This is a welcome editorial in the Los Angeles Times, criticizing what is known in that district as “teacher jail.” The suspension of Rafe Esquith brought this issue to the fore. John Deasy suspended the entire staff of Miramonte Elementary School after two teachers under investigation for sexual abuse, and eventually almost all of them were returned to the school. Los Angeles seems to have an unhealthy culture of suspecting the worst of teachers.
The Times writes:
In 2012, the entire 110-member staff of Miramonte Elementary School was pulled off campus after accusations of molestation were leveled at two teachers. Mark Berndt pleaded no contest to charges involving feeding semen-laced cookies to blindfolded students; charges against the second teacher were ultimately dropped (and he has since left the district). Everyone else spent the rest of the school year cooling their heels in a new, not-yet-opened school.
John Deasy, who was then superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District, justified the move by saying he was concerned there might be a culture of sexual abuse at Miramonte. All staff files were scrutinized. But in only a couple of cases were there previous allegations of abuse; a few other teachers were found to have broken minor, unrelated rules, and most of the staff returned to Miramonte the following year.
At first this looked like nothing more than an honest effort to protect children, after Miramonte administrators had rebuffed earlier complaints. But it was the start of a troubling series of teacher suspensions at other schools that disrupted students’ education and that notably did not involve their safety. These suspensions with pay during often lengthy investigations are known as “teacher jail”; teachers largely spend the time at home while substitutes who often are less qualified take their places.
With classes beginning Aug. 18, the many admirers of Hobart Elementary teacher Rafe Esquith are wondering whether he’ll be there to greet a new batch of fifth-graders after four months in teacher jail. His case, and those of others before him, raise troubling questions about whether the teacher investigation system is causing too much disruption at L.A. Unified schools.
LAUSD seems to treat teachers as guilty until proven innocent. The editorial recommends:
By all means, investigate when necessary. But L.A. Unified should not overreact by removing teachers over allegations that have nothing to do with student safety. The district must put student welfare first, and their welfare is not served by disrupting the school year. It’s time for an independent examination by the district’s Office of the Inspector General.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I hope the parents get involved. The loss of ADA from a day-one boycott might actually get the attention of the Beaudry suits should they fail to clear RE and return him to his school by day one of classes next week.
LikeLike
“Why not just tell the science teacher that science fair projects shouldn’t look like weapons? End of story.”
Why not? The U.S. is, after all, the only country to use science to develop and use two nuclear bombs to obliterate a quarter million people.
Anyway, I guess this is a step forward for the L.A. Times. They have always previously blamed “teacher jail” on those pesky unions which insist on protecting “bad” teachers.
LikeLike
Nobody was surprised at Deasy’s actions at Miramonte or his expansion of teacher jail. At the very least, teachers were put on notice that they better keep their mouths shut or face the possibility of being yanked out of the classroom for any reason at any time. But, no one has questioned why Cortines would have allowed this to happen to Esquith. I hope these questions are eventually answered.
LikeLike
Lots of us have shouted out this question re Cortines insisting on persecuting Rafe Esquith with no evidence, and then to keep implying there would be juicy testimony in his witch hunt to find anything that could be used for evidence. Cortines said 45% of teachers in jail are sexual predators…yet no evidence seems to prevail against this huge group of jailed teachers.
So far, the only potential perp we know of for certain is Cortines himself who is being taken to court for the third time on sexual harassment, and now also on retaliatory firing charges, by the male sex partner he hired as Director of LAUSD Real Estate at a 6 figure salary. Many of us keep asking how and why LAUSD has a two tier system of justice, one for teachers, the other for Superintendents like Deasy and Cortines?
And at Miramonte, not only were the innocent teachers emotionally raped for just being in the school, but the small students themselves were deeply traumatized not only by the actual predator, but by the horrible Deasy and BoE decision to overreact and shut down the school and jail all the teachers. Thereafter, over 100 million dollars of taxpayer money was lost when the district settled court cases when these parents sued the district.
