In December, Jeb Bush posted an update on his Facebook page which began by reporting that, over Thanksgiving, he and his family had “shared good food and watched a whole lot of football.” He added, “We also talked about the future of our nation. As a result of these conversations and thoughtful consideration of the kind of strong leadership I think America needs, I have decided to actively explore the possibility of running for President of the United States.”
The wording of the announcement was oddly diffident. It was widely known that Bush had been “actively exploring” the possibility of a campaign at least since the spring, when he started showing up at the gym in the grand Biltmore Hotel in Coral Gables, where he keeps his office, with a personal trainer and new workout gear. But there had been as yet no signs of a commitment. “It’s the telegraph people have been waiting for,” Jim Nicholson, a former Republican National Committee chairman and Cabinet secretary under President George W. Bush, said.
The announcement inevitably renewed questions about the desirability of political dynasties and about whether Jeb was being propelled to run, in part, by fraternal rivalry. “There’s always been a friendly competition among the siblings in the family, and that’s just human nature, I suppose,” George P. Bush, Jeb’s older son, told me. As Jeb, who was the governor of Florida for two terms, has followed his brother’s career, he has also stood apart from it. “There is kind of George W.’s world, and then there’s Jeb’s world, and frankly there’s not a lot of intersection,” Mark McKinnon, who was a senior adviser to George W.’s Presidential campaigns, said. Jeb is more introverted and more ideological than both his father, George H. W. Bush, whose politics are driven more by personal associations than by doctrine, and his brother, whose conservatism is more instinctual than considered. It was Jeb who signed the nation’s first “Stand Your Ground” self-defense law, and fought to keep Terri Schiavo on life support.
Now, though, as a result of the rightward shift in the Republican Party, Bush is being viewed as a moderate in the emerging Presidential field. He has strong support among the Party’s establishment and donor class, but his popularity among the current conservative rank and file is difficult to gauge. Since he left office, Bush has maintained a national profile through his work on the issue with which, as governor, he had sought to make his biggest mark: education reform. But, after leading the way in pushing a conservative vision for America’s schools, Bush is now caught in the midst of an unexpected upheaval on the issue within his own party.
His level of enthusiasm for running has also been difficult to assess. He has often cited worries about the effect that a campaign would have on his family, especially on his wife, Columba, who dislikes the role of political spouse. George P. Bush told me that it would be hard for his father to relinquish the life in business that he has led since leaving office, in 2007. “People forget that before he went into public service he was in real estate and has always had a business mind,” his son said.
The family that, over three generations, has served in the White House (twice), the Senate, the House of Representatives, and the governors’ mansions of two states is also a family of businessmen. Prescott Bush was a partner at the investment bank Brown Brothers Harriman, but, even as he thrived on Wall Street, with a house in Greenwich, Connecticut, and three live-in maids, he declined to run for a vacant House seat in 1946, because he didn’t think he could afford it. He was finally elected to the Senate in 1952, at the age of fifty-seven. His son George H. W. Bush didn’t enter politics until he had become a millionaire in the Texas oil industry; he was elected to Congress in 1966, when he was forty-two. Doug Wead, who served as an adviser to both Presidents Bush, told me, “I don’t think it’s about money for money’s sake. It’s a way of defining who I am and where I sit in the history of the family: ‘Can I do it? Can I be a real man?’ Just imagine the pressure. The first step in life in the Bush family is: Can I make a million?”
After college, Jeb worked for the Texas Commerce Bank in Venezuela before returning to join his siblings—George; their younger brothers, Neil and Marvin; and their sister, Dorothy—on their father’s 1980 Presidential campaign. Jeb campaigned mostly in Florida; having learned enough Spanish to court his wife, whom he met on a high-school exchange trip to Mexico, he had become fluent while in Caracas, an asset in Miami’s Little Havana. After George H. W. Bush lost to Ronald Reagan in the primaries, Jeb and Columba settled in Miami to raise their three children—George P., Noelle, and Jeb, Jr.
Armando Codina, a Cuban-American real-estate developer who had supported George H. W. Bush’s campaign, offered Jeb a forty-per-cent stake, with no money down, in his company, Codina Partners. Bush’s role was to find tenants for commercial developments, and he easily won over colleagues and clients with his unassuming manner. A few separate deals he was involved in came under scrutiny, including one with a company that sold water pumps in Nigeria, but Bush was never accused of any wrongdoing. He considered running for Congress, but, according to Peter and Rochelle Schweizer’s biography “The Bushes,” his father persuaded him to wait until he had made more money. He served as the chairman of the Dade County G.O.P. and, in 1987, became the state commerce secretary under Governor Bob Martinez but left the post less than two years later to work on his father’s successful Presidential campaign. Around that time, he decided to run for governor, and, in 1992, with his father’s reëlection in doubt, he began to focus on a gubernatorial campaign for the 1994 election. (By then, he had a net worth of more than two million dollars.) In Texas, his brother did the same, which the family viewed as an intrusion on Jeb’s more serious effort. After Bush senior left the White House, he spent far more time campaigning in Florida than in Texas.
