Cornhusker Race Theory: Nebraska Republicans Partner with Promoter of CRT
As the governor whips up hysteria over critical race theory, he's working with a California billionaire who bankrolls it across the country.
It should come as no surprise that Pete Ricketts, the Republican governor of Nebraska and son of multibillionaire TD Ameritrade founder Joe Ricketts, lacks a strong grasp on Marxist theory. Still, I confess I was disappointed by the sloppy thinking on display in the statement he released this week about the allegedly growing Marxist threat to public education in America. Call me old-fashioned, but your lived experience is not an excuse for willful ignorance.
His remarks came as the University of Nebraska’s Board of Regents prepares to vote on a resolution to discourage the teaching of critical race theory on campus. Here’s an excerpt from his statement in support of the measure, emphasis added:
In 2021, communism seems like a distant threat to many. Generations of Americans have learned about the atrocities committed by Stalin and Lenin in Russia. Many are familiar with Mao’s Great Leap Forward, which led to the Great Chinese Famine and starvation and death for millions.
Sadly, communism isn’t something that’s just studied in history books. There’s growing awareness across our state and country that it’s reinventing itself right here at home under the label of Critical Race Theory (CRT). Instead of the old narrative of class warfare, CRT envisions a race-based Marxism that divides people along racial lines. It’s packaged under innocuous sounding terms such as “equity” or “anti-racism,” but it seeks to re-write our country’s history and reimagine public policy all based on a Marxist worldview.
Governor Ricketts is clearly not a subscriber to Vulgar Marxism. If he were, not only could he have avoided perplexing the people of Nebraska with talk about “race-based Marxism,” but he’d know that the goal of the anti-racism industrial complex isn’t to empty the cities, it’s to privatize public schools.
Two weeks ago, I reported on the fact that many of the woke consultancies pushing the kookiest “anti-racism” initiatives in K-12 education, academia, and the nonprofit sector emerged out of the charter school industry with the backing of billionaires. It’s true that their curricula are designed to discourage class analysis and promote race reductionism, but that’s so they can manipulate white liberal guilt to divert public resources to private education. Though Governor Ricketts might quibble with their methods, he certainly shares their goals.
Nebraska is one of only three states - alongside North Dakota and West Virginia - that enforce an absolute prohibition on any form of public subsidies for private schools, including charters, private school vouchers, and scholarship tax credits. For years, the “school choice” movement has attempted various methods of opening up the Nebraska market, to little avail. But after backing a slate of candidates in the state’s unicameral legislature in 2020, the movement is trying again this year, working with Ricketts to push legislation creating a voucher system parents could use for private school tuition.
The campaign is led by the American Federation for Children, a major pro-voucher pressure group. The nonprofit ecosystem that advocates for this segment of the school choice movement is distinct from the one that supports the charter industry. Many of the donors are different, and the voucher crowd doesn’t lean on woke symbology to the degree that the charter crowd does, as they cater to more conservative constituencies. But there are still some important points of intersection.
One of them is William Oberndorf, the billionaire chairman of AFC and the chief financier of its Nebraska initiative. Though he leads a pro-voucher organization, he’s also a major contributor to pro-charter groups, including several that promote CRT-infused diversity training in public schools across the country. And he’s not the only billionaire bankrolling both sides of the culture war.
If you’ve never heard of AFC, you still probably know its most famous figurehead: Betsy DeVos, who served as its chairwoman from 2010 through 2016, when Donald Trump nominated her to be US Secretary of Education. This was why her nomination stoked such fearsome opposition from public school advocates and Democrats more broadly. But while her time at the Department of Education was indeed characterized by vigorous support for school choice initiatives, it also revealed deepening cleavages within the movement.
The federal government provides $440 million every year to charter schools through the Charter Support Program. In February 2020, the Trump administration proposed eliminating CSP and replacing it with a much smaller block grant program for states to spend on school choice initiatives as they saw fit, meaning more schools competing over fewer federal dollars. The move surprised critics and proponents of charters alike, who regarded the administration in general and DeVos in particular as charter allies.
But as the conservative education expert Frederick Hess astutely observed, the proposal was not as puzzling as it seemed:
“Prominent charter leaders have been unhappy with the Trump administration’s stances on hot button social issues like immigration and they’ve said so…Republican officials say they’ve gotten the sense that charter school leaders have made a strategic decision to try and bolster support among Democrats by supporting the ‘woke’ agenda, even if Republicans find it off-putting.
