“Reformers,” as we all know, want to raise standards and improve education. Or so they say. To reach their goals, they say our schools are failing, our economy and national security are at risk, and our educators are rotten apples. their propaganda war against public education is relentless and has the financial support of the U. S. Department of Education, the Gates Foundation, the far-right Walton Foundation, the Broad Foundation, the Dell Foundation, the Arnold Foundation, the Helmsley Foundation, the Fisher Foundation, and many more.
“Reformers” close community public schools, fire teachers and principals, insist on tests that most students fail, and create constant disruption. Eventually the public realizes that they must choose a charter school or voucher school because there is no neighborhood school or its best students have been lured away by charters.
What’s going on?
Brett Dickerson explains that there is a carefully orchestrated plan to liquidate public education.
He writes:
“Plans are under way for investment corporations to execute the biggest conversion – some call it theft – of public schools property in U.S. history.
“That is not hyperbole. Investment bankers themselves estimate that their taking over public schools is going to result in hundreds of billions of dollars in profit, if they can pull it off….
“There are very clear plans being made for just such a thing.
“The plan has been and still is to execute the complete conversion or liquidation of public schools property built up at taxpayer expense for generations.
“It involves raiding pensions that have been hard-won from years of legislative work by teachers and their unions. I reported on ideas being floated in Oklahoma along these lines in this piece that I did for Red Dirt Report earlier this year.
“It will all be done through the control of legislatures that have been mostly compliant with lobbying efforts due to the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision that allowed huge corporate money, mostly unidentified, to flow into elections. The Andre Agassi Foundation is just one of many who have worked this angle for their own return on investment….
“Offer to buy out a profitable company that has little or no debt.
“Silence the work force by tricking them into thinking life will be better with the new owners.
“Once the purchase is complete, fire the workforce.
“Liquidate the pension fund.
“Liquidate the company for the cash value of its paid-for property.
“Leave the host community in financial ruins.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Even as it is nothing new, this may be the most cogent analysis of what is happening to our schools and why it is happening that I’ve yet read. As such, it is as chilling as witnessing cold blooded mass murder. The words of Thomas Jefferson come to mind:”I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep forever.” We drift toward the point of no return with no institutional political power and real resistance in place.
Sleeping America had better soon awaken.
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I’m a billionaire and I want your school! http://www.examiner.com/article/i-m-a-billionaire-and-i-want-your-school-1?cid=db_articles
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Thanks for the link. Great article.
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Parents opting-out is a last line of defense against this onslaught. If parents refuse the tests, take their kids out of the PARCC, the privatizers strategy will hit a brick wall. They need big metrics of failure to justify closing schools, firing teachers and principals, and “turnaround” that replaces public schools with private charters. Big money is at stake here. United Opt-Out holds a national conf MLK weekend Jan 16 in Ft. Lauderdale. Many are coming, me too, consider joining us.
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I wish I could tell parents that they have the right to opt out, but Utah teachers have been threatened with their licenses if they tell parents. It is SO frustrating when I hear parents with major concerns about these tests and I can’t tell them that they can opt out…
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Good piece about how TFA is running candidates for school board in Austin, Texas.
The claim is they back ALL candidates who happen to be former TFA’s whether the candidate is pro-privatization or not, but the piece looks at the money they spend, and they spend next to nothing on former TFA’s who veer from the ed reform gospel.
So while it is true that they back all TFA candidates, they spend a lot more on TFA candidates who are pro-privatization.
“Why would a D.C.-based 501(c)4 nonprofit get engaged in an Austin school district election? Thompson says it’s simple: He’s a TFA alum and a LEE member, and they take care of their own. “Leadership for Educational Equity is an organization made up of current and former teachers, educators, and leaders who care about educational equality.” The group is not dedicated to any set policies, just to candidates who “are dedicated to putting kids first.” There’s one addendum: All those teachers, educators, and leaders are TFA alums.”
http://www.austinchronicle.com/news/2014-11-28/re-forming-aisd/
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It needs to get to the point where a candidate’s affiliation with TFA and TFA’s L.E.E. needs to be the kiss of death for his political future in the minds of voters. Parents and teachers need to step up and raise the consciousness of the public to make this a realty.
We’re not there yet, of course, but that has to be the goal.
