The blogger Red Queen in L.A., aka Sara Roos, has researched the career of Los Angeles Superintendent Austin Beutner. He has a long history in the financial world. He is a Venture capitalist, or as some would say, a vulture capitalist. He is totally unqualified to preside over the second-largest School District in the nation.
He was brought in by Eli Broad’s purchased boardmajority to decapitate public education in Los Angeles, to destabilize it, disrupt it, break it into pieces, and hand off more schools to charter operators.
Read his history to understand his thinking. He knows nothing about education, teaching, learning, or children.
Roos leaves out Beutner’s role as a board member of AIM, the company that owns the National Enquirer.
“Do not look to Austin Beutner’s LAUSD to negotiate any sort of fair settlement with the defenders and practitioners of public education. Our City’s establishment did not elevate him to this position to manifest a lifetime’s achievement of good educational practice. He is installed to play out his life’s work of financial chicanery. That’s the basis of his own education, it’s what got him his fortune and it’s what will be the demise of ours.
“Now is the time to demand Austin Beutner’s resignation. He’s not here to fix what’s broken in public education. He’s here to profit from turning public education private. We the public need to fund our children’s education properly, collectively and equitably, and we need to vote in accountable public officials (Jackie Goldberg 4 LAUSD5!) to do so. Call your schoolboard member and tell them like it is: 1-213-241-1000 .”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
He’s often referred to as a philanthropist. If he was really a philanthropist he would give back the millions he made as a corporate thug!
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a perfect example for today’s villainthropist: in the name of “caring” and “fixing” and “helping,” suck up personal profits
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Beutner sounds like the Arne Duncan of LA, a privatizing hitman to decapitate public education and create the conditions for the triump of charters and the demise of teacher unions and professionalism—sounds familiar–is Eli Broad the Barack Obama of LA?
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someone handed me a sign at the rally saying that Beutner is the Betsy Devos of LA
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Sounds right, does he also have 10 yachts?
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Just another in a long line of pathetic, soulless, non-educator corporate raiders commodifying our kids for his billionaire backers. It is startling to think how many right-wing and neo-lib kleptocapitalists are installed on school boards throughout the country. I guess it is meant to balance out all those educators who sit on the boards of major corporations….
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Beuter- board member of the National Enquirer’s parent company, the company that the Enquirer sought to protect from punishment for the paper’s capture and kill articles related to Trump’s alleged mistresses?
What sleaze!!!!!!
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Many have written about his obvious desire to make a name for himself. It hasn’t happened yet. He wanted to run for mayor, but that failed. He was temporarily put in charge of the Los Angeles Dept. of Water and Power and made a mess out of that. Then he tried and failed to purchase the LA Times. So, maybe this is his last and best hope to get on the list of major privatizers along with his pal Eli Broad. Sounds like he has an ego problem. But, this might be the worst failure in his life. You can see by his demeanor that he realizes he is being greatly challenged and that, rather than getting community support, the exact opposite is happening. Now the press is no longer able to dismiss what’s going on and is admitting that the public is turning more and more against him and his policies. And this is bringing down the board members who brought him on board, particularly Monica Garcia and Nick Melvoin.
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He wants to squirm his way into government to seek the best way to monetize services. He is a vulture capitalist. Public school districts need to get stricter requirements for district leadership written into law. It is an Achilles Heel that these vulture capitalists can buy their way into district leadership.
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It’s like in The Wizard of Oz when Toto pulls the curtain and reveals that the Great Oz is just a man. The “Toto’s” are really starting to stick it to the “Oz’s” and it’s getting pretty dicey for BBC (Billionaire Boys Club). America is starting to wake up, take notice and say “HELL NO”! We must keep up the hard work of exposing this mess and we must elect politicians that will work for the American people and not for big business interests.
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It’s all over for the billionaire privatizers. The public is getting educated and timeis running out on their big heist.
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MAY this be truly in the works: the nation is so blindly unaware.
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I think it really depends on where one lives. I live right outside of DC in MD. Our whole area is dependent on the fed govt and it’s ties with the stink tanks and big business and gov’t contractors. We are really waking up around here!
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I don’t know if any of you are familiar with Theranos, the scam blood testing company that was touted as miraculous, but this is exactly what Theranos did- they promoted a connection to prestigious universities (Johns Hopkins and Stanford) to sell the snake oil:
“Summit Learning, a fast-growing “personalized learning” system, touts a partnership with Harvard researchers even though Summit actually turned down their proposal to study the model.
