This article appeared in the Wall Street Journal. Many educators know Eli Broad mainly through the superintendents trained by his institute to view public education as a business: they shut down struggling public schools and replace them with privately managed charter schools.
But here is Eli Broad, lover of the arts, worried about the disappearing middle class:
WEEKEND CONFIDENTIAL
September 13, 2013, 9:42 p.m. ET
Eli Broad’s Entrepreneurial Approach to Philanthropy
Billionaire philanthropist Eli Broad on art, education and revitalizing Los Angeles
By ALEXANDRA WOLFE
The philanthropist Eli Broad likes to spend much of his time with artists, whether at his table or by having their work on his walls. Although he made his $7 billion fortune in finance, the 80-year-old Mr. Broad prefers the company of creative types, such as artists Cindy Sherman and Jeff Koons. He even once caught the late Jean-Michel Basquiat smoking pot in his powder room. There’s no way to share these intimate experiences, of course, but he likes to think that at least he’s made it possible for the broad public to experience some of the same artwork.
Mr. Broad and his wife of nearly 60 years, Edythe, have given over $800 million to arts and culture institutions and initiatives in Los Angeles to help transform the city into what he now calls a “cultural capital of the world.” At the same time, he’s using his Broad Foundation’s assets of $2.6 billion to try to keep America’s public schools and medical research institutions world-renowned, too. “I work harder now than when I ran a Fortune 500 company,” he says.
At the end of this month, he’ll announce the 12th winner of the $1 million Broad Prize for Urban Education, an award given to an urban school district that has demonstrated the greatest improvement in student performance, and has reduced the achievement gap among low-income and minority students.
Mr. Broad describes his approach to philanthropy as entrepreneurial. Mostly, he says, “what I do is I bet on people.” Mr. Broad himself spends most of his time identifying effective leaders—and then he invests in them and their ideas. He also spends millions of dollars each year coming up with metrics to reveal hard data about performance, and only continues funding a school or institution if it is showing signs of improvement.
His respect for ambitious entrepreneurs could come from his own career, which started with odd jobs such as selling garbage disposals door-to-door and working as a drill press operator at Packard Motor. Born in the Bronx in New York, Mr. Broad moved with his family to Detroit as a child. He went to public school before graduating from Michigan State University. He has since given back to his alma mater by endowing a business school and a graduate school, and by making a $28 million gift to build the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum, which opened in fall 2012.
After college, Mr. Broad became a certified public accountant at the age of 20. At 24 he started Kaufman and Broad (now known as KB Home), a company that streamlined construction costs to offer suburban housing with low mortgages. A few years after it went public, he acquired a family-owned insurance business for $52 million that he turned into the retirement savings company SunAmerica. He sold it to American International Group in 1999 for $18 billion, and since 2000 has dedicated all of his time to philanthropy.
The grantee to whom Mr. Broad’s foundation has given the most money is the Broad Institute, a genomic medicine facility he created with Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Now with over 2,000 employees, it started as the brainchild of the scientist Eric Lander, one of the leaders of the Human Genome Project. The Broads have given $600 million to the institute since 2003.
The Broads have made a big investment in revitalizing downtown L.A., particularly Grand Avenue. (They live in L.A.’s Brentwood neighborhood.) He and former Mayor Richard Riordan spearheaded an effort to build the Walt Disney Concert Hall in 2003. Mr. Broad gifted an additional $7 million to the Los Angeles Opera this year. “We’re getting more and more cultural tourists,” he says. Mr. Broad is hoping the arts will do for L.A. what artists did for the New York neighborhoods of Soho and Chelsea, making the neighborhoods more lively and desirable.
As the founding chairman and life trustee of L.A.’s Museum of Contemporary Art—and a major donor to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where his $60 million gift helped create the Broad Contemporary Art Museum in 2008—Mr. Broad has unmatched influence in shaping the city’s focus on contemporary art. That power has unnerved some critics, but Mr. Broad doesn’t appear to mind playing a lightning-rod figure.
He is now planning to build another museum called The Broad, designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro and scheduled to open in late 2014. The new museum will house much of the Broads’ two collections, both personal and belonging to their foundation. In all that includes about 2,000 works, some of which are currently being stored in half a dozen warehouses across southern California. (The Broad Art Foundation has lent out artworks to nearly 500 museums over the years.)
