The billionaire-funded Parent Revolution flexed its muscle and got enough parent signatures to force the resignation of a highly effective principal.
Please read the story.
This is the principal who was ousted by Parent Revolution:
“Third-grade teacher Kate Lewis said Irma Cobian is the best principal she’s had in nine years at Weigand Avenue Elementary School in Watts.
“Joseph Shamel called Cobian a “godsend” who has used her mastery of special education to show him how to craft effective learning plans for his students.
“Los Angeles Unified Supt. John Deasy praised a plan developed by Cobian and her team to turn around the struggling campus — where most students test below grade level in reading and math — calling it a “well-organized program for accelerated student achievement.” He thanked Cobian for her commitment and hard work.”
21of the school’s 22 teachers have requested transfers because of Cobian’s ouster.
Parent Revolution is a malevolent organization funded by Walton, Gates, and Broad.
There is a special place in hell reserved for everyone who administers and funds this revolting organization that destroys schools and fine educators like Irma Cobian.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“Parent” revolution?!! As a parent, I’m offended that they are tarnishing my title. That seems to be as ass-backward as “No (every) Child Left Behind” and “Race to the Top (bottom)”.
Indeed, Parent Revolution’s Ben Austin makes a false equivalency between elections and signature gathering for a petition… as a hare-brained way to defend parents not being able to rescind their signatures.
This little tid-bit relates to Parent Revolution’s biggest “success” to date…
the takeover in Adelanto.
A hastily-organized and penniless group of parents
in Adelanto tried to have their signatures rescinded,
claiming that they had been lied to and misled into
signing the petition by Parent Revolution operatives.
They even testified to that in court.
This testimony from Ben Austin responding to their claims says it all:
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
BEN AUSTIN: “There are certainly voters who are going to vote
on ballot initiatives this November that do not understand
everything they’re voting on… That doesn’t illegitimize
an election.”
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
Wow!
That is some Classic Ben Austin! You can find it here:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/03/wont-back-down-inspiratio_n_1935876.html
Ben is tacitly admitting that—in the course of Parent Revolution’s
signature gathering—there were and are indeed petition signers
who were misled and confused when signing on
(and presumably would not have signed otherwise)…
with Austin conceding that it was AT LEAST SOME OF
HIS OWN SIGNATURE GATHERERS WERE DELIBERATELY
MISLEADING AND CONFUSING PEOPLE.
There were almost 100 parents who wanted to rescind
their signatures after finding out they had been “duped”.
ANATOMY OF THE “DUPING”:
the Parent Revolution organizers rented a house
across the street from the school, and elicited what
the parents by saying, “This is to make the school better… ”
Well, duh! Who’s not going to sign that?
In an argument that inexplicably prevailed with
an appeals court judge, Ben tries to draw an equivalency…
between petitions and elections…
in that both usually have signers / voters
who may be misled or confused when they
vote for / sign something… and so what if they do?
Once again…
– – – – – – – – – – – –
BEN AUSTIN: “There are certainly voters who are going to vote
on ballot initiatives this November that do not understand
everything they’re voting on… That doesn’t illegitimize
an election.”
– – – – – – – – – – – – –
WTF???!!!
This idiotic argument—attempting to equate elections
and signature-gathering for a petition—essentially legitimizes
wholesale fraud in signature-gathering.
It essentially gives license to any and
every kind of dishonest tactic:
— lying,
—phony promises
—threats
and on and on…
Because later, you can just claim… “well, they do this in elections,
and you’re not allowed to take your vote back… so you shouldn’t
be allowed to take your signature back.”
Unlike an election, petition-gatherer engages in a one-on-one communication
and relationships with the prospective signer… one in which the prospective signer
is at the mercy of the signature-gatherer as to what he or she is
saying—promises, representations, threats, etc.—are actually
truthful.
If the signer of the petition—once he discovers that has “been had”—
is not then allowed to rescind the signature… then the whole fraud
will then run rampant.
An election is nothing of the kind.
The only reason this was not appealed to the Supreme Court was that the School Board in Adelanto had been financially drained by Parent Revolution’s high-powered lawyers. This cash-poor school district was broke, so they had to basically surrender at this point.
This is only the beginning of the demise of Parent Revolution. They made one big mistake…they forgot what was going to happen after the trigger is pulled. They were so focused on getting as many schools to fall for their false promises, that they failed to figure out what the results would be.
Problems are arising in Adelanto too. Already, one of Parent Revolution’s supporting parents has bailed out.
http://www.sbsun.com/news/ci_23317024/parent-trigger-leader-alleges-organizers-promised-parents-pay
The funniest part of that piece is how the scores have gone down in the school.since they pulled the trigger.
I’m not surprised. The parents are split into two warring camps and the community is divided.
Poor kids. Just pawns in this crusade.
its not the beginning they are targeting 100 or more schools. they don’t seem to get the message. as far as they know they are using the law which was written in their favor to bully schools into chaos and engaging in energizing school improvement into retrograde. They answer to no one and don’t care about the outcome.Heck they get paid to work not to achieve real improvement. they specialize in disintegration to pave the way for solutions which will not pay off for students or parents that truly support and are part of solutions.
Readers who have been following the Parent Trigger efforts seem to be forgetting that in Adelanto the parents had to go to court twice because the school board ignored the court decision the first time and certain board members even made outrageous comments about not caring if they were hauled off in handcuffs, they wouldn’t abide by the law. Not to mention that immigration statuses were questioned and lots of “games” played. If trained, professional educators cannot make a difference in a corrupt system, you will be seeing more and more parents pull the trigger with the courts backing.
Even without full knowledge of the situation, just consider:
1), How amazing is it that a manager of an organization with 22 professional subordinates has 21 of them asking to transferring out when their boss is being given the boot? This speaks volumes about the principal’s ability to gain [with very hard work] the trust and respect of her subordinates.
2), Note the precise wording: parents get a vote based on the number of children they have in the school at the time the petition circulates, i.e., their votes are weighted to favor those with more children and disfavor those with fewer. Hence it is perfectly possible that a minority of parents made up that 53% of valid signatures. And how about all the parents who have yet to send their children there but will soon? They didn’t get a vote. And one parent who signed now regrets it—there may be many more.
3), How much time exactly do the charterites/privatizers give others? Let’s see: was it Ms. Cobian with some real success or the RSD of New Orleans with doctored success [see M. Schneider’s posts] that received vastly more time? Double standards, anyone?
4), Board Member Richard Vladovic on kicking out Ms. Cobian [in large part due to less than unrealistic rises in test scores]: “Basically we had no choice.” Sarah Potter of the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education on closing down a commendable charter school for severely challenged students because of [allegedly] low test scores: “We were really forced to do this.” Remember: the charterites/privatizers regularly condemn the cheating that accompanies their “fear and fire” management schemes that use the scores of high-stakes standardized tests by claiming that just because you incentivize immoral behavior doesn’t excuse any teacher or administrator doing so. Ok, what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, so out with hypocrisy and let’s get straight to your mantra: “no excuses”! You edufrauds don’t have to cheat, you don’t have to fire, you don’t have do anything that is immoral and unethical. You simply choose to do so.
5), Last but not least, just where was Superintendent John Deasy and the LAUSD board when there was an obvious campaign of intimidation that included profanity scrawled on walls and on Cobian’s car? How could there have been a fair discussion around the issues raised by the petition when Parent Revolution was free to say anything it wanted and the school’s teachers were forbidden to speak up in defense of the work of both themselves and their principal? Regardless of the legal niceties, Deasy and his bosses not only failed to lead their team, they handicapped them in order to favor the charterite/privatizer team.
There is much more in the article. I urge everyone who visits this blog to read it with a critical eye and make their comments.
It’s becoming clear now that “parent triggers”, like almost all of the current “reform” measures, are based on lies and fraud. Look for changes in this law soon.
Let’s get some constituency trigger laws. . . . when voters are not happy with performance, they can oust people like Duncan, Obama, Tisch, Fletcher, etc. . .
https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/push-congressional-trigger-law-and-presidential-trigger-law/f1RQjsp0
Teaching is not a profession anyone needs to pursue.
It is the biggest bunch of Political CR*P in the universe.
Read about the principal.below committing fraud…and how the county is still sitting on their petukas doing nothing about this man who holds a PHD from a Diploma Mill
Fake PHD…and was the highest paid principal in the county…
This county truly thinks this is going away…No No No..
http://greensboro.rhinotimes.com/1editorialbody.lasso?-token.folder=comm/2013/04/17&-token.story=215475.112113&-nothing&-token.disearea=2
Again not one of you knows what is behind this as none of you have obviously read the law and rules and regulations for the Parent Trigger or Parent Empowerment as it is called legally in California. In regulation 4, page 2, item (g) are the rules for gathering signatures. Parent Revolution broke every one of them in all of their signature gathering. Therefore, according to the laws of the State of California those signatures are no good and the Parent Trigger was not legally pulled. I have sent all the law and rules and regulations to every board member of LAUSD along with an explanation as to how they were broken and that it is their responsibility to reject those applications until the signatures are properly gained. At least 5-6 parents from Weigand testified at the LAUSD Board Meeting on this agenda item as to the promises of food, jobs, help with immigration problems and such along with the intimidation and who knows how they obtained the addresses, private phone numbers and email address’s. Read the law before you talk about important issues. You will not find the rules and regulations on the Parent Revolution website even though they have a place to click to obtain them. Nor do they have any information on their involvement in Florida on their website and anyone who has been paying attention would know about their phony video in Florida and that it comes directly from Parent Revolution. I am not against the Parent Trigger we at CORE-CA want the law, rules and regulations followed. What is wrong with that. In order to comment effectively we read and comprehend these issues before we comment or speak in public. That is why in over 22 years of fraud busting no one has ever proven a thing I have said to be incorrect. I have their documents before I speak on any issue. So should you. Now do your homework before any more comments.
