving, they will escalate these attacks through the 2024 presidential election.  Democrats must relentlessly fight back to expose the real right-wing Republican agenda to destroy public education. The FCDC National Affairs Committee (NAC) is launching a counteroffensive with our Thursday, June 29, 7-9pm virtual Forum entitled: Dark Money Is Coming for Our Children: Exposing the Right-Wing Agenda To Destroy Public Education. The Forum panel of nationally imminent 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. 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 Ph.D. 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 Executive Director of True North Research and president of the board of the Center for Media and Democracy. She has testified before Congress and spearheaded several major breakthrough investigations into those distorting American democracy and public policy, including ALEC Exposed. Her research was featured in the Oscar-nominated documentary, The 13th, and in Bill Moyers’s “United States of ALEC.” She previously served as Deputy Assistant Attorney General at the U.S. Department of Justice in the Clinton and Bush Administrations, Chief Counsel for Nominations for Senator Patrick Leahy on the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee. Graves is frequently cited in news stories and critically-acclaimed books, and her articles and opinions have been published in major papers of record.

Moderator

• Sandra J. Klassen (FCDC National Affairs Committee Chair)