California has more than 1,000 charter schools. When Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger was in charge, he filled the state school board with charter advocates, even though students in charters were only 5% of the enrollment. Today, the California Charter School Association is one of the richest, most powerful lobbies in the state. They don’t lobby for all children. They lobby only for charter expansion and continued deregulation.
Because the State Education Department lacks the staff to supervise so many charters, each of which is akin to an independent district, the charters regularly produce stories of graft and corruption. The exposes roll out almost daily of theft of public dollars. The CCSA thinks that is just fine. They oppose any regulation or oversight of these unaccountable schools.
Here is your chance to join with others who are defending public education in California. Learn about the all-day seminar on July 30, 2016, at Richmond High School in Richmond, California.
See the flyer with information about the event here.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The cartoon in that flyer should have included armed men in uniforms aiming their automatic weapons at the children and teachers in the community based, democratic, transparent, non-profit public school that was being dismantled to build an autocratic, dictatorial, often abusive using bully tactics to intimated and break the children’s spirit, often fraudulent and inferior, for profit corporate charter schools that will be legally allowed to operate outside of the laws that were created by following the U.S. Constitution. In other words, corporate charter schools are anti-democratic and anti-republic, and anti-U.S. Constitution.
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Without the willingness to regulate and with states lacking the manpower to supervise, charters are not only a parasite to public schools, they are are a parasite to taxpayers. Without regulation, charters are rife with abuse and squander public funds on phony real estate deals, nepotism and partiality for favored vendors that sell products that have no evidence of merit. Charters are a form of corporate welfare that exploit children of poverty.
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Walmart is the perfect corporate parasite when it comes to corporate welfare and Walmart does it in an indirect way by paying poverty wages to its workers and then teaching its workers how to apply for ublic assistance so they can afford to eat and pay rent.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/clareoconnor/2014/04/15/report-walmart-workers-cost-taxpayers-6-2-billion-in-public-assistance/#558c7c507cd8
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According to the CCSA and LAUSD, there are now 1,228 charter schools in California, and approximately 258 in LA County.
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What is sad is that the Democratic party should be organizing against charter schools. Instead you have these small grassroots groups that have to reinvent the wheel and start organizing from scratch.
I used to believe that the Republican party represented business interests, and the Democrats were the party of the people. What a joke. Wealthy interests, the same ones who support charter schools and school reform, have captured both Dems and GOP.
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Many, many years ago, Diane spoke at a high school in San Diego. It was completely understandable that, at the time, it was premature to speculate as to the motives behind privatizing education. But, here we are years later, and with the continuing movement towards more and more income inequality, there can no longer be any doubt what those motives are. The answer is GREED.
What we need is someone to do a piece on what the future of education will look like if schools are continually privatized and what the consequences to our society will be as we see a two-tiered system being created. History is our friend and it’s very easy to research what happens in societies that create a privileged class and an under-class while eliminating those in the middle.
What will it take for our leaders to completely change their priorities? The answer to that is very scary.
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Please don’t forget the role of Governor Brown who is on the board of two charters himself and vetoes any regulatory legislation proposed by some decent legislators. Charters in Calif. aren’t even required to feed poor children even though it doesn’t cost the charter anything. Brown vetoed that as well.
As for an example of what schools will look like — how about New Orleans? Isn’t that enough proof?
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The fight against the mess made in New Orleans is starting to look like it might be able to take (some) public options back. With good leadership, the pendulum against testing reform may swing far enough to be effective.
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Seems most of the candidates running for office in California have received outsized donations from oil company and charter school execs. Occasionally the dark money comes to light. Occasionally. I worry that sometimes, it’s hard to tell if you’re voting for someone who really supports protecting labor and the environment, or not. In the Bay Area and L.A., everyone calls themselves Democrats. There are wolves in sheep clothes. In town halls such as in Richmond, informing ourselves must be a priority.
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Dream of possibilities.
Livestreams of multiple sessions like this one coordinated within the state to happen on the same day, with that also happening within every state, same day, multiple locations in each state.
Variant of a teach-in highlighting charter school frauds, corruption,absence of investigations, press fact-sheets avalable, quotes, street theater, etc.
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