Mr. Broad first began collecting art in the 1970s. His and his wife’s first purchase was a van Gogh drawing for $95,000. They went on to buy a 1939 Picasso, and then a 1923 Matisse drawing. Within a few years, the Broads turned to the contemporary market. They own over 100 Cindy Sherman photographs, as well as a substantial collection of Roy Lichtenstein works from the 1960s to 1990s. Despite Mr. Broad’s penchant for lending, he’s so enamored with a few particular pieces that he prefers to keep them at home in his personal collection, such as a Jeff Koons metallic rabbit sculpture and a 1933 Miró painting his wife loves.
Mr. Broad and his wife bought the works of today’s notable artists so long ago that in some cases they now pay more on art insurance than they paid to acquire the artwork. These days, he says, “Japanese and Korean collectors are buying a lot, along with hedge fund managers and others—in Qatar they spend over a billion a year on art.” It’s an inflow of capital that has changed the market. “The value of the art has gone up dramatically” since he bought his first Cindy Sherman work for $200, he says. Despite the far higher prices, he still buys contemporary art. “Most of the work we buy is produced in the last year or two from artists we know,” he says. He often has early access and sees the work being created in the artists’ own studios.
Along with the social commentary in their artwork, he enjoys artists’ thoughts on “the human condition.” He talks to them about social and global issues, from the disappearance of the middle class to the crisis in Syria. The gap between the rich and poor bothers Mr. Broad, he says, and has been an impetus for his philanthropy. “Artists see the world differently than us businesspeople,” he says. “If I spent all my time with bankers, lawyers and businesspeople, it would be kind of boring.”
A version of this article appeared September 14, 2013, on page C11 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Weekend Confidential: Alexandra Wolfe.
Why am I suddenly thinking about the Italian Renaissance?
This article by a toadie who plays up to him and uses his standard PR info makes me want to throw up.
Google his earlier years and the law suits surrounding Kaufmann and Broad. Also take a look at the history of LACMA and his going back on his word there…and how he gobbled up land across from MOMA and near the Disney to build his own Broad Museum…and how he controlled MOMA and brought them to their knees, and how he wanted to control all of downtown LA….. and on and on.
Most of it is online for a deep dark look at the man within.
Yes…think Machiavelli….
oh so misguided. The lack of awareness that Mr. Broad has about how test-based education is hurting the arts is painful.
Our public school students ask “What is art?” Is that a multiple choice question?
And WE ask, “WHERE is art (in our schools)?”
He has good taste in art.
As so many of us who don’t have millions to buy it.
Not really. He is not born with art. He thinks being unreasonable is an art. Need I say more? He basical took what was there. A pair of performance artists named the gorilla girls put him on blast a couple years ago for leaving out : Women, Blacks and other Minority artists. He has also driven out many of the help, curators and directors; his ability to recognize and respect what is current leaves much to be desired ( no Banksy to my knowledge) and he notoriously stiffed the architect who designed the Cortines ( irony police! ) Arts HS or as students who have few little art options there call it : #9
Please nobody mention how much the Nazis loved art …
Oh wait …
Godwin’s Law?
Caesar’s CPA —
The evil that men do lives after them;
the good is oft interrèd with their tax shelters.
Great line Jon…made me laugh.
The trouble with the classicists…
Hmmm, our 21st century Medici family.
Or Roman patricians as the Republic collapsed.
Once again–the word is VILLAINthropist, NOT philanthropist. Philanthropists are those who “promote human welfare” (Merriam-Webster Dictionary), not entitlement of ownership & foisting of misguided ideas on others. Medicis, indeed!
http://www.freep.com/article/20130428/OPINION05/304280058/Education-Eli-and-Edythe-Broad-Michigan-Education-Acheivement-Authority
Broad wrote an op ed in the Detroit paper denying he’s privatizing schools. It’s hard to miss in Michigan, however. The majority of the charters are for-profit, and they’re everywhere (well, they’re not in suburban areas, but in every low income or working class area).
The thing I don’t get about the industrialist edu-donors/unelected lawmakers is, why not start a new private sector company that isn’t publicly-funded? What Detroit needs is a tax base and middle class wages. If he loves Detroit so much, put the new business there.
