The Los Angeles Times reports that the campaign of former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa is funded almost entirely by billionaire charter supporters.
Reed Hastings, who once expressed his wish to see every local school board extinguished, has given the candidate $7 Million. Hastings want every school to be a charter.
Former Mayor Michael Bloomberg recently gave the candidate $1.5 million.
If Villaraigosa is elected, the state board will greenlight every charter application. Oversight and accountability for charters is currently lax to minimal. Under Villaraigosa, they would disappear. The scams and frauds would have a picnic with taxpayers’ money. That’s what Hastings, Bloomberg, Broad, and Riordan are paying for.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I posted this link as a comment, at Oped, where Carl Peterson has written an excellent piece about how the LAUSD board violates open meeting laws so they can do their dirty work behind closed doors.
https://www.opednews.com/articles/Complaint-Alleges-Board-of-by-Carl-Petersen-Open-Government-180514-374.html
Links to this are embedded at the above address. Word press does not put links in!
“In 1953, the California legislature declared that “the people, in delegating authority, do not give their public servants the right to decide what is good for the people to know and what is not good for them to know” and passed the Brown Act. As a result, the actions of all local agencies, including school boards, must “be taken openly and that their deliberations be conducted openly.” The public may be excluded from a meeting “to consider the appointment [or] employment…of a public employee”, but “the legislative body of any local agency shall publicly report any action taken in closed session and the vote or abstention on that action of every member present”.
We haven’t done enough here in Los Angeles to publicize the felony charges against LAUSD board member Ref Rodriguez on a state-wide basis. He was elected thanks to the same donors. Are these the kinds of leaders these donors promote?
Rodriguez needs to be held up as the poster boy for what’s wrong with the charter brand. It’s all about greed, greed for money and power. He just went too far, as many others have done. What remains to be seen is the negative affect this will have on the future of LAUSD. Will the present charter majority with their champion, Beutner, in place be successful in taking down all of LAUSD and then “selling” it off in chunks to financially benefit their donors, or will there be a backlash like no one has ever seen? Let’s hope it will be the latter.
Good of the Times to report this, and to keep it at the top of its website for an entire day, especially considering its editorial board endorsed him a few days prior. My suggestion to California voters who pay close attention, vote for Republican Cox in the primary if you can hold your nose, and for Chiang in the primary if you, like me, vote on principle rather than strategy. Cox is Villaraigosa’s opponent in the primary according to the polls. And Cox won’t have Reed Hastings donating millions to support him if he goes up against a Democrat in November. He’s funding himself. What a complex mess we have, with billionaires able to manipulate elections as they do today.
To be more precise they want to buy a Governor who will veto any and all reforms that manage to make it through the legislature. Brown vetoed a charter accountability bill, a bill providing equitable funding for districts subject to charter incursion, and a ban on for-profit charters, all of which passed both houses of the legislature and died on his desk.
This is why the primary should be like the Virginia Governor primary where public school vs charter school was made into the primary issue.
😱 So sick.
Are there any current or former employees that would like to share their experiences being associated with the charter group using multiple names including, Learn4Life, Desert Sands Charter, Mission View Charter, Assurance Learning Center, Alta Vista Innovation and other names that were being listed under the umbrella of Desert Sands Public Charter School, Inc, in Lancaster, CA. We are working with major media and watch dogs legal groups to explore what we allege may be questionable operations as referenced in the “Shasta Ruling” and other incidents cited by multiple public media entities.
To respond for involvement concerning Desert Sands Charter Schools, Inc and umbrella schools, please send email to:
sophieschuylar@gmail.com