Unlike George, Jeb embraced the ascendant right-wing orthodoxy: he declared himself a “head-banging conservative”; vowed to “club this government into submission”; and warned that “we are transforming our society to a collectivist policy.” On Election Night, he lost narrowly to the incumbent, Lawton Chiles. George Bush, having shown himself to be an unexpectedly able candidate, with a more modulated tone than his brother, beat the incumbent Texas governor, Ann Richards, by more than eight points.
After the loss, Jeb returned to business, working primarily with Codina Partners again. It wasn’t clear if he would continue to pursue a political career. Tom Slade, a former chairman of the Florida G.O.P. (who died in October), told me that Bush had said, “I don’t know if I’m going to run for governor again or not, because I’d rather go settle some stuff with my wife.” Campaigning had been a strain on the family, but, Slade added, “I remember having heard Columba say, ‘Jebby really loves politics,’ and kind of sigh.”
It became apparent to Bush that he had emphasized a conservative agenda at the expense of an organizing mission in his campaign. He had focussed mainly on crime and welfare reform, and, if he were to run again, he would need “to be sure his platform was palatable to a larger community,” as T. Willard Fair, the head of the Miami affiliate of the Urban League, put it. In 1995, Bush found that platform. Early that year, he called Fair and said that he wanted to contribute some money left over from his campaign to the Urban League. Fair thought that Bush would present a check, pose for a picture, and leave. But the two men spent ninety minutes discussing the failure of the Dade County schools to educate black students, who were twenty-four per cent more likely than white students to drop out. Fair, a garrulous man with a conservative bent, told me, “Jeb said, ‘Why don’t you start a charter school?’ I said, ‘What’s a charter school?’ ”
That year, Bush found a compatible source for ideas on education when he joined the board of the Heritage Foundation, which was generating papers and proposals to break up what it viewed as the government-run monopoly of the public-school system through free-market competition, with charters and private-school vouchers. Bush found school choice philosophically appealing. “Competition means everybody gets better,” he said.
He enlisted Fair to help promote a state law authorizing charter schools, which, unlike vouchers, were gaining some Democratic supporters, including President Bill Clinton, who saw them as a way to allow educators to innovate within the public-school system. The law passed in 1996, with bipartisan support, and that year Bush and Fair founded the first charter school in the state—an elementary school in an impoverished, largely African-American section of Miami, called the Liberty City Charter School. Bush brought his mother in for classroom visits and dropped by unannounced to make sure that things were running smoothly. If he found wastepaper lying around, he’d leave it on the desk of the principal, Katrina Wilson-Davis. The message was clear, she recalls: “Just because kids are poor and at risk doesn’t mean that their environment shouldn’t be clean and orderly.”
Bush decided to make a second run for governor, in 1998. He chose Frank Brogan, Florida’s education commissioner, as his running mate, and railed against the state’s graduation rate, which was about fifty per cent, and fourth-grade reading scores that were nearly the worst in the country. He unveiled the A+ Plan, which relied heavily on Heritage Foundation proposals for holding schools more accountable; it imposed a strict A-F grading system at all levels, based on students’ scores on the state’s assessment test, the FCAT, and provided additional funding to schools with good grades and stipulated that students at schools with poor grades would receive taxpayer-funded vouchers to attend private and parochial schools. This time, Bush won easily. He faced a weaker opponent than he had in 1994, but his new agenda seemed to help: he doubled his share of the black vote.
Brogan, a former fifth-grade teacher and middle-school principal, was nominally in charge of the education portfolio. But Bush’s most influential adviser was Patricia Levesque, a former legislative aide to the state House Republican leadership and a graduate of Bob Jones University, the fundamentalist Christian school in South Carolina. (She greeted a new hire in Bush’s administration by asking him if he had “found a church home” yet in Tallahassee.) Brogan had drafted the A+ Plan into a bill, but Bush called for revisions to give its accountability measures a harder edge. Within months, the Republican-led legislature had passed it, providing Florida with one of the highest-stakes testing regimens in the country, and the first statewide voucher program.
