Chris Whittle is founder of Edison Schools as well as a charter school movement funder, & one of the principals in the cozy-sounding "Center for Education Reform," an astroturf organization whose mission is catapulting the propaganda for charter schools:
http://www.edreform.com/Home/http://www.edreform.com/About_CER/?Board_of_DirectorsNotice the resumes of its other Board members:
*Donald Hense serves as Chairman of Friendship Public Charter Schools located in Washington, DC...founded "with assistance from Chris Whittle"
http://www.thehistorymakers.com/biography/... .
*Angus Davis is the "co-founder of Tellme Networks, now a Microsoft subsidiary," MS's Gates being one of biggest charter school funders.
*Gisele Huff is the Executive Director of the Jaquelin Hume Foundation (vegetable-processing fortune), another charter school movement funder, whose founder is "perhaps most associated with the Foundation for Teaching Economics, which he helped found in 1975 to train economics teachers and high school students in free-market principles. He also helped organize the Campaign for America in the 1980s to support anti-Communist insurgencies around the world."
http://www.philanthropyroundtable.org/arti... *Jerry Hume (Chairman Emeritus) is the Chairman of the Board of the San Francisco-based Basic American, Inc....Member of the same right-wing family as the "philanthropist" above.
*Lara N. Vaughan is founding partner of Parchman, Vaughan and Company, LLC....Investment bankers to "education companies." lol.
http://www.parchmanvaughan.com /
*Kevin Chavous is a Partner with Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal LLP...SN & R LLP = one of the big funders of Chicago's Renaissance Charter Schools Initiative.
etc.
Whittle has a few other interesting connections.
Let's start with Dad, often described as a "country doctor".
In fact, Dr. Herbert Pitney Whittle of Tennessee was a bit more than a country doc:
"He then went into industrial medicine as Olin Chemical’s Medical Director based in Charleston, Tennessee for 13 years. Retiring from practice in 1987, he continued his medical services part-time at Olin and Bowater Paper Corporation of Calhoun, Tennessee.... During his industrial medicine years, he worked with the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, on numerous environmental studies. He was a member of the Chlorine Institute and the Tennessee Commission of Industrial Health."
http://www.thedailytimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20071205/OBIT/71204026/-1/PUB&template=printartOlin Chemical = the corp of John M. Olin:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_M._Olinwhose namesake foundation funded a bevy of conservative think tanks:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_M._Olin_FoundationPossibly of no significance, so let's move on.
One of Chris's first big business ventures (1989) was Channel One, which brought newsbites, complete with commercial interruptions, into the public schools:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channel_One_News"As a result of the Channel One success by a hometown boy with an expanding local payroll, Whittle Communications, in the late 1980s, was able to acquire a prime location in Knoxville for a palatial “publishing campus” downtown. Labeled derisively by locals as Whittle City, it was, nonetheless, resplendent with Italian marble, set in soft florescence, and exuding an Ivy League façade; and all of it ended up on the auction block only months after it was completed.
That venture proved to be Whittle’s first big flameout, forcing the sale of Channel One to cover the bills and leaving Whittle with a 7 million dollar estate in the Hamptons and something known then as the Edison Project, an outfit whose education privatization advisors prominently included Lamar Alexander, another local boy who was making a splash at the time as Bush 1’s Secretary of Education. By 1995 Whittle had turned that idea for a mass-market alternative to public education into Edison Schools, Inc."
http://edrev.asu.edu/reviews/rev442.htmWhittle took Edison Schools public, & it *also* "flamed out," share prices crashing, but (not-so) luckily he found a financial angel: Jeb BUSH.
"By the following year, in a sweetheart deal that is even shocking by today’s standards of corporate crony politics, Whittle had found a benefactor in the State Pension Fund of Florida.
With the support of Jeb Bush, the pension fund, whose largest constituency, ironically, happens to be public school teachers, not only bought out the failed company but also allowed Whittle to retain control, doubled his salary while offering him new stock options, provided loan extensions to repay debts, and gave more loans to keep the outfit afloat..."
http://edrev.asu.edu/reviews/rev442.htmSo the question would be, what was the Bush interest in salvaging a failed start-up founded by someone with a history of failed start-ups?
Well, I don't know, but I can smell the general drift, given the Bush-backed "No Child Left Behind" legislation & Neil Bush's venture into school curriculum contracting with "Ignite" & its famous COW:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignite!Finally, Chris's wife & mother of his two children, Priscilla dei conti Rattazzi.
What a fancy name!
That's because she's the daughter of Urbano dei conti Rattazzi and Susanna Agnelli.
Urbano being a Count & relation of this guy:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbano_Rattazzi& Italian politician Susanna (Contessa)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susanna_Agnelli...being the daughter of a princess (Donna Virginia Bourbon del Monte, a daughter of the Prince di San Faustino and his Kentucky-born wife, heiress Jane Campbell) & Eduardo Agnelli.
Susanna being also a scion of Italy's richest family, the Agnellis of Fiat Corp, who reputedly own a majority of the holdings of the Italian stock exchange:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Agnelli_familyhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giovanni_AgnelliReputedly mafia-tied, & definitely fascist collaborators:
"During the years of Fascism their grandfather allowed all management and power to be concentrated in the hands of Vittorio Valletta. Valetta found it profitable for FIAT and himself to collaborate with the Italian Fascists and German Nazis before and during the war and all the way to the 1943 armistice."
Connected to US figures:
"Agnelli represented the most important figure in Italian economy, the symbol of capitalism during all the second half of 20th century, and regarded by many as the true "king of Italy". A cultivated man... forming deep relationships with international bankers and politicians (some of them became close friends, like Henry Kissinger). Another longtime associate was David Rockefeller, who appointed him to the International Advisory Committeee (IAC) of the Chase Manhattan Bank, of which Rockefeller was chairman; Agnelli sat on this committee for thirty years. He was also a member of a syndicate with Rockefeller that for a time in the 1980s owned Rockefeller Center.<1>"
http://www.statemaster.com/encyclopedia/Gianni-AgnelliJust some of the charter movement's "grassroots".
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