The legal advice of Holmquist seems always to be destructive for the taxpayers and the district. Why hasn’t he been fired after supporting all the Deasy, and now the Cortines faulty decisions? And why, yet again, was Cortines allowed to hire the charter school supporter Cole-Gutierrez, a privatizer activist, to be the overseer of the LAUSD charter schools?
So much that is possibly fraudulent continues to happen at LAUSD…and the LA Times finally wakes up with one editorial. Not a moment for accolades. Let’s see the Times do a deep investigative report on all of this…then they will get my kudos.
LikeLike
WHAT???? Hiring male sex partners and paying six-figure salaries is crazy stuff!
LikeLike
Stop the presses! This should be front page news! The Los Angeles Times editorial board is calling to reform the reformers.
Let’s hope the LAUSD school board and superintendent listen to reason. The practice of teacher jail is incredibly disruptive to our students and our schools.
Some of us locals have implored the district to fix this policy immediately. http://badassteachers.blogspot.com/2015/06/open-letter-to-lausd-leaders-by-karen.html I appreciate the LA Times weighing in.
LikeLike
Yes – it certainly isn’t just Deasy who treats us all as criminals who are guilty. I have never seem such a despicable trial as the hearings against those who were being RIFd back in 2009. Each teacher was treated as a criminal (the crime of being laid off?) and evidence brought to prove it. In one case it was someone’s personal blog where she said she hadn’t felt she did much teaching that day (for a Teacher Librarian, apparently it is a crime to feel this). Another teacher had a break up in a personal relationship and missed receiving important communication from LAUSD. That was her crime. Seriously, I did not know this last teacher, but I went up to her afterward to give her a hug. The district lawyers are despicable. Sadly, our union lawyers get one rate of pay so did not actually do anything in our defense.
LikeLike
and in 2009, that was under Cortines when he was full time Supt.
LikeLike
Deasy himself said that investigation should be left up to the police. But when the police found no basis in fact for the vast majority of bogus charges brought against teachers, Deasy and Cortines, both before and after Deasy, continued the witch hunt.
The fact that LAUSD saves approximately $60,000 for every teacher at the top of the salary scale it gets rid of somehow never makes it into the press. Nor the fact that 93% of targeted teachers are over 40 and at the top of the salary scale. Now why is that? There are many articles covering this at my blog http://www.perdaily.com and at CityWatchLA.com.
LikeLike
We parents want to have confidence in our schools, and of course, the most basic thing is to keep our students safe. But it’s hard to believe that really is LAUSD’s primary concern in this case. The law firm the school district is paying to beat down this teacher is the same law firm that apparently tried to protect LAUSD against the families of students at Miramonte (they were even sanctioned by the judge in that case for withholding evidence). http://www.perdaily.com/2015/08/who-is-leading-the-lausd-witch-hunt-against-teachers–the-answer-will-shock-you.html
It should not be one extreme or the other. Come on, LAUSD, do the right thing! Our kids are counting on you.
LikeLike
– – – – – – – – – “Deconstructing Deasy: A VIDEO” – – – – – – – – – – – –
(WARNING: this is long)
There are lots of videos of LAUSD Superintdendent John Deasy on YOUTUBE, where he proceeds to utter one absurdity after another.
For example, try this video is at:
It’s a cell phone video from a public forum on March 3, 2014 at Portola Middle School, located in L.A.’s San Fernando Valley.
At 00:07 , Deasy says…
————————————————————————————————-
————————————————————————————————–
00:07 – 00:55
DEASY: “I would say… overwhelmingly… like 80% or so, or 90%, an outside agency notifies us of the issue (abuse allegations)… Either the LAPD, the FBI, or the (L.A. County) Sheriffs… they bring to our attention an issue that has occurred… uhmm… and unfortunately, those issues are very serious.
“This person is accused of (drug) trafficking on the intent.
“This person is accused of uhh… molestation.
“This person has is of trafficking drugs, prostitution, or whatever.
“Those come to us, and those agencies do the investigation. We don’t tell an employee anything unless that agency tells us what they can say. So we don’t take and over-rule sherrifs, or the FBI in those cases- ”
—————————————–
Not true. Deasy and his henchmen “over-rule” and ignore the law enforcement authorities’ clearing of teachers—i.e. law enforcement authorities rendering them innocent, and authorities saying “this investigation is closed”—all the time.