The privatizers have more money to propagandize, but we have more people to speak truth to power… and one-on-one interaction and social media communication is where the case is can be made. Thus far, this has won and can win the day in elections—i.e. check out LAUSD and in California.
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They’re getting ready to privatize Youngstown schools.
http://www.vindy.com/news/2014/nov/20/closing-of-city-schools-suggested/
Charters are a corrupt, deregulated. chaotic mess in Ohio but it doesn’t matter. They expand them every year while undermining and weakening public schools every year.
The lasting legacy of ed reform won’t be opening charter schools, it will be the damage they did to existing public schools in order to push this privatization agenda. Someone had to lose to enact The Agenda, and it was public school kids. Collateral damage. It’s a betrayal of every kid in this state who currently attends a public school, and that is a lot of kids.
I wonder about the adults in government who attended public schools. What if they had had lawmakers and policy makers who were either hostile towards or abandoned their schools? The adults of their generation supported public schools. Why can’t they return the favor?
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“School Shock”
Shock and Awe will save the school
Where Teachers of Math Destruction rule
Test and VAM are really cool
“Mission Accomplished” said the fool
“we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on which was weapons of mass destruction as the core reason [for invading Iraq]” — Paul Wolfowitz
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Right out of Naomi Klein’s analysis of “disaster capitalism” in her book “Shock Doctrine – The Rise of Disaster Capitalism”.
The Shock Doctrine describes how America’s “free market” policies have come to dominate the world– through the exploitation of disaster-shocked people and countries.
http://www.naomiklein.org/shock-doctrine
In the absence of an actual disaster, create one: simply claim that “our schools are failing, our economy and national security are at risk.” That the rotten teachers are the cause is just a bonus and provides even greater appeal for free market policies and the corporations that would exploit them to take over public education.
Shock and awe was but one manifestation of the shock doctrine. As applied to education reform, it might better be termed “shock and awe-ful”.
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If that is their plan they are succeeding. More and more teachers are quitting, fewer entering the “profession” ad nauseum.
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The third sentence says “totten apples” instead of “rotten apples”. Thought you might want to revise. No need to approve my comment.
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The evidence shows that there is a deliberate and systematic defunding of traditional schools in order to facilitate the total privatization of public schools.
Before (also during and after) the first step described above even happens, the forces of privatization have been deliberately rigging the game against the traditional public schools succeeding and in favor of the charters outdoing them (even with these and other advantages, the charters are NOT outdoing them, but that’s another story.)
They accomplish that rigging by systematically starving the traditional public schools—the ones with a unionized force of teachers staffing them, naturally—of funding, so as to cause failure that results from this underfunding:
— jacking up of class sizes sky-high,
— cutting salaries so quality teachers leave for better paying jobs outside of education,
— no supplies for students teachers,
… and on on and.
Privatizers then use that “failure”—the one that THEY actually and knowingly caused—to close public schools. Without mentioning that they are the actual cause via their deliberate underfunding, privatizers then instead attribute the failure to the general idea that well… public schools controlled by elected school boards are just inherently doomed to failure because of evil unions and other innate deficiencies—no stable governance—that goes along with a system of publicly controlled schools via democratically-elected school boards..
Witness this video:
… where Netflix CEO and arch privatizer Reed Hastings is giving a keynote address to the California Charter School Association. Reed says that the biggest current problem in education is that the public simply loves democracy and democratically-elected school boards so much, as they’ve been “an iconic American institution they’ve known for 200 years.”
(During which the U.S. has become the most dominant economic giant in the history of the human race, and created the economic opportunity and system that allowed Reed to become a billionaire, but Reed, of course, does not go there.)
Reed says that the challenge for privatizers like the California Charter School Association and others is to propagandize the public into hating democracy (when it comes to school governance) and school boards—Reed calls this process “evolv(ing) America”—so that Reed and his allies can wipe those democratic bodies off the face of the earth.
——————————–
REED HASTINGS:
“If we go to the general public and we say, ‘Here’s an argument why we should get rid of school boards, no one’s going to go for it, because school boards have been an iconic part of America for 200 years.”
———————————-
Reed says that democratically-elected school board members are the problem with education, and they must “be replaced by privately-held corporations in the next 20-30 years.”
He talks about how inefficient democracy is… how the bosses aren’t free to do any “long-term planning” (what is he, Stalin, with multiple “Five-Year Plans”?) because school boards are actually accountable to private citizens in such actions. This is so unlike those private boards that Reed so loves, unaccountable bodies that are free to do whatever they want whenever they want whether the public actually wants it or not.
