Mayor Mike Rawlings of Dallas is working hard to convince the public that the Dallas Independent School District should be turned into a “home rule” district. What this means is that Mayor Rawlings and his rich pals called (ironically) Supporters of Public Schools want to eliminate public education and turn the whole district into an all-charter district.
The shadowy group behind the “home rule” idea is led by ex-Enron billionaire John Arnold, who advocates for privately managed charters, not public schools. Arnold, no friend of public schools, leads the Support Our Public Schools group.
Thus far, Mayor Rawlings is having a hard time convincing black and Hispanic citizens that he and his billionaire buddies can be trusted.
Wouldn’t it be great if reformers would call themselves what they are, instead of using names that disguise their goal of privatization?
The most impressive member of the Dallas school board, outgoing member Carla Ranger, described what is really going on. She wrote:
“This is all about politics, power and money — not education.
“With Mayor Mike Rawlings’ constant unethical meddling into Dallas ISD affairs and Superintendent Mike Miles doing more harm than good, the result is a Dallas ISD teaching staff that appears to be more broken in spirit than I have seen in the 8 years I have served as a Trustee.
“Authoritarians always want all power.
“They never want to share it.”
The blog that reported Carla Ranger’s prescient comments proceeded to mock her, but what she said fits the national pattern. Destroying public education in Dallas fits with the movement’s plans in many other cities. The billionaires will say whatever they must and do whatever they can and spend whatever they need to, just so long as they can put an end to public education.
Carla Ranger is right. The people of Dallas should listen to her.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Our children and the monies communities have set aside for our schools are not theirs for the taking. Where is the ACLU in all of this?
And the NAACP and MALDEF?
If children are “”our most valuable assets,” as the Great Michelle Rhee stated, then it stands to reason they should be monetized.
..and the radical Sharia Imam, Gulen, has at least 43 Harmony schools in Texas, ripping off their taxpayers for millions to support the insurretion in Turkey so he can go back to his homeland as it’s leader.
Ask them who will own the new schools they’re planning, and whether the charter promoters and salespeople are willing to let the public take title to the asset after X number of years of public investment.
People in Dallas really don’t want to go from owners of their schools to renters of their schools.
That’s a bad deal. John Arnold would never invest in something where he built no equity over time. They shouldn’t either.
For use on Twitter: Just copy, paste and then Retweet as often as possible. The short link was created through Bitly ( https://bitly.com/shorten/ ) to make more room for content. The link leads to this post.
Remember Enron scandal
$40–45 Billion lost to fraud
Now former Enron Exec
Behind Dallas Pub Ed privatization attempt
http://bit.ly/1kCoid7
Great link Lloyd…thanks…am sending it on to my colleagues.
The same John Arnold who attempted to fund “Pension Perils” series on WNET(PBS) exposed by David Sirota forcing PBS to return his money and cancel the series. Again, it’s the concentration of income & wealth that is tearing apart this country.
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/looting-the-pension-funds-20130926?page=3
Here’s a piece about John Arnold’s role as an expert on public pensions:
“In 2011, Pew began to align itself with a figure who was decidedly neither centrist nor nonpartisan: 39-year-old John Arnold, whom CNN/Money described (erroneously) as the “second-youngest self-made billionaire in America,” after Mark Zuckerberg. Though similar in wealth and youth, Arnold presented the stylistic opposite of Zuckerberg’s signature nerd chic: He’s a lipless, eager little jerk with the jug-eared face of a Division III women’s basketball coach, exactly what you’d expect a former Enron commodities trader to look like. Anyone who has seen the Oscar-winning documentary The Smartest Guys in the Room and remembers those tapes of Enron traders cackling about rigging energy prices on “Grandma Millie” and jamming electricity rates “right up her ass for fucking $250 a megawatt hour” will have a sense of exactly what Arnold’s work environment was like.”
“A study by noted economist Dean Baker at the Center for Economic Policy and Research bore this out. In February 2011, Baker reported that, had public pension funds not been invested in the stock market and exposed to mortgage-backed securities, there would be no shortfall at all.
He said state pension managers were of course somewhat to blame, but only “insofar as they exercised poor judgment in buying the [finance] industry’s services.”
In fact, Baker said, had public funds during the crash years simply earned modest returns equal to 30-year Treasury bonds, then public-pension assets would be $850 billion richer than they were two years after the crash. Baker reported that states were short an additional $80 billion over the same period thanks to the fact that post-crash, cash-strapped states had been paying out that much less of their mandatory ARC payments.”
Thank you Chiarra for reminding us about the Enron thugs. I am one of the hapless Californians they ripped off.
I too follow Dean Baker.
John Arnold belongs in prison, not in the school room.
The PR folks behind “Support our Public Schools” designed the “Save our Trinity” campaign in 2007 so that we could put a toll road down the Trinity RIver floodway in Dallas. It is that level of truth we are dealing with. Look at the data that they are declaring is so negative. DISD was having the greatest progress ever recorded until Mike Miles, the corporate reform superintendent, started in 2012. Look at the chart and data at http://schoolarchiveproject.blogspot.com/ .