Leonard Isenberg, a falsely accused teacher has written more than once about this lie told by Deasy. Deasy often makes the claim that once teachers have been cleared, they immediately return to the classroom.
At other times, Deasy tells a different story.
In the link BELOW, Isenberg includes an embedded video video, which Isenberg analyzes at:
http://www.perdaily.com/2012/12/lausd-superintendent-deasy-lies–knbc-lets-him-get-away-with-it.html
—————————————————————-
ISENBERG: (referring to the embedded video on his page, not the one above)
http://www.nbclosangeles.com/on-air/as-seen-on/139141379.html
ISENBERG: “It is clear that Deasy is lying on this and other assertions. Last week, he claimed that only the worst teachers were being incarcerated in teacher jails by LAUSD, and that if teachers are cleared by the police, they get their jobs back immediately. I have many many teachers in my database who have sat in teacher jail for over 3 years many without any charges and long after they were cleared by LAPD. And yet no mainstream or public media reports this.
“Listen carefully to Superintendent Deasy closely when he says, ‘We don’t know the facts in the case,’ but then says
DEASY: ” ‘We are within our rights to make a judgment call of inappropriate behavior and initiate termination proceeding.’
ISENBERG: “Whatever happened to the presumption of innocence until proven guilty or due process of law? The hysterical witch hunt atmosphere that now prevails at LAUSD, which Deasy continues to exploit after Miramonte, has now destroyed the lives of hundreds of teachers without a shred of verified evidence given under penalty of perjury. There is not one case in my database that LAUSD has respected teachers civil rights and given them timely due process of law in a neutral forum as clearly required by law.”
———————————————————————————————-
———————————————————————————————-
Anyway back to the above Deasy video:
After these local agencies have totally cleared falsely-accused teachers, Deasy’s administrators, under his directions, have kept these innocent teachers languishing in “teacher jails” for years or months on end—knowing full well that these teachers were innocent of what they were being accused… like in the old Soviet Union.
For example, after the one pervert teacher at Miramonte Elementary School was discovered and rightly removed, Deasy then made a bone-head move, and REMOVED THE SCHOOL’S ENTIRE STAFF OF 120 teachers, stuck them in a half-finished school for six months to rot, and go crazy sitting in cubicles for hours every day.
Since this was a multi-track school, this included teachers who had never met the pervert. As one Miramonte teacher said at the time, “This guy may as well have been teaching in Iowa, for all I know. Why am I even in here??!! I’ve never even met him!”
This is the totalitarian tactic of the “mass arrest.” Whenever you have a “mass” ANYTHING—“mass trial”, “mass execution”, “mass firing”, etc.—-by definition those being targeted include the innocent along with the guilty.. indeed, they may all be innocent. This was Deasy employing totalitarian tactics—a toxic, fear-based management style, and exploiting an actual tragedy to carry out his/his corporate reform backers’ goal of weakening UTLA, the local teachers’ union.
In the Spring and Summer of 2012, Deasy and his allies on the LAUSD Board—Tamar Galatzan and Monica Garcia—even tried to exploit the hysteria in the wake of the Miramonte tragedy (that’s certainly what it was) to ram through legislation in Sacramento that would have turned all California teachers into at-will employees (the goal of the Vergara lawsuit, by the way, which Deasy supports and testified at the trial.)
In late June 2012, Deasy went mano-a-mano with then-UTLA-president Warren Fletcher in testimony before the legislature… with dueling testimonies and dueling Q & A. The result, this legislation was barely defeated, and teachers kept their due process protections… until Vergara did exactly this, that is… thankfully, Vergara is on appeal .
(Vote for Tom Torlakson, as his corporate reform opponent Marshall Tuck claims that he will drop the appeal to Vergara should be get elected).
(Is all of this what Deasy is studying in South Korea?)
Also, Deasy makes the bizarre claim that 80-90% of the accusations against teachers deal with accusations of “(drug) trafficking and molestation… prostitution.”
Again… a total fiction.
