Eli Broad intends to raise $490 million to build 260 new charter schools for half the students in Los Angeles. Being a billionaire and moving in a world of billionaires, this will not be difficult for him. It’s true that he knows nothing about education; he has said so himself. But that should be no impediment since many charters are founded and run by people with no education experience.
The Los Angeles Times has an article about the test scores of charters, public magnet schools, and regular public schools in that city. The assumption, I suppose, is that whoever has the highest scorese is best.
But the test scores are beside the point. The really important question is why a billionaire should be allowed to buy half of a public institution. If Eli Broad didn’t like policing in Los Angeles, could he buy half the police force? If he thought the public parks were not well run, could he buy half of them?
Why should he be allowed to buy half the children in LAUSD?
It is widely believed that Eli Broad picked John Deasy as L.A.’s last superintendent. Deasy was a disaster, having cost the district at least $200 million for his failed plan to buy iPads at an inflated price for everyone in the district. The FBI is investigating the iPad mess. Deasy now works for Broad.
Many of the superintendents trained in Broad’s unaccredited superintendents academy have been fired because of their autocratic, top-down style. I happen to be in Dallas, which pushed out its Broadie, Mike Miles, after three tumultuous years, marked by a large exodus if teachers and principals and flat scores. I met with several superintendents, who said Miles had created constant disruption, my-way-or-out, and a “culture of fear.”
Eli Broad should not be allowed to take over half the children in Los Angekes.
Letting this deal go through would be the beginning of the end for public education, not only in Los Angeles but in many other cities as well.
Eli Broad’s power grab is an offense to our democracy. It is wrong. It is illegitimate. The elected board must not let it happen. They were elected to safeguard and improve the city’s public schools, not to privatize them.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
It’s just bizness, yo
Indeed, that’s what they say before they whack you.
Thanks Diane, though it is a little late. After getting rid of 5,000 teachers through teacher jail the opposition is already softened up. Perhaps there will be a miracle. I am holding my breath and waiting.
Michael P Dominguez
September 26, 2015 at 2:56 pm
Here is the only way to starve the charter school beast. Nibbling at the edges will not work.
http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/repeal-charter-school-act-of-1992-in-ca-ballot
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Mike…I took the liberty of adding your call for signers of this petition that you posted at the end of this long long repetitive page of comments by so many philosophers who should also be activists.
I hope everyone who writes here, goes to the petition and signs it. It is only by using the legal process, and also using ballot propositions, that charter schools might be beaten back by an educated voting public.
May, thanks for this.
sue
UTLA IS LATE.
Where have they been?
This has been coming for quite awhile.
Until they realized Broad would not unionize his teachers at his schools it was not problem. They let the 5000 teachers disappear.
UTLA is a huge entity where those in charge look out for themselves. Not the general public.
Now what will Broad do with a private police force? LAUSD has its’ own police and doesn’t publish incidents on campus.
How does Eli intend to police the chaos in LAUSD? Will those police be unionized?
Eli is taking a bigger bite than he can handle.
A few Perdaily posts that EVERYONE MISSED.
http://citywatchla.com/8box-left/6666-lausd-and-utla-complicity-kills-collective-bargaining-and-civil-rights-for-la-s-teachers
http://www.perdaily.com/2014/07/former-ctc-attorney-kathleen-carroll-lays-out-unholy-alliance-between-union-and-public-education-pri.html
http://www.perdaily.com/2011/03/lausd-and-utla–connecting-the-dots-of-blattant-corruption.html
http://www.perdaily.com/2014/06/lausds-treacherous-road-from-reed-to-vergara–its-never-been-about-students-just-money.html
AND ONE THAT I WROTE, when the process took me out i NYC at the moment that I was a celebrated educator, and the NY State Educator of Excellence, because my practice was Pew’s choice in NYC, cohort for the National Standards research.
http://www.perdaily.com/2011/01/lausd-et-al-a-national-scandal-of-enormous-proportions-by-susan-lee-schwartz-part-1.html
Sixteen years later and THE PUBLIC IS CLUELESS> http://www.perdaily.com/2014/03/have-reporters-become-poli-ticks–the-media-parasites-of-the-body-politic.html
Read and learn how long UTLA has been complicit
http://www.perdaily.com/2011/03/lausd-and-utla–connecting-the-dots-of-blattant-corruption.html
http://www.perdaily.com/2013/10/why-does-utla-continue-to-support-lausds-violation-of-california-teacher-dismissal-process.html
http://citywatchla.com/8box-left/6666-lausd-and-utla-complicity-kills-collective-bargaining-and-civil-rights-for-la-s-teachers
http://www.perdaily.com/2014/03/lausd-and-utla-collude-to-end-collective-bargaining-and-civil-rights-for-teachers-part-2.html
It’s amazing, all right. This is from an interview with Blume, the ed reporter:
MONTAGNE: So where does it stand – it’s a memo – is this going to happen?
BLUME: Well, there’s nothing in California law that can stop it. Having said that, however, intense political opposition, which is being generated in some quarters, could have an effect at various levels, including on funders because this plan is estimated to cost $490 million. And opening a charter school is difficult; opening 260 is really difficult – finding staff and land and everything else. So it remains to be seen exactly what will happen.
“There’s nothing in California law that can stop it” Wow.
I know how charter laws work in my state- they change state law to push decision making UP to the state level to avoid local review and democratic process, so I assume that’s what Blume is referring to in California- state law- but- wow.
Any of these guys can essentially just buy a public school district and we all have to hope it goes well? What if it harms the kids in the (remaining) public schools or people the broader community? They just have no say at all in any of this?
I think there would be genuine civil unrest here if someone came in and announced they were buying the public schools. I cannot even imagine it. We had three separate levy votes and a two year public debate over whether to replace certain aging public school building with new facilities. It was HOTLY debated and everyone in town weighed in. I know this a much larger system than mine but do they not even get a vote on this?
http://www.npr.org/2015/09/23/442761641/group-led-by-billionaire-proposes-overhaul-of-la-public-schools
One of the many scary aspects of this power grab is what we have seen happen that when one of these privatization processes does not go well, the privatizers just walk away from it, leaving the students to scramble for another school.
“Nearly Full (of it)”
While some decry “Half empty”
I say “Nearly full”
So Eli Broad’s attempt, see,
Is nothing much to mull
I also think it’s time to get ed reform politicians at the state and federal level to make a statement on this. Do they support this blatant, completely undemocratic power grab?
Where’s John Kasich on this? Jeb Bush? Hillary Clinton? What about the giant ed reform punditry/ expert choir?
They should have to say so on the record. It’s essential information for voters in ANY state or federal election. We should know whether our state and federal lawmakers agree with this, because if they do it could happen to any of us, anywhere. Can a billionaire come in and flood the market with charter schools anywhere? Do we need state laws that disallow this?
Don’t expect much from Hillary Clinton. The Clintons have been close to Eli Broad for over 30 years. They have collaborated to bring us Eli Broad’s brand of corporate education reform. http://www.defendpubliceducation.net/
Thanks. I’m aware of both of the Clintons close ties to the ed reform “movement”.
I don’t think I’ll persuade anyone in DC. I think they’re gone. It’s lock-step. They all recite the same words, down to whole phrases.
What I hope we can do is to force them to run on privatizing public schools, so we can have a real debate with an informed electorate.
I think they have a duty to tell voters that they support this. The key to me is specificity- not “I support great schools!” or “I’m an agnostic!” but “I support Eli Broads plan to purchase this school system” or “I think taking over Youngstown City Schools with no input or debate is a good idea” or “I supported Eli Broad’s take-over of the EAA in Detroit despite the fact that it was an absolute disaster”.
We need to pin them down with specific examples because they have a whole set of phrases they use to weasel out of running on this. It’s happening. There’s example after example. It’s no longer an ed reform theory or hypothetical. It’s time they told us what they believe.
Who’s Hillary’s sec of ed if she’s elected? A Broad academy graduate?
Of course! I bet she picks someone like that derelict Klein who gave the death knell to NYC schools.
Yes, Chiara…any billionaire can come and flood the market with charters anywhere.
Some of us have long been writing about Fetullah Gulen, a Turkish Imam, who iives in his gigantic and highly guarded estate in the Pocono Mtns. in Pennsylvania, and floods America with his charter schools. He drains American taxpayer money of biliions for his brand of directed education in most states, while fomenting revolution in the Middle East, looking toward the day he can return to Turkey as their leader. His goal is to impose Islam worldwide. Read about it at Susan O’Hanian and elsewhere. It is all online.
Yet the media reports very little on him since he seems to be protected not only by our government (Clinton let him, Bush kept him, and Obama protects him) while he garners billions of dollars from his 148 or so, madrassa-like schools (he has over 2,000 world wide), and other businesses, He hobnobs with our legislators and our billionaires, particularly Casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, and he continues to bring unidentified Middle Eastern men into the US on Green Cards ostensibly to run his schools…but in reality many disappear into the countryside to other unkown situations.
It amazes me that there are still people who are so naive not to recognize that our legislators are bought and paid for…and that free elections and free press are only a fantasy.
In California, we just had an election where inner city Latinos/Chicanos were bribed to vote for Ref Rodriguez. (Latinos are now over 50% of the California population and approximately 80% of the public school population.) If this is now to be accepted practice, that if a person shows a voter receipt then they are entered into a lottery to win big cash prizes, and if we indeed get motor/voter registration as a law, as is being touted by Obama and others, then ALL DEMOCRACY IS LOST. This once ‘Golden State’ now has as law that people who are illegal residents can get driver’s licenses, and when you watch them being coached in foreign language while taking their tests at the DMV (no one seems to care who works for DMV) then it is only a step away to their becoming registered voters.