The online platform is backed by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s philanthropy and is now being used in 380 schools across the U.S.
The program “is based on collaborations with nationally acclaimed learning scientists, researchers and academics from institutions including the Harvard Center for Education Policy Research,” Summit’s website says. “Summit’s research-backed approach leads to better student outcomes.” Schools have used that seeming endorsement to back up their decision to adopt the model.”
Maybe the first thing public schools should do is stop worshiping at the alter of prestigious universities.
Mentioning “Harvard” on a website is enough to convince a public school to purchase the Summit product?
Public schools need to stop swallowing ed reform malarkey. No one is forcing our school districts to adopt these stupid fads and gimmicks. They’re signing on voluntarily.
Stop falling for every sales pitch that comes out of the ed reform lobby.
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Later this month, UnKochMyCampus.org has plans to publish a model policy to prevent donor influence from eroding academic independence.
You’re right Chiara,. Too many universities have abandoned principles to become oligarch-funded think tanks with students.
The external reviews of Harvard, Johns Hopkins, University of Southern California, and Stanford identifying where they’ve crossed lines, IMO, would be cringe worthy.
Recently, UnKochMyCampus exposed the sell-out of public, George Mason University to the Koch’s.
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This sounds like the next Theranos.
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It’s just amazing how arbitrary ed reform is.
“Zuckerberg’s wife, pediatrician Priscilla Chan, took a fateful tour of a school in the Summit Public Schools charter network two years earlier. The network soon began working with a Facebook engineering team to build out its technology.”
A billionaires spouse took a tour of an over-hyped charter school and almost FOUR HUNDRED public schools ended up turning their schools over the Facebook.
Where are the adults? If Chan/Zuckerberg told them to jump off a bridge would they do it?
Gosh I hope Priscilla Chan doesn’t tour a different charter school. The 400 schools who bought Summit will all have to switch over to the new product.
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(1) Z-berg wants the student data.
(2) Z-berg has partnered with a Russian, Yuri Milner, in the New Horizons Prize, which gives them access to the latest research discoveries.
(3) Milner owns 23 and me, which gives him access to genetic data.
Bill Browder (Magintsky Act) has warned about a portion of the inherent threat.
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23 and Me just made a deal to sell data to Big Pharma. Without stricter privacy laws, the data will probably wind up in the hands of insurance companies that will start determining rates based on DNA. https://gizmodo.com/23andme-is-getting-lots-of-money-from-big-pharma-to-sha-1827891890
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so futuristic — but not
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Well Edmodo was bought by Dragon net (China) and guess who now has social badges? I’m sure our children’s social emotional data was used for studies.
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Didn’t ed reformers just lose a statewide election in California? The plan is they completely ignore that result and jam thru their agenda anyway?
Californians had an opportunity to vote on privatization. They voted it down. They get it anyway?
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We crushed the Republican Party in California ten years ago but the remnants of it went stealth-mode grass roots, with the CCSA picking up a hundred thousand Democrat-leaning soccer moms along the way.
How? Promise them that they can put their kids in a local, segregated school. Only this time, segregated also means segregating by religion.
Large secondary charter schools are certainly keeping African-American and Latino students from enrolling in higher numbers (e.g., Granada Hills High), but in Los Angeles many of the charter schools are small endeavors where church-affiliated Latinos maintain control over their 250-student charter schools. Church lay persons include the lawyers who create and file the necessary forms.
Why pay the Archdioces of Los Angeles a couple thousand dollars a year when you can accomplish the same thing by creating a local charter school? The public even pays for it.
They are super-cultish, for the most part.
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Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez just re-tweeted this dance video of LAUSD striking teachers and students boycotting school (student participation is key here), dancing as one, doing a flashmob line dance in front of their school (Venice High, I think).
Each dance move communicates a different contract negotiation talking point:
FIRST STEP: Reach up and lower those class sizes.” — reach and pull down motion
…
THIRD STEP: “Scoop into that billion-dollar reserve.” — two-hand scooping motion
Then Aretha Franklin music kicks in. Watch it. It’ll give ya chills.
The apoplectic right-wing tweets below this video give you an idea of its effectiveness.
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