Some friends and associates saw personal motivations behind Bush’s initiatives. Patrick Riccards, who, as counsel for the federal government’s National Reading Panel, discussed education reform with Bush, said, “As the father of Hispanic kids, you become far more sensitive to disparities—kids who look like your kids not getting the skills they need or getting into the right colleges.” (Bush’s children attended private schools in Miami and Jacksonville.) Others detected a competitive desire to surpass his brother’s agenda in Texas. Governors around the country were taking up education reform, but the Bushes were prominent in the field. George W. Bush had initiated his program four years earlier, but it essentially built on Ann Richards’s measures to help struggling schools, such as insuring that they got adequate funding, and it had bipartisan support. It was also far less aggressive—it emphasized testing, but included fewer penalties for failing schools and steered clear of vouchers. Sandy Kress, who was a senior education adviser to George W. Bush in the White House, said that he “really thought this is mainly about improving public schools.”
Jeb’s program, by contrast, was of a piece with his larger agenda to privatize state-run services, from prisons to Medicaid. He also recognized the long-term political benefits of upending the system. According to Jim Warford, a county school superintendent in North Florida, whom Bush selected to be his K-12 schools chancellor in 2003, “He saw the teachers’ unions as one of the foundations of the Democratic Party, and he saw a great advantage—that anything he could do to undercut the teachers’ union would have a political return.”
Advisers to both brothers saw little evidence that they discussed the issue. “They operated through their staffs,” Warford said. “If anything, a more accurate comparison would be two N.F.L. coaches trying to steal each other’s playbooks and game plans.” But if Jeb was envious when George was elected President, in 2000, he did not express it. “If he has any of that feeling, he doesn’t show it,” Lucy Morgan, who covered him for the St. Petersburg Times and knows him socially, said. Instead, he further immersed himself in education research, and brought in national experts, such as Reid Lyon, a brain-development researcher at the National Institutes of Health, for private briefings. Even his opponents concede that he was very well informed. Dan Gelber, a Democrat who served in the Florida legislature, recalls an e-mail debate with Bush about the rating system for test scores. “We ended up having this very esoteric exchange, and I remember thinking, He either has a roomful of experts writing these e-mails or he really knows something.”
During his first term, Bush’s agenda suffered some setbacks. Voters approved a referendum capping class size at twenty-five students in high school and required smaller classes in lower grades. Courts ruled his main voucher program unconstitutional, because it sent taxpayer money to religious schools. In response, he adopted a funding model in which corporations donated to the program in return for tax credits. Still, after a term that also featured a big tax cut for wealthy Floridians, he was easily reëlected, in 2002.
By then, President Bush was implementing his signature legislation, the No Child Left Behind Act, which required schools to meet gradually higher scores on annual tests, set by the states, in order to receive additional federal funding. Jeb Bush made it known that he thought his own approach superior, because it sought to grade schools on improvements in individual students’ scores, rather than just on schools’ performance in a given year. “There were lots of conversations about the work in Texas and how Florida had improved on that,” Warford said. According to education officials, Jeb’s team had little respect for Rod Paige, the former Houston schools superintendent whom George W. Bush had named Secretary of Education. “It was a little prickly in Florida,” Sandy Kress, who worked on the implementation of No Child Left Behind, said. “It was ‘We’re going to do it our way and can do it better.’ ”
Florida’s population grew by 2.5 million during Bush’s eight years as governor—almost the equivalent of adding another Miami, Jacksonville, Tampa, Orlando, and St. Petersburg. Suburbs colonized the former swamplands beyond the Miami airport, the orange and palmetto groves east of Tampa, and the farmland near Fort Myers. The growth, which created jobs in construction and real estate, was fuelled, notoriously, by lax mortgage-lending practices. But it was also fuelled by charter schools.
Developers of new subdivisions teamed up with companies that were opening up charter schools less as a means to innovate than as a way to benefit from Florida’s boom. The “McCharters,” as they became known, were paid for with public money—not just their daily operations but often their buildings, too, since Florida was one of a few states that allowed taxpayer revenue to be used for the construction of charters. But, as charters, the schools were free of public oversight and collective-bargaining agreements. In Osceola County, outside Orlando, a charter school was built next to a traditional public school to absorb students from an expanding subdivision—a “win-win-win for everybody,” Bush said at the ribbon-cutting ceremony.
Under the 1996 law, only nonprofit groups could apply to open a charter school. To get around that, for-profit charter companies set up foundations to file the application and then hire those companies to operate the schools. The St. Petersburg Times reported that by 2002 for-profit companies were managing three-quarters of the state’s newly approved charter schools. According to the newspaper, the companies typically took at least a twelve-per-cent cut of a school’s budget—about two hundred thousand dollars a year for an elementary school and double that for a middle school or a high school. At the same time, the charters were spending about two thousand dollars less per student than traditional public schools (which received relatively low funding, by national standards), a practice that often resulted in inexperienced teachers and spartan facilities. Still, many parents were attracted by the schools’ selective aura, smaller class size, and strict behavior codes. The principal of Ryder Elementary, which served families employed at the Miami headquarters of the Ryder trucking company, explained, “We really operate like a private school.”
