Tomorrow we find out if the majority of the LAUSD board answers to the public or to Eli Broad and his fellow billionaires. As part of the strike settlement, the board agreed to vote on a resolution calling for a moratorium on charter schools. They will vote but will the majority vote for or against it? Tomorrow we learn which votes were purchased by Eli and friends.
The following press release came from Los Angeles Alliance for a Nrw Economy, which fights for a fair economy, for working people and for the environment.
MEDIA ADVISORY for TUESDAY, January 29 at 12 PM
Contact: Haley Potiker – 714-457-2852 – hpotiker@laane.org
Parents Bear Witness to School Board Vote on Charter Moratorium
LAUSD parents who were leaders in teachers strike support show up to make sure district keeps its promise on charter industry moratorium
WHO: Parent leaders in teachers’ strike support effort
WHEN: TUESDAY, January 29, 2018 at 12 PM
WHERE: LAUSD Headquarters, 333 S. Beaudry
WHAT: Parent activists will be available for comment at LAUSD board meeting
LOS ANGELES — The tentative agreement between UTLA and LAUSD includes a commitment by the Board of Education to vote on a resolution calling on the state of California to impose a moratorium on charter growth in LAUSD. Parents who have been organizing together with UTLA to combat privatization will attend the meeting to hold the board accountable to their promise.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Ed Reform fighting back:https://amp.usatoday.com/amp/2694201002
Jeanne Allen hates publicschools and unions. She loves charters, whether or not for profit, home schooling, cybercharters. She cut her teeth at the Heritage Foundation.
and she lives inside the ongoing “teachers are the problem” echo chamber
If the board votes against the resolution, the teachers should walk out on strike again.
From the latest RedQueen in LA,, What’s A Moratorium? She breaks down the numbers of charter money:donations to the Board members:
Melvoin $5,769,988
Gonez $3,429,323
Garcia $1,158,834
Vladovic $503,582
McKenna $0
Schmerelson $0
Not hard to guess which way the vote will go.
CCSA (CA Charter School Association) is expected to bus in a ton of matching t-shirt wearers to grab all the speaker cards. Can you blame them? Their gravy train of public money with no accountability is suddenly being scrutinized by the public.
http://redqueeninla.com/2019/01/28/%ef%bb%bfwhats-a-moratorium/
Truly disgusting. I hope they keep a red light outside their offices so the people know when they’re conducting their business.
Don’t believe anything you see of hear. Keep up the fight and subvert the system from the classroom up. Top down will never happen!
LAUSD Board Member Scott Schmerelson, who has access to the real numbers, put this out on his Facebook page —
“82% of LAUSD Charter Schools are under-enrolled.”
The first comment underneath Schmerelson’s Facebook post:
Jennifer Liebi Zelazny: “That alone is a reason for a cap.”
What happened to those 100,000 or 50,000 (or so) LAUSD kids on charter school wait lists desperate to get into charters, but who were denied because of a lack of space in LAUSD’s existing charter schools — with those wait lists being constantly cited as justification for opening even more charter schools, or expanding the ones that already exist?
I know of one charter school, whose charter application claimed — based on some dubious polling which the charter org itself conducted — that they would be enrolling over 300 students. They ended up getting around 50. The punishment for such public lying … nothing.
As Schmerelson, who as access to the real numbers, now shares with us, those wait list claims are a complete fiction, as is the demand for more charters … so there’s goes the justification for opening more.
This is as good a time as any to re-visit the classic charter school takedown by John Oliver:
(as of today, it has 10,256,043 views in just a couple years … there’s no equivalently successful video on the pro-charter side … forget 10 million views, there’s not one video backing charters with even 10 hundred, or 1,000 views)
Thank you, Jack.
The financial crisis mantra…
Beutner and his allies smiled, when the board agreed to vote on a resolution
calling on the state of California to impose a moratorium on charter growth in LAUSD.
If “agree to vote” shifts the focus off the district’s reserves, pretend to “cave”…
Glenn Sacks:
According to UTLA, “Beutner and his allies at the LA County Office of Education (LACOE) continue to claim that LAUSD is in a financial crisis and has had a running deficit for many years. [This]…is false: The district has had surpluses every year ranging from $210 million to $517 million since 2013-14.”
Arbitrator David A. Weinberg, the Neutral Chair of the California Public Employment Relations Board fact-finding panel, while noting the challenges LAUSD faces, found that the District’s reserves skyrocketed from $500 million in 2013-2014 to $1.8 billion in 2017-2018. How does one run a deficit every year and then quadruple one’s reserve in a five-year period?
LAUSD currently has the largest reserve in the history of California education. This reserve is 26 times as big as what is legally required. (The required reserve is 1% of annual revenue. LAUSD’s is 26% of annual revenue).
…UTLA also points out a fact that has been mostly lost in the budgetary debate — namely, that neither the county, the state’s Department of Education, December’s fact-finding panel nor the other experts cited by the district have actually independently performed an audit. Never, the union adds, has it ever seen LACOE contradict a district budget when the district claims that it is in financial crisis. Everybody — the press included — has simply accepted LAUSD’s three-year projections at face value.