Go back and again watch the video from 00:07 on…
————————————————————————————————-
————————————————————————————————–
00:07 – 00:55
DEASY: “I would say… overwhelmingly… like 80% or so, or 90%, an outside agency notifies us of the issue… Either the LAPD, the FBI, or the (L.A. County) Sherrifs… they bring to our attention an issue that has occurred, and unfortunately, those issues are very serious.
“This person is accused of (drug) trafficking on the intent.
“This person is accused of molestation.
“This person has is of trafficking drugs, prostitution, or whatever.”
————————————————————————————————-
————————————————————————————————–
Also, Deasy’s “prostitution” accusations are pretty bizarre. I’m an ed policy junkie—reading everything I can on the internet—and talk to UTLA officials who defend teachers all the time, and I have never heard of an LAUSD teacher being accused of prostitution, and when I asked those folks at UTLA, they likewise claim to have never heard of such a thing.
“If this would have happened, I think someone in my position would have heard of it,” said one UTLA official, “But you never know.”
I’m not saying it didn’t happen… but given the bias of the media, if an LAUSD teacher had been moonlighting and working in the “the world’s oldest profession,” this story would have come to light… nay, it would have blown up on all the media. Whatever the case, for Deasy to make the “prostitution” claim the third thing out if his mouth misleads the audience into thinking it’s more routine than it actually is.
At 00:53 , the FEMALE MODERATOR calls Deasy on this claim that only serious and credible accusations prompt a teacher’s removal from the classroom. She cites a well-known example who allegedly kicked the wheels of his car, or his car’s muffler, or whatever, and was removed and thrown in teacher jail as he was treated the same as an alleged pedophile.
This prompts applause from the teachers and parents in the room
It’s interesting to watch the controlling and manipulative Deasy attempt to win back the room by
1) shaming them, pressing their “Guilt Button” through the use of a thought-terminating cliche.
2) play the “I’m-Defending-Abused-Children-but-You’re-Not CARD”…
Deasy never answers this question, and successfully changes the subject.
At one point, Deasy says, “I’m not uncomfortable discussing the rights and safety of children. It is first and foremost (inaudible) we do in LAUSD.”
However, at 00:53 , Deasy is quite uncomfortable answering the Female Moderator’s question—a question he clearly did not expect or appreciate—as evidenced by his desperate attempt to change the subject.
————————————————————————————————-
————————————————————————————————–
00:53 – 01:44
FEMALE MODERATOR: “What if it (the accusation) didn’t come from the police and sheriffs? Let me pick another case where a teacher was accused of something by a parent that wasn’t even criminal. It was more like kicking a muffler in a parking log, and they were moved, and they didn’t even know why they were moved until – ”
(HUGE APPLAUSE)
DEASY: “I think it’s bizarre that people will clap when we are looking to ensure childhood safety.”
(He actually pronounces the word bizarre “biz-zahhh”… gotta love that Boston accent)
AUDIENCE MEMBER: “It’s an important question!”
DEASY: “Sir, don’t raise your voice to me! I don’t raise my voice to you.”
AUDIENCE MEMBER: “Don’t lie to us, then!”
FEMALE MODERATOR: “I… I’m trying to – … ”
(DEASY turns from the FEMALE MODERATOR
then forcefully addresses the audience)
DEASY: “We’ll always make the decision to err on the rights and safety of children whether people are comfortable with that or not… ”
————————————————————————————————-
————————————————————————————————–
Like Pavlov’s dogs hearing a bell ring, this gets applause from part of the audience. Deasy successfually short-circuits their capacity for critical thinking this way.
This is a rhetorical trick or fallacy used in propaganda… the false dichotomy… by implication Deasy is the righteous defender of children, while anyone who dares disagree with him is not.
Deasy continues with a manipulative attempt to trigger the emotions of the audience… i.e. his experiences “looking into the eyes’ of abuse children, and then employs a particularly clumsy sentence construction… is the child being “molested with his parents” watching, or “molested” along with his parents?
————————————————————————————————-
————————————————————————————————–
01:46 – 01:55
DEASY: “You don’t look in the eyes of a child who has been molested with his parents. I do!”
