There is likely to be a lot of legislation dealing with school choice, charter schools and related subjects when the Montana Legislature convenes Jan. 5. This file photo of the House chamber was taken by Montana Legislative Services.
Much has already been made of the news that the Montana House Education Committee will be led during the 2015 legislative session by two prominent supporters of school choice and charter schools.
But since Democratic Gov. Steve Bullock is likely to veto any attempts to bring school choice to Montana, it’s the long game that is more interesting, and in that sense backers of school choice seem positioned to prevail someday soon.
“They probably see themselves one governor away from having what they want: to privatize Montana public schools,” said Eric Feaver, head of the Montana Education Association-Montana Federation of Teachers.
Jeff Laszloffy, a former state legislator and head of the Montana Family Foundation, which has been leading the charge for school choice, doesn’t agree that choice equals privatization, but he said Feaver is right about how close the battle is.
“Eric knows he’s hanging on by his fingernails,” Laszloffy said.
The chair of the House Education Committee for the session that begins Jan. 5 will be Laszloffy’s daughter, Sarah Laszloffy, of Laurel, who was elected to her second term in the House this fall. The vice chair will be freshman Rep. Debra Lamm, who has lobbied on behalf of the family foundation in the Legislature. She is also the founder of Montanans Against Common Core, the reading and math proficiency benchmarks adopted by Montana and 44 other states.
Sarah Laszloffy
But the connections between the Laszloffys and Lamm go deeper than their connection with the Montana Family Foundation. The point of connection is Greg Gianforte, the wealthy Bozeman entrepreneur who is playing an increasingly large role in Montana politics, and who is the state’s most powerful advocate of school choice and public funding for private schools.
Gianforte’s involvement in school-choice issues “has been a game-changer,” Jeff Laszloffy acknowledged.
Gianforte is a major backer and chairman of the board for Petra Academy in Bozeman, which describes itself as a “classical and Christian school” that serves pre-schoolers through high-schoolers.
It was Gianforte who persuaded Laszloffy and his Montana Family Foundation to take up the cause of school choice during the 2009 legislative session. Before then, the foundation, based in Laurel, had focused on social issues, mostly working to oppose abortion rights and same-sex marriage.
Gianforte also persuaded ACE Scholarships, a Colorado group that gives private-school scholarships to needy families, to open a branch in Montana. Gianforte then donated $4.6 million to ACE Scholarships Montana. Gianforte is a computer scientist who founded RightNow Technologies in Bozeman and sold it in 2012 for $1.5 billion. A former vice president of that company, U.S. Rep. Steve Daines, was elected this fall to the U.S. Senate from Montana.
Sarah Laszloffy was the first director of ACE Scholarships Montana, a job from which she recently resigned.
Another, newer connection involves John Mork, the chairman of the Energy Corporation of America, the company that announced plans to drill for oil and gas on the Beartooth Front in Montana and Wyoming.
This fall, when a company representative appeared before the Carbon County Commission to talk about an ECA oil well near Belfry, he mentioned the corporation’s commitment to the community. The only actual example he gave was a $100,000 donation from the ECA Foundation to ACE Scholarships Montana.
John Mork’s wife, Julie Mork, is the managing director of the ECA Foundation and also serves on the Colorado Board of Trustees for ACE Scholarships. Gianforte, for his part, is on the Board of Directors for ACE Scholarships and is a member of the Board of Advisors for ACE Scholarships Montana.
Other members of the advisory board for ACE in Montana include Steve Barrett, a former chair of the Montana Board of Regents; former Gov. Judy Martz; David Yarlott, president of Little Big Horn College; and Geoff Gamble, former president of Montana State University Bozeman.
Greg Gianforte
Meanwhile, Greg Gianforte’s wife, Susan Gianforte, is the chairman of the board of the Montana Family Foundation. Laszloffy and his foundation led the successful campaign to stop adoption of a nondiscrimination ordinance by the Billings City Council.
Susan Gianforte was a vocal opponent of a similar measure, which ultimately was passed by the Bozeman City Commission. It prohibits discrimination in housing, employment and public accommodations against people on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identification or expression.
The Gianforte Family Charitable Trust is also a major financial backer of Laszloffy’s foundation. In 2012, the most recent year for which annual reports are available, the Gianforte foundation gave $280,000 to the Montana Family Foundation.
That represents more than half the money—$476,742—that the Montana Family Foundation reported receiving that year. And according to the foundation’s 2012 report, nearly a fourth of the money raised—$114,658—went to pay the salary of Laszloffy, the foundation’s sole employee.
He is no longer the only paid staff member. Earlier this month, the foundation hired Bowen Greenwood, former executive director of the Montana Republican Party, as its communications director.
Lamm, an attorney in Livingston and the freshman Republican who will co-chair the House Education Committee, lobbied for the family foundation as an independent contractor during the past legislative session. She said her main focus was a charter-school bill, but she also worked on some other school-choice bills.
Laszloffy said she had originally considered taking a leave of absence from her job with ACE Scholarships Montana during the upcoming legislative session, but ultimately decided to simply resign. Without going into specifics, she said her new job will involve leadership training for young people, including preparing them for political involvement.
Feaver, head of the largest teachers union in the state, was his normally blunt self in talking about the House committee assignments.
“What we have now is the Montana Family Foundation sitting in a very powerful position on the House Education Committee,” he said. The naming of Laszloffy and Lamm to head the committee, he added, “just kind of takes your breath away.”