Why not stick to what he’s (apparently) very good at, and leave teaching to teachers and policy to the people we elected?
“We’re” really not asking for charity or handouts. Hopefully, with their business expertise, we can all make some money, owners and future Detroit middle class employees both! What a great thing that would be for Detroit.
I get this scary feeling sometimes that “business leaders” are out of ideas, and they only way they see to make a profit now is to shift public spending and assets to the private sector. This isn’t “creating wealth”. It’s just moving money around.
Broad is probably hoping that the Detroit Institute of Art will have a bankruptcy tag sale.
And they very well may have that sale. The city of Detroit owns the museum there and bankruptcy means their art is part of the assets the city owns and could conceivably be selling. The monied vultures are keeping track of that situation, especially the art “lovers”.
As an aside, in Akron OH, the infamous Brennans are big patrrons of the arts. Your tax dollars at work, making the charter owners of Ohio rich and then parceling it out in tiny bits to artists (presumably so the charter owners can be cultured). But art classes in public schools? Fuggetaboutit.
You said this perfectly:
“I get this scary feeling sometimes that “business leaders” are out of ideas, and they only way they see to make a profit now is to shift public spending and assets to the private sector. This isn’t “creating wealth”. It’s just moving money around.”
This is in a nutshell how our leaders have responded to the one-two punch of mechanization/ decline of mfg employment and the rise of globalization since 1980.
This is exactly what is happening, and many of the hedge fund managers are in the business of destroying companies to gobble up the assets, and now they destroy public institutions the same way for the same purpose.
Read the great article on hedge funds and insider traders in this slimy business in the June issue of Vanity Faire.
He loves art but his type of education reform is what is killing the arts. This is like the pot calling the kettle black. I have wondered for a while now what CC among other things is going to do to students whose careers should be artists, musicians, theater performers, fiction writers.
The CCSS are a fascist dictate. Absolutely Orwellian. They overrule every teacher, administrator, curriculum coordinator, and curriculum designer in the country. We underlings are to shut up and do what we are told.
And, BTW, your union loves the CCSS–NEA or AFT. Both are owned by the machine.
Well, actually, I teach in a Catholic school, but my Archdiocese School System follows what the public schools in the state do as far as curriculum. Our testing is a bit different…we’ve used the Iowa Test of Basic Skills for many years and will continue to use it for at least this school year. The public schools in the state have been using the Alabama Reading and Math Plus Science test for more than a few years now and before that, used the Stanford Achievement Test. Starting this year, they will be using ACT’s Aspire. They start testing in the 3rd grade; we start it in the 2nd. No one in my system has lost their job over test scores that I know of, but we are expected to show a years growth and value added is preferred. Schools can loose field trip privileges if Superintendents are not happy with test scores. My principal is worried about accreditation because of test scores…I teach in an inner city Catholic School and we accept everyone and do not put students out. The majority of our students qualify for free lunch. I do not know what test we will use after this year; the Catholic Department of Education seems to have made best friends with Pearson’s lately…maybe one of their CC assessments. I am sick of Pearson and CC. I love your posts about the EA standards; they are totally inappropriate for my 1st graders.
I meant ELA Standards.
I was told today that I cannot use any of my teaching materials because they are not Common Core aligned. They have yet to give me any new materials. Do they want me to teach out of my —?
Thank God I am not the only one who sees it!
The hubris of the oligarchy knows no bounds. Amateurs have presumed to tell every teacher in the country, in precise (and deeply confused) detail, how his or her job is to be done.
The authors of the standards are bright people, but the CCSS in ELA are a mess.
The folks who presumed to dictate to every other person in the country what the English language arts were to be showed breathtaking arrogance, and the standards [sic] they produced profoundly misconceive the various domains that they cover.
And yet the teachers’ representatives, the teachers’ unions, think that this is just okey dokey. People have gotten used to such arrogance from the top in the days since NCLB made testing to state standards [sic] conceived by educrats into the law of the land. Those standards [sic], too, were a disaster. They had horrific consequences. They stifled innovation and destroyed curricular coherence in our field. Now we have v2: NCLB on steroids, and the consequences for innovation and coherence in ELA curricula and pedagogy are going to be profound.