This is unspoken here for it is politically incorrect to reveal all this. But this is how far our state has gone into the ‘rabbit hole’ and it follows that the rest of the country generally is led into these dark places by our state which had the most billionaires, and the 7th largest economy the world.
As to others here who mention NPR…and add to the PBS, these are funded mainly by the Broad Foundation, the Gates Foundation, the Resnick Foundation, the Walton Foundation, the Wasserman Foundation, and others including Spielberg, and Geffen. ALL of these are billionaire charter school supporters.
If our legislators are bought, our media is bought, our people are sleeping and have no information nor do they seem to want it, and they say how wonderful that we have these generous and brilliant philanthropists (which I hear even on the university campus), how can we win this battle?
Hi Chiara:
From a thread ““Jersey Jazzman: Who’s the Liar?”, you could find the answer for your inquiry on the link. Yes, there is a law.
http://www.thomhartmann.com
Here is a partial info that people with or without legal background can realize that “”CORRUPTION”‘ has put rich class TO BE ABOVE THE LAW.
[start quote]
…
Even the framers of the US Constitution knew that. James Madison wrote in 1817…
“There is an evil which ought to be guarded against in the indefinite accumulation of property from the capacity of holding it in perpetuity by … corporations. The power of all corporations ought to be limited in this respect. The growing wealth acquired by them never fails to be a source of abuses.”
And for over a century states maintained control over corporations and corporate power in order to keep that “source of abuses” in check.
…
And so from the very first days of our country, local, state and federal legislatures retained the power to limit corporate activity while still encouraging entrepreneurship.
Much of that power was based in “revocation clauses” — the ability of the state to revoke the corporate charter. “THE CORPORATE DEATH PENALTY”
There’s two key parts there.
FIRST, that the government is giving permission to operate — permission which CAN BE REVOKED.
The SECOND key part is that the license or the charter only gives PERMISSION TO OPERATE in A CERTAIN WAY
…
But that all changed in the late 19th century and early 20th century when states like NEW JERSEY and DELAWARE started changing their charter laws to appeal to the nation’s largest corporations and to allow them to operate in ways that other states didn’t.
Those states led the charge against limits on corporate behavior — they allowed corporations to live forever — and they allowed them to have interlocking boards.
And that started a nationwide race to the bottom in terms of limiting corporate behavior.
If states wanted to attract the largest and most successful corporations, they would have to loosen their restrictions on corporate charters.
And that race to the bottom turned INTERNATIONAL as businesses grew into the MULTINATIONAL MONOPOLISTS that we know today.[=GLOBAL CAPITALISM is controlled by A FEW-China, Japan, India, all under British maybe with the help from USA and Europe. My emphasis]
[End Quote]
Thank you for asking question. Back2basic
Brief recap of LAUSD elections:
In 2011, 30-year teacher Bennett Kayser won, despite being outspent 5-to-1 by the corporate privatizers.
In 2013, 17-year teacher Steve Zimmer won, despite being outspent 5-to-1 by the corporate privatizers.
In 2013, 13-year teacher Monica Ratliff won, despite being outspent 42-to-1 by the corporate privatizers.
In 2014, teacher & principal George McKenna won, despite being outspent 5-to-1 by the corporate privatizers.
In 2015, teacher & principal Scott Schmerelson won, despite being outspent 5-to-1 by the corporate privatizers.
Eli and the billionaires lose again and again at the polls
The voters-citizens-taxpayers have spoken loud and clear that they do not want their schools privatized, and that they want the the corporate privatizers’ backed by money-motivated, predatory billionaires to get the-hell out of, and stay the-hell out of LAUSD.
Undaunted at all his candidates losing, Billionaire Eli Broad others announced that he was pumping $1 billion dollars into charter expansion in Los Angeles… even though the voters have vehemently rejected this:
The arrogant attitude of Broad, Gates, the Waltons, etc. is…
“Elections schm-elections… school boards, schm-ool boards…
“At the end of the day, we really don’t give a sh#% what the citizens, the parents, and the taxpayers want. If we can’t buy control of the the board via the election process, we’re still gonna shove money-motivated privatization and charterization down the public’s throats whether they want it or not.
“So those unwashed masses should just shut up and accept it!”
This loss of the Broad/Bloomberg supported charter school candidates merely made the Rheeformers dig in harder. They came up with the idea of using bribes to get uninformed poor people to go the polls and vote for the Latino surnamed candidate, who won for LAUSD BoE. If they can do this once, and win, do you not think that this will become the new de rigeur voting practice? When buying elections with bribery, and with multiple voting using different addresses. as is happening all over California, what is the election process worth?
Can you imagine them doing this with other public institutions?
Eli Broad showing up at LAPD Headquarters, and proclaiming,
ELI BROAD:
“I’m now appointing myself Chief of Police. Here’s how things are going to change from now on! We’re going to replace the management and officers at 50% of LAPD precincts with two charter police organizations:
“Acme Police Services… and Ronco Rent-a-Cops—two charter police precinct management organizations that I happen to own. Those police currently serving at those targeted precincts will effectively be fired, and have to re-apply to work for the new Acme or Ronco charter police management with no guarantees of being hired, or a decent salary, benefits, job protections, etc.
“Oh, and both Ronco and Acme will be run by private boards, with no transparency to the public as to the budgeting, salaries, or the required qualifications or training of police officers. We’re also setting up an entirely different police academy training facility that we won’t share with the public either.
“In general, you’re just gonna give us the billions of dollars of citizen-taxpayer money that formerly went to LAPD, and let us spend it and run the police whatever way feel like… with no oversight from any elected body, and no transparency to any elected body… and if certain neighborhoods are simply too expensive or troublesome to police, well… we’re not going to patrol them at all.”
“Eli. I have one question: Why would you think that you have any right to do all of this?”
“Because I”m a billionaire. That’s why. Anybody got a problem with that?”
“Yeah… actually, I think that EVERYBODY has a problem with that.”
I have to say too, it’s amusing to watch the ed reform “movement” abandon the Common Core the minute they got the testing they wanted and go right back to a relentless focus on “choice”. So much for “we want to improve public schools”.
The minute those tests went in they got right back to business privatizing schools. It’s appalling behavior, and a real betrayal of the people who trusted them to support their giant national Common Core program, long-term. We’re back to 24/7 attacks on public schools and the ink is barely dry on the Common Core tests. Why should anyone, anywhere trust these people with public schools? The Choice Agenda trumps everything, including kids who are currently in public schools.
If the public magnet schools are performing better than the charters and are not “broken,” Broad should not be allowed to privatize at will, just because he wants to. He should have to prove that what he is offering is superior. I hope the board stands up for the students. People will money are not always right.
NO, he should not have to “prove” ANYTHING! Those schools are PUBLIC PROPERTY! NO ONE should be allowed to take something that the public has paid for and turn it into a private, revenue-generating business. We OWN the schools. WE, as in “We the People.” It should be ILLEGAL to take public assets like this. I don’t care if the schools are “superior” in test scores or are all “college ready” (whatever that means). I don’t care that he has more money than God. I care that he thinks he IS God, and that school boards and legislators are letting him play God. In my opinion, someone like Broad should lose his citizenship. We’re not supposed to have kings in the U.S., and everyone who is making, or allowing, that to happen should be publicly stripped of his/her citizenship.
My students all have to pass the citizenship test to graduate from high school now. They fail the test, they don’t graduate. These autocrats, but their actions, have proven that they don’t understand U.S. citizenship.
said it here already but it bears repeating: Quote from the DEFEND PUBLIC EDUCATION SITE
http://www.defendpubliceducation.net/who-is-eli-broad
“Taking public controls off of private capital set the stage for the wealthiest one per cent in American society to amass enormous personal wealth and use that wealth to lobby and legislate the radical redistribution upward of wealth and income over the next thirty years. It is this ideal of deregulation that Broad holds up as a metaphor for public education. The only way to do that is to hand over public institutions to the private sector. As is being seen with the unfolding disaster of school closures, applying private sector methods to public institutions ignores economic and social reality. Downsizing a corporation to please Wall Street investors is not the same thing as downsizing a public school district because it is not turning out enough students ready for college.
“Venture philanthropists like Eli Broad continue to try to use venture capitalist methods to create an educational system after their own image. They believe that privatizing schools will turn out a select number of students for their business needs and also give them another huge source of profit.
“Just as the people of the world continue to suffer from the economic tremors of the 2008 financial bailout, just like the collapse of the housing bubble, the tremors created by corporate education reform will cause an economic and social earthquake that will collapse corporate education reform like the house of cards that it is. If corporate educational reform is not making a big enough return in profit, they will move on. Corporate education reform opens up the educational system to the instability of the market place. The public schools are not going anywhere, even when they are grossly underfunded, because they are not in education to make a profit.
If supporters of public education mobilize to support it, left standing, though battered and wounded, will be the U.S. public school system that began after the American Revolution…but what about the children growing up in this war?”
NOW THERE’S A QUESTION.I say!!!!
THIS COUNTRY HAS YET TO SEE THE RESULT OF THE END OF PUBLIC EDUCATION and an ignorant electorate, as well as a hug underclass with no skills whites ever.
PS: Sorry to yell, and I wasn’t yelling at you, retired teacher. This abrogation of the rights of the public just makes me crazy. The fact that history and civics are no longer considered “essential” topics by “reformers” shows what contempt these ultra-wealthy deformers have in the U.S. as outlined in the Constitution.
LAUSD School Board Members Ref Rodriguez’ and Monica Garcia’s backers DON’T EVEN BELIEVE IN THE EXISTENCE OF DEMOCRATIC SCHOOL BOARDS LIKE THE ONE FOR WHICH THEY ARE NOW SERVING. The California Charter School Association’s true and openly-expressed (BELOW) end game is to abolish the LAUSD Board that meets down at 3rd and Beaudry (and abolish all school boards everywhere, by the way), and convert all current public schools into privatized charter schools, which will be profit centers for Eli Broad and their other wealthy backers.