Again, they use the alleged traditional public schools’ “failure”—again, for which they, the privatizers, are truly culpable—as the pretext for then closing traditional public schools, and replacing them with privatized charters. Reed even brags about how New Orleans is 90% privatized with charters… and how California, at a mere 8%, has “a lot of catch up to do.”
If anyone ever tries to sell you the lie that “charters don’t want to replace public schools. They merely want to provide parents more choice of schools and options. They want to work side-by-side with traditional public schools, sharing best practices… There will be a family of schools—public, charter, private—walking hand-in-hand through the meadow of education… blah-blah-blah… ”
When you hear them blather this, and about how noble the charter movement is, play them this video. The privatizers, as Reed blathers here, WANT TO CONTROL ALL SCHOOLS AND ELIMINATE PUBLIC EDUCATION, AND DON’T YOU FORGET IT!!! He’s giving the keynote address to the Charter School association… listen to them cheer Reed on when he blatantly calls for this. They can’t deny it. It’s on freakin’ video.
Also, look at how they loudly this charterizer-privatizer crowd cheers when Reed references the show “HOUSE OF CARDS”, a drama about sociopathic D.C. political hucksters and insiders. Indeed, the catchphrase of Kevin Spacey’s slimy leader character:
“Democracy is so over-rated.”
Disgusting.
The problem the privatizers run into is in school districts with a strongly progressive (liberal… there, I said it 😉 ) tradition, such as the case with Los Angeles’ LAUSD. Unlike other major cities where the mayor used political maneuvering and power to replace school boards with a rubber stamp kangaroo school board appointed by the a pro-privatization mayor (New York, Chicago, etc.), Los Angeles remains a city where schools are controlled by the citizen-taxpayers / voters… because that’s the way the voters (and school parents, of course) want it.
In 2006, school privatizer Mayor Villaraigosa successfully got the state legislature to pass a law to give him and the Mayor’s office control of the schools similar that of mayors in New York and Chicago—a rubber stamp board appointed by him—but this was challenged and thankfully thrown out by a judge.
That’s when the privatizers then go to Plan B (as Villaraigosa did):
work within and use the democratic school board system that they so despise and so want to eliminate… with the ultimate goal being to gradually destroy and eliminate that same system down the road. It’s privatization in slow, stealth steps, if you will.
The cynicism is breathtaking. Here’s how read describes it,
—————–
REED HASTINGS:
“Now, if we go to the general public and say, ‘Here’s an argument why we should get rid of school boards,’ no one’s going to go for it. School boards have been an iconic part of America for 200 years.”
—————-
So what’s a corrupt privatization movement to do in the face of this?
Why… just approach that same public that dead-set is against privatization… tell them a bunch of lies and trick them into voting in a bunch of politicians that will then do exactly what the public doesn’t want…. privatize education and eliminate public schools.
In the video, Reed euphemistically calls this tactic “work(ing) within the district to grow (i.e. privatize via charters) steadily.”
So how do they do that?
Reed and his allies (Bill Gates, Eli Broad, the Walton family, et al) run corporate/privatizer puppet candidates—trojan horses, if you will. As with trojan horses, these candidates present themselves to the public by proclaiming benign intentions and backgrounds—failed candidate Kate Anderson comes to mind… she was “the plucky mom who just cares about kids and their schools”… and who also got $3 million from the privatizers to run her campaign.
However, once they are in power, these trojan horses then defund and sabotage the pre-existing public schools, and ramp up privatization—replacing tho traditional public (and yeah unionized) schools with privatized charters. The most recent and most prominent of these “trojan horses” is Marshall Tuck, the failed candidate for California State Superintendent of Public Instruction. Tuck—and his campaign in general—is a virtual epitome and prototype of the privatization trojan horse politician. (He got over $30 millilon dollars just from out-of-state billionaires pushing for privatization.)