The image of Broad asking painters (possibly baked, possibly in the “powder room”) their views on “the human condition” got an actual LOL out of me.
Eli Broad is an arrogant, narcissistic blowhard. The only reason these artists like Koons talk to him involves his purchases of their art. His support of corporate “ed reform” with total devotion to “black and white”, one “right/rest wrong” answers on high stakes tests is ARRESTING students’ creative development. Maybe it is a “supply and demand thing. If he kills off creativity in our youth, the value of his artwork may go up due to a scarcity of new art out there.
Spoken like an Angelino, Art. You are right on.
I have written about this before, but when Michelle Rhee spoke to the LA World Affairs Council last winter, I sat at the next table to Broad and Rhee, and when he introduced her to some of the wealthiest movers and shakers in LA, his grandiose introduction made Rhee seem like the Second Coming. She proceeded to give the most self aggrandizing speech about how “she just loved firing all those people in DC…and how you should never cross angry Korean woman.” He beamed and ate it up.
Then a few weeks later, the information ax fell with Merrow publishing the ‘secret Rhee report”…and for awhile Eli seemed quiet.
He is far from the person he purports to be in this article.
And I believe that it was probably he who kept Diane from speaking at LAWAC (she has written about that) for he is on their Board and the Board members whom I have met at meetings this past year, all seemed to own and brag about Charter Schools as the only way to go….and they also brag about their fun times together at the secretive
Bohemian Grove, the northern California playground for power guys including Presidents, senior government officials, and billionaires…the ultimate Bonfire of the Vanities.
Onward to Broad’s boys, Supt. Deasy, and his self chosen LAUSD Asst. Supt. Jaime Aquino, (who resigned Friday during a scandal re iPads and Common Core and the huge expenses he and Deasy have run up on public money with many in LA thinking they may have engaged in sweetheart deals) who was my lunch partner last winter at the LAWAC/Finnish Ambassador joint presentation of the head of the Finnish School System…so it is a small world. But there are many of us in LA who have been here all our lives, seen all the big players, and have had their power game forced down our throats, be it in the art world, or education, or home building, or insurance.
As you can see, I have decided to spill many beans, because we California educators and taxpayers are getting a very raw deal because of the Broad chosen Deasy and Aquino (who today blamed it all on politics, and on parents, teachers, school board members, community members, who have finally had the temerity to speak out.
Many of us are hoping our new School Board will have the sense, determination, and guts to clean house of the Eli Broad Academy graduates.
@Ellen.. yes this “Broad Syndrome” is definitely bi-coastal – ughh! And if that is not bad enough, the circulation of CEO/Superintendents is bi-coastal too. Deasy was in MD before going to CA! Hite went from MD to PA .. where to next… Wisconsin or MI before heading to CA???? I think their strategy is to take the money and run… to take their high salaries and golden parachutes and then to set a destructive fire and to get out before being burned (but letting all those in the trenches burn)!
Ellen Lubic: great comments! Their public images hardly match their true characters and accomplishments.
IMHO, these self-same leaders [spanning the political spectrum] almost all share something in common: a strong streak of mediocrity. One sign of this is their lack of interest in actually knowing what really exists, and how things work, and how they work out. Remember how some people made fun of President Bush Jr. by calling him “Incurious George”? For those puzzled by the reference, it refers to a cartoon character, a lovable monkey called “Curious George” whose interest in the world around him provides many a teachable/learning moment for small children.
I don’t think it mischaracterizes him [e.g., just think of WMD & Iraq, financial shenanigans, and NCLB] but he is hardly alone. It is not a question of intelligence per se but the stern adherence to ways of thinking and acting that prevent one from dealing with relevant data in logical and reasonable ways. We see this in the ed debates: cherry picking and inventing and omitting facts in the service of selling eduproducts, torturing numbers & stats to make fantastical claims seem correct, and preferring secretive decision-making by small groups of ideologically “correct” operatives rather than engaging in open and transparent democratic practices.
Consider just one of the ‘thought mantras’ of the educational establishment: “unfettered greed will answer all educational need.” Diane’s new book—I just picked up mine today!—more than adequately addresses this nonsensical bit of tired old dogma.
Their minds are already made up, regardless of the evidence.
