The United Teachers of Los Angeles sent this letter to billionaire Eli Broad. Broad has been a major funder of privately managed charter schools in Los Angeles, Detroit, and other districts around the nation. He currently is promoting a $450 million plan to put half of all students in Los Angeles in charter schools. He also donates large sums to candidates who advocate the replacement of public schools with charter schools.
A few days before the vote to confirm Betsy DeVos, Broad announced that he opposed her.
UTLA wrote to Eli Broad:
Dear Mr. Broad:
UTLA and public education advocates, parents, students and community members have been fighting against Betsy DeVos’ nomination as Secretary of Education months before your letter, dated Feb. 1, was sent to all US Senators, in which you asked them to vote against her confirmation, which just took place today.
You were late to that struggle. We are not surprised.
If you are, according to your letter, “a believer in high-quality public schools and strong accountability for ALL public schools, including traditional and charter,” then you can do something right now: Immediately withdraw your financial support for the California Charter Schools Association (CCSA).
CCSA is a lobbying arm of the charter school industry that has amassed more than $170 million to fight the very existence of our neighborhood public schools.
Instead of continuing to fund CCSA, you should take responsibility for the damage you have caused, through your funding, to the school systems in California, Detroit, and New Orleans. In the latter two places, you worked hand-in-hand with Betsy DeVos.
To repair the damage, send your generous donations with no strings attached to the democratically elected school boards in California, especially the Los Angeles School Board, as well as schools in New Orleans and Detroit. School boards and school communities will invest this money appropriately.
In your letter, you say you “have never met Mrs. DeVos” and you have “serious concerns about her support of unregulated charter schools and vouchers as well as the potential conflicts of interests she might bring to the job.”
Forgive us as we take a moment to put this statement in context.
Last year, as one of the largest donors to CCSA, you helped thwart common-sense legislation like SB 322, which would have protected charter school students from unfair expulsions. You, through donations to CCSA, also intensely lobbied against AB 709, an accountability and transparency bill, which would have required that charter schools comply with the same state laws governing open meetings, open records and conflict of interest that traditional public schools do.
You and DeVos teamed up to fund legislative races in Louisiana, a state that, post-Hurricane Katrina, became the poster child for unregulated charter growth and the systematic destruction of the civic institution of public education.
Since 2008, you gave $212,500 to DeVos’ lobbying organization founded and chaired by her called “Alliance for School Choice.” It is a Washington, DC-based lobbying firm that, similar to CCSA, undermines public education and pushes for expansion of unregulated charter schools and school vouchers.
You and DeVos both funded the Educational Achievement Authority in Michigan, which oversaw the mass charter-ization and de-unionization of Detroit public schools, resulting in a wasteland rife with student equity and access violations, recently documented in a front page story in the New York Times.
While you claim to have never met her before, you have worked with her on multiple fronts, in multiple cities.
In 2016, with a donation of $2 million to CCSA Advocates, you were the most generous among California’s
elite handful of billionaires, including the Walton family of Walmart, Reed Hastings of Netflix and Doris Fisher of Gap, Inc. Your friend and former Los Angeles mayor Richard J. Riordan donated $50,000 to CCSA. He has also given
$1 million in the school board district race against School Board President Steve Zimmer.
You have so much money, maybe there is confusion around what legislation and which candidates your
vast wealth is actually fighting or supporting.
Because of your torrential financial support, last year CCSA far surpassed all other funders in state political races, including groups backed by the energy industry and real estate developers.
You and members of your billionaire club gave more than $27 million to various PACs like the Parent Teacher Alliance (PTA), the title of which is sneaky and confusing to parents. PTA has amassed $8 million this year alone. EdVoice amassed another $9 million. You gave more than $1.5 million to both of these PACs.
These independent expenditures help fund groups like Speak UP, Parent Revolution and Great Public Schools Now, as well as countless CCSA-backed candidates, who then work to undermine public education on your behalf.
When DeVos was first nominated, on Nov. 23, CCSA released a statement with high praise for Trump’s pick, and even said “Mrs. DeVos has long demonstrated a commitment to providing families with improved public school options and we look forward to working with the administration on proposals allowing all students in California to access their right to a high quality public education.”
CCSA and Great Public Schools Now have since backed off their enthusiastic support for DeVos,sensing it would be unpopular. We hope you have a deeper reason behind sending out your letter to the Senate, and that it will signal a shift in your financial support.
In your letter, you say DeVos is “unprepared and unqualified for the position.” You further say that we must have someone “who believes in public education and the need to keep public schools public.”
We couldn’t agree more.
Our public schools are in great need, many of them suffering from the years of unrelenting attacks from people like you.
Make amends. Join parents, students, educators and community members in our fight to save public education.
Immediately suspend your financial support of CCSA. Give your generous donations with no strings attached to public schools in California, Detroit, and New Orleans, and leave the educational decisions to our elected school boards and local stakeholders, who — unlike billionaires — are truly accountable to our communities.