Here are some of the things that trojan horse privatizers do once elected:
—approve whatever cockamamie “Ted Morris”-like charter proposal that is presented to them, as every charter opened (no matter how inept or corrupt and damaging to that charter’s students/parents/attendance area) drains children and funding away from public schools, and removes a brick from the wall of public education… eventually the whole wall collapses;
— close “failing” (as defined by the privatizers, of course) traditional public schools and replace with charters;
— gut funding for the traditional public schools, which, in turn, raises the class-size sky-high… and triggering “failure”; also, since fewer classrooms are needed, this also facilitates charter expansion, in the form of invasions of the campus, otherwise known as “co-locations” (SEE BELOW);
— gut the pay of teachers, lowering the quality of education… great teachers will quit, become disgruntled—causing dissension within the teachers union, and influencing other potentially great teachers considering teaching as a career—who would otherwise end up at a traditional public school—not to do so;
— in general, bring about the de-professionalization of teaching, devaluing it from a highly-skilled, highly-educated, respected, decades-long career and profession—such as doctor, lawyer, engineer, etc.—and dragging it down to a low-level, short-term service job such as office temping, fast food, or retail, with low-pay—2 years or 5 max and you’re out… rinse and repeat; indeed, how can the privatizing profiteers make a profit if they have to pay professional wages?
— eliminate or gut tenure… all the while claiming it’s all for the kids, so that they’ll be great teacher in ever classroom… when that’s clearly not their goal… de-professionalization and privatization is;
— appoint a “Broad Academy-trained” Superintendent who terrorizes the teaching force, and targets teacher union activists and older, veteran teachers… replacing them with mostly anti-union Teach for America… who have a scant five weeks training, and will be gone after two years, three tops;
— force co-location of charters on public school campus, facilitating the expansion of charters, and chaos, leading to the destruction of public schools.
All of the above (and so much more) is EXACTLY what happened in LAUSD when the board dominated by corporate privatization puppets Yolie Flores, Monica Garcia, and Tamar Galatzan took over in 2009.
Thankfully, this disaster has been stopped and rolled back, thanks to a informed voting public that has woken up to the privatization crisis at hand. In the last four elections, the good guys all won (despite being outspent anywhere from 5-to-1 to 100-to-1).
— career educator Bennett Kayser defeated privatization shill / non-educator Luis Sanchez (taking over privatizer Yolie Flores’ seat on the Board);
— career educator Steve Zimmer defeated privatization shill / non-educator Kate Anderson (keeping his seat);
— career educator Monica Ratliff defeated privatization shill / non-educator Antonio Sanchez;(taking over privatizer Nury Martinez’ seat)
— career educator George McKenna defeated privatization shill / non-educator Alex Johnson; (taking over the seat of the late Marguerite LaMotte, a true public school champion)
(privatization puppet Monica Garcia came to within 4 percentage points of facing a run-off with education activist Robert D. Skeels… while spending $3 million dollars to Robert’s $30,000…. but we’ll get her next time 😉 )
In the case of the Yolie Flores and Monica Garcia, the level of cynicism of the privatizers was quite stunning. They ran candidates proclaiming themselves to be poor Chicanas from the barrio, who would fight for the rights of other poor Chicanas from the barrio… blah-blah-blah… and then once they got in, the acted like total corporate reform-bots and execute everything and anything their corporate masters want them to do… even reading speeches that were emailed or faxed into them from their masters in the middle of LAUSD Board meetings
Yolie was so despised by her community once they caught on to what she was all about, that—and after Yolie saw in the polls that she’d lose badly if she tried to run again—she didn’t even try to run for re-election. Instead, privatizer Bill Gates created an educational foundation just for the purpose of giving Yolie a six-figure position… an after-the-fact bribe for services rendered.
As for Monica Garcia, check out this disgraceful performance—during the same event as the Reed Hastings speech above—where the privatizing California Charter Schools Association anointed her the organization’s “Elected Official of the Year”:
Hey, Ms. Garcia, you poor Chicana from the barrio!
NEWSFLASH !!!! — You were elected to IMPROVE the public schools, NOT CLOSE AND/OR ELIMINATE THEM through replacing them with privatized charters!!! As an LAUSD Board Member, you’re supposed to represent the interests of the parents, citizen-taxpayers, and voters in your district, NOT THE INTERESTS OF THE BILLIONAIRES AND VULTURES WHO WANT TO PRIVATIZE AND STEAL AWAY THE PUBLIC EDUCATION THAT BELONGS TO THEM!!!
So why are at one of their events, sucking up to them and getting an award from them???!!!
