Ellen Lubic and other education activists have formed a new organization called Joining Forces to help parents fight off corporate takeovers of their public schools. Imagine this: an earnest young man or woman comes to your neighborhood, even rents a house there, and button-holes parents to collect their grievances against the neighborhood school. What about that principal? Is there a teacher you don’t like? Do you need more of this or less of that? Sign here. Sign the petition and we can make them change. One day, if they are successful, you won’t have a neighborhood school. Instead, it will belong to a charter corporation, it will have its own board, and it may kick out your child.
Lubic writes:
“It is called divide and conquer. if parents are kept at bay and do not have a common cause of their neighborhood public school, they are easier to fool, to manage, to usurp…yes a low form of social engineering.
“Anyone who wants to work against Parent Revolution, please contact me at
Joining Forces for Education
joiningforces4ed@aol.com
“This particularly pernicious form of privatization is spreading like wild fire across the US. We must join together to educate the community about parent trigger laws and how the inner city parents are manipulated to sign phony petitions to essentially give their schools away to free market, for-profit, charters.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Another new grassroots group was started in TN to remove Kevin Huffman as TN DoEd commissioner. Haslam had so many calls about Huffman last week he held a rare press conference to express his support.
https://www.facebook.com/RemoveKevinHuffman
Small acts of resistance are springing up all over the country. Thanks, Diane, for serving as Public Education’s Grand Central Station of information and activism. Often, I become demoralized by the scope and power of the privatization movement but when I come to this blog my sense of hope returns.
There is nothing wrong with the Parent Trigger law. It is how Parent Revolution is illegally using it in the signature process and not training people in what they are voting for and all the options much less what is in the law, rules and regulations. Ellen Lubic is the first person who asked me for that law, rules and regulations. LAUSD passed a resolution that there will be no more Parent Triggers without training of parents in their options before any vote and that the signatures be legal, which they now are not and that the district lobby the state to pass laws to do the same. We are now in discussion with several schools about the parents pulling the trigger at their schools and the parents, students, teachers and communities running those schools not the district or any other organization, only locals. We have the nationwide experts in all fields including the one most do not have and that is finances and fraud busting. We seem to have more knowledge in that area than anyone else we have ever found. No money, no programs. For instance, At both Roosevelt PLAS receives between $7,800-9,000/student for each school. Their budget for each school is from $3,800-4,400/student. Where is the rest of the money? If you do not know the financial game you would never know the difference. Before we were asked to be involved no one knew the difference. This is constant as you have seen by our comments on other districts across the U.S. in which no one seems to know what is going on in any way with the districts budgets. It take me about 20-30 minutes to see what is going on in general. That is all. We also work every other area of society other than education.
The Parent Trigger was made for districts like LAUSD, N.Y., Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit, D.C. and the list goes on and on wherein the district and local officials tell the parents where to go and they have no other option. Austin and Parent Revolution are perverting the process for their power and profit. UTLA has also called for the training sessions. Working with the California Title 1 Parent Union we have the first training sessions planned and the first session was before the vote at LAUSD on the Parent Trigger resolution. It is not an accident that that resolution and the L.A. Times editorial came out. After the last vote on the resolution we sent the board members and the L.A. Times the law, rules and regulations and stated very clearly that the law had been broken, the passage of these triggers was illegal by the law and that this was not going to go away. Then you had the L.A. Times editorial and the resolution. Nothing happens by accident and if you are in the game seriously you know that most happens behind closed doors. This is how you get things done on top of the large public presence at the board, at other meetings and in the political power centers where we operate.
Anyone who wants to continue to knock the basic value of this law and not realize the illegal activities of Parent Revolution will be knocked down with the facts and real reasons for this law not how Austin and the billionaires have attempted to pervert it. Wake up people don’t you know how to use their game against them? If you do not know how to do that you are not ready for Prime Time and they will run you over easily.
By the way to show ignorance and a total lack of concern in knowing what they are talking about only 3 people asked for the law, rules and regulations. To this day I have not seen one comment by a knowledgable person that I could even say had read one word of that legislation, rules and regulations. How do you comment on something you know nothing about and call yourselves educators. This is an oxymoron.
This is definitely an oxymoron as are so many things going on. Spin, spin, spin…and smile, kiss babies, and shake hands. Then there’s infotainment.
