Jeremiah Kittredge

Jeremiah Kittredge has been a darling of the national charter school movement’s wealthiest and most powerful benefactors. Since starting the pro-charter organization Families for Excellent Schools in 2011, he’s courted reform-friendly governors and members of Congress, funded his group with tens of millions of dollars from America’s wealthiest financiers and philanthropic organizations, and emerged as perhaps the closest ally to the country’s most well-known charter school leader, Success Academy CEO Eva Moskowitz. That all ended, when Bryan Lawrence — a banker who sits on Families for Excellent Schools’ board — blasted out a statement to reporters that Kittredge had been “terminated” following an outside law firm’s investigation into allegations of “inappropriate behavior toward a non-employee.” That incident took place last November at a Washington, D.C., hotel during the Philos conference, an annual gathering hosted by Education Reform Now, the policy affiliate of the advocacy organization Democrats for Education Reform. Kittredge is best known in New York for helping to arrange enormous pro-charter rallies attended mostly by Success students, who have had their schools closed for the day and been bused to rallies in Albany and various parks and squares in New York City. In November 2016, Kittredge led Families for Excellent Schools’ Massachusetts arm, called Great Schools Massachusetts, to a 25-point loss in a ballot referendum that would have expanded the number of charters that can open in the Bay State. The loss was particularly devastating to charter leaders considering that Massachusetts has some of the highest-performing charters in the country. The ballot question, known as Question 2, was largely run by Kittredge and cost the group $20 million in money from private donors. The state’s campaign finance board found that Great Schools Massachusetts had illegally concealed its donors, and charged the group $426,500. Great Schools Massachusetts was forced to dissolve, and Families for Excellent Schools is banned from campaigning in the state for the next four years. Education philanthropists began to fret, and a report originally commissioned by the Walton Family Foundation to look into the Question 2 campaign morphed into an autopsy; Walton gave the group over $13 million between 2014 and 2016 alone. Kitteridge was fired from another pro-charter school group, Democracy Builders, in 2011, according to multiple sources. Kittredge referred POLITICO to his lawyer, the white-collar criminal defense attorney Charles Clayman.