Their goal is to eliminate any voting or input from the public, and have unelected charter school boards—made up of businessmen, profiteers, and non-educators—who meet in secret, and are free to whatever they want, whenever they want to maximize profits, and with no one to stop them.
In short, LAUSD School Board Members Rodriguez and Garcia cynically ran and were elected for an elected position, and to serve on an elected body—per their masters’ marching orders—whose functioning they will endeavor to undermine and hopefully eliminate… or, failing to do that while in office, Garcia and Rodriguez will do his corporate masters’ bidding and do as much damage to the board’s functioning, and lessen the number schools under its oversight, and make as much progress towards the board’s elimination as Garcia and Rodriguez can while serving on it.
Garcia’s and Rodriguez’ whole campaigns were an affront to the citizens and taxpayers in his district. STRATEGY: Tell the public a bunch of lies to trick them into voting for two people—funded by out-of-state billionaires—who will endeavor to… END THOSE SAME CITIZENS’ POWER TO VOTE FOR, AND ULTIMATELY TO CONTROL PUBLIC SCHOOLS.
The mind boggles.
Netflix CEO and billionaire school privatization proponent Reed Hastings recently dumped $1.2 million dollars into the PAC that is backing the slate of Rodriguez, Lydia Guttierez, and Tamar Galatzan (with only Rodriguez getting elected).
In his keynote address at the California Charter School Association’s annual dinner last year, Netflix CEO and corporate ed. reformer Reed Hastings stated the CCSA’s goal should be to abolish all democratically elected school boards, and end any input and participation of citizen-taxpayers in how their tax money in spent in education, and in which people are chosen to decide how money is spent. (CCSA IS Rodriguez primary financial backer… at one point, Rodriguez even served on CCSA’s board)
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REED HASTINGS (March 3, 2004): “The importance of the charter school movement is to evolve America from a system where governance is constantly changing… (i.e. democratically elected school boards, where the citizen-taxpayers have decision-making power.) to an all-charter school system, with no traditional public schools under the governance of an elected school board.
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Hastings further says charter school chains are superior because “they don’t have an elected school board.” He celebrates New Orleans system where every school is a privately-run charter with ZERO accountability to the public, and where the public has ZERO power to influence their governance.
————————–
REED HASTINGS (March 3, 2004):
“Now if we go to the general public and we say, ‘Here’s an argument for why we should get rid of school boards,’ of course, no one’s going to go for that. School boards have been and iconic part of America for 200 years.”
————————–
We’re still going to do it to those citizens. We’re just not going to tell them, and by the time they wise up, it will be too late.
Since in most cities, corporate reformers cannot do a New Orleans-style wiping out of democratically controlled school boards—as there’s no Katrina-like catastrophe to exploit—Hastings instead recommends a slow, deceptive, stealth strategy. He instructs the charter schools and their advocates to “work with districts” quietly and “grow steadily”. This means that the charter industry will falsely profess that they wish to co-exist with the traditional public schools, and complement the public school system, while the truth is that they are merely putting on that façade with the ultimate goal being the total elimination of public schools via this “slow growth” strategy.
The other prong of this strategy—one that Garcia and Rodriguez will be engaging in—is to sabotage the traditional public schools through starving of them of funds, jacking up class size, cutting the arts, libraries, etc. … all to trigger low performance… and use that low performance that they initially and actually caused, as justification for closing public schools and replacing them with private charter management.
Eventually, as the percentage of traditional LAUSD public schools shrinks, and the percentage of charter schools within LAUSD grows, they cost of maintaining the salary, health benefits, retirement, for those staffing traditional public schools, etc. will cause the district to collapse from within. The end game is a small pseudo-“board” whose sole function is to rubber stamp charter school authorizing… and no control actual over charter schools’ functions after doing so… no transparency to the public, no accountability to the public, and that can and will refuse to educate all of the public—i.,e. those who are expensive to educate, and who will not produce high scores on tests… special ed., English language learners, recent immigrants, homeless, foster care.
That’s why out-of-state billionaires, Wall Street hedge fund charter proponents, etc. pumped millions into the school board campaigns of Garcia and Rodriguez.
And right after Hastings’ speech at the same CCSA celebration, guess who gets an award from the CCSA—the “2014 Hart Vision Elected Official of the Year”?
Why it’s the privatizers’ and corporate reform’s bought-and-paid-for LAUSD School Board Member Monica Garcia: (and look who introduced her, and who is standing next to her while she gives this speech… it’s Ref Rodriguez, the newly-elected LAUSD School Board member)
The best part of her speech is when Garcia courageously uses this opportunity of her acceptance speech to respectfully contradict Hastings’ fervent dream—expressed moments earlier to a rapturous standing ovation—that school boards like the one on which she serves should not be wiped off the face of the earth, as Hastings so desires… as, you know, Hastings’ goal would end two centuries of democratic control of schools in the United States… and how not responding and contradicting Hastings would be a total betrayal of the voters who voted for her to serve on the LAUSD Board, not destroy it through a Smarick-ian, Hastings-ish slow stealth charterization / privatization.
Just kidding 😉 she never says anything of the kind.
It’s like two members of the U.S. Senate attending an annual convention for a group that wants to wipe out democratic institutions such as… oh… the U.S. Senate, then getting on stage and getting awards from this group… and this award and acceptance speech all happens… right after one of the group’s main leaders just gave a speech about their goal to eliminate the U.S. Senate.
WTF???!!!
Seriously, when Garcia asks the charter honchos in the audience, “Do you believe that all kids can learn?” and they chant “Yes”, keep in mind that included in those charter leaders who are chanting along are folks who have unashamedly kicked out… errr… counseled out up to 70% of their students before graduation. (see Caroline Grannan’s investigation on charter school attrition)
One more tidbit—(from one Allie Wall)—regarding Monica Garcia’s ties to billionaire privatizers: (it’s a hoot!)
Back when she was running for re-election in 2012, Garcia gave an interview on that very topic a reporter from L.A. School Report (LASR).
Check out these interesting (to say the least!) answers to these two conflict of interest questions:
(KEEP IN MIND… these are YES or NO questions, so the first word out of Garcia’s mouth should be “Yes” or “No”, and then a further clarification and explanation behind the “yes” or the “no.” That’s not what happened here.)
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/21/monica-garcia-lausd-board_n_2347337.html
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LASR: “You’ve raised a lot of money from charter schools. Isn’t that a conflict of interest since it’s the school boards job to approve or disapprove of charters?”
–
MONICA GARCIA: “I’ve raised money from a very diverse set of folks. Charters are one of them. That’s a separate conversation than the way I do my job.
“I need people to invest in the campaign. Whether it’s the largest public works program that built 129 new schools, 160,000 new seats, and the equivalent of 8 acres of parkland, or the people that, everyday we buy paper and pencils and toilet paper and napkins from — those people care about who’s here.
“Like I said, there are people who contribute to a campaign and want to support my reelection. I welcome that.”
–
LASR: “If a Congressman was on the Energy committee and was taking money from the coal industry, I think people would look at that as a story. Isn’t this the same thing?”
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MONICA GARCIA: “The effort to raise money for my campaign reelection is not about the influence in how I do my job. Or the decisions. I’ve done my job, I have a record, it’s been very clear, it’s about kids. I’m inviting whoever wants to invest. They can do their $1,000.”
–
Great questions… ridiculous answers….
Let me see, Monica… you get millions from privatizers, yet you tell LASR with a straight face that there are no strings attached or expectations from the privatizers for donating those millions to your campaign?
And yet you want the public to believe it’s just pure coincidence that—before and since—you’ve said and done everything that that your privatizer backers wanted you to?
Whatever you say, Ms. Garcia.
Somebody emailed me and asked what “Smarick-ian” mean? That’s a reference to corporate ed. reform theorist and strategist Andy Smarick, who has let the cat out of the bag as to their secret game plan… still available on-line. (link BELOW) In districts where there is still an elected school board, people like Reed Hastings, Bill Gates, Eli Broad, etc. finance the campaigns of corporate puppets like Monica Garcia and Ref Rodriguez to carry it out.
BELOW Smarick details this plan of using a slow, stealth charterization to cause the collapse of public school districts and public education overall:
http://educationnext.org/wave-of-the-future/
(If any privatization ever tries to claim that they want charter schools to complement the public school system, or co-exist with public schools to provide parents with “a family of different school options—public, charter private”… RE-READ THIS BELOW. The privatizers don’t want co-existence; they want to conquer and devour all… and don’t you forget it—check out New Orleans… THE WALL STREET PRIVATIZERS / CHARTERIZERS WANT IT ALL).
(CAPS MINE and parentheticals () mine, Jack)
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——————–
ANDY SMARICK:
“Clearly we can’t expect the political process to swiftly bring about charter districts in all of America’s big cities. However, if charter advocates carefully target specific systems with an exacting strategy, the current policy environment will allow them to create examples of a new, high-performing system of public education in urban America.
“Here, in short, is one roadmap for chartering’s way forward:
“FIRST, commit to drastically increasing the charter market share in a few select communities until it is the dominant system and the district is reduced to a secondary provider. The target should be 75 percent.
“SECOND, choose the target communities wisely. Each should begin with a solid charter base (at least 5 percent market share), a policy environment that will enable growth (fair funding, nondistrict authorizers, and no legislated caps), and a favorable political environment (friendly elected officials and editorial boards, a positive experience with charters to date, and unorganized opposition).
“For example, in New York a concerted effort could be made to site in Albany or Buffalo a large percentage of the 100 new charters allowed under the raised cap. Other potentially fertile districts include Denver, Detroit, Kansas City, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, New Orleans, Oakland, and Washington, D.C.