While many casual observers regard ‘school choice’ as a single thing, there are significant tensions between charter school advocates and voucher proponents. Many voucher proponents emphasize religious liberty, while charter leaders tend to lean left on church-state relations and LGBT issues. Similarly, many charter leaders work hard to demonstrate that they’re supporters of' ‘public’ education by contrasting charters with school vouchers…When charter schoolers distance themselves from the voucher advocates who speak much more directly to the concerns of Republican evangelicals or market adherents, there are consequences.”
The voucher advocates aren’t imagining things. As I reported back in July, the charter industry has been leaning hard into an ever more insular and bizarre aesthetic of social justice for a number of years, particularly with regard to issues of race and racism. As polarization around cultural matters intensifies, it’s unsurprising that this would exacerbate tensions within the eclectic school choice coalition. Nevertheless, these two segments of the movement remain intertwined at a number of levels.
While many pro-charter philanthropies won’t invest in voucher advocacy, some are willing to back both. From 2015-2020, the Walton Family Foundation made grants totaling over $29.5 million to NewSchools Venture Fund, the wokest of the pro-charter pressure groups. NSVF directed that money towards all kinds of initiatives that Pete Ricketts thinks will set the stage for the liquidation of the bourgeoisie. These included “abolitionist fellowships” where teachers learn to “decolonize themselves and their classrooms,” and consultancies that teach major public school districts how to “make meaning of the historical and ongoing impacts of racism and white supremacy.”
During the same period, the Waltons provided more than $10.6 million to AFC in support of their voucher advocacy. Not only does the Walton family support the group financially, John T. Walton co-founded AFC with William Oberndorf back in 2004. After DeVos left the group at the end of 2016 for the Trump administration, Oberndorf succeeded her as chair. And whatever tensions may exist between voucher advocates and charter schoolers, they haven’t stopped him from keeping one foot in each world.
According to NSVF’s website, Oberndorf is one of the 41 donors who helped fund the organization from 2018-2021. Public tax filings from his personal foundation show that he gave NSVF $100,000 in 2018, the most recent year for which data is available. They also show that Oberndorf is a supporter of the Aspen Institute, yet another pro-charter advocacy group being drawn deeper into the anti-racism discourse. In 2020, Aspen set up a task force “to develop and implement new ways for the Institute…to become a more actively anti-racist organization.” These include acknowledging “America’s long history of racism and systemic injustice,” “changing the ways we do our work so that it is more anti-racist and inclusive,” and “centering equity in program design; increasing inclusivity in Institute programs and events; addressing structural racism and other inequities in funding and fundraising decisions.”
Oberndorf also funds the Breakthrough Collaborative, an organization that provides teaching fellowships to young people of color interested in a career in education. They don’t sound too happy about it though. According to their website, their group is complicit in “the historical harm that the U.S. educational system has caused by upholding an exclusionary culture that has led to inequitable access for Black, Indigenous, and People of Color.” Why? Because the group “has operated within that system, maintaining the status quo.” For this reason, all fellows must now undergo training developed by its “Race, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (REDI) Workgroup” before interacting with students.
If any of this bothers Governor Ricketts, he doesn’t show it. More likely, he doesn’t know it. In March, Ricketts participated in a panel hosted by Invest in Kids Nebraska, the new state affiliate of AFC pushing the voucher legislation. Oberndorf himself was also the top contributor to AFC’s slate of candidates in Nebraska’s legislative elections in 2020. Between September and December of last year, Oberndorf gave over $140,000 to AFC’s PAC in Nebraska, nearly half of all the money it took in that cycle. The PAC used the money to support 10 pro-voucher candidates, seven of whom prevailed.
It remains to be seen if cultural polarization will continue to push these segments of the school choice movement further apart. Little grassroots pressure seems to exist for either side to abandon the other. Despite its professed commitments to racial equity, NSVF takes cash from right-wing fanatics like Charles Schwab, who gave $800,000 just this year after backing Donald Trump and congressional Republicans in 2020. On the right, people like Governor Ricketts are whipping up culture war hysteria for popular support, while conspiring behind the scenes with the billionaires bankrolling what he claims to believe is a communist death cult. But then again, if the constituencies they serve don’t care, why should they?