Deasy and General Counsel Holmquist regularily break the law and this is another example. Email me at georgebuzzetti@gmail.com if you want the current Calif. law and rules and regulations and/or the proposed Florida law. Always know what you are talking about or when you get in public expect to be ripped a new one by someone like me.
In agreement yet again with George, and in answer a bit to some other comments, outside of Los Angeles, and most sadly, even in LA, too many people see Deasy as a hero. People do not understand how parents are intimidated into protests, and some even are offered quid pro quo rewards for signing protest forms.
Deasy has NO compunctions to bend the truth in aiding all these ‘reforms’ clearly learned at the feet of Eli Broad. When a billionaire real estate developer calls the shots in his “Education Foundation” of using bare knuckles business practices to privatize public schools, and the products of his methods are Rhee, Deasy, and the Chicago Supt., plus hundreds of others nationwide, this is the kind of result you get.
This same behavior has occurred at Crenshaw, Hamilton, Venice, Verdugo High Schools which I know of from reports from colleagues at those sites. He visits the schools, admires and lauds their collaborative programs, and then shuts them down to bring in private Charters…and he says with a straight face that he NEVER did a site visit. His nose is growing longer than Pinocchio.
I assume Deasy’s school takeover goal in LAUSD will be rapid (his word to me and others in public meetings) and extreme in the next few weeks while Villagraigos still is Mayor. And it is horrifying to read that incoming Mayor Eric Garcetti supports this ‘reform.’ I urge anyone in LA with access to Garcetti, to set him straight.
Deasy must go!! The new School Board should have a proper extensive search for Superintendent of the second largest school district in the US, over 900,000 students. Broad and Villaraigosa were able to get Deasy appointed with no other candidates being interviewed. Outrageous!
The LA Times today tells the story in great detail and it is worth reading it since it is only moments until it hits schools in your states.
I don’t think Garcetti supports privatization. What evidence is there that he does? He stayed neutral in the Sanchez-Ratliff race, and received endorsements from UTLA and CTU. He flip flopped on parent trigger, but I don’t think he really supports it. Contrast that with Greuel who endorsed Sanchez, shared the stage with Monica Garcia, supported Deasy, and appointed Dick Riordan her education advisor. Thank God she lost. She would have been a nightmare like Rahm.
Of course the billionaires will pressure Garcetti so people need to be vigilant.
Susan…the LA Times, Howard Blume and other reporters have recently said both candidates supported Deasy and his positions on charters. I hope those reports are exaggerated. I think Eric was by far the better choice for Mayor and look for him to bring jobs to LA, but will not hold my breath over the pot holes. I was not happy to read that was his position. If you google the last two weeks of issues you can find either Blume or the woman whose name escapes me (it is 3 AM as I am writing this) and you will see those reports.
From the LA Times article:
“This week, parents voted to accept Cobian’s turnaround plan as the next step forward. Although a Parent Revolution statement quoted Garcia as saying that parents “spent several months carefully reviewing” the plan, she told The Times last week that she had never read it and disagreed with key elements, such as its focus on reading and writing.”
Wow. All I can say is, Wow.
What? You mean that Parent Revolution folks were lying?
That Ms. Garcia did not actually “spend several months carefully reviewing” the plan, as Parent Revolution claimed?
That the leader and the brains behind the whole Trigger process NEVER EVEN READ THE PLAN—the plan whose primary designer is the Principal whom she targeted—the plan WHOSE DEFICIENCIES ARE THE SUPPOSED JUSTIFICATION FOR THE WHOLE TRIGGER PROCESS?
And that, although having not read a word of the plan, Ms. Garcia states that her second-hand knowledge of the plan lead her to believe that the plan stinks, and the sole problem with it that she can site is that it emphasizes “reading and writing”?
This whole situation is bat-shit crazy.
Yeah, that about sums it up.
And you really got to wonder about a Revolution whose parent leader has a problem with reading and writing.
Why would anyone want to work for these people? All of the teachers should just walk out. This whole situation reminds me of Dante’s Inferno. I keep wondering what type of punishment would Dante envision for the reformers???
When did it become a principal’s fault that an entire community has low-achieving students? The Ben Austin guy is crazy.
https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/push-congressional-trigger-law-and-presidential-trigger-law/f1RQjsp0
Should we have a President Trigger Law and a Congressional Trigger Law?
Love this suggestion….wish we could make it a national movement (like the urban myth re Buffet changing Congress). When do we all march to DC with pitch forks??? If you start a Congressional Trigger petition I promise to be first in line to sign.
If our political leaders allow this sort of thing to happen, then what is left? Where is the Occupy Wall Street movement? We are losing. Prepare for the days of Neo-Feudalism to follow.
We are not losing. We win new victories every day. Even when the privatizers think they have scored a big victory–like the mass closings in Chicago–it is such a colossal error that it blows up in their faces.
Diane, although I agree with so much of what you write about education, I don’t think you have the full story on Parent Revolution. If this principal is so wonderful, why didn’t the district send her to another school? In Adelanto, although a new staff is coming into Desert Trails, including a new principal, this coming August, the current principal has a contract with the district and is being moved to another position and even receiving a promotion. Yes, parents can put pressure on someone to resign, but the principal works at the whim of the board, and they could have “saved” her, unless they agreed with the parents. The parents were not the villains in Adelanto, and I think there is much more to this particular story as well.
If the parents were not the villains then why did so many parents and teachers not agree with Parent Revolution. Many parents enrolled their kids out of such a divided and controversial school. This was not the case before parent revolution. Are the students better off? I don’t think so, But parent revolution did get paid and probably got a bonus. yay…..Walmart money going the long way to ruin our future. Walmart needs price checkers not critical thinkers. Parent Revolution has no proven strategies to improve schools they are forcing change for the worse.
There was enough parent support to go back to court and win–twice. The new school does not open until August, but anything will be an improvement because change was needed with a clean slate, otherwise the staff and district would be happily keeping the status quo into the next century. The movie was mild compared to some of what was going on.
In the interview linked to BELOW, Parent Revolution leader
Ben Austin characterizes the opposition to the Parent
Trigger in Compton(December 2010) thusly:
“The teachers’ union struck back”,
He then proceeds to describe McKinley Elementary
in Compton (the target school) overall as a
child-abusing hell-hole.
(Oh really? Then why did 90% of the parents
choose to remain at McKinley… the child-abusing hell-hole…
instead of at the charter school that Parent Revolution helped
open just a block away?)
Seriously, Dr. Ravitch. You’re not going to believe this—but Austin claims
THAT the the unionized teachers at McKinley retaliated against the the
pro-Parent Trigger parents by physically torturing the children of
those parents (???!!!) while the children of anti-Parent-Trigger,
pro-evil-union parents were spared this Abu Ghraib-like physical
and mental torment.
Austin said this an interview for the far-right-wing, anti-union Choice Matters,
where he is being interviewed by Bob Bowden, who had previously made
an anti-union, pro-charter documentary, “THE CARTEL”.
Check out this link for the video:
(NOTE: the scary, unnerving tinkling piano music underscoring the urination / defecation torture story)
Next, try watching it while reading along to my transcript:
(ALSO NOTE: Dr. Ravitch, I was very precise in my transcription of this part of the interview—including all the pauses, ellipses ( … ), “uhh” ‘s, “uhhmm” ‘s, etc.. .
I did this to illustrate that Ben Austin is clearly lying his head off. Show this video
to any police detective, or anyone else trained in lie detection, and see
what they say. Compare Austin’s delivery and demeanor to that of
the interviewer Bowden, who is not under pressure to knowingly lie.
Austin is bumbling, while Bowden remains smooth.
Lying is hard work. It places intense cognitive demands and pressures
on the person who is lying, and as a result, when you get someone who
is not very effective and/or experienced in lying, you get a ridiculous, stumbling,
bumbling performance like that of Austin’s in the video.
Also, the bolding during the torture story is mine, Jack)
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
TRANSCRIPT: (00:41 – 02:06)
AUSTIN: “Instead of being embraced and applauded for getting involve
in the education of their own children, (THE PRO-PARENT-TRIGGER PARENTS) were intimidated uhhh… and abused and harassed… uhhmm… and… uhmmm… we quiclkly found out that there were few… moral boundaries that the other side was unwilling to cross.
“One story in particular that was… uhmmm… jaw-dropping.. was that… uhmm… we found out pretty quickly that parents… whose… who—uhh… children whose parents signed the petitions… uhhm… were not allowed to go to the bathroom, and… when the children peed in their pants, they were sent to the… Nurse’s Office… uhh… and… that is where the parents… uhmm… parents got called in to bring in clean underwear… uhh… and that’s where the parents got hit up to give their … uhhh… to rescind their… signatures.”
BOWDEN: “Let me get this straight? In the same classroom where the parents who didn’t support the Parent Trigger petition… those students were allowed to go to the bathroom, and if your mom or dad supported the Parent Trigger, you were told, ‘Too bad. Stay there.’ ” (and thus, be forced to urinate/defecate on yourself, Jack)
AUSTIN: “That’s right. I mean it’s.. it’s… i-i-i-i-i… the-the… Things got so bad that the parents… uhhmmm… uhh… had to
—-(AUSTIN STARES DOWN AT SOMETHING… another “tell” of lying)
” … uhhmmm… sue the school district… and uhhmm… they … ”
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
Austin doesn’t even seem to believe the
bullshit that he’s spewing. His mind is jumping
around awkwardly… rambling about kids peeing in
their pants, then about parents forced to
bring clean underwear…
It’s like he’s trying to remember whatever phony story
that he, Gabe Rose, Pat DeTemple, and/or other Parent Rev. folks
vomited up during a secret strategy session.