This struck some people as being far from the spirit of charter reform. “Should we be paying money for real-estate companies posing as charter schools?” Sherman Dorn, an education-policy expert who taught at the University of South Florida, said to me. Teachers’ unions and some Democratic legislators spoke out against the for-profit schools. But, in 2002, Bush signed a law allowing charter operators who were denied approval by local school boards to appeal to the state. In 2003, he signed a law to eliminate the state’s cap on the number of charters, which had been set at twenty-eight in the largest counties. Republican lawmakers fought to increase the amount of taxpayer money available for charter construction, and to let developers build schools using the subdivision homeowner fees that they used for pools and other amenities.
Bush, like other proponents of education reform, wanted parents to have the freedom to choose from various schools. “Florida has the largest, most vibrant charter-school movement in the country,” he said at the opening of a for-profit charter high school in Fort Myers. He had no personal financial stake in the school boom, a point that his spokeswoman, Kristy Campbell, emphasizes. “Governor Bush does not personally profit in any way from his education-reform advocacy work,” she said. (Bush declined to be interviewed for this article.) But some of his political allies in the state did. In 1997, Jonathan Hage, a former Heritage Foundation staffer who had helped Bush set up the Liberty City Charter School, started Charter Schools USA. Hage told the St. Petersburg Times that he had simply identified a “classic business opportunity.” Charter Schools USA, whose headquarters occupy a building across from a Jaguar dealership in the Fort Lauderdale suburbs, now manages seventy schools in seven states and has nearly three hundred million dollars in revenue.
In 2004, Robert Cambo, a former Codina Partners employee who had started his own building firm, worked with Hage’s company to develop two schools. Al Cardenas, who became the chairman of the Florida Republican Party in 1999, went on to be a lobbyist for Charter Schools USA and the Florida Consortium of Charter Schools. (Until recently, he was the chairman of the American Conservative Union.) Octavio Visiedo, a Bush family friend, was the superintendent of the Dade County school system. He retired in 1996 and started a company that evolved into Imagine Schools, which now has thirty-four thousand students nationwide. Cardenas, who advised Visiedo as he set up the company, told me that the Governor’s support for the growing industry was pivotal: “Bush was helping me get the movement going.” When asked about the money to be made in for-profit charters, Cardenas said, “I don’t care about how much money someone makes. I care about how they’re educating kids. It’s kind of socialistic to decry an organization for making money. What people should be concerned about is what’s the quality of it.”
The quality was difficult to assess. By 2006, Jeb’s last year in office, there were more than three hundred charter schools (for-profit and nonprofit) in Florida, with more than a hundred thousand students, most of them in big metropolitan areas such as Miami and Tampa. But the state made only sporadic efforts to track their performance. The 1996 law called for annual statewide reports on the schools, but none were produced until November of 2006. Test scores in lower grades were found to be slightly higher than at traditional public schools, and slightly lower in the higher grades. The reading test-score gap between black students and white students in elementary grades decreased at about the same rate as in traditional schools, but in the charter high schools the gap widened. However, direct comparisons were difficult, because the charters took about twenty per cent fewer low-income and special-needs students. It was even harder to track the impact of vouchers, because the private and parochial schools that accepted them were not required to administer state tests.
As Bush saw it, some schools and companies were inferior, but that situation would sort itself out over time. Kristy Campbell told me, “Expanding school choice was a priority for his administration.” However, she added, just as with traditional public schools, Bush “believes charter schools should be closed if students aren’t learning.” Frank Brogan, Bush’s lieutenant governor, told me, “The Governor is a free-market guy.” But Andy Ford, the president of the Florida Education Association, the teachers’ union that was trying to halt the spread of for-profit charters, believes that although Bush “does genuinely care about trying to make kids’ lives better,” his approach created “a closed circuit of people making a lot of money on so-called ‘reform.’ ”
By the end of Bush’s second term, fourth-grade reading scores in the state had improved sharply, though eighth- and tenth-grade scores were more middling. (Since Bush left office, gains in test scores at all levels have been relatively incremental; graduation rates have steadily increased, but they remain among the nation’s worst.) Nevertheless, Bush saw his education record as his central accomplishment. “The fact is that more kids are learning now and we’re not dumbing down the curriculum,” he said.