Sincerely,
UTLA President
Alex Caputo-Pearl
Cc:
United States
Senators
—
Anna Bakalis
UTLA Communications Director
(213) 305-9654 (c)
(213) 368-6247 (o)
Abakalis@UTLA.net
http://www.UTLA.net
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Great job.The last minute Broad letter opposing Betsy DeVos had no purpose other than protecting the Broad brand of charter schools. Her support for vouchers could undermine the “market” for charter schools.
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May DeVos be vindictive enough to try and make his life miserable; greed outing greed.
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I absolutely love this idea and would pose the challenge to Gates and other billionaires as well.. Every real public school in LA, NO, and Detroit should make a list of what they need from safe, well equipped buildings to licensed, experienced educators. They can add community programs for families, wrap around services, and universal PreK as well as the more obvious smaller classes and real research-based, rich curriculum. Educators’ access to highly qualified consultants with histories of success in similar schools as well as realistic measures for accountability could replace canned behavior based nonsense.
We can post the lists of needed resources very publicly with ongoing records of the donations made to reformer organizations compared with that made available to real public schools. For that matter, we could include what is taken from public schools for charters and compare the social impact of those funds. I do like this idea.
Mary
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Vouchers would put a good segment of the charter school industry out of business. We should hope for this type of civil war between these groups.
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“Reformers” from the billionaire club are highly manipulative and sneaky as they suppress democratic control of local schools. They purchase acquiescence from policymakers to undermine public education. The local citizens are the true stakeholders, not wealthy outsider privateers whose goal is strip funds from public education. Local communities should have the right to have well funded public schools.
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Wouldn’t be the first time Broad said one thing publicly and did quite another privately.
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A little public _itch slapping is just what was needed. Unfortunately, I’m not sure how big an audience this letter will get, but good job to the person/people who drafted it and had the guts to send it! If the reformsters won’t relent, then try to humiliate them.
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With the charter school industry that’s favored by U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos bleeding vital funds from the public’s schools, the thoughtful person will ask: “Why are hedge fund people the main backers of the private charter school industry? After all, hedge funds are not known for a selfless interest in educating children.”
Well, the answer, of course, is MONEY.
For example, look at DeVos’ home state of Michigan: There are 1.5 million children attending public elementary and secondary schools and the state annually spends about $11,000 per student which adds up to pot of about $17 billion that private charter school operators have their eyes on. If these private operators succeed in getting what DeVos wants to give them — the power to run all the schools — these private profiteers could make almost $6 billion in profit just by firing veteran teachers and replacing them with low-paid inexperienced teachers, which is what the real objective of so-called “Value-Added” evaluations of veteran teachers is all about.
But wait! There’s more!
In fact, there are many more ways that big profits are being made every day right now by the private charter school industry. Here are just some:
The Office of Inspector General of the U.S. Department of Education has issued a warning that charter schools posed a risk to the Department of Education’s own goals. The report says: “Charter schools and their management organizations pose a potential risk to federal funds even as they threaten to fall short of meeting the goals” because of the financial fraud, the skimming of tax money into private pockets that is the reason why hedge funds are the main backers of charter schools.
The Washington State Supreme Court, the New York State Supreme Courts, and the National Labor Relations Board have ruled that charter schools are not public schools because they aren’t accountable to the public since they aren’t governed by publicly-elected boards and aren’t subdivisions of public government entities, in spite of the fact that some state laws enabling charter schools say they are government subdivisions. THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A “PUBLIC CHARTER SCHOOL” because no charter school fulfills the basic public accountability requirement of being responsible to and directed by a school board that is elected by We the People. Charter schools are clearly private schools, owned and operated by private entities. Nevertheless, they get public tax money.
Even the staunchly pro-charter school Los Angeles Times (which acknowledges that its “reporting” on charter schools is paid for by a billionaire charter school advocate) complained in an editorial that “the only serious scrutiny that charter operators typically get is when they are issued their right to operate, and then five years later when they apply for renewal.” Without needed oversight of what charter schools are actually doing with the public’s tax dollars, hundreds of millions of tax money that is supposed to be spent on educating the public’s children is being siphoned away into private pockets.
Charter schools should (1) be required by law to be governed by school boards elected by the voters so that they are accountable to the public; (2) a charter school entity must legally be a subdivision of a publicly-elected governmental body; (3) charter schools should be required to file the same detailed public-domain audited annual financial reports under penalty of perjury that genuine public schools file; and, (4) anything a charter school buys with the public’s money should be the public’s property.
NO PUBLIC TAX MONEY SHOULD BE ALLOWED TO GO TO CHARTER SCHOOLS THAT FAIL TO MEET THESE MINIMUM REQUIREMENTS OF ACCOUNTABILITY TO THE PUBLIC.
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Yeah, it certainly is safer to team up with her
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I8IyXi4wWbw
than with Eli Broad. Maybe she’ll now make a funny and edgy piece on public education for her “insider” show, emphasizing the edureform’s sexist side.
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Too much money and power in too few hands.
How can we change this?
Campaign Finance Reform is key. I’m not naive enough to believe this will come easily…but it really DOES need to become a reality. Forcing the hand of our elected officials is one of the first and most important steps. Democrat and Republican.
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Thank you, UTLA leadership. Good luck in the election.?You’ve earned my vote. Let’s keep it up.
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Did not mean to include the question mark, sorry.
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