In this instance at least, Austin’s a pretty unconvincing liar.
the same video is also here:
I have never seen a video where it was
more completely obvious that someone (Austin) is
lying his head off. The “uhh..”‘s,
“uhhmmm”s… pauses etc…. repeatedly’
the staring down, and looking to the side.
Again, note the contrast with cadence
and manner of the interviewer,
who is not lying.
CONCLUSION:
THIS__STORY__IS___TOTAL___AND___UTTER___BULLSHIT.
NOTE: Austin was an uncredited consultant to the
screenwriters of ‘WON’T BACK DOWN’. The urination
scene is in the movie, with the added wrinkle
that the evil unionized teacher first locked the
pro-Parent-Trigger parent’s kid in a dark closet.
When the hero mom shows up, the evil teacher
says that’s what your kid gets for you being
a trouble-maker—i.e. signing the petition,
and gathering signatures.
Sheesh!
If that ever happened in real life, the teacher
would be taken out of the school in handcuffs.
These Parent Rev. people are sociopaths, or
psychopaths who are so steeped in pathological dishonesty—
telling whatever lie they want to tell
whenever they want to tell it, so long as
it advances their agenda—that, in this
instance at least, they’ve lost
touch with reality.
In my next post, I’ll tell you about
1) the bogus “McKINLEY PARENTS FOR CHANGE” flyer
that Robert Skeels wrote about:
2) Parent Revolution’s despicable “Plan B” they tried to put into effect in Compton, and which ultimately failed.
I’m reposting above with the appropriate links:
In the interview linked to BELOW, Parent Revolution leader
Ben Austin characterizes the opposition to the Parent
Trigger in Compton(December 2010) thusly:
“The teachers’ union struck back”,
He then proceeds to describe McKinley Elementary
in Compton (the target school) overall as a
child-abusing hell-hole.
(Oh really? Then why did 90% of the parents
choose to remain at McKinley… the child-abusing hell-hole…
instead of at the charter school that Parent Revolution helped
open just a block away?)
Seriously, Dr. Ravitch. You’re not going to believe this—but Austin claims
THAT the the unionized teachers at McKinley retaliated against the the
pro-Parent Trigger parents by physically torturing the children of
those parents (???!!!) while the children of anti-Parent-Trigger,
pro-evil-union parents were spared this Abu Ghraib-like physical
and mental torment.
Austin said this an interview for the far-right-wing, anti-union Choice Matters,
where he is being interviewed by Bob Bowden, who had previously made
an anti-union, pro-charter documentary, “THE CARTEL”.
Check out this link for the video:
(NOTE: the scary, unnerving tinkling piano music underscoring the urination / defecation torture story)
Next, try watching it while reading along to my transcript:
(ALSO NOTE: Dr. Ravitch, I was very precise in my transcription of this part of the interview—including all the pauses, ellipses ( … ), “uhh” ‘s, “uhhmm” ‘s, etc.. .
I did this to illustrate that Ben Austin is clearly lying his head off. Show this video
to any police detective, or anyone else trained in lie detection, and see
what they say. Compare Austin’s delivery and demeanor to that of
the interviewer Bowden, who is not under pressure to knowingly lie.
Austin is bumbling, while Bowden remains smooth.
Lying is hard work. It places intense cognitive demands and pressures
on the person who is lying, and as a result, when you get someone who
is not very effective and/or experienced in lying, you get a ridiculous, stumbling,
bumbling performance like that of Austin’s in the video.
Also, the bolding during the torture story is mine, Jack)
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
TRANSCRIPT: (00:41 – 02:06)
AUSTIN: “Instead of being embraced and applauded for getting involve
in the education of their own children, (THE PRO-PARENT-TRIGGER PARENTS) were intimidated uhhh… and abused and harassed… uhhmm… and… uhmmm… we quiclkly found out that there were few… moral boundaries that the other side was unwilling to cross.
“One story in particular that was… uhmmm… jaw-dropping.. was that… uhmm… we found out pretty quickly that parents… whose… who—uhh… children whose parents signed the petitions… uhhm… were not allowed to go to the bathroom, and… when the children peed in their pants, they were sent to the… Nurse’s Office… uhh… and… that is where the parents… uhmm… parents got called in to bring in clean underwear… uhh… and that’s where the parents got hit up to give their … uhhh… to rescind their… signatures.”
BOWDEN: “Let me get this straight? In the same classroom where the parents who didn’t support the Parent Trigger petition… those students were allowed to go to the bathroom, and if your mom or dad supported the Parent Trigger, you were told, ‘Too bad. Stay there.’ ” (and thus, be forced to urinate/defecate on yourself, Jack)
AUSTIN: “That’s right. I mean it’s.. it’s… i-i-i-i-i… the-the… Things got so bad that the parents… uhhmmm… uhh… had to
—-(AUSTIN STARES DOWN AT SOMETHING… another “tell” of lying)
” … uhhmmm… sue the school district… and uhhmm… they … ”
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
Austin doesn’t even seem to believe the
bullshit that he’s spewing. His mind is jumping
around awkwardly… rambling about kids peeing in
their pants, then about parents forced to
bring clean underwear…
It’s like he’s trying to remember whatever phony story
that he, Gabe Rose, Pat DeTemple, and/or other Parent Rev. folks
vomited up during a secret strategy session.
In this instance at least, Austin’s a pretty unconvincing liar.
the same video is also here:
I have never seen a video where it was
more completely obvious that someone (Austin) is
lying his head off. The “uhh..”‘s,
“uhhmmm”s… pauses etc…. repeatedly’
the staring down, and looking to the side.
Again, note the contrast with cadence
and manner of the interviewer,
who is not lying.
CONCLUSION:
THIS__STORY__IS___TOTAL___AND___UTTER___BULLSHIT.
NOTE: Austin was an uncredited consultant to the
screenwriters of ‘WON’T BACK DOWN’. The urination
scene is in the movie, with the added wrinkle
that the evil unionized teacher first locked the
pro-Parent-Trigger parent’s kid in a dark closet.
When the hero mom shows up, the evil teacher
says that’s what your kid gets for you being
a trouble-maker—i.e. signing the petition,
and gathering signatures.
Sheesh!
If that ever happened in real life, the teacher
would be taken out of the school in handcuffs.
These Parent Rev. people are sociopaths, or
psychopaths who are so steeped in pathological dishonesty—
telling whatever lie they want to tell
whenever they want to tell it, so long as
it advances their agenda—that, in this
instance at least, they’ve lost
touch with reality.
In my next post, I’ll tell you about
1) the bogus “McKINLEY PARENTS FOR CHANGE” flyer
that Robert Skeels wrote about:
2) Parent Revolution’s despicable “Plan B” they tried to put into effect in Compton, and which ultimately failed.
Before I get to the post about the flyer and “Plan B”, check out this near the end of the BEN AUSTIN / BOBBY BOWDEN INTERVIEW video:
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
( 02:51 – 03:13 )
BOWDEN: “What happened to the teachers who did that?”
AUSTIN: “Nothing”
—-LONG PAUSE where Ben doesn’t clarify this in the least
BOWDEN: “They’re still working?”
AUSTIN: “Uhhmmm… yeah… and… and… I mean our-our goal is not to teacher-bash… or even union-bash… for some people see this simply as a struggle for power… not an issue of social justice… not an issue of …. ”
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
Right… Ben says that he and Parent Revolution are “not about teacher-bashing”… Oh, no… not at all… he just tells some horrific (and totally bogus) story about teachers at a school torturing children as a means of winning a “struggle for power.”
As anyone on either side of the issue would, Bowden is genuinely interested in whether or not the perpetrators of this were ever held accountable for this alleged conspiracy of abuse.
But Ben doesn’t want to go there… other than to say “Nothing.” when asked if the anything happened to these teachers.
Somewhat embarrassed and staring down (another “tell” of lying), Ben just quickly moves on from this line of questioning to blather about “struggle for power” and “issue of social justice.”
—I’m going into Sam Kinison voice as I type this (I know that dates me with some folks reading)
Hey Ben!!!!!
Didn’t someone ever think of alerting Compton Unified?!!!
Didn’t you think of calling the police?!!
Have those kids gotten psychological treatment?!
Have the child victims’ parents done anything in response?
Are they suing?
The answer to all these question is,,,
—more Sam Kinison Voice
HELL- NO!!!!
Why?
BECAUSE NONE OF THIS EVER FREAKIN’ HAPPENED!!!!!
OH!! OH!! OHHHHHHH!!!!!!
OH!!! OH!!! OHHHHHH!!!!!
BEN AUSTIN… YOU FREAKIN’ LIAR!!!!
OH!! OH!! OHHHHHHH!!!!!!
OH!!! OH!!! OHHHHHH!!!!!
—back to normal voice
I’m an elementary school teacher who has to take the Child Abuse Awareness Training video and test annually.
Here’s how it works.
If I—or ANY teacher / administrator—became aware that another teacher or an administrator had been torturing a child—forcing the child to urinate / defecate on himself / herself…
Like all teachers, administrators and other “mandated reporters”, I am required BY LAW to report this immediately… if not, I will be immediately removed from the classroom, will be prosecuted, and will be open to be sued for a six-figure sum (at least), and I will lose my job and my credential… and eventually get banned from teaching for life.
Look at how blase Austin is when Bowden asks him if anything happened to these teachers. There’s not the slightest bit of anger or outrage on Austin’s part… he’s a bit annoyed at the question, and instead moves on..
Oh well, la-di-dah… kids got tortured… let’s change the subject…
Austin then abruptly changes the topic to “we’re not here to teacher bash or union bash”…
Ridiculous!
If this HAD actually happened, the Parent Revolution douchebags would have gone to the police, held press conferences, had the “pro-bono legal team” sue everyone and every organization in sight—Compton Unified, the teachers, the union, the administrators… etc.