Also, unlike your optimistic prediction in this video—and that got such a rousing roar from the audience—the CCSA’s privatization candidate, non-educator Alex Johnson LOST to career educator and public school advocate George McKenna. You and your privatization masters didn’t get to place another corporate trojan horse puppet like you—or to use your words… “a change agent”… yuck!—to the LAUSD Board to carry out the bidding of the privatizers.
Four of the seven seats on the LAUSD Board are up for election in the Spring. Between then and now, we need to raise the citizen’s consciousness about the political reality and issues that are being discussed here.
That’s all for now.
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I think I’ll cancel my subscription to Netflix!
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I already have.
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Long, but all of your points are worth repeating. Bill Gates gives failed privatizers a foundation of their own–not quite, but not a bad payoff for being a shill.
Also, if you have not recently visited the education industry website do so. Just key in Education Industry Association. Look around and you will see that the Dean of Johns Hopkins School of Education has committed that institution to coaching startups and providing research-based evaluations of “providers” of educational services for a fee. Higher education is a becoming no more than a holding company for intellectual “talent” for hire, a high-end provider of credibility if you have the cash to pay for the aura of respectability for your venture. .
For lots of trend analyses on who and what is thriving in the for-profit “education sector” see what investment gurus pay attention to at:
Click to access bmocm%202014%20education%20industry%20report.pdf
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Hi, Laura. Thanks for chiming in.
In the last year of her term on the LAUSD School Board (2010-2011), both Yolie and her corporate backers (such as Bill Gates) knew she was finished as an LAUSD Board member as she couldn’t get re-elected. Again, this was as a result of her carrying the marching orders of those same corporate masters. In her community, the word on Yolie was out and it was not favorable to her.
The citizens in her board district positively despised Yolie for all that she did… and still do to this day. In the Latino sections of LAUSD—and its LAUSD-controlled environs such as South Gate—the name of “Yolie Flores” “will live in infamy” forever after (to quote Roosevelt’s “Pearl Harbor” speech).
Perhaps the most despicable and damaging of Yolie’s acts was the now-defunct “PUBLIC SCHOOL CHOICE ACT”… otherwise known as the “Public School GIVE-AWAY”… as it was intended to give away 1/3rd of the LAUSD’s public schools to private charter management… which it did for two years until voters and overall public opinion pressured the LAUSD to stop this—we’re talking potentially 300 schools TOTAL (???!!!) to be privatized once it ran its course.
To compensate her for doing the privatizers’ bidding, Bill Gates created an astroturf organization for her to lead—“Communities for Teaching Excellence”—for which she began working while still a board member at a salary of $200,000-plus.
During this same time period, she and Monica Garcia convened a closed LAUSD Board board where she was the prime backer in voting in Broad-trained and Gates-trained John Deasy to succeed Ramon Cortines for Superintendent.
There was no public input or discussion on this.
No public meeting even.
No multiple candidates were considered, or who had to interview and make their case that they were fit to be LAUSD’s next superindentent.
Yolie wants Gates’ & Broad’s boy Deasy. Deasy’s in. PERIOD. THE END.
(and we all know how well THAT turned out, don’t we?… I-pads anyone?)
Think about that for a second. Yolie Flores…
1) was the prime mover of PUBLIC SCHOOL CHOICE—which turned over hundreds of millions of dollars of school property and annual school budgets in perpetuity to private control by charters controlled by, funded, and/or affiliated with Bill Gates (and was poised to turn over even more schools and school money until it was stopped),
and
2) also almost single-handedly installed a Gates employee and Broad-trained union-busting/privatizing puppet to be the next superintendent…
… while at the same time…
Yolie simultaneously takes a six-figure job from a brand new company funded by Bill Gates.
Sweet Jesus!!! If that’s not a conflict of interest, then what the-hell is?
I just dug up this old pro-Yolie article—dated just after Yolie left the LAUSD Board and began her lucrative Gates-generated position—which describes Yolie’s new job:
http://www.labeez.org/articles/2011/07/07/yolie-flores-leaves-lasting-mark-on-los-angeles-schools
———————————-
LABEEZ’ Gloria Angelina Castillo:
“For the last year (Yolie’s final year on the LAUSD Board — 2010-2011), on a part-time basis, Flores has been working for Communities for Teaching Excellence, a national nonprofit organization backed by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
“(After leaving office) She now takes on that role full-time as the groups’ chief executive officer. The organization is in four cities across the country: Memphis, Tenn.; Hillsborough County, Fla.; Pittsburgh, Pa.; and Los Angeles.
