Kochs Off Campus! first heard of the Freedom Center’s high school course while distributing leaflets about the Freedom Center at a film festival in June 2017. A woman approached us and said the Freedom Center had published a dreadful textbook that was being used in Tucson high schools! She told us how to find a scathing review of it online and then vanished into the crowd.

We read the philosopher’s review and bought a used copy of the textbook. Reading it ourselves confirmed what an appalling hack job it was. Thus began our battle to remove the Freedom Center’s course from Tucson’s two school districts.

We showed up at school board meetings and educated them about the Koch network, the Freedom Center, the course that had been sneaked into the curriculum without the board’s knowledge, and the abominable textbook for the course. We planned our three-minute presentations in advance, to be sure every important topic was covered in spite of the 3-minute time limits. 

In response, the Tucson Unified School District (TUSD) convened a citizen committee to review the textbook, with three of our members on it. The rest of us submitted a plethora of expert reviews criticizing the textbook (see below). The committee voted to discontinue the textbook, and subsequently, the board declined to consider a proposal to offer the course the next year. “Ethics, Economy and Entrepreneurship” was dead in TUSD.

The Amphitheater School District board had never even heard of the course or its textbook, although the course was being offered in an Amphi high school. After our presentation to the board, the superintendent of Amphi decided not to offer the course the next year due to “lack of student interest.” — Another success!

The underhanded way the Freedom Center got its course into Tucson’s public high schools exemplifies Koch network modus operandi and corruption. Freedom Center Assistant Director Mario Villarreal-Diaz was placed in charge of getting the course into local high schools. He later transferred to the University of Texas, where he was managing director of the Koch-sponsored Salem Center for Policy. Ironically this man, who slipped the Freedom Center’s course into Tucson’s high schools, was charged with child pornography in 2020.

Experts Debunk the Freedom Center’s Dual Enrollment Course Textbook

EXPERT ANALYSIS OF THE FIRST EDITION OF THE FREEDOM CENTER'S DUAL ENROLLMENT COURSE TEXTBOOK: ETHICS, ECONOMY & ENTREPRENEURSHIP

This disastrously flawed textbook was used both in dual enrollment high school courses and for PPEL 101 at UA. Below are many expert opinions about it. It has now been replaced by the also disastrously flawed textbook Commercial Society. Reviews of Commercial Society follow the reviews of Ethics, Economy & Entrepreneurship [EEAE] below.

• Philosopher David Johnson's Critique of EEAE - “The textbook offers up about as alarming a display of Koch-inspired free-market propaganda as I have ever come across.” “What I found was a peculiar mixture of the utterly banal and the frighteningly ideological.” 

• Economist George Evans critiques EEAE’s inadequate discussion of macroeconomics, fiscal policy, monetary policy, and the Great Recession following the financial crisis of 2007-2008. “How can it be that there is no discussion in this book of arguably the worst US and global economic crisis of the last 75 years?”

• Economist Frank Ackerman's Review - “This is a book full of unsubstantiated personal opinions, often with a partisan slant.” “The text minimizes the actual role of government in the economy.” “[It] presents an extraordinarily selective and biased view of the history of economics.”

• NAU Philosophy of Education Professor Guy Senese finds the Freedom Center's EEAE textbook doesn't meet its own learning objectives. His review contains extensive quotations from Parts 1 and 2.

• UA Anthropology Professor David Killick explains the laughable archaeological and anthropological misconceptions in EEAE. A short, enjoyable read.

• Patrick Diehl Critiques EEAE's coverage of entrepreneurship. “The derogatory way in which working for someone else is consistently treated in this passage is especially troubling.” “The entrepreneur is a risk-taker, hardworking, brave, and tough--kind of like a professional free-climber, but operating from an office chair.” “One can only agree with the statement on pg 19, “This course will not even come close to telling you everything you need to know to be successful in running your own business.” Dr. Diehl is a former assistant professor of English and comparative literature at UCLA and UC Berkeley. More from him on this textbook can be found in our Blog.

ANALYSIS OF THE REVISED EDITION OF THE FREEDOM CENTER'S DUAL ENROLLMENT COURSE TEXTBOOK, NOW RETITLED COMMERCIAL SOCIETY

• Professor George Evans’ Critique of Commercial Society (30-minute read). “The book contains numerous deficiencies that concern me as an economist and which, in my view, render it unacceptable as a textbook. This was my assessment of the earlier book, and there has not been significant improvement in the current version.”

• Patrick Diehl’s Critique of the New Edition (6-minute read) This version of the Freedom Center’s textbook “now has a legitimate publisher. No longer is it being published out of Schmidtz’s and Johnson’s house here in Tucson. The typos and boners are gone. The smarmy tone has been toned down somewhat.” However, “the authors still fail to acknowledge that they are propounding just one view of economics;” [their] “treatment of ethics is still so shallow and thin as to be almost grotesque;” [they] “continue to promote entrepreneurship without adequately warning the student of the likelihood of failure;” [and] “in the light of the unfolding tragedy of global climate change, the chapter on negative externalities (Ch. 28) has become a bad joke.”

If you are a teacher, and you are contacted about offering the Freedom Center’s course “Commercial Society,” please contact us.

Take Charge Today

Take Charge Today (TCT) offers personal financial literacy lesson plans free of charge to teachers in high schools and middle schools nationwide. Kochs Off Campus! has not evaluated all of TCT’s lesson plans, although an option in the Advanced Level course “The Basics of Taxes” to have the class discuss and vote on whether or not to eliminate taxes raised our eyebrows.

TCT was housed in UA’s Take Charge America Institute until 2018 when it moved to UA’s Department of Political Economy and Moral Science (PEMS). (PEMS was founded in 2017 at the behest of the Freedom Center.)

The Take Charge America Institute was founded in 2003 with a $10 million endowment from Michael Hall at Take Charge America, Inc. (a nonprofit credit counseling agency in Phoenix). An IRS investigation concluded in 2005 that Take Charge America, Inc., had paid fees to real estate and software companies owned by its founder (who was also Michael Hall), in addition to lucrative salaries for Hall, his wife, his son, two brothers-in-law, and at one point his 95-year-old father. (See “Behind the Credit Counseling Curtain” on foxbusiness.com.)

Kochs Off Campus! is very concerned that the Freedom Center may use the TCT database of 40,000 educators around the country to push its high school course. The Freedom Center stated in its 2019 “Self Study”: “To further build a program in EEAE, we incorporated the Take Charge Today program” (page 10 at this link).