The latest from Los Angeles, where a strike is a real possibility and a clueless hedge fund manager is superintendent.
Subject: UTLA demands LAUSD accept mediation dates immediately
UTLA demands LAUSD accept mediation dates immediately
UTLA continues our demand that LAUSD stop stalling and agree to start the mediation process immediately. UTLA has made it clear that we’re ready and willing to meet for mediation on August 22, 23, 24, 27, 28, 29, 30, & 31. However, Austin Beutner and the district have basically ignored their legal and moral obligation to participate and refused to meet until September 27.
“We find it upsetting that the top public employee for LAUSD has tried to dodge the state mediation process, which labor laws are built on, which protects UTLA members, and frankly is the only way to guarantee that the legal rules of bargaining will be followed by someone who brags about breaking rules all the time,” said UTLA President Alex Caputo-Pearl.
As UTLA members gear up for an important strike authorization vote beginning this week, Supt. Beutner continues a campaign of blaming educators and spreading misinformation. Some of these false claims have landed in media reports. They include:
Claim: Beutner is not stalling mediation.
Fact: The district has refused to meet for state mediation date until 56 days (Sept. 27) after a mediator was first appointed on Aug. 2. This is unacceptable.
Claim: A “pact” has been forged between Beutner and the UTLA president.
Fact: There has been no progress made toward an agreement. Beutner, who is accustomed to back-door deal making as a multi-millionaire hedge-fund capitalist, hasn’t grasped the fact that he’s dealing with a 34,000-member union that demands a transparent and legal collective bargaining process.
Claim: Beutner offered UTLA members a 6% raise and proposed an increase in staffing and lower class sizes.
Fact: Neither Beutner nor LAUSD has made any of these proposals. In fact, the district gave very few proposals or counterproposals through 19 bargaining sessions over 17 months. That’s why there are more than two dozen issues that have to be bargained, many of which wouldn’t cost the district more money.
Claim: UTLA does not want magnet schools.
Fact: UTLA is not against magnet schools. One of the keys to a successful magnet conversion is stakeholder buy-in, so our proposal calls for a 60% vote by the educators at a school to endorse the magnet. We want guardrails in place so the district doesn’t exploit the magnet process to remove teachers who are willing to speak up on behalf of students, question the leadership of the school, or express different opinions about the direction of the conversion.
“All indications point to the fact that Beutner does not believe educators should have a say in their own future or the future of our students and communities,” said Arlene Inouye, chair of the UTLA Bargaining Team. “That goes against the very nature of bargaining, which allows a democratic process for union members to create better working conditions for themselves and a better learning environment for our students.”
What adds to this insult, Caputo-Pearl says, is that today the school board voted down Board Member Scott Schmerlson’s resolution on the interim BD5 appointment of Jackie Goldberg, a veteran educator and former school board member. Instead, Nick Melvoin and Monica Garcia proposed that BD5 residents to submit applications for the job, an orchestrated attempt to appear open and transparent. The board would appoint the candidate at the Sept. 11 meeting. The vote was deadlocked 3-3.
“The reason they are appointing an interim board member is because the entire tenure of Ref Rodriguez was ill-gotten, yet the charter-lobby-backed board majority did not cry foul over this because it served their purposes,” Caputo-Pearl said.
“This smacks of hypocrisy,” he said. “The people of BD 5 had to endure a year-long insult to democracy while Ref Rodriguez faced felony charges tied to campaign finance money laundering. He was kept on the board by the same people who are now making overtures for transparency and accountability.”
As this cloud of corruption hung over the school board, Rodriguez was kept on for his swing vote, to have a prominent role in deciding the rules and policies that govern the nation’s second-largest school district. His vote was crucial in the appointment of Beutner, a mega-wealthy investment banker with no experience as an educator.
UTLA reiterates our demand that any interim appointment to BD5 seat be a true advocate for public education, not beholden to CCSA, and one who truly respects and values transparency and accountability, until a special election can be held.
****FOR MEDIA PLANNING PURPOSES****
What: UTLA strike authorization vote
When: Thursday, Aug. 23
Time: 3 PM
For more information:
Anna Bakalis, UTLA Communications Director
(213) 305-9654 (c)
Abakalis@UTLA.net
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Sickening. &*$#@! The oligarchs wants to “own” knowledge. The oligarchs want to be the dispensers of knowledge. The oligarchs don’t want illiterate and innumerate citizens…not in the oligarch’s best interests. This is about $$$$$ and power.
Democracy is an inconvenience to wealthy power brokers. The charter sycophants worshiping the power brokers have no interest in honoring the voices of voters. They have shown a willingness to commit and support any crime to support their greed. The only form of opposition that will get their attention is one that hits them where it hurts them, their pocketbooks. A strike be a’coming.
I doubt Austin Powers… I mean Beutner is clueless, at least not when it comes to charterizing the district.
Gordon Gekko.
As Austin Powers famously asked, “Shall I shag the school district now? Or shag it later?”
I see… Yeah baby.
Shagadelic, baby!
Or maybe that should be “Charterdelic, baby!”
It’s obvious Beutner and his privatizers wants teachers to strike so they can further demonize them.
sad truth: the strikes which MUST happen if the nation has any hope of protecting both education and children are so quickly co-opted by those who control media messages and wish to frame teacher action as negative action
I agree with SomeDAM Poet. This dude isn’t clueless about what he was sent to do. The privatizers have taken over the building and have brought the goon squad with them from New Orleans and Newark to destroy LA public education. It’s an all star line up. It may be too late, but at the very least, we finally have union leadership that is calling this out for what it is. Like most educators here, I can’t afford to strike and I’d rather be teaching. But this is a fight for the life of public education. What choice do we have?