“Flores told EGP the group will partner with community-based advocacy groups in the four cities to help them understand school data, and build the capacity to take on the issue of effective teaching and to mobilize communities and parents to help schools.”
——————
All of this corrupt behavior was a key factor in Bennett Kayser—a non-Latino in a overwhelmingly Latina board district, mind you—defeating Yolie’s anointed successor (and also fellow privatizer Monica Garcia’s chief-of-staff), the non-educator Luis Sanchez. This was despite Sanchez outspending Kayser 7-to-1… $3.5 million to Kayser’s $500,000.
I remember Kayser’s campaign office being packed every day and especially ever weekend with positively irate and highly-motivated citizens from the neighborhoods where Yolie did the most damage by giving away brand new and pre-existing schools (and school budgets in perpetuity) to her corporate masters. The voters at almost every door upon which we knocked were equally motivated.
“YOLIE FLORES backs HIM? That’s ALL I need to know. I’m voting for the other guy. Who cares if he’s not Latino?” was the common response.
These citizens knew what was at stake truly “blew it out”, and brought Kayser to victory… and hopefully will do so next spring.
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I just had to add one more tidbit to my comments about Monica Garcia’s backing from privatizers and any resulting conflicts of interest. 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
–
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?”
–
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.
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Great post! Very well put!
Check out The Young Turks’ take on this:
NOTE: TYT’s Cenk Uygar’s fessing up here that he was once pro-charter school (i.e. pro-competition). However, Cenk (pronounced / JANGK / , I believe) has reviewed the overwhelming evidence of the poor performance and massive corruption in the charter movement as it has played out in the last decade or so. No, sorry to say, the “cream does not rise to the top”, charters “do not outperform” the public schools they want to replace, and the rampant profiteering and conflicts of interests abound—i.e. the charter backers’ push charter leaders to use vendors owned by them instead of hiring more teachers or whatever..
Given all this, Cenk has now changed his mind. A private company, Cenk now concedes, places the goal of “making every red cent” they can the priority, not the best interests of kids’ education.
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To back up the charges of massive corruption in the privatization / charter school movement—mentioned in THE YOUNG TURKS piece above—-check out this New York Daily News article showing how financial corruption is running rampant in the charter school industry:
http://perdidostreetschool.blogspot.com/2014/11/audits-find-new-york-charter-school.html
———————————-
– – – – – – – – – – – –
N.Y. DAILY NEWS’ Ben Chapman:
“New York State charter schools have made more than $28 million in questionable expenditures since 2002, according to a new review of previous audits of the publicly funded, privately run schools.
“The Center for Popular Democracy’s analysis charter school audits found investigators uncovered probable financial mismanagement in 95% of the schools they examined.
“Kyle Serrette, executive director of the progressive, Washington-based group, said the review of previously published audits showed the schools need greater oversight.
“ ‘We can’t afford to have a system that fails to cull the fraudulent charter operators from the honest ones,’ said Serrette. ‘Establishing a charter school oversight system that prevents fraud, waste and mismanagement will attack the root cause of the problem.’ ”
– – – – – – – – – – – –
PERDIDO:
“An oversight system for charter schools in New York State?
“Ha, that’s a laugh.
“You can literally lie about everything other than your birth date on your application as head of a charter school and the New York State oversight entities (the Board of Regents and NYSED) won’t catch you.
“Even after your caught, no one at the oversight entities will take responsibility for giving charter approval to a fraudulent lead applicant – they’ll instead try and pass the buck to one of the other entities.
“The political establishment will make excuses for the fraudulent behavior, minimizing it is a “mistake” instead of the criminal behavior it is.
And the school will STILL open, despite it’s birthing by a fraudster, so long as said fraudster ‘resigns’ from the board of trustees.
“Chapman’s Daily News article comes at a sensitive time for charters because they are looking to increase or eliminate the charter cap in the spring but are having to live down the ‘Dr/’ Ted Morris Jr. fraud fiasco I referenced above as Exhibit A for why charters are a problem.
“And now comes this:
– – – – – – – – – – – –
N.Y. DAILY NEWS Ben Chapman:
” The state controller’s office and state Education Department have audited 62 of New York’s 248 charter schools, according to Serrette’s report. All told, Serrette’s group estimates wasteful spending at charters could cost taxpayers more than $50 million per year.
