We were told when “Great Public Schools Now” began functioning, it would support all schools, whether they were public schools or charter schools. This is the group funded by Eli Broad and his friends that intends to take over half the student population in the Los Angeles public schools and put them into privately managed charters.
But Great Public Schools Now made its first grants, and none of the money went to public schools.
A group that has vowed to start high-quality schools across Los Angeles on Thursday announced its first grant recipients: a charter school that is expanding, an after-school and summer enrichment program for children, and an organization that recruits recent college graduates for two-year teaching stints.
None of the money went to the Los Angeles Unified School District, although it’s likely to benefit from the teacher-recruitment effort.
Of course, it is doubtful that the public schools will benefit from a program that recruits more inexperienced, ill-prepared Teach for America recruits. Why not fund a program that recruits experienced teachers or creates a pipeline to develop career teachers?
What has logic got to do with it?
We knew all along that Eli Broad and his fellow billionaires don’t want public schools in Los Angeles, except as a dumping ground for kids kicked out of charters.
My bet is that the group will make a contribution to a public school to maintain the illusion of even-handedness. But we know where its heart is. Privatization.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Great Public Schools Now is a misnomer. Should be All Charter Schools Now. The major privatizers in LA are all behind this 501c3 and they donated so many millions, so fast, that within only months this charter group was able to produce grant funding to the 3 chosen ‘golden’ charters. They are on a roll and if LAUSD and the public supporters here do not stand up to them rapidly, they will fulfill Eli’s plan of taking over 50% of the district.
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addendum…Rafe Esquith won his appeal to be able to prosecute LAUSD…and his lawyers have over 2,000 teachers joined in their class action lawsuit against LAUSD. If they win, it could bankrupt LAUSD. But they really deserve to win after putting 100s of teachers in teacher jail on trumped up charges and letting them rot there at the taxpayers’ expense. See the LA Times article today. It is NOT financed by Broad and Co.
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Dear Ellen,
You deserve recognition for standing with Rafe unswervingly.
Love,
Leftie
P.S. Regarding the fact that Eli’s Totally Awesome Schools Now is not keeping its promise to support great district schools like magnets, I am shocked. Shocked, I tell you.
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This one is genuinely amusing because they LITERALLY just changed the name and the rhetoric. Come on. It’s insulting.
Why not just admit they’re privatizing all the schools? That’s the goal. Are they not proud of it? Afraid the unwashed masses will object without this carefully crafted marketing and “winding down” of public schools?
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I personally cannot wait until Democrats and Republicans finally eradicate labor unions.
Then there will be no more income inequality, wages will go up, inequities based on race will end and all will have exactly equal “opportunity”.
Gosh, why didn’t someone think of this secret sauce sooner? The tiny portion of the US workforce who are unionized are ruining everything. Thank God the Best and Brightest found the culprit.
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By accident, sort of, I ran into a piece about Shanghai’s public schools yesterday (7-13-16).
The piece was published by Asia Society.org. The title of the piece was “Shanghai: The World’s Best School System”
http://asiasociety.org/global-cities-education-network/shanghai-worlds-best-school-system
If you click the link you will discover that in Communist China’s public schools they are improving so-called failing schools — in China they don’t use the world ‘failing’. They call those schools weak — using a completely different method than the rank and punish system in the U.S.
In case you don’t have the time or interest to click that link, here’s the paragraph that reveals the CCP’s secret sauce to improve public education and it doesn’t close public schools and open opaque, often fraudulent and inferior cooperate charter schools that find a way to profit even when they come with the non-profit tag.
“One interesting strategy employed by Shanghai to improve weak schools is the commissioned education program. Under this scheme, top performing schools are assigned a weak school to administer. The ‘good’ school will send a team of teachers and a principal to lead the school and improve it. This has been happening within the city but also as a type of exchange program with poor rural schools. Such a system assists the poor schools and benefits Shanghai schools by allowing them to promote teachers and administrators.”
I think Eli Broad and all the other bilionare oligarchs will clearly hate China’s method to improve its public schools, because there seems to be no way to profit off of it.
And lest you forgot already, Shanghai China ranked 1st in every category in the 2012 international PISA test. This is something that the corporate public educatoin demolition derby for profit and power reminds us of often without ever revealing what Shanghai does to improve its own public schools without trashing them.
