The United Teachers of Los Angeles blasted Superintendent Austin Beutner’s “secret plan” to break up the district into “networks,” which may be part of his long-range plan to downsize and privatize the district. Beutner, a non-educator, comes from the financial sector, where large corporations are routinely broken up and sold off. The point of this strategy becomes clear when you see the “corporate reformers” that Beutner has hired.
The LA Times leaked the plan and revealed the names of the consultants that Beutner is relying on. The two major consulting firms are Kitamba and Ernst & Young. The LA Times describes them:
Kitamba partner and chief executive Rajeev Bajaj, while heading different companies, became a major consultant in 2010 and 2011 for the school-reform effort in Newark, N.J. The companies in which he was involved attracted media attention because of potential conflicts involving business ties to state and local officials.
His partner at Kitamba, Erin McGoldrick Brewster, served as chief of data and accountability for the District of Columbia Public Schools, under hard-charging former Supt. Michelle Rhee. In 2009, McGoldrick Brewster, along with Rhee, came under scrutiny for not pushing harder to investigate credible allegations of cheating at schools that showed huge gains on standardized tests.
The work of Ernst & Young and Kitamba is being paid for by the recently established Fund for Equity and Excellence, which pools philanthropic resources for local education. Donors include the Ballmer Group, the California Community Foundation, the California Endowment, the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation and the Weingart Foundation.
http://www.latimes.com/local/education/la-me-edu-lausd-school-networks-20181105-story.html
The UTLA said in a press release:
Austin Beutner’s secret plan to break LAUSD into ‘32 networks’, as leaked to the LA Times, is a reflection of Beutner’s short tenure as superintendent. Just as he continues to hide from public scrutiny, this plan was developed with no transparency and without the authentic involvement of parents and educators.
‘Decentralization’ is a common refrain in so-called portfolio districts — like New Orleans, Newark and Detroit —cities that are riddled with a patchwork of privatization schemes that do not improve student outcomes. They do, however, degrade the teaching profession and create chaos for parents and students trying to navigate the system. In New Orleans, there are no public schools left. In Detroit, a sea of charters has decimated democratically-run public schools.
In a competition-based portfolio model, clusters of schools compete against each other for resources and support, creating a system of haves and have nots and exacerbating segregation and equity issues. Rating systems are installed to justify closing “low-performing” neighborhood schools.
Beutner is working closely with the charter lobby–backed School Board members (the same ones who pushed through Beutner’s secretive hiring) while he is shutting out the voice of other elected board members who represent tens of thousands of voters.
“Austin Beutner should be figuring out how he spends the record-breaking $1.86 billion in reserves on urgent student needs, instead of spending time with high-priced, unaccountable consultants plotting the downsizing of a district that serves all students,” said UTLA President Alex Caputo-Pearl.
The people working on this secretive plan for a portfolio district are being paid off the books through a more than $3 million discretionary fund financed by known privatizer Eli Broad and others. They are exercising power at the highest levels in LAUSD, without any accountability or scrutiny by the public. Beutner is surrounding himself with the same architects of the privatization schemes in Detroit, New Orleans and Newark:
ThirdWay Solutions founder Cami Anderson was superintendent in Newark, New Jersey, from 2011 to 2015. Her billionaire-bankrolled “One Newark” universal enrollment scheme led to numerous neighborhood school closures, mass firings, and multiple complaints of civil rights violations. Parent outrage led to her resignation.
Erin McGoldrick Brewster is a partner at “portfolio district” specialists Kitamba. She helped then-Washington, DC, schools chancellor Michelle Rhee stonewall an investigation into higher-than-typical erasure rates on multiple-choice standardized tests during Rhee’s controversial test score-linked merit pay program.
Last week, Rebecca Kockler stepped down as Beutner’s Chief of Staff. She previously oversaw the massive charterization of New Orleans public schools.