“THIRD, secure proven operators to open new schools. To the greatest extent possible, growth should be driven by replicating successful local charters and recruiting high-performing operators from other areas (see Figure 2).
“FOURTH, engage key allies like Teach For America, New Leaders for New Schools, and national and local foundations to ensure the effort has the human and financial capital needed.
“LAST, commit to rigorously assessing charter performance in each community and working with authorizers to close the charters that fail to significantly improve student achievement.
“In total, these strategies should lead to rapid, high-quality charter growth and the development of a public school marketplace marked by parental choice, the regular start-up of new schools, the improvement of middling schools, the replication of high-performing schools, and the shuttering of low-performing schools.
“AS CHARTERING INCREASES ITS MARKET SHARE IN A CITY, THE DISTRICT WILL COME UNDER GROWING FINANCIAL PRESSURE. The district, despite educating fewer and fewer students, will still require a large administrative staff to process payroll and benefits, administer federal programs, and oversee special education. WITH A LOPSIDED ADULT-TO-STUDENT RATIO, THE DISTRICT’S PER-PUPIL COSTS WILL SKYROCKET.
“At some point along the district’s path from monopoly provider to financially unsustainable marginal player, the city’s investors and stakeholders—taxpayers, foundations, business leaders, elected officials, and editorial boards—are likely to demand fundamental change.
“That is, EVENTUALLY THE FINANCIAL CRISIS WILL BECOME A POLITICAL CRISIS.
“If the district has progressive leadership, ONE OF TWO BEST-CASE SCENARIOS WILL RESULT:
“THE DISTRICT COULD VOLUNTARILY BEGIN THE SHIFT TO AN AUTHORIZER, developing a new relationship with its schools and reworking its administrative structure to meet the new conditions.
“Or, believing the organization is unable to make this change, THE DISTRICT COULD GRADUALLY TRANSFER ITS SCHOOLS TO AN ESTABLISHED AUTHORIZER.
(In other words… Bye, bye, traditional public schools—the ones accountable and transparent to the citizen-taxpayers! Hello, total privatization of schools where the public loses all input and decision-making power to the private sector! Andy Smarick’s wet-dream-come-true!)
“A more probable district reaction to the mounting pressure would be an aggressive political response. Its leadership team might fight for a charter moratorium or seek protection from the courts. Failing that, they might lobby for additional funding so the district could maintain its administrative structure despite the vast loss of students. Reformers should expect and prepare for this phase of the transition process.
“In many ways, replacing the district system seems inconceivable, almost heretical. Districts have existed for generations, and in many minds, the traditional system is synonymous with public education.
“However, the history of urban districts’ inability to provide a high-quality education to their low-income students is nearly as long. It’s clear that we need a new type of system for urban public education, one that is able to respond nimbly to great school success, chronic school failure, and everything in between. A chartered system could do precisely that.”
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That’s the billionaire privatizers’ gameplan that, if elected, useful (and well-paid) privatization puppets like Garcia and Rodriguez will execute as they follow the orders of their corporate masters. In short, there’s no New Orleans’ Hurricaine Katrina to go all “Shock Doctrine” on the public school systems in other cities like Los Angeles, so what’s a privatizer to do?
Just induce a financial and political crisis that will eventually destroy the public schools (re-read Smarick’s plan above). Again, it’s straight out of The Shock Doctrine.
Eventually, as the percentage of traditional LAUSD public schools shrinks, and the percentage of charter schools within LAUSD grows, the cost of maintaining the district’s salary, health benefits, retirement, etc.will cause the district to collapse from within.The end game is then to replace our current board (and democratic system) with a small pseudo-“board” whose sole function is to rubber stamp charter school authorizing… and which has no control actual over charter schools’/charter chains’ functions after doing so… no transparency to the public, no accountability to the public, and that can and will refuse to educate all of the public—i.,e. those who are expensive to educate, and who will not produce high scores on tests… special ed., English language learners, recent immigrants, homeless, foster care.
That’s why out-of-state billionaires, Wall Street hedge fund charter proponents, etc. are pumped millions into the campaigns of LAUSD School Board Members Monica Garcia and Ref Rodriguez. Bennett’s first race for the board.)
Again, for a short video summary of Smarick’s plan, watch the Reed Hastings’ speech again:
Just wondering if there is a strategic pattern in Broad’s larger privatization scheme that is predictable? Does he “Groom” through Broad Academy, then get his “groomees” hired in top positions in strategic locations around the nation so they can hone their training while getting the lay of the land? Does he then use the “skills acquired” to go in to charterize certain regions… “going in for the corporate kill”?
Deasy was Broad trained and then led PG County MD (in no way of note yet was promoted to LA)… Did this pave the way for Broad to now orchestrate his “charterization” of LA?
And then there is William Hite… anyone been following him lately? He was Broad trained then cut his “superintendent teeth” also in PG County MD. He wasn’t considered a great leader by anyone yet managed to greatly increase his pay in a superintendent’s position in Philly. And on a hunch, I think Philly seems to be setting up for a charter school invasion. He is reorganizing and some of his newly hired leaders were leaders in various charter school organizations. Do read this article (and in particular some of the comments at the article’s end)
http://thenotebook.org/blog/158781/hite-reorganizes-district-administration-expands-learning-networks.
It might be worth looking at Broad Academy “trainees” and where they take their first positions – but more importantly where they are “Promoted” to… this seems to be the “charterization target”. Just wondering here if there is any “tooth” to my suspicions…
The saddest part about the whole thing is Blume says the public schools were harmed by Deasy’s IPad fiasco.
Eli Broad damaged the public schools with that ridiculous tech initiative and now he’s conducting a hostile take-over.
They can’t win this game, public schools. If they go along with ed reform gimmicks they’re weaker and then ripe for take-over. If they oppose ed reform gimmicks then they’re supporting the “status quo” and they’ll just use that to go after them.
None of this is new news. Many of us for years have written here about Eli Broad and the Broad Academy which was founded in 1999. Their Mission Statement clearly defines their goals.
All one has to do is read this, and follow the thousands of posts and comments here from all over the US as to the results. These Broad-trained CEO/Supts. have destroyed, and are currently destroying, public school districts using their Broad business models to encourage rapid charterizing. See Chicago, Cleveland, New Orleans, LA, and hundreds more cities where the same model exists.
After all this info was posted here for almost 3 years, it is late in the game to recognize how far along this privatizing has come, and maybe to finally act on it.
Almost 1.000 LAUSD teachers and public school supporters marched last Sunday to protest Broad’s charter onslaught , and in the Los Angeles 100 degree heat. I love and respect them for this. Thank you Alex, for setting this in motion.
Why isn’t this happening all over the US?
Actions speak far louder than words!!
I feel really discouraged to read some of this sudden awakening by people who have been commenting here for years. I would have hoped that everyone, everywhere, who understands this vast loss of democratic public education would be at school board meetings, and doing letter writing, and generally being loudly pro-active in this assault by the oligarchs. Too many seem to already be The Rhinoceros’ depicted by Ionesco.
This is how Fascism prevails.
An offense to our democracy.
Slip sliding away….. aided in Los Angeles by Steven Spielberg, the Waltons, and Broads, owner of the Clippers, and at the larger scale aided by the California legislature and citizens of California who elected them.
The “public” on which public education depends appears to be disengaged enough to allow this takeover…NPR called the Broad plan an “overhaul” a misrepresentation of the intent to take private control of at least half of the school system, the tipping point needed to more forward to 100% privatized control, with public subsidies retained.
Broad probably hoped that his new art palace would distract attention from this plan.
Maybe NPR is earning that Walton funding
I am so, so sick of the out-sized influence of wealthy people in this country I can’t even listen to them anymore. I no longer care if they’re well-intended. I didn’t elect any of them and I am tired of hearing their prescriptions for children. What is the point of voting if this select group are going to be running things no matter who we vote for? Why spend a billion dollars on a Presidential election if we get the same “leadership” and “influencers” no matter who we elect?
But do the privatizers really want 100% privatized control? It seems they prefer to leave the most expensive and struggling students in the public system. That way, it’s easier for them to claim to be “better”.
Although I suppose that once the entire system is privatized, no one will even care about failing schools, as long as they can be starved of funding and their students just left to rot.
That’s why Broad only wants to buy half of LAUSD. That way, he has a place to “dump” all of the “unwanted kids.” In Utah, we call it the mid-year dump–when, after October 1, the kids the charters don’t like are thrown back to the public schools, but the charters keep the funding. Last year, my school literally had a student with special needs dumped on our doorstep by an administrator from a charter school. Literally. The administrator drove the kid to our school, told my school the kid was expelled from the charter, and left him with us. Not even with his paperwork and IEP information. And we were stuck. Not one thing we could do.
Ohmy god! I thought I had heard everything!
NYC Public School teacher,
No charter chain will ever take over an entire district because they have nowhere to dump the kids they don’t want. Then there’s Néw Orleans, which is nearly all charters, but about half are failing schools. Takes a whole lot of propaganda by the Waltons to cover that up
Check out “Who is Eli Broad and why is he trying to destroy public education? at Defend Public Education! for information about the Broad Superintendents Academy.
http://www.defendpubliceducation.net/who-is-eli-broad/
Thanks for this important link, Ken…I keep a printout on my desk and use your facts often to strengthen our position against these oligarchs who seek to own and rule all of America….of course, without elections nor unions to protect the rest of us.
To Guru Ken Derstine:
Thank you very much for your super duper website “Defend Public Education”
Your provided link points out that “academic elitism” has truly been the cause to create the effect of “financial elitism.”