What they didn’t count on was this and other blogs, you and other activists, and the pushback by citizens in a democracy.
Thank you for all your efforts.
🙂
You cant kill off creativity. There may be ways to condition it out of someone. That happens , but in the hood not so much unless there is the desructive urge. Which this Fristration provokes. There has bbedn a huge rise inyouth vilence on the street…which gives me an idea. Adios..
oh, this is rich. and by rich I mean…
oh, you know what I mean!
One record of Broad’s methods can be found in this article about the architecture firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro who are building Broad’s art museum in Los Angeles.
New York Review of Books – September 27, 2012
Diller, Scofidio, and Renfro have a most demanding patron in Eli Broad, the Los Angeles tract house developer and financial services tycoon who hired them in 2010 to design the Broad, a repository for his collection of contemporary art that will be open to the public, now in construction next to Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall of 1987–2003 in downtown Los Angeles. Scheduled for completion in 2014, this commission has been fraught with ironies from the outset. Until just days before the opening of Piano’s Broad Contemporary Art Museum it had been assumed that the collector would give his extensive holdings to his eponymous gallery, but at the very last moment he announced that he was retaining ownership of his art after all.
Broad’s unexpected pullback shocked many observers, but cognoscenti were scarcely surprised. “Eli’s middle name is ‘strings attached,’” Christopher Knight, the art critic of the Los Angeles Times, observed on a 60 Minutes profile of Broad, and recipients of the meddlesome Maecenas’s funding have widely concurred. This self-styled “venture philanthropist”—a coinage that perfectly reflects his market-driven values—has given some $2 billion to cultural, educational, and other charitable causes, but he apparently expects that his largess also gives him the final word.
Broad twice hired and then fired Gehry (who vows he will never again work for the man he called a “control freak” on 60 Minutes), and Piano has made no secret that his BCAM scheme was badly compromised because of the donor’s rejection of the original light-filtering system as too expensive. Thus it will be interesting to see what this difficult client is able to accomplish with Diller, Scofidio, and Renfro.
The name of the article is The City’s Their Stage by Martin Filler
As an addendum to this, when Eli built his own mansion in the wealthiest part of LA, he hired Frank Gehry to design it and help with the oversight of building it. Eli, who has a massive temper I am told, had a falling out with Gehry and fired him, and, convinced he is a genius at all things, designed another portion of the plan himself. Many folks tell this story who have been in the house and say that the Gehry portion is beautiful…but the Broad portion is quite pedestrian..
philaken: thanks for this insightful (or shall I say “inciteful”.. commentary)!!! Speaks volumes about the reality. Are Broad and Gates twins? Do they have a cousin named Bloomberg whose twin is a Walton ????
charter schools suck! we are destroying public education…
Insulting.
“The philanthropist Eli Broad likes to spend much of his time with artists, whether at his table or by having their work on his walls…“Artists see the world differently than us businesspeople,” he says. “If I spent all my time with bankers, lawyers and businesspeople, it would be kind of boring.”
Huh, fancy that. A life without art and artists would be kind of boring. Sort of like how a childhood spent doing things bankers, lawyers and businesspeople think you need to do would be kind of boring. Hey, Eli Broad, I have a (small) solution to your being “bothered” about the gap between the rich and poor! How about you stop destroying public education so that I don’t have to spend $300,000+ sending my kids to private school so that they can have art every day! I know I’ll never be able to catch up to you, but at least the gap wouldn’t be so large. 🙂
I think Broad doesn’t understand the harm he is doing to public schools. I think he is well intentioned… but… Broad doesn’t see that the opportunities available 60 years ago when he started out in the world of work are not available to 20-somethings today. Worse, he and his fellow “reformers” think that the incentives that motivate upwardly mobile businessmen will work in schools… Every major art museum exists because of men like Broad who are willing to share their art with the public… but the artists in the museums didn’t create their works because they wanted to win a competition… teachers are more like artists than they are like businessmen… they love their work and love the creativity that comes with their work— they don’t want to follow a regimented curriculum to win a competition based on test scores, they want to create good citizens for the future and bring out the best in the students they work with… If Broad invested his money with that in mind he might be able to reform schools.