Eighteen audits targeted charters in New York City, representing about 9% of the 197 charters in the five boroughs. Each audit found issues.
” — A 2012 audit found Brooklyn Excelsior Charter School was paying $800,000 in excess annual fees to the management company that holds its building’s lease.
” — A 2012 audit of Williamsburg Charter High School revealed school officials overbilled the city for operations and paid contractors for $200,800 in services that should have been provided by the school’s network.
” — A 2007 audit of the Carl C. Icahn Charter School determined the Bronx school spent more than $1,288 on alcohol for staff parties and failed to account for another $102,857 in expenses.”
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PERDIDO:
“And that’s just what’s been found with financial audits.
“Imagine top to bottom investigation of charter practices, including state test scores (which are self-graded at high school charters), attrition rates and special education services.
“There’s a reason Eva Moskowitz sued to keep audits from happening at her charter chain (and won that suit, though that victory came before changes to the auditing procedures in last spring’s state budget agreement.)
“There’s a reason why the charter school sector is in the game to sue the city and state comptrollers to limit the audits that were decreed legal and necessary by last year’s budget agreement.
“They don’t want anybody looking into them because they understand the charter sector is a Wild, Wild West industry where pretty much anything goes.
“If that isn’t obvious after the ‘Dr.’ Ted J Morris Jr. fraud fiasco, I don’t know what it is.
“But it’s even more true after these the Center For Popular Democracy’s audit analysis.
“The key takeaway from Ben Chapman’s DN story is:
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N.Y. DAILY NEWS Ben Chapman:
“Eighteen audits targeted charters in New York City, representing about 9% of the 197 charters in the five boroughs. Each audit found issue…investigators uncovered probable financial mismanagement in 95% of the schools they examined.”
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PERDIDO:
“Not every charter was audited but every charter that was audited had issues.
“What that says to me is, it’s time to target every charter school for auditing.
“And since neither oversight body at the state level (the Regents or the NYSED) managed to catch the fraud of “Dr” Ted J Morris Jr, the con man who claimed to have a BA, an MA, a Ph.D, and an MSW (he may not even have a high school diploma), the state and city comptrollers need to be the leads on these audits.
“When the oversight bodies that are supposed to hold charters accountable don’t care to do their jobs and make excuses for a lack of oversight when fraud is exposed via the news or blogosphere, it means those oversight entities should no longer have oversight responsibilities.
“The aggressively pro-charter Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch and the former charter school founder NYSED Commissioner John King are part of the problem with charters, not part of the solution.”
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Check out the N.Y. Daily News article referenced by Perdido:
http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/education/charter-schools-28m-questionable-expenses-audit-article-1.2028052
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This is the only explanation that makes sense. Otherwise the constant testing, disruption, chaos, just seem crazy, if the purpose were really to improve public education. See “follow the Money” by Murray and Adeline Levine in a recent issue of the Journal of Orthopsychiatry for more details.
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Here’s a video interview with charter school con artist “Dr.” Ted Morris, Jr.:
***VIDEO OF TED MORRIS, JR,***
This news story has a handsome, telegenic male reporter who forget to check if Morris had the actual credentials Morris was purporting to poses. In it, Morris argues that his lack of experience actually gives him an advantage over seasoned education professionals.
http://13wham.com/news/features/top-stories/stories/local-man-launching-new-charter-school-17949.shtml
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Just watched the interview with Morris again… I fail to see any of the overwhelming charisma that I was expecting from Morris… the only thing that stands out he employs some serious teeth-whitening, and that he could perhaps he could miss a few meals and slim down a bit. (Hey, a lot of us can say the same 😉 )
The principal of the last high school he attended said that Morris showed up on campus, sat at the lunch tables, shot the breeze with students and teachers—including the principal—but never attended any of the classes to which he was assigned.
http://www.democratandchronicle.com/story/news/2014/11/25/questions-raised-year-old-charter-founder/70096942/
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“Former School Without Walls principal Dan Drmacich and the Rochester School District both verified that Morris left the district in 2008.
” ‘From what I remember, he was very articulate, a great conversationalist, but … he didn’t go to many of his classes,’ Drmacich said. ‘We constantly worked with him through his teacher adviser and the school counselor, to no avail — to the point he realized and we realized he was just coming to school and hanging out versus attending classes on a regular basis.’ ”
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One phone call to this principal from Morris’ charter partner Kozik would have—or should have—ended Kozik’s involvement with Morris and his proposed school. However, Kozik never made that phone call… or probably chose not to make that phone call so he could have deniability.