Yes the retired “academic elitism” offers its EXPERTISE and CONNECTION to enhance the “financial elitism” to shape and to destroy American Democracy in order to fulfill THE BOTTOM-LESS “CORPORATE GREED” = MULTINATIONAL MONOPOLISTS = GLOBAL CAPITALISM owned by a few RICH families.
Regardless of creed, race, gender or educational background, human beings are naturally drawn to GREED, LUST, and EGO.
As a result, the only sentient being with human conscience (to conscientiously alleviate the unfortunate’s sufferance through a teaching of civility, responsibility and being considerate) can break free of these emotional trivialities. Back2basic
We use the term “illigitimate” all the time in our rhetorical fight against the reform movement. “Illegal,” “against the law,”….we use these terms quite a bit and from our perspective they are accurate. However, our use of these terms and the broad idea that many reformers and their political minions are breaking the law to forward their agenda, has it all wrong. We are limiting our ability to fight the reformers by assessing things incorrectly.
The reform movement is CHANGING the laws. They are not, as we sometimes naively assume, working within the law. They push legal boundaries for sure, and because of the technocratic nature of this stuff, it gets NO attention from the media or the public. In this push against the boundaries of current law, the reformers are provoking legal change.
The reformers are not, by and large, law breakers, but rather law changers. Our side needs to realize that the chronic “exposé” nature of our rhetoric is not working, falling flat, not changing the narrative, and generally losing primarily because we are fighting the wrong fight. They are changing laws and on that level, exposing things hardly makes a dent. Movement politics, well beyond the easy and normal phone calls, letter writing, and petitions, is the primary instrument against a corporate push bent on CHANGING LAW. Exposé politics is great against crime being committed, but that’s not really the case in our fight at the macro-level.
NYSTEACH,
I don’t agree. Exposing underhanded tactics and lies is crucial to informing the public, which has been fed a steady diet of lies and boasts for the past decade. Much more is needed, including mass opt outs by parents and student activism. The eight Newark students who mic upside Cami’s office for four days changed the narrative. The 220,000 students who opted out in Néw York created their own narrative.
And yes I believe it is illegitimate and undemocratic for billionaires to use their money to privatize a civic responsibilty. Just because they want to.
I wonder how California and other states compare with Missouri in just how calculated the intentional changing of demographics are. I need someone more competent and talented than I am to expand a simple look at the censuses of 2000 and 2010. Here is some of what I found in St. Louis….the population dropped by close to 29,000. 21,106 were black, and a smaller percentage was white….. A closer looks shows….The 29,000 population decline included about 21,000 under the age of 19. The discovery of these stats brings me closer to having the overall theme for a book about St. Louis, if I knew it was unique. Proving anything is like nailing jello to a wall. I would say a central aspect of what has happened, and continues to happen is the failure of the media to have made any effort to follow up on the still unsolved 2006 execution of a former special needs student. 12 bullets…….and criticism from the media for spending 20,000 dollars to protect the board president who was rumored to be next. A year later……the state took over the schools. Illegally with phony stats, from what I could learn.
Billionaires tend to loathe the electoral process. Too much participation by low lifes.
http://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/Los-Angeles-Eli-Broad-s-I-in-Best_Web_OpEds-Democracy_Diane-Ravitch_Education_Eli-Broad-150926-163.html#comment564780
“Eli and the billionaires lose again and again at the polls
The voters-citizens-taxpayers have spoken loud and clear that they do not want their schools privatized, and that they want the the corporate privatizers’ backed by money-motivated, predatory billionaires to get the-hell out of, and stay the-hell out of LAUSD.” writes Jack Covey.”Undaunted at all his candidates losing, Billionaire Eli Broad others announced that he was pumping $1 billion dollars into charter expansion in Los Angeles” even though the voters have vehemently rejected this:”
Covey continues: “The arrogant attitude of Broad, Gates, the Waltons, etc. is — ‘Elections schm-elections” school boards, schm-ool boards” At the end of the day, we really don’t give a sh#% what the citizens, the parents, and the taxpayers want. If we can’t buy control of the the board via the election process, we’re still gonna shove money-motivated privatization and charterization down the public’s throats whether they want it or not. So those unwashed masses should just shut up and accept it!’ ”
Covey got Broad’s contempt (for the people ) right.
In reading the first set of quotes from LAUSD Board Member Monica Garcia, what strikes me is that Garcia doesn’t even grasp how contradictory and downright idiotic that her own rhetoric is. (The two words I put in CAPITALS are contradictory)
“I would go to any PHILANTHROPIC arm and say ‘Please INVEST in our kids,’ ” García said.”
“Philanthropic” actions are the exact opposite of “investing.” Philanthropy—literally meaning “the love of humanity”—is charity, OR voluntary giving of help to those in need, as a humanitarian act.
Philanthropy is most certainly not the capitalist concept of “investing”—which is basically the “love of money”—as the philanthropist, unlike the “investor,” neither desires nor expects a monetary return on the money he donates, nor does he demand control over any organization to which he donates money.
Broad, Walton, and the rest have been called “vulture philanthropists.”
To bridge this contradiction, Broad and others have sometimes resorted to calling themselves “philanthropreneurs”—what they believe is a benign descriptor of their predatory activities.
I mean… really! “philanthropreneurs” ??? Seriously?
That word is an oxymoronic mash-up of “philanthropist” and “entreprenuer”. That’s like describing a geometric figure as is a “square circle.” You’re either one or the other. You can’t be both.
You’re either…
— a “philanthropist” whose motives are selfless and lack any desire for person gain or control,
or you’re…
— an “entrepreneur” who’s motives are selfish and out for personal gain or control.
You can’t be both.
Here is just one of thousands of articles about it a kind of philanthropy—or rather pseudo-philanthropy—called “impact investing”:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/skollworldforum/2013/07/30/why-impact-investing-is-an-emerging-paradigm-shift-in-philanthropy/
They’re bastardizing the terms and concepts of “philanthropy”, “philanthropic,” “philanthropist,” etc. This “Impact investing” is nothing but ruthless capitalism covered the thinnest veneer of social responsibility and “charity”.
FROM THE ARTICLE: (Note the capitalization)
“Attached to all this fervor is a fair amount of confusion about what impact investing actually represents. Is it investment, philanthropy or both? Simply put, impact investing is THE DEPLOYMENT OF CAPITAL WITH AN EXPECTATION OF FINANCIAL RETURN, where the success of the investment is also contingent upon achieving a stated social or environmental goal. For example, at JPMorgan Chase we are committing capital—more than $50 million to date—to private equity funds THAT WILL DELIVER US AN APPROPRIATE FINANCIAL RETURN while simultaneously improving livelihoods for underserved populations around the world.”
I mean, come on… “deliver us an appropriate financial return”… this is not “philanthropy” by any current or past definition.
In Eli Broad’s and the billionaires’ approach hostile takeover of education, it allows them to make the specious argument:
“Sure, we’re making millions off this ‘education reform’, ‘reforms’ that allow us to seize control of hundreds of millions of the public’s tax dollars, and control over massive school districts / schools with absolutely no oversight, transparency or accountability from the public who are kicking on those tax dollars…
” … but we’re also helping improve the education of poor black and brown children at the same time… so that means EVERYBODY WINS, and that means our profiteering really is ‘philanthropy’ and that makes it okay!”
Those millions should go to the classroom, not into the pockets of hedge fund managers, or the bank accounts of money-motivated charter honchos like Eva Moskowitz ($ 600,000 / year). Once all of this is exposed to the public, they’ll feel and think the same way, and resist such “reform.”
Thank you, Julie. Good post.
Sure, feel free.
I actually think this post about an article at HARPERS is equally instructive:
============
Below is a HARPERS article about the neo-liberal push of Broad and others to…
… abolish democracy and “citizenship” — where all citizens of all socio-economic and ethnic groups can weigh in via democratic voting…
… and replace it with…
… the Broad-ian concept “leadership,” or the control of all institutions—both private and public— by certain special, superior mostly white “elites”, and the masses just have to accept these elites’ edicts and policy implementation passively and gratefully.
I say “mostly white” because those mostly white elites do make room for token “sell outs” that they can then use as pawns to trick certain minority populations into supporting their elitism… Roland Fryer, and Dr. Steve “fake Phd” Perry, Dennis Walcott, Monica Garcia, Ref Rodriguez and Derrell Bradford are some that come to mind.
The HARPERS’ article goes into detail about how this neo-liberal perversion of society and its values has also infected the universities and colleges. According to its author, the neo-liberal concept that higher education’s mission is now merely about churning out needed workers, and nothing else… is spreading like an ebola virus, unchecked and out of control.
http://harpers.org/archive/2015/09/the-neoliberal-arts/
The author, William Deresiewicz, contrasts a certain university’s century old mission statement, and the fact that its author is credited:
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“The paramount obligation of a college is to develop in its students the ability to think clearly and independently, and the ability to live confidently, courageously, and hopefully.”
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… with its replacement… four vague, anonymously-authored, neo-liberal, anti-democratic concepts of …
——————————————
“leadership
“service
“integrity
“creativity”
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WILLIAM DERESIEWICZ:
“Let us take a moment to compare these texts.
“The first thing to observe about the older one is that it is a sentence. It expresses an idea by placing concepts in relation to one another within the kind of structure that we call a syntax. It is, moreover, highly wrought: a parallel structure underscored by repetition, five adverbs balanced two against three.
“A spatial structure, the sentence also suggests a temporal sequence.
” ‘Thinking clearly,’ it wants us to recognize, leads to ‘thinking independently.’
” ‘Thinking independently’ leads to ‘living confidently.’
” ‘Living confidently’ leads to ‘living courageously.’
” ‘Living courageously’ leads to ‘living hopefully.’
“And the entire chain begins with a college that recognizes it has an obligation to its students, an obligation to ‘develop their abilities to think and live.’