AUDIENCE applauds
————————————————————————————————-
————————————————————————————————–
Once again, the Pavlovian applause response from playing the Abused-Child-Card, and the propaganda trick of false dichotomy.
In effect, he’s communicating:
“I, John Deasy, care about abused children. Any people who refuse to back me 100% do NOT, and are a bunch of pedophile-enablers.”
This guy sits up in a luxury office on 24th floor of LAUSD’s Beaudry Building, while it’s the teachers who interact with the students for 7 hours (or more… i.e. after-school tutoring, homework clubs, extra-curriculars, etc.) each day.
I’ve seen those same tears from abused children, Dr. Deasy. We teachers have to report any and every suspicion of child abuse to police and child protection authoritiies, or face being fired and loss of credential. We do it all the ding-dong time.
I and thousands of my fellow teachers have looked into the eyes of those abused children on many occasions, and done my duty, as have countless administrators, filling out the SCAR (“Suspected Child Abuse Report”) Form, and staying late for hours… off-the-clock, and I”m happy to do so….meeting with authorities to give details on what the child reported to me.
Again, let’s get back to he muffler-kicking incident at
00:54
At one point, Deasy claims that he’s “not uncomfortable” discussing his handling of child abuse accusations, but throughout the night, he ducks the hard questions, diverts attention, and plays the “Abused Child Card” over and over to avoid answering these questions
However, the moderator’s question about the” kicked muffler” makes him pretty “uncomfortable” discussing these things.
(forgive me it this is repetitive)
——————————————-
00:54 – 02:38
FEMALE MODERATOR: “What if it (the accusation) didn’t come from the police and sheriffs? Let me pick another case where a teacher was accused of something by a parent that wasn’t even criminal. It was more like kicking a muffler in a parking lot, and he was moved, and they didn’t even know why they were moved until –
(AUDIENCE breaks into applause… Deasy has just lost the crowd.
At this point, notice how Deasy diverts attention from this question, and never answers the question. He tries to shame the teacher for “raising his voice.”)
EASY: “I think it’s bizarre that people will clap when we are looking to ensure childhood safety.”
AUDIENCE MEMBER: “It’s an important question!”
DEASY: “Sir, don’t raise your voice to me! I don’t raise my voice to you.”
AUDIENCE MEMBER: “Don’t lie to us, then!”
FEMALE MODERATOR: “I… I’m trying to – … ”
(DEASY turns from the FEMALE MODERATOR
then forcefully addresses the audience with his
“only I care about abused children” canard.)
DEASY: “We’ll always make the decision to err on the rights and safety of children whether people at schools (inaudible) or not… ”
FEMALE AUDIENCE MEMBER: “What about the Crenshaw music teacher?”
FEMALE MODERATOR: “I don’t want to get into specifics, because this is not really the forum for that right now.”
DEASY: “No, we should NOT talk about other individuals. It is their private right to either go to their attorney, or to their union.”
FEMALE AUDIENCE MEMBER: “What about … (inaudible.. but I believe the parent or teacher in the audience is complaining about how, since Deasy took over, the investigation process… a process that returns innocent teachers to their classrooms… has gone from taking mere days… to taking weeks… to taking months… and now years to wrap up… meanwhile those teachers are cracking under the strain, and giving up and quitting… Deasy’s goal when dealing with the high-paid teachers, by the way…. lower the line item of salary, and replace them with docile newbies with no connection to the union.)
DEASY: “LAUSD will take as long as necessary to do its investigation, to ensure the rights of both the employee, or the teacher. Thank you.” (I think he meant to say the “student and the teacher.”
—————————————–
This above back-and-forth refers to the high-profile case of Dr. Iris Stevenson, a nationally-renown music teacher from Crenshaw High School who was unjustly removed from her classroom.
Her Crenshaw High student choirs perform all over the country.
Dr. Stevenson and her student choir singers had just returned from a performance for President Obama at the White House. Upon landing in L.A., she was thrown in teacher jail and never told what the allegations against her were. At the time of this forum in the video, Dr. Stevenson was still stuck there. There were rumors that she was there because she didn’t fill out all the required paperwork for out-of-town student trips. She claimed that she DID do all the required paperwork, just as she had done dozens of times before.