When Bush left office, in 2007, he and Columba returned to Miami. He signed on with a commercial-real-estate brokerage, started a management-consulting firm—Jeb Bush & Associates, with Jeb, Jr.—and joined at least four corporate boards. Again, one of the ventures he was associated with—InnoVida, a startup maker of inexpensive building materials—ran into legal difficulties, but again he was not implicated. He also became a paid adviser to Lehman Brothers, just before the financial crisis, and gave the kinds of remunerative speech that former governors tend to give.
Bush continued to stay active in education policy. In 2008, he launched the Foundation for Excellence in Education, a nonprofit that promoted his reforms and urged other states to adopt similar practices. The organization, led by Patricia Levesque, holds an annual two-day, expenses-paid summit for school administrators and elected state officials. The foundation also organized a half-dozen state education commissioners—called “chiefs for change”—to promote Bush’s agenda at conferences around the country.
By this time, school reform had become a bipartisan national movement. No Child Left Behind had made its mark across the country, as local leaders, such as the mayors Michael Bloomberg, in New York, and Cory Booker, in Newark, championed their roles in raising scores, and many Democratic leaders, including the newly elected President, Barack Obama, and his Education Secretary, Arne Duncan, accepted the necessity of testing-based accountability. (The Administration’s Race to the Top initiative rewarded states that engaged in aggressive reform.) Meanwhile, as teachers and administrators struggled to meet the law’s demands, the education industry responded. For more than a century, private companies had sold textbooks and other educational supplies to public schools, but now, particularly with the advent of the Internet, the marketplace exploded. The range of new offerings included the state tests. In Florida alone, the British publishing conglomerate Pearson was paid two hundred and fifty million dollars over four years, to administer the FCAT. Then there were test-prep products, mostly digital, that promised to improve scores by helping teachers track students’ progress. (Neil Bush had entered the field, with Ignite, an education-software firm geared toward middle-school social studies, science, and math, which he started in 1999.)
In 2010, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. launched an education-technology division, called Amplify. It was led by Joel Klein, who had been the New York City schools chancellor under Bloomberg. Murdoch said, “When it comes to K through 12 education, we see a five-hundred-billion-dollar sector in the U.S. alone that is waiting desperately to be transformed.” Amplify’s products include digital tablets loaded with instructional programs and games (in one, Tom Sawyer battles the Brontë sisters), for use in K-12 classes. The company says that it has sold several hundred thousand tablets to schools across the country.
Companies soon came to see the Foundation for Excellence in Education as an ideal platform to promote a range of ideas and products to state officials. Murdoch gave the keynote address at the 2011 summit. In 2012, the foundation earned revenues of ten million dollars, much of it donations from education companies. Those companies sent representatives to the summits, where foundation officials set aside time for them to have “donor meetings” with the chiefs for change.
Sometimes, according to e-mails obtained by the watchdog organization In the Public Interest, Levesque pitched the state commissioners on behalf of the companies. In July, 2011, she encouraged Chris Cerf, the New Jersey commissioner, to accept an offer from Dell of a demo “teacher dashboard,” a digital classroom-management system. (“Public education is a public enterprise,” Cerf told me. “But it’s also true that, like all public entities, it also relies on collaborations.”) In 2012, Levesque e-mailed Tony Bennett, the Indiana commissioner, urging him to consider an overture from Reasoning Mind, which sells a math software program for grades two through six. She told Bennett that Jeb Bush “would really appreciate you and your staff taking time to meet with” the company’s president “when you get a chance to review his curriculum.”
In 2010, Bush had used the foundation to launch an initiative called Digital Learning Now, which promoted the benefits of “virtual schools,” providing online instruction. Virtual schools had once been a fringe market for families that homeschooled their children. But, as more school districts faced budget cuts and overcrowded classrooms, some required students to take classes online—in all grades, but mostly in high school—and the industry surged. The quality of instruction is uneven. Classes are typically two or three times larger than in traditional schools, and teachers, who work from home, earn much less. In 2012, the National Education Policy Center studied one of the largest virtual-school companies, K12, and found that its students lagged in math and reading proficiency and had lower graduation rates than those in traditional schools. In a statement at the time, K12 disputed the N.E.P.C.’s methodology.