“Finally, the sentence is attributed to an individual. It expresses her convictions and ideals. It announces that she is prepared to hold herself accountable for certain responsibilities.
“The second text is not a sentence. It is four words floating in space, unconnected to one another or to any other concept. Four words — four slogans, really — whose meaning and function are left undefined, open to whatever interpretation the reader cares to project on them.
“Four words, three of which — ‘leadership,’ ‘service,’ and ‘creativity’ — are the loudest buzzwords in contemporary higher education. (‘Integrity’ is presumably intended as a synonym for the more familiar ‘character,’ which for colleges at this point means nothing more than not cheating.)
“The text is not the statement of an individual; it is the emanation of a bureaucracy. In this case, a literally anonymous bureaucracy: no one could tell me when this version of the institution’s mission statement was formulated, or by whom. No one could even tell me who had decided to hang those banners all over campus. The sentence from the founder has also long been mounted on the college walls. The other words had just appeared, as if enunciated by the zeitgeist.
“But the most important thing to note about the second text is what it doesn’t talk about: thinking or learning. In what it both does and doesn’t say, it therefore constitutes an apt reflection of the current state of higher education. College is seldom about thinking or learning anymore. Everyone is running around trying to figure out what it is about. So far, they have come up with buzzwords, mainly those three.”
William Deresiewicz talks about Scott Walker changing Wisconsin’s state university mission from one similar to the one above… to the cold, uncaring, unthinking “to provide the needed members of the workforce.”
Deresiewicz later asks a different university president the most important thing students should learn.
“Leadership,” was this neo-liberal university president’s reply.
Deresiewicz eventually articulates why this neoliberalism with this “leadership” emphasis troubles him.
http://harpers.org/archive/2015/09/the-neoliberal-arts/8/
——————————————
WILLIAM DERESIEWICZ:
“The worst thing about ‘leadership,’ the notion that society should be run by highly trained elites, is that it has usurped the place of ‘citizenship,’ the notion that society should be run by everyone together.
“Not coincidentally, citizenship — the creation of an informed populace for the sake of maintaining a free society, a self-governing society — was long the guiding principle of education in the United States.
“To escape from neoliberal education, we must escape from neoliberalism. If that sounds impossible, bear in mind that neoliberalism itself would have sounded impossible as recently as the 1970s. As late as 1976, the prospect of a Reagan presidency was played for laughs on network television.
“Instead of treating higher education as a commodity, we need to treat it as a right. Instead of seeing it in terms of market purposes, we need to see it once again in terms of intellectual and moral purposes.
“That means resurrecting one of the great achievements of postwar American society: high-quality, low- or no-cost mass public higher education.
“An end to the artificial scarcity of educational resources.
“An end to the idea that students must compete for the privilege of going to a decent college, and that they then must pay for it.”
May I repost this elsewhere Julie Tran?
The fact that a business provides a service that its customers want or need does not make it a philanthropy. You are right, Julie, the fact that their venture capital actually may have some social benefits beyond making money for the investors is great, but it is not philanthropy. I wonder if there are tax benefits?
“Foilanthropy”
The billionaire’s foilanthropy
Subverts and foils democracy
It circumvents the people’s voice
Replacing it with wealthy choice
Is she uncomfortable begging them? Is it the proper role of government to be begging these people to show some restraint?
I mean, really. At some point you have to start asking whether we’ve internalized this idea that we’re all charity cases and we have to politely ask them if we may possibly object, please sir, and thank you.
I know what vulture philanthropy does to the givers- it seems to make them incredibly arrogant. What does it do to the receivers, the public? Does it change us too? Does it turn us into people who beg for leniency?
Chiara…it sounds like Charles Dickens…”please, Sir, may I have some more?”
“Please invest in our kids”?
They’re paying for these “donations”. They must know that. They must know they’re exchanging agency and democratic process for Eli Broad’s money. Is it worth it? I guess so!
When one whores for cash, one does as one it told by the PIMP and the JOHN. In this case, LAUSD whored for Broad’s money, and they have folded to his whip.
This whole battle was described by Peter Greene in his eloquent 4th of July article earlier this year, where he contrasts…
“The Easy Way” of government espoused by Broad and others such as Reed Hastings AND
“The Hard Way” of government via democracy, or a system where every citizen has a vote or say:
“The Hard Way” VS. “The Easy Way”
http://curmudgucation.blogspot.com/2015/07/the-hard-way.html
PETER GREENE:
America stands for doing things the hard way.
When it comes to running a country, the easiest way to do it is to put one guy in charge and let him tell everybody how to do everything. He can be picked by heredity or tradition or power or wealth; he can be installed by a committee of Important People, or by the roar of the crowd, or even a legitimate-ish election.
But the important part– the easy part– is that once you have him installed, you just let him run everything. No debates. no discussions, no big arguments about What To Do Next– just let your Grand High Potentatial Poohbah decide it all.
…
But instead, we dedicated our country to doing things the hard way. We wrote down a bunch of foundational premises for running a country, and then we set up a mechanism by which, over time, those principles could be interpreted and extended to their natural conclusions, even if the majority of founders didn’t agree with those conclusions. The constitution is the ultimate exercise in saying, “Look, I’m going to agree to these principles, and every time I try to weasel out of actually following them, I want you to bop me over the head and stop me.”
Furthermore, we set up a system based on the principle of not shutting people up, sorting them somehow into classes ranging from Those Who Must Always Be Listened to all the way down to Those Who Must Always Be Ignored.
The Framers had seen the many ways in which the easy way could go wrong, and somehow, they found the means of sitting down together with fellow citizens with whom they deeply and profoundly disagreed.
We have always been annoyed by our own system. We’re irritated by the way it fosters unending debate on every little thing– even things that we thought were already decided. And good Lord in heaven– can’t the people who are Dead Wrong just shut up and go away? We waste time, energy, and money on processes that are inefficient and inconsistent. There’s hardly anything in this country that we don’t do the hard way, loaded with argument and controversy and inefficiency and ambiguity.
…
On top of that, our peculiar brand of running a country ties all of our citizens together, so that people in one community have to worry about, be involved in, pay taxes to finance decisions in other communities. Gah! Can’t we just take care of our own and let those Others go hang? Having to be all tied together is just hard!
And so we are always bedeviled by folks who want to get America to do things the easy way. And with the unleashing of Citizens United, many of our wealthy citizens are doing their best to move us to an easier system, a system where the people who are Better just go ahead and settle issues for the rest of us.
Also, why shouldn’t I be able to just close the doors on my gated community, pay for my own police and fire company, and just not have to give a cent to those Other People?
This pressure to start doing things the easy way is felt all across our country, but we are getting hit by it head on in education.
When Netflix CEO Reed Hastings says we should just abolish school boards because letting voters get involved in school decisions is just inefficient and disruptive, he’s searching for the easy way.
When Bill Gates decides that all American students (well, all non-rich non-private school students) should meet the same standards, and those standards should be the ones laid out by this couple of guys he knows, he’s looking for the easy way.
When folks like the Waltons and Broads look for ways to break down the teaching profession so that we can have people in classrooms who just follow the instructions they’re given, it’s one more search for the easy way.
When people across the spectrum agitate for a standardized test that can measure the complex learning achievements of every student in America, that’s a search for the easy way.
When charter-istas think that simply unleashing the invisible hand of the market place will somehow create excellence in education (and, perhaps, help sort the Betters from the Lessers, while making some Betters a big pile of profit)– that’s a search for the easy answer, too.
There are two problems with the easy way.
The first is a moral problem. The easy way requires us to silence everyone who is not on the Right Page. If you lost the vote, if you’re in the smaller group, if you’re on the less powerful side, then you just need to shut up. The easy way seeks to stop all disagreement and discussion so that we can unite behind one clean, clear, elegant solution, and there is only one way to do that– to silence everyone who doesn’t agree.
Worse, and more morally repugnant, the easy way calls on us to ignore Those People entirely. It encourages us to think of them as Lessers, which somehow makes it okay to give them less– less service, less support, less kindness, less consideration, because, hey, they’re Less Than, and so they deserve to get less. We can abandon them because that’s all they deserve. It is straight up immoral to treat other human beings as less valuable than our own tribe.
And yet, that immoral behavior is always required by the easy way.
Which brings us to the second problem, the practical problem– the easy way just doesn’t work. Look back through history– a nation or institution can sustain the easy way for a generation at most, but then things just fall apart. Turns out that silencing people thoroughly and forever is really, really hard. And it also turns out that engaging in immoral behavior over time comes with huge personal, institutional, and cultural costs.
Without the arguing and debating and voices that just won’t shut up, you can’t move forward. As a nation we have made many huge mistakes, but by and large we have been able to move forward and try to leave those mistakes behind, because the voices who could and would point out those mistakes were not silenced. The easy way lets you get stuck in a bad place.
By creating a government structure that doesn’t support tyranny easily, we have made a commitment to doing things the hard way, and every time we have tried to weasel out of that commitment, it has cost us as a culture and a country.
So the current struggle in education against the forces who would like to reduce education to an easy solution is not just about education, but another version of our national struggle.
There will always be people who want to silence others in the name of ease and efficiency, and they will always be wrong. To look at the rich, complex business that is the education of an entire nation’s varied population of young people– to look at that and think that there is an easy answer to How To Do It– is to be both unAmerican and simply foolish.
Living in a pluralistic society is hard. Saying that human beings all have value and acting like you really mean it is hard. Dealing with people who don’t see things the same way you do is hard. Educating the children of an entire nation is hard. That’s all right. We’re Americans, and 236 years ago, we made a commitment to doing things the hard way, because, in the end, it’s the way that continues to lead us, slowly but surely, to a better version of ourselves as a culture. Don’t let anybody con you into anything else.
wo articles just came out in the aftermath of
the Broad announcement that he was making
LAUSD a 50% charter school district.