The public outcry against this led to her eventually being returned to her position in August.
Instead of being “not uncomfortable” discussing the high-profile matter—and admitting he screwed up—Deasy, in the above video, ran from the question. This Stevenson affair was a major embarassment for Deasy and his corporate reform backers. Throughout her incarceration, Dr. Stevenson was never told of what she was being accused of, or given any documentation whatsoever.
Here’s some coverage about Dr. Stevenson, who was finally
returned to the classroom recently:
http://www.thenation.com/article/179605/where-shame-policy-inside-las-teacher-jail
… and here’s L.A. School Report’s coverage of Stevenson’s exoneration and return to the classroom:
http://laschoolreport.com/crenshaw-choir-director-released-from-teacher-jail/
That’s all for now.
I hope that you enjoyed this lengthy post.
Jack
LikeLike
Wow, the article from THE NATION
about teacher jail and Dr. Stevenson
is devastating. It was published in
April 2014, when Dr. Stevenson was
still languishing in teacher jails,
and written by one JoAnn Wypijewski.
It deals with Deasy’s exploiting the “sex”
and “child molestation” angles as a
dishonest way to crush innocent veteran
teachers—the highest paid naturally—
and simultaneously destroy teacher
unions’ ability to protect innocent teachers
unjustly accused of something.
http://www.thenation.com/article/179605/where-shame-policy-inside-las-teacher-jail
Here’s the opening paragraphs:
————————————————————————-
JoAnn Wypijewski of THE NATION:
“Iris Stevenson hurt no child, seduced no teenager, abused no student at Crenshaw High School in Los Angeles. This is what her supporters say in rallying outrage that this exemplary teacher has languished for months in the gulag of administrative detention known as ‘teacher jail’: she doesn’t belong there.
“And she doesn’t.
“Days before being removed from her music classes in December and ordered to spend her workdays isolated on a floor of the LA Unified School District (LAUSD)HQ with other suspect teachers, Stevenson, a legend in South LA and beyond, was at the White House directing the renowned Crenshaw Elite Choir as it sang for President Obama.
“She has not been officially informed of the charges against her. Unofficially, Stevenson is said to have swept off the choir to perform first in Paris and then in Washington without permission—an absurd claim, since parents had to consent, and Stevenson has conducted such foundation-supported field trips untroubled for decades. District authorities say only that Stevenson is under investigation.
“If she were a de facto kidnapper, police should have been called long ago. But, no, this is not about criminality or even misconduct; it is about a larger game of control being played by School Superintendent John Deasy. That game owes quite a lot to sex, because a few years ago a scandal tripped the panic button, which Deasy has kept his finger on ever since, exploiting justified public anger over a classroom pervert to pursue a war on teachers.
“The political question, then, is not just whether Stevenson belongs in teacher jail, but what this institutionalized containment regimen, this sub-bureaucracy of punishment, exists for in the first place, and how the specter of sex is the cowing excuse to go after anyone.”
———————————–
And it goes on from there… Read the whole thing at:
http://www.thenation.com/article/179605/where-shame-policy-inside-las-teacher-jail
LikeLike
These witch hunts began a couple years before the Miramonte scandal broke. Literally thousands of teachers have been unjustly fired and their lives are ruined because LAUSD wants to weasel out of paying their retirement benefits or because the teacher dared to report corruption, noncompliance or abuse. That is an ironic twist to be sure. What will happen to them now? Are we gping to pretend that they don’t exist? Some of these teachers died from the stress; others are homeless. For the last five years , I have worked to get us justice and I think it’s Long overdue, but even now I have little hope for it . I think the LAT is providing too little too late and unless parents. The BOE and other teachers demand it, none of us will be made whole.
LikeLike
“His case, and those of others before him, raise troubling questions about whether the teacher investigation system is causing too much disruption at L.A. Unified schools.”
Ya think?
“Stating the Obvious”
The LA Times has spoken
And obvious is true
The LA Times is broken
And NY Times is too
LikeLike
I am well aware that I am not following the path of this discussion but as a parent,an educator, an advocate, a human being, I just have to ask… was the lowlife, scumbag, deviant, semen cookie baking fool incarcerated? Surely to goodness he had to have been put in some kind of protective dungeon if he lived long enough to get there.