And then publicize the hell outta ALL OF THE ABOVE from now till Doomsday. They’d milk this for all its worth, AS PROOF OF HOW EVIL TRADITIONAL PUBLIC SCHOOLS AND and HOW EVIL TEACHER UNIONS ARE.
Why haven’t they?
—going back into a Sam Kinison Voice
BECAUSE_IT_NEVER_FREAKIN’_HAPPENED!!!!!!
—more Sam Kinison Voice
OH!! OH!! OHHHHHHH!!!!!!
OH!!! OH!!! OHHHHHH!!!!!
BEN AUSTIN… YOU FREAKIN’ LIAR!!!!
OH!! OH!! OHHHHHHH!!!!!!
OH!!! OH!!! OHHHHHH!!!!!
I’m reposting the above post, but this time
I’m including a link to the video:
Before I get to the post about the flyer and “Plan B”, check out this near the end of the BEN AUSTIN / BOBBY BOWDEN INTERVIEW video:
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
( 02:51 – 03:13 )
BOWDEN: “What happened to the teachers who did that?”
AUSTIN: “Nothing”
—-LONG PAUSE where Ben doesn’t clarify this in the least
BOWDEN: “They’re still working?”
AUSTIN: “Uhhmmm… yeah… and… and… I mean our-our goal is not to teacher-bash… or even union-bash… for some people see this simply as a struggle for power… not an issue of social justice… not an issue of …. ”
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
Right… Ben says that he and Parent Revolution are “not about teacher-bashing”… Oh, no… not at all… he just tells some horrific (and totally bogus) story about teachers at a school torturing children as a means of winning a “struggle for power.”
As anyone on either side of the issue would, Bowden is genuinely interested in whether or not the perpetrators of this were ever held accountable for this alleged conspiracy of abuse.
But Ben doesn’t want to go there… other than to say “Nothing.” when asked if the anything happened to these teachers.
Somewhat embarrassed and staring down (another “tell” of lying), Ben just quickly moves on from this line of questioning to blather about “struggle for power” and “issue of social justice.”
—I’m going into Sam Kinison voice as I type this (I know that dates me with some folks reading)
Hey Ben!!!!!
Didn’t someone ever think of alerting Compton Unified?!!!
Didn’t you think of calling the police?!!
Have those kids gotten psychological treatment?!
Have the child victims’ parents done anything in response?
Are they suing?
The answer to all these question is,,,
—more Sam Kinison Voice
HELL- NO!!!!
Why?
BECAUSE NONE OF THIS EVER FREAKIN’ HAPPENED!!!!!
OH!! OH!! OHHHHHHH!!!!!!
OH!!! OH!!! OHHHHHH!!!!!
BEN AUSTIN… YOU FREAKIN’ LIAR!!!!
OH!! OH!! OHHHHHHH!!!!!!
OH!!! OH!!! OHHHHHH!!!!!
—back to normal voice
I’m an elementary school teacher who has to take the Child Abuse Awareness Training video and test annually.
Here’s how it works.
If I—or ANY teacher / administrator—became aware that another teacher or an administrator had been torturing a child—forcing the child to urinate / defecate on himself / herself…
Like all teachers, administrators and other “mandated reporters”, I am required BY LAW to report this immediately… if not, I will be immediately removed from the classroom, will be prosecuted, and will be open to be sued for a six-figure sum (at least), and I will lose my job and my credential… and eventually get banned from teaching for life.
Look at how blase Austin is when Bowden asks him if anything happened to these teachers. There’s not the slightest bit of anger or outrage on Austin’s part… he’s a bit annoyed at the question, and instead moves on..
Oh well, la-di-dah… kids got tortured… let’s change the subject…
Austin then abruptly changes the topic to “we’re not here to teacher bash or union bash”…
Ridiculous!
If this HAD actually happened, the Parent Revolution douchebags would have gone to the police, held press conferences, had the “pro-bono legal team” sue everyone and every organization in sight—Compton Unified, the teachers, the union, the administrators… etc.
And then publicize the hell outta ALL OF THE ABOVE from now till Doomsday. They’d milk this for all its worth, AS PROOF OF HOW EVIL TRADITIONAL PUBLIC SCHOOLS AND and HOW EVIL TEACHER UNIONS ARE.
Why haven’t they?
—going back into a Sam Kinison Voice
BECAUSE_IT_NEVER_FREAKIN’_HAPPENED!!!!!!
—more Sam Kinison Voice
OH!! OH!! OHHHHHHH!!!!!!
OH!!! OH!!! OHHHHHH!!!!!
BEN AUSTIN… YOU FREAKIN’ LIAR!!!!
OH!! OH!! OHHHHHHH!!!!!!
OH!!! OH!!! OHHHHHH!!!!!
I’m reposting the above post with links to the video
Before I get to the post about the flyer and “Plan B”, check out this near the end of the BEN AUSTIN / BOBBY BOWDEN INTERVIEW video:
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
( 02:51 – 03:13 )
BOWDEN: “What happened to the teachers who did that?”
AUSTIN: “Nothing”
—-LONG PAUSE where Ben doesn’t clarify this in the least
BOWDEN: “They’re still working?”
AUSTIN: “Uhhmmm… yeah… and… and… I mean our-our goal is not to teacher-bash… or even union-bash… for some people see this simply as a struggle for power… not an issue of social justice… not an issue of …. ”
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
Right… Ben says that he and Parent Revolution are “not about teacher-bashing”… Oh, no… not at all… he just tells some horrific (and totally bogus) story about teachers at a school torturing children as a means of winning a “struggle for power.”
As anyone on either side of the issue would, Bowden is genuinely interested in whether or not the perpetrators of this were ever held accountable for this alleged conspiracy of abuse.
But Ben doesn’t want to go there… other than to say “Nothing.” when asked if the anything happened to these teachers.
Somewhat embarrassed and staring down (another “tell” of lying), Ben just quickly moves on from this line of questioning to blather about “struggle for power” and “issue of social justice.”
—I’m going into Sam Kinison voice as I type this (I know that dates me with some folks reading)
Hey Ben!!!!!
Didn’t someone ever think of alerting Compton Unified?!!!
Didn’t you think of calling the police?!!
Have those kids gotten psychological treatment?!
Have the child victims’ parents done anything in response?
Are they suing?
The answer to all these question is,,,
—more Sam Kinison Voice
HELL- NO!!!!
Why?
BECAUSE NONE OF THIS EVER FREAKIN’ HAPPENED!!!!!
OH!! OH!! OHHHHHHH!!!!!!
OH!!! OH!!! OHHHHHH!!!!!
BEN AUSTIN… YOU FREAKIN’ LIAR!!!!
OH!! OH!! OHHHHHHH!!!!!!
OH!!! OH!!! OHHHHHH!!!!!
—back to normal voice
I’m an elementary school teacher who has to take the Child Abuse Awareness Training video and test annually.
Here’s how it works.
If I—or ANY teacher / administrator—became aware that another teacher or an administrator had been torturing a child—forcing the child to urinate / defecate on himself / herself…
Like all teachers, administrators and other “mandated reporters”, I am required BY LAW to report this immediately… if not, I will be immediately removed from the classroom, will be prosecuted, and will be open to be sued for a six-figure sum (at least), and I will lose my job and my credential… and eventually get banned from teaching for life.
Look at how blase Austin is when Bowden asks him if anything happened to these teachers. There’s not the slightest bit of anger or outrage on Austin’s part… he’s a bit annoyed at the question, and instead moves on..
Oh well, la-di-dah… kids got tortured… let’s change the subject…
Austin then abruptly changes the topic to “we’re not here to teacher bash or union bash”…
Ridiculous!
If this HAD actually happened, the Parent Revolution douchebags would have gone to the police, held press conferences, had the “pro-bono legal team” sue everyone and every organization in sight—Compton Unified, the teachers, the union, the administrators… etc.
And then publicize the hell outta ALL OF THE ABOVE from now till Doomsday. They’d milk this for all its worth, AS PROOF OF HOW EVIL TRADITIONAL PUBLIC SCHOOLS AND and HOW EVIL TEACHER UNIONS ARE.
Why haven’t they?
—going back into a Sam Kinison Voice
BECAUSE_IT_NEVER_FREAKIN’_HAPPENED!!!!!!
—more Sam Kinison Voice
OH!! OH!! OHHHHHHH!!!!!!
OH!!! OH!!! OHHHHHH!!!!!
BEN AUSTIN… YOU FREAKIN’ LIAR!!!!
OH!! OH!! OHHHHHHH!!!!!!
OH!!! OH!!! OHHHHHH!!!!!
Now, here’s the post about the phony flyer & “Plan B”:
Here’s a blast from the past—2 1/2 years ago to be precise—of the infamous events in Compton, California during December 2010:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/45455171/astroturf-parent-revolution-compton-caper-flyer
This is the flyer—claiming to be from the parents running “McKinley Parents for Change”.
This was supposedly group of parents of Compton’s McKinley Elementary who were ostensibly out gathering signatures to turn over McKinley Elementary’s multi-million dollar campus/annual school budgets in perpetuity over to the private Charter company Celerity—i.e. from the public sector where it is controlled by an elected school board accountable to the public…. to the private sector, where the Board meets in secret, and the public is cut out of all decision-making.
At this point, a community activist—with an admittedly anti-charter school point-of-view—named Robert Skeels then called the number at the bottom of the flyer, and here’s what he found out:
http://rdsathene.blogspot.com/2010/12/update-on-veracity-of-mckinley-parents.html
– – – – – – –
ROBERT SKEELS (December 2010): “Considering the certainty and conviction of the bullet points on the flyer by this newly formed, pro-Celerity ‘parent’ group, supposedly wholly unrelated to the well-paid professional staffers at the billionaire-financed Parent Revolution, I figured my questions and concerns would be promptly addressed.