Basic rule of people who call themselves “reformers” today. They mean the opposite of what they say.
“Putting kids first” means “Kids don’t matter.”
“Save our schools” means turn them over to private operators who will fire the teachers and buy more computers.
The Network for Public Education exists to sort out the real and the fake. The fakes have all the money. The real have children in public schools.
Mike Miles – Broad Alum. Ding ding ding alarm bells going off….
If that’s how he wants it they Tom should support the schools, no more tax dollars for private schools. If this happens, it is a clear case of taxation without representation. I’ll say it again, if the schools are private/charter then who decides when taxes need to be raised to support the schools? I sure wouldn’t trust an ex-enron employee, especially not one who got away (he’s extra sneeky).
You may also be interested in this from ProPublica. I used Bitly to shorten the link for a Tweet and the link leads to the ProPublica piece. I already posted this on Twitter. Anyone’s welcome to copy and paste.
How billionaires manipulate America
$383 million spent for 2012 elections
ProPublica Reports
on Koch brothers
http://bit.ly/1gvkKUJ
The very scary part about this attempt is revealed upon further examination of the “home rule district” (HRD) law which SOPS is using in order to take over the district. This is not your normal charter school which would go into effect should HRD be passed:
1) ALL of the assets of the district would belong to this new entity, including the $1.4 billion dollar budget, all of the real estate, all of the technology, etc.
2) This new entity would have taxation authority.
3) This new entity would not be under the Chapter 21 labor laws in Texas which apply to regular ISDs. No minimum salary, no due process, no maximum working hours, etc.
4) This new entity can have whatever form of governance is chosen by the 15 appointed commission members. The governance can be elected OR appointed. Appointed by whom? By whomever the commission chooses to have appoint the new governing board- whether it be the mayor of Dallas, the City Council, the police force, or the dogcatchers.
An article in the Dallas Morning News reported that there have been private conversations which revealed that one goal of SOPS is to replace the elected board with an appointed one, perhaps under the mayor’s control: http://www.dallasnews.com/news/education/headlines/20140307-3-sources-say-home-rule-was-pitched-with-dallas-mayor-running-schools.ece.
This is a power grab, pure and simple. There is nothing which the SOPS group has proposed as their objectives (longer school days, year-round school, different curriculum) which has not been tried before in Dallas, or couldn’t be tried under existing law within the current system. The reason SOPS wants HRD to be passed so badly is because this gives an elite, unelected group complete control over the assets of the district, with little if any accountability to the public. Educating the children will be an afterthought, and probably will be doled out to various charter operators.
Thanks Lloyd…another great link. The Kochs seem to be the Grand Inquisitors waiting to pounce on the riff raff, all the rest of us that is, and suck us dry of any assets and any freedom.
Two of the four Koch brothers don’t want to take our freedom away. They want to take our safety away. These are guys that want to shrink the government until it’s the size of a pea and turn every service the feds and states do over to the private sector under the assumption this would give us more freedom.
They are hard core libertarians—a theory of government that’s worse than Communism under Stalin or Mao and worse than Germany ruled by Nazis.
Libertarianism is based on trust and honesty & ignores crooks, corruption and killers as if they don’t exist. Has there ever been a time in human history where anyone was free to do anything and not worry about being robbed or killed?
They are very wealthy nut cases who can afford their own private army and live in a fortress. Even though they never say it, what they advocate is anarchy for everyone but them and then they won’t have to pay any taxes or follow any laws—for instance, environmental laws. The Koch brothers are behind the Global warming movement that claims it isn’t caused by CO2 pollution. They also own the largest privately owned oil company in the U.S.
I wrote this comment on some other posts, but it lingers in my psyche, so here it is again.
addendum….LA folks know this Dem so well and have extolled his political prowess for decades…..
Yesterday I was at a Dem Club meeting in LA to honor 40 year Congressman Henry Waxman who is not running for office again. Waxman has been a liberal cheerleader for decades and wrote and carried more bills than any other person in the body politic.
During Q and A, I asked him to please expand on his views about what Obama and Duncan were doing to foster the rapid expansion of charter schools across the country, and escpecially since California and LA lead the nation in the proliferation of charter schools.
He looked pained at the question and proceeded to do a 5 minute rationale about education not being his area of expertise. He ended with one sentence that brought tears to my eyes…the unkindest cut of all.
He said, “but I really like charter schools”….so I am left with that last remark as my memory of this venerated politician.
They also own Bounty paper towels and most of the everyday products most of use.
This was supposed to be an addition to Lloyd’s comments on the Kochs.
Why is it that these uber-capitalists cannot respect the boundaries of public life, but instead think that they must own and profit off every facet of community life. John Arnold joins Eli Broad, Bill Gates, the Waltons and so many more in breaking the institutions that attempt to train all Americans to think critically, know history and civics. What curriculum will they have in place in 20 to 40 years as the institutions of the great American experiment in democratic values, our public schools, fade from the scene?