The world is so full of subhumans who have no business using our oxygen. It is really frightening that he was ever in a classroom. really, really frightening.
LikeLike
That lowlife was sentenced to 25 years in prison, and his victims shared $140 million paid by the district. http://www.inquisitr.com/1650197/mark-berndt-teacher-cookies-140m-awarded-to-families-of-children-forced-to-eat-semen-cookies/
LikeLike
Thank you Diane and Linda . The brief description in in the LA Times article smacked of the McMartin case, so bizarre as to be beyond belief, If this went on for decades one can see one reason the pendulum swung so far in the other direction – another excuse to punish the masses.
LikeLike
This man was allowed to “teach” for decades because administrators turned a blind eye to complaints from students, teachers and parents. And yet, to my knowledge, none of these people were sanctioned in any way. Why?
LikeLike
I was heartened during first read of the LA Times article. Then I read the comments section. Someone wrote, “Ahh the wonders of government bureaucracy! Vouchers anyone?” It made me think.
So I posted, “What do the Times and it’s billionaire owners gain by writing this article? Creating public fear of publicly elected school boards in order to replace them with privately selected overseers (billionaire owned charters). Don’t be fooled by Eli Broad’s Tribune Corp!”
LikeLike
Unrelated, a cool series by Nikole Hannah-Jones
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/contributors/nikole-hannah-jones
LikeLike
Speaking of the malfeasance of John Daisy, there’s something I still don’t understand about the iPad scam. An ongoing public investigation kept yielding evidence against Daisy and Apple colluding. Then the FBI came in and confiscated all the evidence, and that was the last we heard of it. What happened to the investigation? Is it the Federal Bureau of Investigation or the Federal Bureau of Cover-up?
LikeLike
It’s our understanding that the FBI investigation takes time. There has been no information available about the progress. There is also an SEC investigation underway. Again, there has been no public disclosure on the outcome of it either.
LikeLike
You make an interesting point, but go further. It’s not just the iPad scandal, it also the MiCiS data program scandal, Ramon Cortines’ sexual harassment scandal, Cortines’ getting $150,000 a year from Scholastics, when he was also being paid as LAUSD superintendent- Scholastics had a $14 million contract with LAUSD- conflict of interest??? And then of course there is the Belmont Learning Complex built on an irremediable toxic waste site, or the high school built on the old Ambassador Hotel site for twice the price of any previous high school and with talking benches, and Pearson’s contract to supply inappropriate learning materials for students continuing to be socially promoted without the ability to do math or basic English- vendors interests over students.
When the media is controlled by 5 corporation or NPR is beholden to foundations that pick up its budget shortfall, the scandals never get investigated and the public has a short memory- especially the White public who doesn’t have their children in public school and refuse to use their social capital to bring pressure to bear that these people get prosecuted…instead of being given another cushy job like Deasy with the Broad Foundation.
As long as their are no consequences, criminal behavior will continue to flourish. If you don’t like it, try supporting some actions trying to change the game:
8/16 LA Organizing Meeting Of Repeal Charter Schools Laws In CA
Sunday August 16, 2015 3:00 PM – 5:00 PM
Coco’s Bakery Restaurant (meeting room) ( Please purchase food)
18521 Devonshire Street
Northridge, CA 91324
Please Register If You Will Be Attending-For Information and registration contact (415)867-0628
8/17Press Conference/Speak Out At Broad Foundation
Stop Destroying Public Education-Repeal California School Charter Laws
Get The Crooks Out Of Public Education
Broad Foundation
2121 Avenue of The Stars, Los Angeles
Monday August 17, 2015 12:00 noon
LikeLike
Thank you for this editorial. We also need in depth articles interviewing numbers of workers at diverse schools. The problem has been rampant at least since Miramonte incident.
LikeLike
And yet UTLA continues to refuse to buy insurance for those in teacher jail: https://www.facebook.com/groups/utlaaccountability/permalink/914462688621520/
LikeLike