Oh my George…another judgmental tirade from one who is neither a current school parent nor a trained educator, but is only an angry gadfly.
I found the most cogent information such as the long initiative, online, as can everyone who wishes to do endless hours of research. And George, there is room for many different groups to educate the public to contain Parent Revolution. That is the primary goal of the educators working with Joining Forces and it is because of our lifelong credibility and our demeanor that we are getting invitations to speak publicly and to help others who wish to start up their own groups.
Jumping to conclusions that I and my educator cohorts have not read the total initiative, and have not studied the Ben Austin role in getting it passed in California, is far from fair minded. You are not the only person who pays close attention. Teachers are smart people George, and they tend not to ‘shoot from the lip’, but rather to use measured tones while educating. We do not insult, defame, and rage against those who have different views.
This California law is a perverted law in and of itself. It is the template being used in many other states, and the highly paid lawyers who write the legislative language, such as Austin, are funded by the most reactionary groups in America, such as the Walton Family Foundation, and for only the most egregious two reasons, 1) to privatize all public schools for their own profit, and 2) to do away with the American union movement.
This may seem to you to be an oversimplification but starting with an easy to grasp postulation, and thereafter expanding it with facts and figures, is a proven and successful method of teaching.
We build from there to cite cases and we present supporting information which I need not do here as we preach to our beloved choir. George, you may not realize that many teachers have also gone to law school, can find and analyze facts rapidly, and then present them to others with brevity and with clarity.
As I said in my letter to Diane and other colleagues, educators can do best what they are trained and prepared to do, and that is to educate in simple terms for all to understand. Those who wish more information in terms of statistics may want to delve further. We have that information available from professional PhD statistics specialists who are allied with us.
There is little need for all the other hyperbole in order to open the eyes of the public to this plan of the Billionaires, whom we all mention, to do the mass takeover of public education. If Diane had chosen to post my entire letter, everyone would have links to read much of it for themselves.
And I do differ with you when you open with “there is nothing wrong the Parent Trigger law,” and then close with insults to educators whom you don’t know saying that all of us are ignorant and imply that only one person with no academic background as an educator, knows it all. It is this kind of ‘off the wall’ behavior that keeps many activists out of your angry sphere.
Note to readers…it has become a pattern that whenever I blog an issue George jumps right in to claim it as his own. I do consult him on occasion by email. He is a very smart man but loses his points with insults toward almost everyone.
Thank you for not giving up. This kind of information needs to known far and wide.
I just have to add that the parallels of history are starkingly familiar.
Yes, Yvonne, the historical patterns of tyrannical takeovers are generally similar if not the same. Just look beyond our interest in education to the greater situation we face in the US. Not meant to be cryptic, but there are too many executive orders leading to too much control by only one branch of government, the Executive.
Those 4 + 1 hyper conservatives on the Supreme Court claim to be absolutists, but have, since Bush v. Gore, made the most activist decisions that will affect us for many decades.
And as one who teaches university public policy, we see a clear pattern in this century of the marriage of corporations and government, as with Citizens United and other SCOTUS activist proclamations. This is the definition of fascism.
We, the People, pay for it all, but have little say in how we are treated. Education is one part of this situation.
Can’t there be a collective lawsuit against the Administration or the DOE for negligence or something? To get other branches involved (kinda like how our president was decided upon in 2000?)
Also, where are the celebrities who would/do support public Ed? Where is Frank McCourt?
“‘Tis” time to step up and say something.
Ellen, has your university hosted any round tables on this stuff? Do you think the universities are being loud enough on this? Or are there compromises because profs are paid to consult for the reformers?? What is the situation. I keep wanting to hear loud outcries from universities.
I figure if public schools really did just up and disappear that parents would form home school co-ops and not give the charters any business. I don’t think mamas would just take it–I really do not. Or daddys either.
I can see churches offering school in the basement and aunties volunteering to take kids in for instruction in exchange for food.
Studying various types of folk music lead me to discover very grassroots ways of teaching music and connecting and coordinating.
I want public schools to stick around, of course, but I would bet parents will never allow themselves to be slaves to for-profit charters. Put that in the market pipe and smoke it–no demand, then what??