Yeah, but why do my kids (and every kid in their generation) have to pay the price for his ideological blinders? He can have them, just on his own time. Everyone knows plutocracy is bad up until you’re one of the guys at the top. Then – suddenly – democratic institutions and ideals seem so passé. The fact that this doesn’t set off any warning bells reveals how poorly educated these men are themselves!
The last thing that Eli Broad is, is well intentioned. He knows exactly what he is doing in destroying America’s public schools and turning education into a business model and free market enterprise. Read up on his career. You don’t come from the Bronx as a poor kid and wind up one of the world’s richest billionaires by being well intentioned. He is a shark and a cutthroat who donates art for his tax benefit, and as a legacy, but only if it is housed in buildings with his name engraved in big letters.
I suggest you read carefully his plan for public education when he formed his Foundation and the Broad Academy in 1999. He spells it out in his goals and his mission statement. His Academy has turned out many of the worst and most heinous Supts. of Schools in America, he is the mentor of Michelle Rhee who most thinking educators consider a dangerous and greedy charlatan. Broad Academy grad,Byrd-Bennett in Chicago closed 50 schools in the past year, and some were practically given away to developers for building
condos, and now 52 charters are opening in their stead.
Wgersen…google it all and you will see what Broad is really about.
Broad, like his fellow reformers, really believe in “the market” the same way we believe in the need for government to provide more services to help children raised in poverty. He and his fellow reformers think that schools, hospitals, social services, and the government would operate better if they operated like a business. He and his reformers think that the economic system is meritocratic and if you work hard and play by the rules you can become a billionaire. You, I, and most who follow Diane Ravitch strongly disagree with this line of thinking… We don’t need to persuade each other that the reformers are wrongheaded, we need to convince the public that public schools and the government can work effectively if they are given the resources.
Is it wrong of me to just want this man to die? He’s no Medici, but behaves like one.
If the middle and working classes don’t like what’s going on with income inequaltiy, then let them buy art . . . . . i meant, let them eat cake . . .
The Walton family likes art, too.
Usually art opens up the mind. Something happened in the case of the “Broadfather.” He became a genetic anomaly in which it worked in reverse just like wordspeak. Art has made the “Broadfather” a destroyer of education, ie. society. Tomorrow, at LAUSD after the Friday CORE-CA letter to the LAUSD Board of Education calling for an open and public process in the replacement and evaluation of the Superintendent, Deasy, OIG and Asst. Sup. of Instruction, Jaime Aquino. Ellen Lubic has taken the reins and taken this majorly up nationally with her leadership. Now there is national attention. Why not where we live and not just in L.A. is the word on the “Jungle Drums.”
Public Participation in these critical positions is the antithesis of the billionaires game plan. That is why this is sooooo KISS. Right to the heart of the problem. We could not have dreamed this up. As a result lately of CORE-CA and the California Title 1 Parent Union presentations at the board and the Thursday Committee meeting and do not forget that about 10 days ago LAUSD received from DOE a letter telling them they have been out of compliance with Title 1 for at least two years. The California Title 1 Parent Union has a $2.5 billion dollar lawsuit against LAUSD in both Federal and Calif. Superior Court. When you add the criminal violations and the Federal hammer coming down then the I-Pad debacle where in one power point it is $200/device and a 5 year warranty in February to $1,000/device and a 3 year warranty and also in the same power point is a price of $1,592/device. How can this be? If you were caught with this would you get out of Town????? If Deasy was going to try to blame you for all his plans would you stick around?????
Tomorrow the game comes down. You will be able to watch the fun on George1la as I post it. You Tube takes a long time to load. It will be a lot tomorrow as we have the truancy issue my friend has been fighting for over 5 years also on the table later in the day. This is a process on many fronts. Bring this process to your district also.
And Broad mandated to his lackey 3 years ago, our former Mayor Villaraigosa, that, without any search for a new Supt as is the common standard., Deasy, who is a Broad Academy grad should be hired, and as soon as the gutless old School Board did as they were told by Eli the Lord of the Universe, and all things LA, Deasy brought in Aquino as his second in command…and surprise, Aquino also is a Broad grad.