Kozik is a disgrace to education for being stupid or corrupt enough to get himself involved with a crook like Morris. I wouldn’t hire him to work at a school—not even as a lunchroom monitor or crossing guard.
Could someone without a high school diploma—let alone without a medical degree—bamboozle people into allowing him to practice as a doctor, or head up specialty department at a hospital?
Could someone without a high school diploma—let alone without a law degree—bamboozle people into allowing him to practice law, head up a law firm, or serve as a judge?
The whole time, Morris was crossing his fingers that nobody found him out while saying to himself, “What a bunch of suckers!” My guess is that, during his teen years, Morris was carefully and constantly looking for a scam with a big payoff for himself, and then chanced upon the neo-liberals’ and privatizers’ recent push for totally unregulated charter schools to replace public schools, and Morris saw exactly the phenomenon that he could exploit.
He probably Googled “charter school scam” or something similar to see how he could pull this off… and all the ways to steal money and line one’s pockets while running a charter.
As he perused scandal after scandal in on-line news reports, he would notice that in most instances, by the time the charter crooks were caught, the money that the charter thieves stole was effectively theirs for good—moved to an off-shore bank in the Caymans or Switzerland. As an actual paid employee, they could fire Morris once his scam was exposed, but they couldn’t recover the money.
Had this gone ahead with Morris running the show, I suspect you would have seen all the usual charter school perfidy:
— farming out services to for-profit companies owned by Morris, and Morris pocketing a huge sum;
— a crooked real-estate deal that results in Morris pocketing a huge sum;
— hiring of Morris family and friends at huge salaries, but vague duties where they do nothing, and never/rarely even show up on campus;
— in general, just cutting costs to the bone of every aspect of the school that they can—more money for Morris to steal… and do so via the use of uncredentialed teachers with 50-80 kids crammed in a room full of computer terminals… and no oversight as to whether any of the on-line “lessons” deliver instruction or the students are doing any real work—“Hey man, charter schools are awesome… I get to surf the net all day, and play video games!! Woo-hoo!!”
Morris even says not to expect a significant portion of the students at Greater Works Charter School to go to college… so when no one ends up going, he can say “that’s how we planned it… so kids could get into careers that didn’t require college.”
— eventually, an announcement that the leaders messed up, and that school is millions of dollars in debt, and has to suddenly close with the students being dumped back into the pre-existing public schools from whence they came, and the crooks like Morris skipping out of town to repeat the scam elsewhere. (This happened with the ICEF charter chain here in Los Angeles, with billionaires rushing into save the schools from total collapse and public scandal. The crook Mike Piscal skipped town and, I believe, head up one of Andre Agassi’s schools.)
What I notice from the the charter industry is that once a massive scam has occurred with millions of dollars of taxpayers’ money gone for good, they respond by saying, “Well, we want these crooked charter schools closed as much as anyone else. They give charters bad name, blah-blah-blah… ”
However, when school boards or legislators want to enact safeguards and regulations that would prevent multi-million-dollar frauds from happening in the first place, or ask the charter to reveal their books, those same charter proponents—California Charter Schools President Jed Wallace comes to mind— fight it tooth and nail. They talk about how charter leaders need flexibility and freedom to innovate and can’t be held back by the status quo… or some other such nonsense.
If you took away the opportunity for charter heads to line their pockets—
i.e.
—say that those in charge of charters had salary caps so that salaries would be in line with their equivalent in the public school system;
or
— impose strict conflict-of-interest regulations where you can’t farm out any services to companies you own or are related to… and instant death penalty for the charter once this is discovered;
or
—demanded that the books be wide open so you could see where every penny goes;
or
—demand that all their teachers be credentialed;
or
—demand that they could not cream off a subset of the brightest and easiest-to-educate kids, but instead had to educate everyone—even the Special Ed. kids, English-language-learners, behavior problem kids… that are more costly to educate, and, in general, had to have the same admissions and expulsion policies as the regular public schools…
If stuff like that happened, the motivation for the hucksters to open a charter would drop like a rock, as would the number of charters opening.
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Charter schools need regulation, something the capitalists hate. They shouldn’t be allowed to disappear without consequences. They are toying with taxpayer money and children’s futures.
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