Yet Bush, a longtime technophile, saw in virtual schools the same revolutionary potential to expand choice that he had seen in vouchers and charters. Unions consider virtual schooling “an even bigger threat than vouchers because it’s such a disruptive idea,” he told National Review. In 2010, he convened a “digital learning council” that included virtual-school executives from around the country. It issued a report urging states to adopt industry-friendly measures, such as eliminating limits on virtual-school enrollment. Several states proceeded to do so. In Maine, according to a 2012 investigation by the Portland Press-Herald, foundation staff members essentially wrote legislation backed by the Republican governor, Paul LePage, to expand virtual schools. “I have no ‘political’ staff who I can work with to move this stuff through the process,” Maine’s education commissioner had e-mailed Levesque, after meeting her at a foundation summit. Levesque replied, “Let us help.”
One entrepreneur who had seen the potential of the school-reform boom was Randy Best, a legendarily eccentric Texan with a knack for buying and selling. While a student at Lamar University, in the nineteen-sixties, Best started a class-ring and jewelry business, which he and his partners sold for twelve million dollars. That was followed by an eclectic array of ventures: art galleries, clinics, cattle yards, oil and gas, defense and aerospace, and Girl Scout-cookie manufacturing. He spent much of his wealth on a personal natural-history collection that included a seven-foot-long Egyptian sarcophagus lid, a Siberian cave-bear skeleton, and sabre-toothed-tiger skulls from the Pleistocene period.
Best had perceived a vast potential market in school reform back in the mid-nineties, when George W. Bush was governor of Texas. “There’s nothing else as large in all of society. Not the military—nothing—is bigger,” Best later told Mother Jones. In 1995, he launched Voyager Expanded Learning, a for-profit chain of after-school tutoring programs in Dallas, and started donating money to George Bush’s 1998 reëlection campaign. That year, the Governor appeared at a photo op in front of a Voyager banner, calling for twenty-five million dollars in the next year’s budget to fund for-profit after-school programs.
Best hired early-reading experts who had worked on Bush’s reforms to transform Voyager into a phonics-based early-literacy curriculum. No Child Left Behind created a billion-dollar Reading First program, with the aim of improving instruction in the early grades, and federal education officials held up Voyager as a curriculum that met the program’s standards. In Texas, legislators passed an unusual mandate that required school districts to spend twelve million dollars on Voyager. By 2005, Voyager was being used in more than a thousand districts in all fifty states.
The company’s extraordinary success attracted scrutiny. A 2006 Department of Education inspector general’s audit and a 2007 report by the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee found that Reading First officials had been paid generous “consulting” fees by some of the companies whose services they were recommending, including Voyager. George Miller, the Democratic chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee, said that the situation was “very close to a criminal enterprise.” In 2007, a major comparison of reading programs conducted by the Department of Education found that Voyager had “potentially negative effects,” because students using it showed a decline in comprehension. Best says that neither he nor Voyager officials were contacted or questioned by any regulatory or investigative bodies.
By then, Best had sold Voyager to ProQuest, a Michigan company, for three hundred and sixty million dollars. In 2007, he started another Dallas-based company, Higher Ed Holdings, later renamed Academic Partnerships, which persuades public colleges to attract more students by outsourcing to the firm their master’s-degree programs in fields such as business and education. The company puts the courses online, recruits students from a call center in Dallas, and takes a large percentage of the tuition revenue—between fifty and seventy per cent. It has contracts with more than fifty colleges nationwide, although it hasn’t been welcomed everywhere. At the University of Toledo, the education faculty blocked the contract because, as Leigh Chiarelott, then the head of the department, told me, there were serious concerns that “we’d be almost like a diploma mill.”
Best needed someone to lend credibility to the company. Florida had spent heavily on Voyager during Jeb Bush’s governorship, and, in 2005, when Bush was still in office, Best spoke with him about going into the education business. By 2011, Bush had joined Academic Partnerships as an investor and an adviser, and he became the company’s highest-profile champion. Best told the Washington Post that Bush’s annual salary was sixty thousand dollars, but he did not disclose the terms of Bush’s investment stake. For the first time, Bush was making money in an educational enterprise. But Campbell, Bush’s spokeswoman, is careful to draw a distinction between his work for Academic Partnerships and his education advocacy, noting that Academic Partnerships is involved in higher education, not K-12 schools.
In July, 2011, Bush sent letters to college presidents inviting them to the company’s first big marketing conference, at the Four Seasons Hotel near Dallas. Speakers included Tony Blair and the former Australian Prime Minister John Howard. Last spring, Bush recorded an infomercial inviting people to attend another Dallas conference, in March. This time, the speakers were Thomas Friedman, Fareed Zakaria, and Hillary Clinton, who opened her remarks with praise for Bush’s work on education. He was, she said, someone who “really focused on education during his time as governor in Florida and has continued that work with passion and dedication in the years since.”