First, corporate reform’s bought-and-paid-for
Monica Garcia welcomes charter expansion,
and dismisses the damage it will do to existing
system of public schools, because regarding that
system… she “hope(s) that system ends.”
She contrasts the charters, as a “one system emerging is a
learning organization that meets the needs of kids” with
the traditional public schools as a “the system that didn’t serve
(students) as well. I, too, hope it ends.”
http://laschoolreport.com/garcia-welcomes-foundations-promoting-charter-school-expansion/
L.A. SCHOOL REPORT:
(Garcia) also doesn’t believe more charter schools will spell the end of LAUSD.
“A successful LA Unified cannot be over, we will only get stronger (with charters comprising 50% or more of LAUSD),” García said. “We’ve had people talk about one system dying and one system emerging. That one system emerging is a learning organization that meets the needs of kids. The (old) system that didn’t serve (kids) as well. I, too, hope it ends.”
…
“I would go to any philanthropic arm and say ‘Please invest in our kids,’” García said. “We have many, many good strategies that need support.”
Her sentiments come in sharp contrast to other board members who view the proposed expansion with skepticism or even as a threat for the possibility that it would drain public dollars from the district’s traditional schools.
Board president Steve Zimmer told the LA Times last week that an aggressive expansion of charters could undermine the district’s own improvement efforts, saying, “The most critical concern would be the collateral damage to the children left behind.”
————————————————–
————————————————-
Meanwhile, Zimmer gave an interview
with JEWISH JOURNAL. He pulls no punches,
saying that Eli Broad’s massive expansion
of privately-run charter schools not about
just adding charters schools; it is actually
an attack on public schools that will have
“collateral damage for kids.” It’s it’s also about
“changing the idea of what public education is”
for the worse.
Unfortunately, he doesn’t use the words “privatize”
or “privatization”
He also says this charter expansion is also an attack
on unions as well. The people and organizations
funding it are the same people and organizations
who have a goal of wiping out unions.
Broad’s charter expansion, Zimmer says, “is not about children.”
Here’s the linlk:
http://www.jewishjournal.com/education/article/lausd_board_president_steve_zimmer_talks_about_getting_back_to_basics
Some highlights:
————————
STEVE ZIMMER: “I think there is a difference between support for existing charter schools that parents have chosen [and support more for new charter schools]. I respect and support those choices as long as the charter is doing very well, and I mean very well.”
JEWISH JOURNAL: “Why a different bar for charter schools?”
STEVE ZIMMER: “Because that’s why charters are supposed to exist: either to provide something better, or unique and innovative. Otherwise there’s no compelling reason to authorize them.”
JEWISH JOURNAL: “Do you think there’s any chance to roll back the charter trend?”
STEVE ZIMMER: “We have the most charters of any school district in the nation. We have incredibly high levels of saturation. If choice is so important, the California Charter Schools Association’s agenda and the Walton Family Foundation and other foundations’ agendas to situate more and more charter schools within the LAUSD boundary is not about children. It’s not about choice. It’s not about innovation.
“It’s about a very different agenda of bringing down the school district, an agenda to dramatically change what is public education.
“It’s about altering the influence of public sector unions. I just happen to disagree with that agenda. But (pro-charter) folks should be explicit about what their agenda is.”
JEWISH JOURNAL: “It seems like a lot of the dialogue relating to LAUSD pits teacher against student. If something is good for students, it’s bad for teachers and vice versa.”
STEVE ZIMMER: “How it’s said in my world is whether you have a kid agenda or an adult agenda. That is an incredibly deceptive political construct. Anybody who has spent their career in public school knows that’s a lie. When you’re supporting teachers, you’re supporting kids. When you create a better environment for learning, you’re supporting kids and everyone who works with them.
“That lie — kids versus adults — that lie is a subterfuge about what part of the reform movement is about, which is eviscerating or lessening the influence of public sector unions. A lot of that is focused on teacher unions. Teacher unions are teachers. I’ve been very critical of my own union and the union I consider to be an ally. [But] there’s a difference between being critical of different policies of a labor union, and believing that union should not exist.
“And a lot of money that fuels the charter and reform movement is by people who believe teacher unions should not exist.”
(then later)
STEVE ZIMMER: “I’m actually very proud we have some of the highest-performing charters in the country. It takes a lot for me to not renew or to close down an existing charter. But at the point we’re at, a new charter has to be compelling. It has to offer something we don’t have right now, and that is a high bar. I am unapologetic about it.
“I believe in choice, but I am very, very wary. I am very cognizant of the damage that competition (from charter expansion) has done to our schools. And we became obsessed with data instead of being data-informed. When a system becomes so obsessed with competition that they view children through their potential to score versus their overall humanity, the dehumanization of that public school system is not something that is attractive to parents, is not something that is warm and inviting. And our public schools, to my great regret, have become test score-obsessed. A lot of charter schools have, too.”
I loved your comment, and I published it at the end of the link to the Greene piece linking git back here..
What is your name. Jack, as you are brilliant. I would like to put this comment up as it’s own post, but do not know your name, or how to attribute it to you.
Alternet’s Adam Johnson wrote about an Chicago Tribune editorial hoping that Chicago would have a Katrina-like disaster, one that would allow—as it did in New Orleans—a “handing over (of) the reins of their local governments to technocratic, largely white neoliberal systems.”
That’s exactly what Broad and the other billionaires are trying to do to LAUSD schools
http://www.alternet.org/media/most-evil-op-ed-ever-writer-wishes-katrina-storm-hit-chicago
ADAM JOHNSON:
“But (Chicago Trib editorial writer) McQueary’s piece is far worse. Praising a devastating storm that killed 1,800 people as a net positive is already a terrible thing. Expressly wishing for a devastating storm to come along and wipe out the third largest city in America so one can expedite a Randian ‘End Times’ is positively psychotic. In an attempt to be polemical, McQueary exposes the dark heart at the core of what Naomi Klein calls ‘disaster capitalism.’
“For these people, it is not a thought experiment, it’s not rhetorical, it’s real. They truly believe that largely black (or majority low-income Latino like in Los Angeles, JACK), union-friendly cities would be better off in the long run handing over the reins of their local governments to technocratic, largely white neoliberal systems. To them, the tragedy of Katrina wasn’t the mass displacement and death of thousands, it was that it didn’t happen soon enough.”
Below is a HARPERS article about the neo-liberal push of Broad and others to…
… abolish democracy and “citizenship” — where all citizens of all socio-economic and ethnic groups can weigh in via democratic voting…
… and replace it with…
… the Broad-ian concept “leadership,” or the control of all institutions—both private and public— by certain special, superior mostly white “elites”, and the masses just have to accept these elites’ edicts and policy implementation passively and gratefully.
I say “mostly white” because those mostly white elites do make room for token “sell outs” that they can then use as pawns to trick certain minority populations into supporting their elitism… Roland Fryer, and Dr. Steve “fake Phd” Perry, Dennis Walcott, Monica Garcia, Ref Rodriguez and Derrell Bradford are some that come to mind.
The HARPERS’ article goes into detail about how this neo-liberal perversion of society and its values has also infected the universities and colleges. According to its author, the neo-liberal concept that higher education’s mission is now merely about churning out needed workers, and nothing else… is spreading like an ebola virus, unchecked and out of control.
http://harpers.org/archive/2015/09/the-neoliberal-arts/
The author, William Deresiewicz, contrasts a certain university’s century old mission statement, and the fact that its author is credited:
——————————————
“The paramount obligation of a college is to develop in its students the ability to think clearly and independently, and the ability to live confidently, courageously, and hopefully.”
——————————————
… with its replacement… four vague, anonymously-authored, neo-liberal, anti-democratic concepts of …
——————————————
“leadership
“service
“integrity
“creativity”
——————————————-
WILLIAM DERESIEWICZ:
“Let us take a moment to compare these texts.
“The first thing to observe about the older one is that it is a sentence. It expresses an idea by placing concepts in relation to one another within the kind of structure that we call a syntax. It is, moreover, highly wrought: a parallel structure underscored by repetition, five adverbs balanced two against three.
“A spatial structure, the sentence also suggests a temporal sequence.
” ‘Thinking clearly,’ it wants us to recognize, leads to ‘thinking independently.’
” ‘Thinking independently’ leads to ‘living confidently.’
” ‘Living confidently’ leads to ‘living courageously.’
” ‘Living courageously’ leads to ‘living hopefully.’
“And the entire chain begins with a college that recognizes it has an obligation to its students, an obligation to ‘develop their abilities to think and live.’
“Finally, the sentence is attributed to an individual. It expresses her convictions and ideals. It announces that she is prepared to hold herself accountable for certain responsibilities.
“The second text is not a sentence. It is four words floating in space, unconnected to one another or to any other concept. Four words — four slogans, really — whose meaning and function are left undefined, open to whatever interpretation the reader cares to project on them.
“Four words, three of which — ‘leadership,’ ‘service,’ and ‘creativity’ — are the loudest buzzwords in contemporary higher education. (‘Integrity’ is presumably intended as a synonym for the more familiar ‘character,’ which for colleges at this point means nothing more than not cheating.)
“The text is not the statement of an individual; it is the emanation of a bureaucracy. In this case, a literally anonymous bureaucracy: no one could tell me when this version of the institution’s mission statement was formulated, or by whom. No one could even tell me who had decided to hang those banners all over campus. The sentence from the founder has also long been mounted on the college walls. The other words had just appeared, as if enunciated by the zeitgeist.
“But the most important thing to note about the second text is what it doesn’t talk about: thinking or learning. In what it both does and doesn’t say, it therefore constitutes an apt reflection of the current state of higher education. College is seldom about thinking or learning anymore. Everyone is running around trying to figure out what it is about. So far, they have come up with buzzwords, mainly those three.”