Now these two have cost taxpayers in California a fortune with their bad decisions. They have fired teachers for little to no cause, put them in Teacher Jail, ruined lives and careers, all business skills taught to them by the Broad Academy in order to make public schools into free market investment opportunities. It is called the rape, not of the Sabine, but of the taxpayers and the free universal education system….and it is now all over America.
Folks, please wake up to reality and understand how dangerous and powerful this man is. And read Diane Ravitch’s last two books which delineate all of the billionaire boys goals in detail. Think Waltons, Murdoch, Bloomberg, Anshutz, Gates…and more.
Spot-on, KrazyTA! “Their minds are already made up, regardless of the evidence. What they didn’t count on was this & other blogs, you & other activists, & the pushback by citizens in a democracy.”
Darn straight–we KNOW what’s going on, and we are NOT going to sit back and let the 1% roll over us–& especially NOT our children.
To borrow a reader’s coined word, Broad is no philanthropist; he is a villainthropist with an eye on ROI.
By building a museum to house his extensive art collection – and also refusing to reveal any possible real estate investments in the downtown area where the museum is to be located – Broad is juicing the vale of that collection and any other art he may own.
In the manner of all malanthropists, Broad’s “philanthropy” is a taxpayer-subsidized PR screen and vehicle for his financial and political interests.
They are only after two things: MONEY AND POWER. Gates hired Deasy one week after he quit his Prince Georges County superintendents job one week after the stories about his phony PHD broke. Total lack of ethics. Of course, that is what they are all about.
Today, however, the LAUSD school board is going to be put on the spike concerning the appraisal of Deasy and the OIG. On top of that in the revised agenda is the replacement of Jaime Aquino. We now have the trifecta or the “Perfect Storm” handed to us by Aquino and chance.
Friday CORE-CA sent a letter to the LAUSD Board of Education stating our requirement for an open public process as in the election of Ruben Zacarias in 1997 before the billionaires got their hooks into LAUSD real deep. CC and LCFF call for parent participation, public participation. That is all we and Ellen Lubic are calling for. Ellen, thanks once again for all you have done since Friday. Now, because of your work, this is up on the national scene and the blogosphere is saying all want this.
Today, the billionaires are receiving an injection of our own pandemic virus. This is public participation in their school district. One thing that is the antithesis of their program is public participation. If that exists they are finished.
I say to all the Deasy and Aquino “True Believer Gates and Broad people” Please leave now and go home. We don’t need your phony illegal activities here anymore. Your game is dead. The Feds are coming in with an investigation into Title 1. The I-Pad deal is going down the tube when they try to answer pertinent questions both legal and financial. We are not backing down. We have much more in child abuse and financial illegalities. CORE-CA just took 20 new cases of child abuse to the president of the boards office last week alone. Is that enough reason to get out of town before the bricks hit you on the head also.
As an addendum to what George writes above, the School Board meeting which is always streamed online, was not yesterday, and there is no video of the meeting. This is how Broad/Deasy and their indentured lackeys keep control.
Democracy only works if there is transparency.
Ellen is so correct. By accident, because it was so interesting, I videoed almost all of the meeting. The reason they did not show it live is so that no one except the few in the room would know this important information. Accidentally, they are aced.
Now, what is needed once again is the help of those who read and comment on the Ravich Blog to once again help us in L.A. stop the billionaires. With Monica Ratliff the world there changed. Without the last minute assistance of the Ravich Blog this would not have happened. Now they are starting full out war on this new “BOARD OF REAL EDUCATORS.” LAUSD and all in the U.S. need your help to help us have the back of the “BOARD OF REAL EDUCATORS” begin to fix the mess and lead the way and show it is possible. All of these 5 board members: Richard Vladavic, Board President, Steve Zimmer, board vice-president and chair of the Committee of the Whole, Bennett Kayser, Marguerite LaMotte, and Monica Ratliff are actual lifetime educators who have proven over many years that they can do it in the classroom and as prinicpals for real not for maybe. Mr. Vladavic has also previously been a superintendent of another school district. Think about this and why they want to destroy them and destroy anyone being able to hear “THE TRUTH.”
PLEASE HELP THE LAUSD BOARD OF EDUCATION DO THEIR JOB AND HELP US STOP THE BILLIONAIRES BY HAVING A PUBLIC OPEN TRANSPARENT PROCESS ON WHO RUNS YOUR DISTRICTS.