As governor, Jeb Bush had been among those who noted one of the biggest problems with the No Child Left Behind law: standards varied greatly from state to state, depending on how ambitiously officials designed their tests and defined their success. In 2009, a coalition of governors and state education officials came together and, with financial support from the Gates Foundation and the implicit backing of the Obama Administration, devised a new set of standards intended to raise the calibre of instruction nationwide. The states broke into two consortia, each of which designed a set of tests around the new standards, called the Common Core.
The effort was bipartisan, and, at the beginning, all but four states signed on to it. Jeb Bush was not directly involved, but he was a vocal supporter of making tests and standards more consistent across the country, as part of his philosophy of full accountability for schools. The Common Core, he said, was a “clear and straightforward” path to “high, lofty standards.” In March of 2011, he appeared onstage at Miami Central High School with President Obama and Arne Duncan, who were in town to promote the Administration’s policy. “Education achievement is not a Republican issue or a Democrat issue,” Bush said. “It is an issue of national priority.” Obama thanked Bush for coming to the event, adding, “We are so grateful to him for the work that he’s doing on behalf of education.”
To avoid the standards being viewed as a federal mandate, the Administration had left their creation to the states. But it initially made states’ acceptance of them a requirement for receiving funds under its Race to the Top initiative. Conservative activists quickly seized on the standards as another example of Obama’s big-government overreach, along the lines of the Affordable Care Act. (They referred to the standards, inevitably, as Obamacore.) The Koch brothers, the talk-radio hosts Glenn Beck and Michelle Malkin, and the Heritage Foundation joined the attack. (Bush had left the Heritage board when he ran for governor the second time, in 1998.) “The élites in the Republican Party and the Democratic Party don’t get this,” a lawyer for the American Principles Project, one of the groups leading the backlash, said.
In June, 2011, Jeb Bush and Joel Klein, newly installed at News Corp., co-wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed headlined “The Case for Common Educational Standards.” A month later, an e-mail went out from the Foundation for Excellence in Education to the chiefs for change, alerting them that the upcoming convention of the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council, with which the foundation was usually allied, was going to take up a resolution against the Common Core. The e-mail urged the commissioners to lobby legislators attending the convention to oppose it.
The campaign against the standards particularly threatened Tony Bennett, the Indiana commissioner, a rising Republican who was one of the chiefs for change. In many states, the commissioners are appointed, but in Indiana they are elected. In 2012, the Tea Party organized opposition to Bennett’s reëlection; e-mails between Bennett’s office and the foundation that summer are full of alarm about the “black helicopter crowd.” In November, Bennett lost to an anti-Common Core Democrat who had Tea Party backing. Several potential Republican Presidential candidates for 2016—including the governors Scott Walker, of Wisconsin, Bobby Jindal, of Louisiana, and Mike Pence, of Indiana, all of whom had supported the Common Core—backed away from the standards, as did Florida’s governor, Rick Scott. Last April, Bush told Fox News, “Others that supported the standard all of a sudden now are opposed to it. I don’t get it.”
Meanwhile, several of the chiefs for change whom Bush was relying on to promote the standards were leaving office. Early last year, New Jersey’s Chris Cerf took an executive position at Amplify, which in 2013 had won a $12.5-million contract to develop a digital library of student-assessment tools from one of the state consortia that were developing the Common Core-based tests. Such movement from the public sector to the private is routine, but it underscored a central critique of the standards from both the left and the right: that, because the new testing regime required states to buy new test-prep materials, curricula, and even computers on which to take the tests, they were essentially another sales opportunity for the education industry. A headline on the Web site of the libertarian magazine Reason in July claimed that “Common Core Is Crony Capitalism for Computer Companies.”
A decade and a half earlier, Bush had been in the vanguard on conservative school reform. But, last September, he was not invited to the Values Voter Summit, the big annual event in Washington, D.C., for Republican politicians seeking to build support among religious-right activists. Tony Perkins, the president of the Family Research Council, which hosts the summit, explained at a news conference that “Jeb is a very nice guy, but he has a challenge among real conservatives for aggressively pushing for Common Core.” He added, “That’s a huge problem.”
Since Bush left the statehouse, the for-profit charter-school industry in Florida has continued to grow; the two largest chains have doubled their enrollment, to more than fifty thousand students. For-profit charters now spend half a million dollars a year on lobbying, and they contribute heavily to political campaigns. Charter Schools USA alone gave more than two hundred thousand dollars to candidates for state office in the 2012 elections. The industry so dominates the field, particularly in the Miami and Fort Lauderdale areas, that it has discouraged the expansion in Florida of highly regarded not-for-profit networks, such as KIPP and Green Dot. But questions about for-profit operations continue to mount.