William Deresiewicz talks about Scott Walker changing Wisconsin’s state university mission from one similar to the one above… to the cold, uncaring, unthinking “to provide the needed members of the workforce.”
Deresiewicz later asks a different university president the most important thing students should learn.
“Leadership,” was this neo-liberal university president’s reply.
Deresiewicz eventually articulates why this neoliberalism with this “leadership” emphasis troubles him.
http://harpers.org/archive/2015/09/the-neoliberal-arts/8/
——————————————
WILLIAM DERESIEWICZ:
“The worst thing about ‘leadership,’ the notion that society should be run by highly trained elites, is that it has usurped the place of ‘citizenship,’ the notion that society should be run by everyone together.
“Not coincidentally, citizenship — the creation of an informed populace for the sake of maintaining a free society, a self-governing society — was long the guiding principle of education in the United States.
“To escape from neoliberal education, we must escape from neoliberalism. If that sounds impossible, bear in mind that neoliberalism itself would have sounded impossible as recently as the 1970s. As late as 1976, the prospect of a Reagan presidency was played for laughs on network television.
“Instead of treating higher education as a commodity, we need to treat it as a right. Instead of seeing it in terms of market purposes, we need to see it once again in terms of intellectual and moral purposes.
“That means resurrecting one of the great achievements of postwar American society: high-quality, low- or no-cost mass public higher education.
“An end to the artificial scarcity of educational resources.
“An end to the idea that students must compete for the privilege of going to a decent college, and that they then must pay for it.”
We use the term “illigitimate” all the time in our rhetorical fight against the reform movement. “Illegal,” “against the law,”….we use these terms quite a bit and from our perspective they are accurate. However, our use of these terms and the broad idea that many reformers and their political minions are breaking the law to forward their agenda, has it all wrong. We are limiting our ability to fight the reformers by assessing things incorrectly.
The reform movement is CHANGING the laws. They are not, as we sometimes naively assume, working within the law. They push legal boundaries for sure, and because of the technocratic nature of this stuff, it gets NO attention from the media or the public. In this push against the boundaries of current law, the reformers are provoking legal change.
The reformers are not, by and large, law breakers, but rather law changers. Our side needs to realize that the chronic “exposé” nature of our rhetoric is not working, falling flat, not changing the narrative, and generally losing primarily because we are fighting the wrong fight. They are changing laws and on that level, exposing things hardly makes a dent. Movement politics, well beyond the easy and normal phone calls, letter writing, and petitions, is the primary instrument against a corporate push bent on CHANGING LAW. Exposé politics is great against crime being committed, but that’s not really the case in our fight at the macro-level.
Here’s what Seth Litt, the new leader of the phony astroturf parent group PARENT REVOLUTION—which gets millions of annual funding from… wait for it… Eli Broad—thinks of all this carping about Eli Broad and his plan for a hostile takeover over of LAUSD schools: This former TFA Corps member and former charter school principal references last Sunday’s anti-Broad protest outside the opening of Broad’s new museum, deriding the protest as “a noisy distraction”:
http://parentrevolution.org/our-blog/2015/9/18/a-noisy-distraction
———————————————–
SETH LITT:
“One of the reasons we don’t have enough real conversations about student achievement is that we, as educators, waste time and energy on arguments that get us no closer to providing a quality education for every student. (Fighthing the undemocratic seizing and privatizing of our schools by billionaire elites is not a waste of time and energy, especially when the public has voted over and over again against this privatization, JACK)
“In Los Angeles, one education leader (UTLA, led by Alex Caputo-Pearl, JACK) with the influence to focus the energy and attention of 35,000 teachers, is choosing to protest the opening of a new free art museum. In a district where only 3% of English Language Learners are meeting the standards on our new assessments (because those new assessment are bullsh#%, designed to falsely portray schools and students as failing, JACK), and over 40,000 students are sitting on charter school waitlists (more bullsh#% as those waitlist numbers always turn out to be false) unable to get in, you might think we would all welcome efforts to create new high-quality schools. (No we would welcome an increase in funding successful strategies, such as lowering class sizes, providing classroom aides for all teachers, provide a rich curriculum, etc…. all things both Broad, and his puppet group Parent Revolution have opposed, JACK)
“Or maybe, we would focus all of that energy and attention on strategies to grow and replicate successful practices from schools of all types (i.e. close up traditional public schools that have served L.A. students for over a century, and replace them with Eli Broad’s privately-run McSchools, JACK).
“Instead, we wind up wasting our time hearing the same broken arguments about district vs charter schools rather focusing on results for kids. (it’s not an either/or…. charter schools represent the privatization of LAUSD, turning schools into profit centers that are unaccountable to public, not transparent to the public, and which do not educate all the public… eschewing the most difficult, costly, and burdensome to educate… special ed., English Language Learners, homeless, foster care kids, etc. JACK)
“At Parent Revolution, we are accountable to the families that we serve and help organize in pursuit of a kids-first agenda. (No, no, no… P-Rev is accountable to its billionaire, pro-privatization funderS, most prominently Eli Broad, JACK…. parents are merely the equivalent of a conman’s “marks” or suckers, JACK)
“The families we serve come from high-need communities where good schools have been in tragically short supply.
“Community, family and student interests aren’t being served by this protest. Their interest is simply having access to a high quality education for their students. Let’s focus the energy on delivering that.”
————
Good job, Seth!!! Keep earning your forty pieces of silver!!!!
Instead, watch this and see what the protest was all about:
(go to 12:15 for the speeches)
(go to 12:15 for the speeches)
Jack…wonder what salary Seth Litt is paid by the Broad and Walton Foundations? Ben Austin reportedly made over $250K a year plus perks.
Litt seems to move around a lot…from TFA and so many jobs on the East Coast, wonder how he will do in LA? Interesting that PRev did not promote internally, Mr. Rose, who has been so prominent speaking for them in the community, and who knows this territory as a Californian from a good university, but rather chose a Bronx, NY guy from Fordham.
Great Post! Parents must get involved or public schools are over.
If you do the math, if he spent the same amount on each of those 260 schools, he would be spending less than $190,000 per school. He is going to need a whole lot of help to create 260 charter schools. I’m guessing he is banking on taking over a lot of public space a la New Orleans.
Here is the only way to starve the charter school beast. Nibbling at the edges will not work. http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/repeal-charter-school-act-of-1992-in-ca-ballot
Mike..thanks for posting this petition to do away with the California Charter School law of 1992. I signed.
Please post this at the top of the page, and throughout all the Ravitch posts. We drown in the repetitive hyperbole of others who comment endlessly…but this is the ONLY worthwhile pro-active suggestion on the entire page.
I’m thinking actually “building” 260 schools would run around 10 billion dollars.
So, obviously a different definition of “build a school” not relating to 260 new buildings under construction.
I went to the link that Ken offered and May applauded, and this wonderful summary of what Broad and the billionaires are doing. go here and read the history of Eli Broad, with this summary AT THE END… AN EMBEDDED LINKS…. ABSOLUTELY MARVELOUS.
THNAKS MAY AND KEN:
http://www.defendpubliceducation.net/who-is-eli-broad/
AND READ THE LAST SENTENCE! IT IS THE TAKE-AWAY!
” Taking public controls off of private capital set the stage for the wealthiest one per cent in American society to amass enormous personal wealth and use that wealth to lobby and legislate the radical redistribution upward of wealth and income over the next thirty years. It is this ideal of deregulation that Broad holds up as a metaphor for public education. The only way to do that is to hand over public institutions to the private sector. As is being seen with the unfolding disaster of school closures, applying private sector methods to public institutions ignores economic and social reality. Downsizing a corporation to please Wall Street investors is not the same thing as downsizing a public school district because it is not turning out enough students ready for college. (For further analysis see “The Rise of Venture Philanthropy and the Ongoing Neoliberal Assault on Public Education: The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation”
“The freewheeling deregulated market accelerated during the Bush years, putting the financial sector on steroids, and leading to the financial crisis of October 2008 for which Congress allocated $700 billion of taxpayer dollars to hedge funds, corporations and banks to prevent them from defaulting on huge debts. Despite this lesson, venture philanthropists like Eli Broad continue to try to use venture capitalist methods to create an educational system after their own image. They believe that privatizing schools will turn out a select number of students for their business needs and also give them another huge source of profit.
“Just as the people of the world continue to suffer from the economic tremors of the 2008 financial bailout, just like the collapse of the housing bubble, the tremors created by corporate education reform will cause an economic and social earthquake that will collapse corporate education reform like the house of cards that it is. If corporate educational reform is not making a big enough return in profit, they will move on. Corporate education reform opens up the educational system to the instability of the market place. The public schools are not going anywhere, even when they are grossly underfunded, because they are not in education to make a profit.
“If supporters of public education mobilize to support it, left standing, though battered and wounded, will be the U.S. public school system that began after the American Revolution…but what about the children growing up in this war?
See Links to articles for many news links which update information in this article since its February 24th, 2013 publication.
From what I know of Broad from the beginning is that he quite firmly believes that based on private parochial schools that secular charters can do the job cheaper and better. Therefore, de-unionizing LAUSD has been the point from the 1990’s. Therefore, new teachers should consider their options carefully. Get used to funding your own 401 K pension from the salary you are paid. Check out your health benefits. Once employed at a L. A. school, count on it being taken over. I am wondering about all the thirty and forty somethings who didn’t support our anti-charter move. Actually, I am not above not caring much what happens to them now.
Terry Grier may be Broad’s person to run the charters….BRR
Billy R. Reagan
(713) 795-9696
(832) 215-8877 cell
When I searched Eli Broad on Google, there was a warning, (circle with a red x) for this link. I knew better, but people are not going to get the truth because Google seems to have blacklisted this website.