“I left a message with my name and number for McKinley Parents for Change last night, and lo and behold Parent Revolution returned my call this morning. Yuri (not sure if I’m spelling that right, my apologies if I’m not) must not be aware of my years of investigative journalism exposing the insatiable greed of the lucrative charter-voucher industry. The poor woman couldn’t answer any of my questions about Celerity’s lack of compliance with the Modified Consent Decree or the State Board of Education’s proposed regulations on their Corporate Charter Trigger Law, so she said she’d have Gabe Rose (an official of Parent Revolution) call me back to clarify.
“She also was very helpful and explained to me that Gabe Rose played a major role in the creation of the flyer (who would have guessed?), so he was the best person to explain it. So much for McKinley Parents for Change’s claim that they are parents at McKinley Elementary School. I somehow doubt I’ll receive that second phone call.”
– – – – – – – – – – – –
Over a hundred McKinley parents demanded that they be allowed to rescind their signatures that Parent Revolution collected, claiming that the signature gatherers were not McKinley parents, and that those paid signature-gatherers lied to them about the full implications of what all the parents were signing (“This is for new computers… sign here…. this is to beautify the campus… sign here… ” and on and on)
Parent Revolution officials disputed this, claiming that 70% of the parents at the school signed with fully knowledge of the petition’s implications, and that all those parents were indeed demanding Celerity take over the school.. and that it was the McKinley parents, not Parent Revolution doing all the signature gathering.
(See BELOW where Parent Revolution eventually comes clean about this lie)
This went to court, and also prompted hearings at the State Board of Ed.
Hmmm… who was telling the truth?
Well, we eventually found out, as there eventually was a metric to
show which side was telling the truth.
Parent Revolution then assisted Celerity in opening a charter school a block away from McKinley in an abandoned Catholic school building (NOTE, this was a charter authorization separate from the contentious Parent Trigger process.)
The new “Plan B” was to depopulate McKinley—with the students leaving to the new Celerity school—and then use Prop. 39 to have Celerity co-locate and invade the school anyway because of all the empty classrooms—Prop 39 allows this. They were even promising free laptops to all the students who defected from McKinley to the Celerity Charter. Given how impoverished the typical family was/is in this community, free laptops must have been tempting.
Check out L.A Weekly’s Simone Wilson’s article about Parent Revolution’s ‘Plan B’ :
http://blogs.laweekly.com/informer/2011/05/parent_trigger_plan_b_charter_school_to_open_2_blocks_from_mckinley_elementary.php
(the pro-Parent Revolution / pro-charter writer, Simone Wilson, is positively salivating at this prospect of Celerity “U-Hauling its top-notch operations” into McKinley):
– – – – – – – – – –
SIMONE WILSON: “Indeed, Plan B is looking pretty promising. If Celerity opens a first-rate campus — laptops for all ! — two blocks from McKinley, chances are at least 200 of roughly 400 students will leap at the chance for a better education. This would leave the McKinley campus ‘underutilized,’ at which point another controversial California law, Prop. 39, could force the district to let a charter school take over its facilities.
” ‘I’m excited because I know my daughter is going to get the education she needs and deserves,’ parent Shemika Murphy told the Los Angeles Times.
“With this kind of support, Celerity would be ready, willing and perfectly poised to U-Haul its top-notch operations from the church over to the elementary school — virtually the same outcome as a successful Trigger would have allowed.
“… In the end, we’ve got to give props to Revolution for finding the sneaky back-door alternative to a Trigger. Whatever it takes to rescue Compton kids from the poor-get-poorer dis-educational system to which district officials have condemned them.”
– – – – – – – – – – – – –
How nice. Simone praising the “sneaky back-door” antics of Ben Austin & Co. That speaks volumes for the character of all who were participating in, and backing “Plan B”.
Alas, Simone was salivating over this “sneaky back-door” tactic in vain as it turned out.
In the coming fall, the public finally got definitive proof that the Parent Revolution was not on-the-level. Only 10% (or less, depending on reports) of the parents opted to go to the new Celerity school—far short of the 70% Parent Revolution organizers—and writers like Simone Wilson—had been telling everyone were clamoring for the Celerity takeover.
Also, U-Haul must not have been pleased as Celerity had to cancel any trucks they had booked for invasion and exfiltration of McKinley.
At about the same time, Parent Revolution’s Ben Austin was removed from the State Board of Ed. by California’s newly elected Governor Jerry Brown.
In the face of this public relations fiasco—where it became obvious to all that only a mere 10% (or less) of McKinley parents actually wanted Celerity taking over their school, after all—Ben Austin and Parent Revolution put out this new version:
http://parentrevolution.org/content/mckinley-elementary
– – – – – – – –
PARENT REVOLUTION: “We have also been very public about the fact that the McKinley campaign was not a perfect campaign… the vast majority of the signatures gathered were ultimately gathered by our organizers, not by the parents themselves.”
– – – – – – –
Oh really, Ben?
That’s most certainly NOT what you and your cohorts were saying back December 2010. No, you said it was the parents doing everything, with only minimal Parent Revolution assistance… or again, that’s what Parent Revolution claimed.
Their new story was that Parent Revolution had recently “became very public about” all this… yeah… but this was ONLY AFTER people like Robert Skeels exposed them, and the shenanigans in which they were engaged.
There’s a great article about the Adelanto PARENT REVOLUTION fiasco.
Since I’m too lazy to excerpt it, I’m going to post the whole thing BELOW.
I love the last paragraph where the writer discovers an interesting advertisement:
— the charter company taking over as a result of the Parent Trigger—you know, the private, union-free company that’s going to be the savior of the Desert Trails sstudents—-is advertising for teachers who only have a substitute credential… (the traditional public school the Parent Trigger eliminated and replaced requires teachers with a full credential.)
(****WARNING**** this is verrrrrryyyy long, so you may want to skip this and / or read it in its entirety later)
Here’s the link:
https://www.nsfwcorp.com/dispatch/parent-trigger/7b67c93a41fdc20f1fdf095032cde124246e59e2/
Here’s the text:
– – – – – – – – – – –
The Bitcoinfinger Issue :: April 16, 2013
Pulling the Trigger
By Yasha Levine
When NSFWCORP sent me to Victorville this January, I little expected that the neighboring town of Adelanto would become ground zero for a fight between billionaires like Anschutz on one side, and poor, vulnerable minority parents and children on the other.
I first heard about the fight through the local right-wing paper, the Victorville Daily Press, which gleefully announced on its front page that a local school, Desert Trails Elementary, had just made history as the first school in the nation to be privatized under California’s new “parent trigger” law. The paper described the takeover as “promising a fresh start to the failing elementary school,” and claimed it had received widespread support from parents.
The national press gushed in similarly glowing terms. The LA Weekly described the Adelanto privatization as an “historic moment for the education-reform movement picking up steam across the nation.” The New York Times dutifully compared the takeover of Desert Trails to “Won’t Back Down.” An “issues” movie starring Face of Indie Maggie Gyllenhaal, “Won’t Back Down” promotes the parent-trigger law as a panacea for America’s public-education problems, one that “empowers” parents to fight back against self-interested public school teachers and their union.
All in all, everyone agreed that this takeover of Desert Trails Elementary represented a triumphant moment for parents and their children, a victory for the people over rapacious elementary school teachers and their unions.
But something didn’t seem right about this story — it was too pat, too much like a triumph-of-the-spirit Disney tale, too much like Maggie’s movie. So I made some calls and started spending some time in Adelanto, to find out what really went on there.
* *
Motorists entering the City of Adelanto are greeted with a big blue sign that reads: “The City With Unlimited Possibilities.” It’s not clear who came up with this slogan, or when.
But, these days, the sign is a cruel joke.
Founded in 1915 by the guy who invented the modern electric iron, Adelanto never amounted to much. Mostly it served as pit stop and junkyard to a nearby George Air Force Base. The base closed more than a decade ago, and home values have collapsed since the last real estate bubble popped. Entire neighborhoods emptied out, and building companies went belly up, leaving behind half-finished “master planned communities” that still stand there, desiccating in the dry heat. Signs advertise brand-new three-bedroom McTractHomes for zero down and $800 a month.
Today, Adelanto is the end of the line. A poor, desert town, the city serves as a dumping ground for low-income minority families who have been squeezed out of the Greater Los Angeles-Orange County region and pushed out over the San Bernardino Mountains into the bleak expanse of the Mojave Desert, where housing is dirt cheap and jobs almost non-existent.
The numbers tell the story: Of the 32,000 people who call Adelanto home, one out of three are below the poverty line. Per-capita income is just under $12,000 — nearly three times lower than the California average, and about as much as the average person earns in Mexico. There are almost no jobs here, and Starbucks ranks among the city’s top ten employers.
Nearly two-thirds of the population is Latino, many of them undocumented. Another one in five are African-American. Then there is the 5 percent of the population that the census bureau classifies as “institutionalized,” which is nothing but a wishy-washy bureaucratic way of saying that 1 out of 20 Adelanto residents is currently rotting in jail — a rate five times higher than the national average. Adelanto does not have its own high school, but dropout rates in the neighboring suburb of Victorville, also hard-hit by the subprime bubble, are among the worst in the state — hovering somewhere around 50%. If you stand at the city’s welcome sign, you can just make out its three major prison facilities: a giant federal prison complex to the north, a brand-new state prison to the west, and just north of that, California’s largest private immigrant deportation facility. The last was built recently by Geo Group, the nation’s second-largest private prison contractor.
* *
I would spend several weeks talking to the parents of children enrolled in Desert Trails Elementary, meeting with them in local taco joints and strip mall diners and talking about what happened. As I had suspected, their version of events turned out not to match the Disney version in national papers.