No interim will be appointed. The Schmerlson resolution to appoint Goldberg failed 2-4, with Vladovic emphatically opposing any appointment. He also voted no on the Melvoin resolution to make an appointment via community input; that resolution also failed 3-3. No side has the votes for any appointment without Vladovic, usually considered a swing vote. So I guess the voters will decide in March and May.
I hope Jackie Goldberg runs for the open seat.
Unfortunately, I’m pretty sure she doesn’t live within the boundaries of District 5.
The district boundaries have been re-drawn by a city commission since she occupied that seat long ago (more than two decades?) for purposes of encouraging greater representation for East LA and Southeast cities – rendering the district overwhelmingly poor and Latino (78%) and away from her core (geographic) base. BD5 is thought of as a ‘Latino seat.’ There are six contenders already on record as intending to file – 4 are Latinos, and others expected to join the group before filing deadline. She is a formidable candidate, but the numbers don’t favor her as a presumptive dominant candidate any more. The Mayor allegedly favors another white female candidate that also has the support of UTLA, so it wouldn’t be a cakewalk for Jackie in spite of her impressive electoral record. Which is why the move to appoint her seemed like a one (long) shot deal, and why things got so hot yesterday. Whoever wins the election next Spring, will have to make a strong case to SELA families (preferably in Spanish) that their long-marginalized voices will be front and center.
http://www.latimes.com/local/education/la-me-edu-los-angeles-school-board-rodriguez-20180821-story.html
“Reformers” plan to continue to rig the board to give them what they want: more charters!
“The City Fund’s goal is for cities to have a large charter sector, “often scaling to serve 30-50% of students,” the presentation reads. Those schools, it argues, creates a competitive environment, one pillar of The City Fund’s model. They believe this will help “all boats rise.”
The second pillar is accountability, or “the expansion of the city’s best schools and the replacement of its worst, regardless of type,” based on a common performance rubric. And the third is equity, which it connects to a central choice system for a city’s district and charter schools.
One thing that is explicitly not part of the approach: more public money for schools. “None of these structural reforms cost public dollars,” the presentation reads. “Cities can increase the efficiency and equality of the system within existing budgets — with philanthropy supporting the transition costs.”
Another ed reform plan that offers absolutely nothing to students and families in existing public schools. In fact, they’ll lose funding because portfolio systems cost more with their layers of fragmented management and quadrupled transportation costs so each student gets LESS funding.
This is a “movement” that simply doesn’t consider public school students when they make plans. Kids in existing public schools take a back seat to the drive to privatize.
Read thru any of these ed reform plans and try to identify a single tangible benefit to any kid in any ‘district” school. There are none.
40 cities! The plan is to jam this template over 40 cities in the US. A small group of well-connected ideologues and true believers backed by billionaire bucks will be designing the “public” education systems of 40 cities. The arrogance takes your breath away.
The recent report on NOLA noted that most of the new money went to administration and transportation.
“Our goal is to make the model normal,” the presentation says. “After enough adoption we believe the model will transition from being a radical idea to a standard policy intervention.”
I give the privatization advocates credit though. At long last they finally admit eradicating public schools is “radical”.
That won’t stop them from jamming this template into every city in the country, but it is more honest than the previous marketing strategy, which was insisting they weren’t bent on privatizing when they clearly were.
Barry Goldwater himself never envisioned completely privatized systems. Ed reform is now further Right than their ideological father. The goal is to abolish public schools. As a side benefit they’ll also eradicate the largest labor union in the country, hence the funding by plutocrats.
Milton Friedman is their ideological godfather. He authored school privatization in Chile too.
He loved markets and for-profit.
Chile’s love affair with the free market has led to widespread student riots and destitute senior citizens living in poverty after they privatized social security.https://tcf.org/content/commentary/twelve-reasons-why-privatizing-social-security-is-a-bad-idea/
Friedman didn’t love “markets”.
He loved fascists
Fascists love markets.
Or at least one fascist in particular: Pinochet.
He loved him because Pinochet gave the Chicago boys free reign to implement their economic program.
What they love is not free markets, but free junkets for a small privileged group within a country and resources (people and material) for US corporations.
The Chicago boys opened up Chile to plunder by its own leaders and by US companies.
The idea of a “free market” as put forward by Friedman was and is a myth.
There was nothing free about it, other than the free reign it gave Pinochet to institute his “Shock doctrine” quite literally through electroshock of anyone who opposed Pinochet.
Chile was undoubtedly chosen by Friedman and his acolytes as a petri dish for Friedman’s theories because, as William F. Buckley observed
Mr. Friedman can absolutely be counted upon to
say that his theories were not given an adequate
exercise. There is no doubting that he is correct.
But it is possible that his theories suffer from the
overriding disqualification that they simply cannot
get a sufficient exercise in democratic situations —
because it takes longer for them to produce results
than the public is prepared to wait.
— William F. Buckley, Jr., in National Review,
August 16, 1971
Apparently Chile was selected precisely because even Friedman was not willing to wait around to see if his policies would be adopted in the US.
Claims about free markets notwithstanding, Friedman was a big fan of government control — of the dictatorial type.
Reed Hastings, founder of Netflix, has been a major supporter of the pro-privatiization side of LA’s school board. He basically believes the public is too stupid to be a part of the decision-making process that is so vital to its children. He thinks people like himself (billionaires) should be the ones making those decisions. I boycott Netflix.
Don’t worry about the ambiguous future, just work hard for the sake of clarity