In the 2013 session, Bullock vetoed SB-81, which would have allowed tax credits for contributions to private schools or scholarships to private schools by corporations and individuals. Feaver said Gianforte paid “a personal visit” to Bullock, urging him not to veto the bill.
“I think SB 81 was his attempt to give himself a tax credit for the good deeds he thought he was doing,” Feaver said of Gianforte. “I called it a pretty cynical and self-serving proposition then and I call it that now.”
Eric Feaver
With a tax credit, Feaver said, donations to ACE Scholarships and similar organizations would result in a dollar-for-dollar reduction in state taxes for the person or corporation making the donation. Feaver said that would be a big hit on state revenues and would violate Article X of the Montana Constitution, which prohibits direct or indirect public appropriations to sectarian schools.
Looking ahead to the 2015 session, Feaver said, “It’s going to be a very rough ride.”
Jeff Laszloffy laughed when told of Feaver’s comment that the Montana Family Foundation will essentially control the Education Committee.
“Gosh,” he said, “I only wish we had as much power as the teachers union does.”
In fact, Laszloffy said, it was the defeat of school choice legislation in the 2009 Legislature that prompted Gianforte to ask ACE Scholarships to open a branch in Montana. Laszloffy said Gianforte was distressed that RightNow Technologies was having trouble finding Montanans with adequate skill levels, and he was keenly interested in improving Montana schools.
“He thought the solution was providing school choice,” Laszloffy said.
Laszloffy said fears about the future of public schools in a climate of school choice are unfounded. In Arizona, which has a wide variety of school options, and has for decades, he said, 85 percent of the state’s children still attend public schools.
That’s the point, he said: private schools are there for the kids who aren’t doing well in public schools for whatever reason.
Jeff Laszloffy
As for opposition from the teachers unions, Laszloffy said, “It’s all about power and money, and they don’t want to give up either.”
Kirk Miller, director of School Administrators of Montana, echoed Feaver in saying that “any reasonable person” who looks at the House Education Committee would see that it “has definitely been stacked with leadership who want to move toward privatization and profitization of public education in Montana.”
He said charter schools, on average, perform no better than public schools, and that public schools in Montana outperform public schools in states where charter schools are popular. Miller said one of his main objections to charter schools and other private schools is that there is little public oversight—no public scrutiny of financial statements or curricula, no open meetings, no freely elected school board.
“We’re going to definitely be against anything that would take away … the public’s authority to govern local schools through a locally elected school board,” Miller said.
He also said that some Montana legislators appear to be “driven by out-of-state interests rather than their own constituents.” As for Gianforte, he said, “He’s passionate about the things he believes in, and he has the resources to influence others to be passionate about the things he believes in.”
Lamm agrees that there is some privatization going on when it comes to education in Montana, but not in the way Feaver and Miller see it. She said corporations like Pearson Education, which is involved in textbook publishing and other educational programs around the world, see public schools as “a profitable frontier.”
She said serious concerns have been raised about the content delivered by Pearson, regarding both political content and educational quality.
“So much of it is not education-based as being about beliefs, opinions and attitudes,” she said.
She also discounted fears about the loss of local control in terms of private vs. public schools. Most public school boards don’t really exercise much control, anyway, she said, because “they become entangled by the education groups who direct them,” and board members who do try to represent the public are marginalized by their peers.
In a newsletter published last year by a coalition of public school groups, including Feaver’s union and the School Administrators of Montana, Lamm was derided for saying “that a connection exists between Common Core and the United Nations UNESCO, the ‘New World Order,’ Marxism, Globalism, Islam, etc.”
Lamm said that was not true. She said the school groups conflated her own views with those of a group that was advertising a talk she gave on Common Core.
Debra Lamm
Whatever the case, Feaver said Lamm is a terrible choice to serve as vice chair of the education committee. During the last session, when Lamm was lobbying for the Montana Family Foundation, Feaver said she approached him and asked if there wasn’t some way they could work together on education issues.
“I told her I don’t work with terrorists,” Feaver said. “I absolutely mean that. These guys want to destroy the fabric of public education.”
Others have criticized Sarah Lasloffy for her lack of post-high school education. Laszloffy said she is completing a degree through a correspondence course at the Thomas Edison State College in New Jersey, and she also studied for a year at the Bethel School of Supernatural Ministry. She said that school is not really a divinity school, but trains people from all walks of life about how to be evangelists.
Laszloffy said committee chairmen are so busy simply running the committee that they may end up wielding less power than others on the panel. She also promised to be even-handed.
“If I’m doing my job as a chair well, every bill should get a fair hearing, and no one should know how I feel about any of the legislation,” she said.
Austin Knudsen, R-Culbertson, the incoming speaker of the House, said House Republicans will definitely be bringing some school choice bills to the table this session, but he wasn’t sure yet exactly what form those bills would take. He is a big supporter of private schools, he said, though his two children attend public schools.
For students “slipping through the cracks,” he said, there are few options, and there is no reason not to give them some. And he makes no apologies for naming two school-choice proponents to head the education committee.
“That’s why I put them there,” he said. “That’s not a mystery.”
Denise Juneau, the Democratic superintendent of Public Instruction, said her office’s priorities this session will be bills to raise the dropout age from 16 to 18 and another that would allow schools to continue receiving funding for students who are 19 but still need to finish some courses to earn a high school degree.
She also said public schools already provide a lot of choice, from which school to attend to advancement-placement classes and other individualized options.
“Parents have a lot of choice for how they want their child educated,” she said. “We don’t need private organizations providing public education, or diverting money to private schools.”