And surprise, surprise, guess what country’s public education system China learns from to improve it’s own public education system like the one in Shanghai. The answer is one word, America.
You might be interested in reading: Reforming Chinese Education: What China is Trying to Learn from America”
“What the Chinese found valuable in American education is the result of a decentralized, autonomous system that does not have standards, uses multiple criteria for judging the value of talents, and celebrates individual differences. Recognizing the negative consequences of ‘test-oriented education,’ China has launched a series of national reforms to cultivate more creative citizens. In 1999 China’s Central Committee sought to reform testing, abolish middle school exams, and encourage local provinces to experiment with their own examination regimens. This was followed by further decrees in 2001, encouraging more diverse curricula, and greater choice for students in subject matter—although any new material used must still ‘equip students with patriotism, collectivism, a love for socialism, and the Chinese cultural traditions, as well as moral-ethic values, democratic spirits with Chinese characteristics.'”
http://www.thesolutionsjournal.com/node/1077
By the way, if you still have a passion to teach, China hires many English speaking teachers to teach in their schools because learning Enlgish is mandatory. Just make sure you go through the proper process to be hired to teach English in China. Don’t take shortcuts because some profit motivated fraud will take you to the cleaners and leave you without a job once you get there.
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Now there’s irony for you! The Chinese admire the local control and the attention to individual differences of our schools while our government seeks to upend the community education model and replace it with corporate “teaching robots.”
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It is ironic. All the evidence I’ve seen in China indicates they are moving toward where the U.S. was more than fifty years ago while the U.S. is moving toward where China was during Mao’s Cultural Revolution (1965 – 1976).
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Also I find it instructive to watch Ref Rodriguez, who legally shouldn’t be on the Board as far as I’m concerned. But he is much more finessed that this group and is convening a group of charter and public schools to meet together to “help” each other. He is so effective that he has won over the rest of the board. What they don’t see is that he and Eli Broad have figured out that they can eliminate the “bad” charters and put in only the ones they thing should survive. Their criteria? I would guess that they want to get rid of the smaller ones, the ones not controlled by the 1% nor making much of a profit, or producing higher scores. I think that puts many of them in the queue for closure.
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Right on, Joan. After LAUSD appointed Cole-Guitierrez as overseer for the district, it was clear that they were colluding with CCSA since he had worked for the Charter group and with Refugio. Then clearly, using “Voteria” a lorrery that paid for registration (and subsequently for votes for the Latino surnamed candidate), Refugio stole the election for BoE from the teacher incumbent Bennett Kayser.
It has been a fix for some time and the moles inside LAUSD, plus Monica Garcia, and the weak sisters on the BoE, all have done their parts to get to what you eloquently describe.
Why did LAUSD allow the Voteria crowd to solicit, register, uninformed kids within the public high schools with the promise they could win $24,000 just for registering to vote? What kind of lesson in democracy was this? Who allowed this to happen within the district?
And now, with hatchet woman Garcia who pays her constituents to be street performers in front of Beaudry, and gives out free food and drink to this end, and the clever and soft spoken but mendacious and manipulating Refugio Rodriguez partnering on the BoE, it seems only a short distance to the complete takeover of LAUSD by the privatizers.
I have never in my very long career seen a 501c3 developed so rapidly, gotten State approval so rapidly, collected multi millions of dollars so rapidly, and be run now by a NON-EDUCATOR as the face, while in the background it is ruled by two long time politicos who take their orders from Broad, the Waltons, those who run Alliance Charters, et al.
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It seems high time that educators take back the term “Public Schools” to mean traditional tax supported, free schools that are controlled by publicly elected school boards that are responsible to the voters and call the so called “Public Academies, Charter Schools, etc” GOVERNMENT SCHOOLS. They are funded by “State” funds and are ran by “For Profit” corporations without any oversight by the voting citizens in the communities they are located in! We need to take back the language from the Koch Brothers funded Radical Republican Right that wants to destroy our “Public Schools” and send all children to their “Government Schools” for political indoctrination!
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Incestuous. Keeping the money within the family. Lannister stuff.
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A dive into the 990 forms from these “non profits” shows an interesting pattern of supporting free market groups. Idaho’s Albertson Foundation contributes to the Friedman Foundation for Education Choice and others. Predatory philanthropy….that’s what it’s about.
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“Great Public Schools Now” aka Lousy Privatized Charter Schools Immediately, No Public Schools Left Tomorrow
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