The parents told me that a Los Angeles-based group calling itself “Parent Revolution” organized a local campaign to harass and trick them into signing petitions that they thought were meant for simple school improvements. In fact those petitions turned out to be part of a sophisticated campaign to convert their children’s public school into a privately-run charter — something a majority of parents opposed. At times, locals say, the “Parent Revolution” volunteers’ tactics were so heavy-handed in gathering signatures that they crossed the line into harassment and intimidation. Many parents were misled about what the petition they signed actually meant. Some told me that the intimidation with some of the undocumented Latino residents included bribery and extortion.
They first noticed something was up in the summer of 2011, when small groups of parents decked out in Parent Revolution T-shirts started appearing around town, going door to door to speak to parents of Desert Trails Elementary kids, spreading the word that they were organizing a “parent union” to try to improve the quality of their children’s education.
At that, local parents who’d been involved in school affairs started to grow suspicious. According to several I spoke to, two of the leading members of this new “parent union” had previously served in the school’s Parent Teacher Association, and had resigned amid accusations of improprieties.
Why would they suddenly start a new parent organization? Spite? Revenge? And what exactly was Parent Revolution?
Parents didn’t get much of a chance to ponder these questions. As soon as summer vacation ended, the parent union began to reveal its true function. Adelanto was to become the first victim of a giant corporate push to privatize public schools.
* *
Put simply, a parent trigger law allows a group of parents to hand over their kids’ public schools to private contractors, and then allows these new private contractors to tear up teacher union contracts and fire or hire as they see fit — all while receiving taxpayer money to fund their private-charter school business.
The law works like this: If enough parents sign a trigger petition (representing more than 50% of the number of students in the school), they can fire its principal, lay off unionized teachers or hand it over to a private charter school company.
According to a recent investigation by FryingPanNews, Parent Revolution has received $14.8 million since its founding in 2009. Almost half of that — $6.3 million — came from the Walton Family Foundation, which has long bankrolled the war on unions and public education. The rest of Parent Revolution’s cash came from more liberal sources, including The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Broad Foundation, each of which has given about $1.5 million to the group.
As reported in Dissent, these three foundations — Gates, Walton and Broad — spend roughly $4 billion a year to hand public K-12 education to the private sector, giving them increasing leverage over a sector that’s worth $500 billion per year.
Parent Revolution is a direct outgrowth of the charter school industry. Ben Austin, the outfit’s leader, previously headed a large charter-school firm called Green Dot Schools, whose backers overlap nicely with Parent Revolution’s backers — Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Walton Family Foundation, Eli Broad, Phillip Anschutz, and others. Austin’s replacement at Green Dot Schools is a former partner at Bain, Mitt Romney’s old firm.
Parent Revolution’s Ben Austin has described the law as “a groundbreaking and historic new policy” that will “transform public education,” and has dressed it up in the language of parents’ rights. ALEC, which adopted a version of the Parent Empowerment Act as a model for “parent trigger” legislation, described it in similar terms, saying that it “places democratic control into the hands of parents at school level.”
And yet, for all this empowerment, parents have never tried to pull the trigger on their own, not without Parent Revolution coming into town and applying pressure, intimidation and bait-and-switch techniques on unsuspecting parents.
In recent years, Diane Ravitch, former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Education under George H. W. Bush, has turned into the most eloquent and forceful critic of charter schools and voucher programs. She tells me that California’s parent trigger law was not designed for the parents’ sake. Instead, Ravitch describes it as “a stealth tactic by charter advocates to gain a larger market share by duping parents.”
Charter school advocates like Parent Revolution and so-called “school reformers” like Michelle Rhee (recently discredited in a series of test-score cheating scandals and for trying to conceal the wealthy Wall Street funders of her “StudentsFirst” pro-privatization group) front for some of the world’s biggest, most powerful corporate figures. Potentates from the extraction industry, Wall Street hedge fund tycoons and others have invested huge sums into privatizing America’s public education system. For them, it is a public trough filled with up to $1 trillion just waiting to be converted into private profit, whatever the consequences for children.
Former “Junk Bond King” and convicted felon Michael Milken, Oracle billionaire Larry Ellison, Netflix founder Reed Hastings and billionaire venture capitalist John Doerr are just some of the names betting heavily on privatized education. Black Rock, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and just about every other big name in Wall Street and private equity are in on the action, as well.
An investigation by the Huffington Post revealed that Michelle Rhee’s secretive, well-funded pro-privatization group StudentsFirst is backed by hedge fund tycoon David Tepper, who pocketed $2.2 billion in 2012 alone. Another backer is billionaire John Arnold, a former Enron trader who reportedly gave Rhee’s group “tens of millions” of dollars. Arnold, a self-described “libertarian” who profited heavily from Enron’s manipulation of the California energy markets, is funding the drive to slash California teachers’ pensions through his front-group, The California Foundation for Fiscal Responsibility.
Just last month, Rhee joined the “Parent Revolution” group for a joint march in support of parent trigger and charter schools in Los Angeles. It’s a small world, school privatization, and its inhabitants have very deep pockets.
So these are some of the people behind the parent trigger law, which should indicate what it’s really about. The law will give these corporate interests a new weapon with which to privatize public education and access to a virgin vein of taxpayer dollars. Best of all, the trigger law makes it look as if parents are choosing to privatize public education out of their own free will. They were given a choice, and they put their trust in the private sector.
California is just the beginning. In the past few years, parent trigger laws have popped in seven states so far, and another dozen others are currently deliberating similar legislation.
But this kind of reform did not come easy. The parent trigger law was conceived as a con, but that didn’t mean that parents would fall for it automatically. That’s what Parent Revolution learned when it used the trigger law for the first time shortly after it passed in 2010.
Parent Revolution first tried using the law to take over a school in Compton in 2010, organizing a small clique of local Compton parents and waging a blitz fake-grassroots campaign to dupe parents into pulling the trigger on their kids’ school. But the campaign crashed and burned after parents and teachers pushed back hard. Compton parents accused Parent Revolution organizers of deception and harassment, and many of those who signed the petition eventually rescinded their signatures. “They told me the petition was to beautify the school,” one parent told the Los Angeles Times. “They are misinforming the parents, so I revoked my signature.”
To fight back, Parent Revolution called in a favor from Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, a former Chicano community organizer turned charter school advocate. Villaraigosa, who has stacked the LA County Board of Education with former employees of the Eli Broad empire, counter-accused Compton parents of harassment, and equated them with union-busters:
“It’s particularly alarming to see these parents resort to the kind of intimidation, the kind of smear campaigning, the kind of rumor-mongering that is all too reminiscent of the way bad employers try to intimidate working people.”
But it was no use. Even Compton — a city synonymous with gangs, poverty and violence — was neither poor enough, nor isolated enough to take Parent Revolution’s “power empowerment” program without a fight.
An isolated desert suburb about halfway between Los Angeles and Las Vegas, home to some of the poorest families in Southern California, would prove to be much more vulnerable to the tactics used by Parent Revolution.
* *
So they went to Adelanto. By enlisting local parents to canvass the neighborhood speaking out against the teacher’s union, Parent Revolution had already laid the groundwork. The “parent union” was a classic PR strategy, designed to create a rift between parents and the local teachers’ union. Parent Revolution’s aims were initially vague, except on one issue, which was demonizing the teachers union. Parent Revolution volunteers all told the same story: The school’s problems were the fault of bad, self-interested teachers, who cared more about their own pay benefits and job security than about educating the children. As the group’s website explained, “Our schools are failing our children because they are not designed to succeed. They have been designed to serve adults, not children.”
In September 2011, the local “parent union” was joined by the big guns: a troop of trained, experienced organizers sent in from Parent Revolution’s main office in Los Angeles.
Parent Revolution’s “lead organizer,” a former Green Beret by the name of Alfonso Flores, headed the campaign. Flores is not just any old organizer. He has worked as a public school teacher, run a Los Angeles charter school called Global Education Academy and is considered an expert in the field of applying free-market solutions to public education. In 2008, Flores led a panel at a seminar hosted by the Pacific Research Institute, a GOP think-tank linked to ALEC and the Cato Institute, and backed by major oil, tobacco, pharmaceutical and health insurance firms. (Pacific Research Institute flaks served on President George W. Bush’s environmental advisory panel in 2001.) The same year that it hired Flores to offer advice on how charter-school administrators could improve student behavior, Pacific Research Institute was lobbying hard against the healthcare reform and a government-run medical system, saying that it would inevitably result in Soviet-style shortages and the rationing of medical care.
Alfonso Flores set up a command bunker in a rented home just a block away from the school, on Delicious Street. Parent Revolution advisors and organizers sent in from LA continuously came to the house to hold strategy sessions, instruct trigger parents on everything from collecting signatures to handling the media. They used it as a forward operating base to launch tactical operations into the community. Hanging in the living room and overlooking all this activity, was a black-and-white poster depicting Parent Revolution’s mission and raison d’etre. The top part of the poster showed a big black fish eating a group of disorganized little fish. This was the “system” eating the “parents.” Below it was another big black fish, but this time it was being chased by an even bigger fish made of organized smaller fish. This was the local “parent union” eating “Desert Trails Elementary School.”
Devouring a public school—nothing better describes what Parent Revolution was doing in Adelanto. Over the next three months, packs of trigger activists and organizers would spill out of the house and swarm the neighborhood, aggressively pushing parents to sign some sort of petition that they barely bothered to explain.
First, they started with the school. Parent Revolution’s lead organizer Alfonso Flores led the pack.
One mother described the group’s aggressive petition drive in a signed statement filed with the Adelanto School District. I was able to obtain this statement from anti-trigger parents:
“The man came to my car over several days and constantly begged me to sign the petition when I asked to get it & turn it in later he stated that he couldn’t do that so after several minutes of harassment I gave in and signed the petition unaware of the consequences. He was very pushy & persistent. I wish I that I wan’t intimated [sic] by him & that I didn’t sign the petition.”