The U.S. Department of Education is auditing the practices of charter companies, including those of Florida’s largest for-profit provider, Academica. The company, which was founded in 1999 by two brothers, Fernando and Ignacio Zulueta, has nearly a hundred charter and virtual schools in the state. The Miami Herald reported last April that the audit is examining the company’s practice of leasing space from development firms controlled by the Zuluetas. A 2006 Miami-Dade County audit determined that this arrangement, at one cluster of Academica schools, had cost taxpayers $1.3 million. (A company spokeswoman says that its leasing practices are proper.)
Academica recently hired the Florida state senator Anitere Flores, who served as an education adviser in Bush’s administration, and Manny Diaz, Jr., a state legislator, to administer Doral College, a new for-profit operation. It offers college-level classes to students at the company’s Doral Academy, a charter high school tucked incongruously in a warehouse district just west of the Miami airport.
Nearby, Armando Codina (with whom Bush has not worked since he first entered office) is building an eight-hundred-student charter school next to a hundred-and-twenty-acre luxury-condo development in the freshly minted “downtown” of Doral. The building will be financed and controlled by a Codina-affiliated nonprofit but managed by the local school board. An official at Doral town offices, however, could not provide any information about the school being built across the street. Any interested parents would need to “research it with Codina Partners,” he said.
Bob Graham, a former Democratic governor and U.S. senator from Florida, laments Bush’s legacy of privatized education. “I wish this experiment were taking place somewhere other than Florida,” he told me. Alex Villalobos, a former Republican state-senate majority leader who sparred with Bush over vouchers, shared that sentiment: “If the issue is you have failing public schools, then how is taking more money away from public education and giving it to private entities that are not accountable going to help public schools?”
The Liberty City Charter School closed in 2008, after a costly legal dispute with its landlord. But T. Willard Fair, the co-founder, told me that he still believed in the changes that the school had helped spark, including the for-profit charters. “This whole hue and cry about ‘for profit’ is hogwash,” he said. “We’re talking about competition.”
In late November, Bush went to Washington for the annual Foundation for Excellence in Education summit, held at the Marriott Wardman Park hotel. He reiterated his support for the Common Core and school choice in a speech that was full of education bromides (“poverty is not an excuse”; “states and local communities are where the best ideas come from”). It was hard to question the conviction underlying his remarks, but his delivery was phlegmatic. Todd Lamb, a former education adviser to President George W. Bush who now works for Engrade, the digital-learning division of McGraw-Hill, said that if Jeb “had grown up in, say, rural Northern California, he would’ve become a chief academic officer for a school district.”
In the corridors, hundreds of state legislators, education commissioners, activists, and Bush aides mingled with education-industry executives and lobbyists. Campbell Brown, the former CNN anchor, who is now an anti-teachers’-union activist, walked through the hall with a cup of coffee in each hand. Joel Klein was there to pitch Amplify’s latest products, including a tablet app that features the actor Chadwick Boseman reading from the autobiography of Frederick Douglass. The “donor meetings” between the state commissioners and company executives were held all afternoon in a conference room.
Later, attendees drifted to the hotel bar, where they waited to hear Condoleezza Rice speak at a banquet that evening. Tony Bennett walked through the lobby. After he lost his bid for reëlection in Indiana, he briefly served as Florida’s education commissioner, but resigned after the Associated Press reported that he had tweaked the rating of an Indiana charter school founded by a major G.O.P. donor. (An inspector general later cleared him of any legal violation.) He was consulting for the test-prep company ACT Aspire, which is co-owned by Pearson. “In this incredible land of opportunity,” Bennett said, “why shouldn’t someone who served his country get to serve in another way?”
Less than a month later, Bush announced his possible Presidential candidacy. In the weeks since, he stepped down from his position at the foundation, and he has been extricating himself from his business ties. He quit his advisory post at Barclays (which acquired Lehman Brothers); left the boards of Tenet Health Care and Rayonier, a real-estate and timber company; and resigned from Academic Partnerships.
He is, for now, maintaining his position at his consulting firm, Jeb Bush & Associates, and at three private-equity funds that he has helped assemble during the past two years. According to Bloomberg Politics, the funds have together raised a hundred and twenty-seven million dollars, much of it from a Chinese conglomerate, called HNA, to invest in oil and gas ventures and in the aviation industry. “I’m not ashamed” of those ties, Bush told a reporter for a Miami TV station in December, about his former business affiliations. “Taking risk and creating jobs is something we ought to have more of.”
Al Cardenas told me that Bush’s decision to walk away from his business interests suggested that he had heard the call of duty. “It’s not easy,” Cardenas said, but “there are lots of things you do for your country—and this is one of them.” ♦