Getting rid of central oversight and accountability would allow the unchecked spread of the worst of the charter sector abuses: not serving all students, financial scandals, misuse of public funds, and conflict-of-interest charges.
“There is no evidence that Beutner’s network approach would save any money—in fact, it likely would cost millions of dollars more as each network builds its own bureaucracy with redundant jobs and duplicative services,” Caputo-Pearl said. “Once this plan is enacted and the protections for our students are compromised, it will be open season for the privatization industry.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
People should be occupying this guy’s office, and no district employee should lift a finger to follow his orders.
Why do we continue to let the rich try to steal our kids public education?
Here in California, teachers need a ballot measure on this to drive a stake in this vampire.
UTLA has taken the high road and made classroom conditions as its major issue in the present contract negotiations. Last June, teachers and parents made it clear that Beutner was an incredibly unpopular choice as superintendent. This plan to break up the district in this way will certainly fall apart. Yes, LAUSD should be streamlining its operations in any way possible, but doing so with this plan that is so poorly conceived and done behind closed doors without stakeholder input is totally ridiculous.
We also have to keep in mind which LAUSD board members voted for Beutner. All their major funders are totally behind the privatization of public education. So, there is every reason to fear that Beutner’s plan will further that goal in one way or another.
Those who read LA Progressive and/or CityWatchTodayLA might remember that last winter I wrote about the travesty of the bought and paid for LAUSD BoE hiring Austin Beutner..
It was a long time plan to get one of the approved members of the biliionaire investor group into the system to break it down by using the successful plan they finally devised with their 501c3 Great Public Schools Now. They hired two pros who could manipulate, with the help of these power brokers, the state of California to rush through this new non profit as they concurrently raised many millions of funding dollars so as to rapidly make grants to districts for charter innovation.
The naive public is eating it up.
LAUSD allowed indicted felon BoE member and charter purveyor, Refugio Rodriguez, to remain on the Board just long enough for him to join his divisive charter colleagues, Garcia, Melvoin and one other newly elected woman Gonet, who represented the new majority of charter ‘pushers’ and who had $17 Million donated to their candidacy by these same billionaire vulture philanthropists in order to win their elections. Beutner, a partner in wealth and close friend to Eli Broad and Richard Riordan, had failed as publisher of the LA Times, but he was a likely shill for the charter group since he was not as well known and hated as the Broad Boys and Girls. And he had/has the arrogance to pretend to know what he is doing…but his main goal seems to be to break up the entire District so as to possibly force it into Chapter 11 bankruptcy and/or to privatize it en toto.
Do the math? He wants 32 separate districts with all the redundancy of administration. All decentralized and independent…yes…like charter schools.
These same investor greed merchants from all over the US who funded the BoE elections, dumped over $40 Million to get Marshal Tuck elected yesterday. What do they expect as pay back? How do these bought candidates rationalize their whoring for election?
Why do they do everything in secret? It’s bizarre that these ed reform plans always have to be “leaked”.
It’s like they have a “public” government and then a private government that runs things.
It seems almost guaranteed to produce a lack of trust, yet they do this over and over again- as if the secrecy is essential to the plans, that if they ran them by the public they know the plans would be rejected.
Why did a non-educator ever get hired in the first place? They know nothing about schools. Schools are not businesses.
It’s amusing to me that people who talk so much about “innovation” hire the same people over and over and over.
Joining the echo chamber is a guarantee of a job for life- they just switch seats.
They all agree with one another and operate in a lockstep fashion because they are the same group of individuals in every city and state. They just parachute in en masse.
It is too bad this plan to downsize LAUSD is coming from such an obvious anti-public education source. Once districts get larger than about 100,000 students, they become faceless bureaucracies that give parents very little opportunity to address the issues effecting their children. However, downsizing needs to include the voices of all stakeholders and consultants from large corporate entities with a history of attacking public schools are not stakeholders. Parents, students, teachers and taxpayers are the stakeholders.