It got so bad that parents had to ask the school to deploy more security to protect them from Parent Revolution’s pushy canvassers.
“They were there every day, every morning and every afternoon,” says Maggie Flamenco, a mother of two special-needs children enrolled in Desert Trails, and a member of the Adelanto’s Special Education Parent Advisory Committee. We met at a Denny’s just around the corner from Desert Trails Elementary. The way Flamenco describes it, the trigger campaign was much more like a low-intensity war designed to break the parents’ will using intimidation, harassment and deception, than anything like the “empowerment” that the Parent Trigger advocates claimed it was.
She described to me how Parent Revolution volunteers would block cars with their bodies to get the parent driver to sign their parent –trigger petition; how they’d knock on windows, hound and follow parents when they dropped their kids off and when they picked them up after school. They were so persistent about it that it got to the point where parents like Maggie dreaded going to collect their own children.
Maggie told me she had to file a police report against a Parent Revolution activist because the man kept harassing her every time she came to pick up and drop off her kids at school. “Because I was one of the parents who did not want to sign… he blocked the car with his body and prevented me from leaving, writing my writing my plates down, taking pictures of my plates, taking pictures of the kids…it was just harassment.”
The harassment worked. Maggie didn’t sign the petition, but she did withdraw her kids from the school because of the stress and fear they were suffering from the repeated harassment.
“Their anxiety was high. Their teachers and aids were saying, ‘The school is gonna be done.’ They were scared,” she explained. “The doctor put them on a home hospital due to their anxiety. All this stuff with their school they were just freaking out that it was going to get taken over, that they are not going to have their aides, their teachers anymore. They are autistic so they don’t understand anything. They told me the other day, ‘I hope they don’t close the school when we’re in there.’”
This was clearly no longer a grassroots campaign run by local parents, nor was its mission to empower the community. Its primary goal now was to force as many parents as possible to sign “parent trigger” petitions.
Parent Revolution operatives followed people into local businesses, harassed them with constant phone calls and staked out people’s homes. One father got a panicked call from his child, who was scared because a man was lurking outside their home for a long time. Panicking, the dad rushed home, only to find a Parent Revolution organizer camped outside waiting for a signature.
Some Desert Trails parents noticed that Parent Revolution organizers had somehow obtained contact information that was not publicly listed, including cell phone numbers and addresses, and worried that the group had somehow illegally accessed their children’s confidential school records.
One mother outlined her suspicions in a signed statement later filed with the Adelanto School District:
“I received a call on my cell phone, and the parents came to my house twice. My cellphone is not public record and when I questioned the gentleman on the phone how he received my cell # the call disconnected. I then called back and did not receive and [sic] answer. I am also wondering how they knew my address. I feel there has been a breech in confidentiality of my 2 childrens [sic] record at the school … I am now afraid they have my childrens [sic] Social Security numbers.”
Parent Revolution used every debt-collector trick in the book, purposefully making life so miserable for parents that they would agree to sign just to get the canvassers off their backs. “Most of the reason the parents signed was because they were tired of not answering their door, of hiding from them,” said Maggie Flamenco.
Lori Yuan, a mother of two kids Desert Trails and a member of Adelanto’s planning commission, who would later lead the parent effort to resist Parent Revolution, agreed: “Most folks were duped and had no idea the consequences of this petition succeeding.”
Statements filed by parents with Adelanto’s school district all say pretty much the same thing: “We were duped and pushed.” Here are just a few examples:
“I was misled and told that we weren’t going to fight to be a charter school. They kept coming to my home and insisted I sign. I am upset thats not what I wanted for my students.”
“The petitioner kept coming to my doorstep, for many days, my wife told me not to sign it but I did because I felt harassed, and I wanted them to leave me alone. I don’t blame them I blame myself but I don’t agree with the petition now that I understand it.”
Just a few months before Parent Revolution showed up in town, there had been a huge scandal involving the Adelanto Charter Academy, a new publicly-funded charter school that embraced “conservative and Christian values” run by a couple of businessmen with deep connections to San Bernardino County’s GOP political machine. At the time, it was Adelanto’s only charter school. District officials started to notice something was up when they discovered administrators didn’t bother with even the most basic bookkeeping, and a deeper audit revealed that the school failed to meet basic education requirements, served tainted food and functioned as little more than a shell company that diverted public education funds into private bank accounts and political campaigns.
On top of all that, it turned out that the charter school was set up with the help of San Bernardino County Supervisor Bill Postmus, who crashed and burned in that special way only evangelical closet-cases manage to pull off: he was arrested for possession of meth while under investigation for a long list of corrupt dealings and kickbacks. Right before the Adelanto Charter School scandal broke, Postmus pleaded guilty to fourteen felonies, including bribery, conspiracy, extortion and the misappropriation of public funds.
It was big, ugly mess, and it did not make charter schools look very good. So Parent Revolution canvassers did what any honest community organizer would do: they pretended that their petition had nothing to do with charter schools.
“When Parent Revolution came to my door, they explained they wanted to make the school better, get water fountains, the playground set and making sound like they were gonna do a makeover, instead of a takeover,” said Eleanor Medina, who moved to Adelanto 10 years ago from Buena Park in small city in Orange County to retire, and has been helping raise her grandchildren. “They also said that everyone was going to get a computer.”
Other parents report they were told pretty much the same thing: Parent Revolution promised that they were not trying to convert Desert Trails into a charter school, and reassured parents current teachers would not be fired. Organizers also made the dubious claim that if the petition went through, each child was going to receive a laptop to own.
For parents who insisted on giving the petition a closer read, Parent Revolution used a crude bait-and-switch technique: canvassers asked the parents to sign two completely separate petitions, and invoked two different clauses of the parent trigger law. The first petition sought only to introduce reforms and give parents greater power over administering the school. The second petition invoked the full privatization package: firing all the teachers and handing the school over to a private charter- school company (the specific company would be chosen at a later time).
Two petitions? Well, Parent Revolution’s reps explained that the second petition would never be used officially, but only employed as a negotiating tool — a prop that could be used to threaten the school district if it attempted to stall implementing the demands of its first petition.
Chrissy Alvarado, a mother of two students at Desert Trails, says she always thought the two petitions were just a ruse, a way to sow confusion. “They never explained themselves enough for us to understand anything,” she said. “In reality, it was all about the charter.”
She was right.
In early January, Parent Revolution activists announced that they had collected signatures representing 70 percent of the students, and proceeded to submit the petition calling for full charter conversion.
The news outraged Desert Trails parents, but it finally spurred them into action, and the small group emerged to try and stop the petition.
Eleanor Medina couldn’t believe they had the gall to dupe parents like that: “You’re talking about my kids’ education. They need to go to college. Pretty soon they’re gonna need to go to college just to get a Jack in the Box job.”
“We didn’t know what we could do, because no one had done this before,” Lori explained as she met me for coffee, before heading to an Adelanto planning commission meeting. “We were in overdrive, 24 hours a day, doing nothing but research, pounding the pavement, driving around, having meetings, going crazy. Literally nothing else in life existed how do we beat this, what do we do.”
Very quickly it became apparent a whole lot of parents had been duped, and would happily rescind their signatures if they got a chance.
“We called hundreds of lawyers, but no one would help us. They didn’t even refer us to the right lawyer who could help us,” Lori explained, shaking her head. “Meanwhile, Parent Revolution had a slick legal team working for them pro bono.”
Anti-trigger parents were grasping at straws, and felt totally alone. Local teachers couldn’t help them; they were afraid to even talk. The union told them to stay quiet because it was afraid of legal action from Parent Revolution. Anti-trigger parents say that, in the end, the only real help came from California’s teachers union, but even that was mostly restricted to legal advice on how to properly collect statements from parents so that Parent Revolution would not be able to challenge them in court.
“We got no real help from anyone,” said Lori. And that included the press, which tended to smear anti-trigger parents as union stooges and thugs out to intimidate low-income minorities into submission. LA Weekly ran a series of particularly nasty articles, specifically attacking Lori for doing the bidding of corrupt teachers who care more about “cushy union contracts” than their students’ education. The Wall Street Journal’s editorial features editor (and son of raging neocon Douglas Feith) David Feith published a string of pieces attacking the efforts of anti-trigger parents to push back against Parent Revolution’s astroturf campaign. Feith smeared their genuine grassroots organizing as a “systematic and legally questionable pressure campaign waged against parents” on behalf of the “hostile unions” and the “education establishment.”
Lori started to feel surrounded by intrigue. She says, “I would do these interviews with these people and reporters and journalists and bloggers. Anyone that would call I would talk to because I need to get this information out because people need to know this. And then I’d get the article and I’d be like this has nothing to do fucking do with what I said. I got to the point when I started thinking, do they — and by they, I mean Parent Revolution — do they own everything? Do they own the fucking editors, do they own the newspapers?”
Lori’s paranoia-sense was not that far off the mark.
Parent Revolution might not own the press, but the people and companies who fund groups like Parent Revolution and stand to profit from school privatization, well . . . they quite literally do own the press. Sometimes they are the press.
Among the major investors in privatizing education is Rupert Murdoch.
It was Murdoch’s 20th Century Fox that put out “Won’t Back Down,” Maggie Gyllenhaal’s parent trigger film bankrolled by Phillip Anschutz, the right-wing oil billionaire who funds everything from anti-gay ballot initiatives and Christian Identity, to teaching creationism in schools. Anschutz is also a major backer of ALEC, the right-wing lobby group that pushed through the “Stand Your Ground” vigilante laws that resulted in Trayvon Martin’s murder. ALEC is also spearheading “Parent Trigger” laws in states across the country.
Murdoch recently announced his plans for aggressive expansion into the private primary education sector, saying, “When it comes to K through 12 education, we see a $500 billion sector in the U.S. alone that is waiting desperately to be transformed.”
Murdoch’s News Corp media empire is vast. The Washington Post Company — which owns The Washington Post, Slate.com, Foreign Policy magazine, among other news media holdings — relies heavily on its for-profit education subsidiary, Kaplan Inc, which generated 62% of the company’s revenue in 2012. Then there’s The Financial Times and The Economist, both are which are owned by Pearson, a multinational mega-media company that’s also heavily involved in private education.
Incidentally, all three companies have been members of ALEC’s pro-charter Education Task Force, which has been at the forefront of the effort to enact legislation to privatize public education in states all across America.
But for Adelanto residents, the centralization and corruption of news media was a bigger issue. The main concern for Lori and other anti-trigger parents was to collect as many rescissions as possible.
As they made their rounds, they found that the vast majority of parents they spoke to had had no idea that the petition would convert the school to a charter. The magnitude of Parent Revolution’s deception came as a shock. “In our canvassing to gain rescissions, there were maybe three people or households that I can recall that actually said, ‘Yep, we know exactly what this petition will do, we want the teachers fired’,” explained Lori.
Over the course of two months, anti-trigger parents managed to collect somewhere around 116 rescission statements.
As the group collected rescissions, talked to parents and educated as many as possible about what Parent Revolution’s intended to do with Desert Trails, tension in the community continued to mount. There was real anger and bitterness. Friends and neighbors suddenly became mortal enemies, and even kids started getting drawn into the conflict.
Desert Trails’ principal David Mobley told the Los Angeles Times that kids whose parents were on opposite sides of the trigger issue had started fighting at school. “It’s sad because these kids used to be really good friends. Now these kids have become pawns in a political mess, and it just breaks my heart,” Mobley said.
Chrissy Alvarez’s best friend — I’ll call her Mary (not her real name) — was one of the leading members of the trigger group. Chrissy explained that their friendship turned into hostile after she realized that Mary had been an accomplice to Parent Revolution’s swindle and knowingly helped sell out her community — something Chrissy could not forgive.
Why would Mary do the bidding of a corporate front group, pouring her energy and time into privatizing her kid’s school?
Turns out that Mary, who had a second-grade daughter in Desert Trails, had good reason to join the campaign. Chrissy says she had serious problems with her immigration status and was facing deportation. Parent Revolution promised to make those problems disappear. It was an offer than must have been hard to resist: help a group pull off its trigger campaign or face deportation and the possibility that she’d never see your family again.
“No shit?!” I blurted out. We were sitting in a taco shop in a strip mall on the edge of town with a couple of other parents. We were in a family setting, and there were kids around. But I couldn’t restrain the profanity. I was too shocked. I just couldn’t believe it.
“Yes! She told me! She was my best friend,” Chrissy explained. “We were still best friends until the time she submitted the petition. And I told her to her face: You guys have been bs’ing. These were bought with citizenship. She had already signed two documents that she was supposed to leave the country years ago. She was in a heap of trouble. She had gone to a lawyer, who told her that there was no way around this other than you going back to Mexico.”
I recognized the woman’s name. She had been interviewed by cable news networks, and appeared in dozens of news stories talking about parent empowerment and the need for parents to take an active role in their children’s education. She even squirted a couple of tears for reporters once.
Dangling citizenship in front of desperate mother facing deportation—this is what parent empowerment looks like to the billionaires trying to privatize public education. And it appears she was not the only one…
Multiple sources told me that Parent Revolution had propositioned other undocumented Latino immigrants, promising to help resolve their immigration status in return for their support of the parent trigger petition. Help with immigration in exchange for a single signature? It’s an offer that many families must have found difficult to turn down.
I made multiple to attempts to verify these allegations. But no one would talk or even communicate with me — on or off the record. Through a third-party, I was told that they feared retribution from Parent Revolution and did not want to put their families in danger. “One, they are tired. Two, they are scared. Three, they are thinking: ‘What’s the point The school is already gone’,” explained a parent who had tried to arrange a meeting.
They were scared. And who could blame them?
As undocumented immigrants, they had nothing to gain by talking to me. On the contrary, they had everything to lose. The sprawling private deportation facility located just a few miles north of the school, dedicated to corralling and booting out people just like them, served as a constant reminder of just how much they had to lose, and how easily deportation could happen to them. A speeding ticket is enough to initiate deportation these days, and it doesn’t matter if they have children or family: recent stats show that a quarter of people deported are parents with children who are U.S. citizens.
I could appreciate this kind of fear. My family fled the Soviet Union in 1989, and we spent seven nerve-racking months living in European refugee camps. We had no money, no citizenship and no idea about the future. I was just a kid, but I was deeply affected by the fear, anxiety and insecurity that dominated our lives. We certainly didn’t think we had any rights, or that we were entitled to anything. The most important thing was to keep your head down and not rock the boat.
No wonder Parent Revolution chose Adelanto. Out here it could act with near-impunity.
Even so, there was some pushback. Even the poor don’t like being ripped off.
Armed with the stack of rescissions collected by Lori and Chrissy, Adelanto’s school board invalidated 100 of the 466 original petition signatures submitted by trigger activists, bringing the number below the simple majority required by law. And so on March 2012, Adelanto’s school board unanimously voted to reject Parent Revolution’s petition on grounds it had failed to meet minimum signature requirements.
But it was a short-lived victory.
Parent Revolution lawyered up, and after a year of court battles, forced the Adelanto’s school district to accept the trigger petition. In the summer of 2012, San Bernardino County Superior Court Judge Steve Malone ruled that the school district had no right to reject the petition because California’s parent trigger law did not give it authority to rescind signatures. It was a bizarre decision, and didn’t seem to accord with the spirit and letter of California’s Parent Empowerment Law.
But was it valid?
That’s not clear. Adelanto’s cash-strapped school district didn’t appeal the decision. It simply didn’t have the resources to continue a lengthy court fight. Not that it would have continued to fight for very long, even if tired. Shortly after the decision, two parents who had been involved in Parent Revolution won spots on Adelanto’s school board, finally and totally tipping the board’s ideological balance in favor of charter school.
“I thought the ruling was crazy,” said Diane Ravitch. “If anything, it seems totally not to have empowered the parents, but to say: you mistakenly signed a petition and you can’t take your name off. That’s not parent empowerment, that’s parent deception.”
“It’s basically the taking of public property,” said Ravitch, unable to hide her annoyance with the claims made by trigger advocates. “In the nature of public education, people come and go. In the course of a few years, there is a lot of turnover in terms of who the parents are in a school. But they don’t own the school. The public owns the school. So you’re taking a public facility that was paid for by tax dollars and saying that they people who are using it right now this year have the right to turn it over a private operator.”
Imagine if we did the same thing with other public services like buses or libraries… “Take a vote of everyone who happens to be in a public library at any given moment and say we want to hand it over to the Library Corporation of America to run for a profit.”
But the reality was even worse than that.
On October 18, Desert Trails parents met in a park adjacent to the school to vote and pick the specific charter company that would take control of the school. California’s Parent Empowerment Act allows only the parents who signed a trigger petition to cast a ballot in this vote, which meant that hundreds of parents should have shown up to make the decision, and to exercise their newfound empowerment. But in the end, only 53 ballots were cast — with 50 of them voting to give the contract to LaVerne Elementary Preparatory Academy, a small charter operator that runs one other school in a nearby town.
A decision made by 53 people in a town of 32,000? That’s less than 0.2% of the population. Parent empowerment indeed.
As this article goes to press, LaVerne Academy has posted a job ad looking to hire teachers for the newly rebranded Desert Trails Preparatory Academy. According to the ad, job seekers only need a substitute teachers permit to apply. Apparently that’s all that’s required to help improve education at a chronically struggling school.
There is always two sides of the story, And I am sorry Diane you have the wrong part of the story. Parent Revolution is doing the job of LAUSD. I find it crazy that it took 4 years to kick out Irma Cobian out of Weigand Ave. She did so much damage to that school.The worst part about it is that it would of never taken as long as it did if the school would of been in a different part of town. Its amazing how LAUSD did not act on this situation in 2011 when test score drop with in her first year of leadership. I still can’t believe that LAUSD would keep a person like Irma Cobian in the system. Irma Cobain is a bully and bullied all the teachers at Weigand Ave.
I, along with my colleagues who decided to leave Weigand with our administrator Ms. Cobian, were never bullied, or intimidated by her. If you don’t know the truth, don’t make up lies.
I, along with my colleagues who decided to leave Weigand with our administrator Ms. Cobian, were never bullied, or intimidated by her. If you don’t know the truth, don’t make up lies.
Hi
it is years later and I am ben Austins 15 year old daughter, public school student currently reading this to Ben Austin right now. I appreciate all the people who had so much to say about my dad and his work. I especially would to thank Jack who included multiple videos of my dad at 11 o’clock at night analyzing how y dad speaks. Also, Im glad you know who the “classic Ben Austin is” given that ive you know lived with him with him my whole life you are so right Jack my dad is so so bad truly trying to rip the world apart one charter school at a time. And im sure him and Gabe rose had a secret session talking directly about how he would lie about children being abused at my soccer game when I was 6. Seriously classic Ben Austin. I hope your life as an “elementary school teacher” has worked out for you and im sure you are a great teacher who spends so much of your time teaching students and defiantly not stalking my dad and anylizing his speech patterns in the middle of the night. Sorry for not responding sooner my dad didn’t care enough about what you think because he unlike you has a real life where he actually has children and works to make life better for children that aren’t like me. But again so so glad you truly know more than I or really anyone else knows about my dad and his lifestyle and I love your take on his brain and how it works. I hope your life is looking up a little bit so you might have better things to do than stalk a random dad on the internet.
#theclassicbenaustinagenda
#fuckkids
much love F. R. Austin (ben Austins daughter)