The charter Industry has one thing going for it. Guess what that is. Not superior academic results. No, its trump card is money. In this society, money is power. Politicians always are in search of money for their next campaign. Big donors always find open doors. Follow the money has become a precept more recognizable in this era than the Ten Commandments.
In California, there is a heated battle over how to reform the charter law. That law was designed by billionaires like Reed Hastings (formerly a member of the State Board of Education) to unleash charter schools from any oversight or supervision. The deal was that they would get millions of public dollars, and their authorizers would be hundreds of miles away, and the state would lack the staff to monitor their activities. How great a deal is that: the charter operators collect millions from the state and no one watches them. The rich and powerful California Charter Schools Association lobbies to keep the charters free from oversight.
In the wake of multiple scandals, the Legislature has been considering modest efforts to hold charters accountable and to limit their ability to evade oversight. Of course, the CCSA considers these efforts to be completely inappropriate. Instead of spending their time and resources cleaning their Augean stables, they are intent on squelching laws that threaten their freedom from oversight.
Rob Sandusky, a Parent in Ross Valley, California, sent the following warning:
EdSource is reporting that California Governor Gavin Newsom is potentially looking to gut the two pending bills to curb out of control charter growth:
AB1505: restoring local control to public school districts to approve/deny charters including due to fiscal impact to existing public schools
AB1507 would end ability for districts or counties to authorize charters into neighboring counties
https://edsource.org/2019/governors-team-jumps-into-fray-over-contested-charter-school-bill/615053
Newsom is making concessions to the Charter / Privatization to water down these bills. In looking at the Ed Source article, some of the changes make it very easy for charters to make (unsubstantiated) claims of bias to ensure that they get approved at the state level.
Newsom assigned a charter-heavy task force to come up with recommendations from which AB 1505 and 1507 were drafted (if I’m not mistaken), and now he is looking to gut this same legislation.
Voters in California need to contact Newsom’s office, and those of a few key senators, and tell him to stop pandering to the Charter Industry. CCSA has been lobbying hard, paying for protesters to show up in Sacramento with free rides, pizza, t-shirts and who knows what. They have a TON of cash and are backed by direct connections to the Privatization billionaires (check out this chart of how our local charter school – denied by both the district and county – is intertwined with the Privatization pushers and have been destroying and disrupting our community for several years:
[ LINK:. https://coggle.it/diagram/WN_bdOqtdwABB-Hu/t/ross-valley-charter-and-dark-money-networks/f8e5b506af9b2db7e2f2c100eb7ff0e6f430108fc04d0c7e7d74a5e2e2cfb360]
Here is contact information for people to call. People are watching what happens in California, the “Wild West” of charter law. CCSA has been using it as a demonstration and testing ground for taking over a state and will apply learnings across the country.
How else are we to combat the tide of money and influence coming from billionaires overriding common sense legislation?
Governor Gavin Newsom:
Phone: (916) 445-2841
Fax: (916) 558-3160
Senate coauthor of AB 1505 is:
Nancy Skinner (D) D9
(916) 651-4009
Senate Education Committee Members:
Senator Connie M. Leyva (Chair) (D) D20
Capitol Office: (916) 651-4020Senator Scott Wilk (Vice Chair) (R) D21
Capitol Office: (916) 651-4021Senator Ling Ling Chang (R) D29
Capitol Office: (916) 651-4029Senator Maria Elena Durazo (D) D24
Capitol Office: (916) 651-4024Senator Steven M. Glazer (D) D7
Capitol Office: (916) 651-4007Senator Mike McGuire (D) D2
Capitol Office: (916) 651-4002Senator Richard Pan (D) D6
Capitol Office: (916) 651-4006
Thank you again for all that you do!
Best,
Rob Sandusky
After Rob posted this comment, another reader in California added this postscript:
Commenting on Rob Sandusky’s request to phone members of the CA Senate Education Committee. This morning the Committee narrowly passed both bills, so these watered down versions are still alive, and are wending their way to a full Senate vote, if they first clear a financial committee. Phoning the Governor’s office, listed, is still a good idea. We would love to see California becoming a model of accountability.
It opus discouraging to see the charter industry snatch victory from the jaws of defeat, but bear in mind that the tide is turning against its greed and rapacity. Hold your elected representatives accountable for their votes. Never give up. Never.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Tom Steyer, no longer on the CAP Board, decided to run for President. Neither Newsom nor Steyer benefit from the CAP/Gates baggage.
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Nor do the American people.
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The irrepressible Michael Kohlhaas is at it again:
http://michaelkohlhaas.org/wp/2019/07/11/green-dot-charter-schools-ceo-christina-de-jesus-served-on-gavin-newsoms-state-charter-school-task-force-earlier-this-year-according-to-tony-thurmond-the-point-was-to-identify-what-is-trul/#more-27324
In this blog post, he contrasts Tony Thurmond’s public claim that the charter commission would consider all voices equally — with the focus on what’s best for kids…
… WITH …
Green Dot Charters’ leader Christina DeJesus’ (CDJ) private email in which she boast to folks in the charter industry, telling them not to worry about anything damaging emerging from the commission, as she claims that, because the charter folks had the majority of the commission’s votes, they would be the “ultimate voice” of what the commission produces, (but CDJ, of course, swears all the email’s recipients of the email to secrecy, so that Thurmond’s description will be what the public falsely believes to be the truth .. not anymore, I guess, thanks to Kohlhaas’s blog.)
There’s more tidbits in Kohlhaas’ post.
After the L.A. Times put out an expose of yet another embarrassing charter scam in South Central, DeJesus wrote a Letter to the Editor (LTE) in which she illogically accused charter critics of causing the scam, as they drove the corrupt charter operators to commit this wholesale larceny … a letter never published, but hilarious none-the-less.
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Also from Kohlhaas is this remarkable email document about how the charter industry does damage control to counter the endless parade of charter school scandals: (which Kohlhaas is more damning than the Christina DeJesus stuff above)
(another one that was never supposed to be seen by the public … but now we can all read it)
Click to access 20190328-1026-Sean_Thibault-Fwd__Re__CCSA_Communications_Advisory_Group__LA_Times_Series_on_Authorization_and_Political_Landscape.pdf
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When “talking points” are provided and, described as such, it’s evidence that it’s corporate spin not a grass roots movement for privatization.
Thanks for the post.
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Pandering to moneyed interests is what most California politicians (Republican and Democrat) do best.
It’ may be the only good argument against getting rid of the electoral college.
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“Every time I’m attacked, I raise more money.”
— Nancy Pelosi, speaking to AOC
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/07/11/fed-constant-attacks-and-insults-ocasio-cortez-slams-pelosi-outright-disrespectful
”
In an interview with New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd published online Saturday, Pelosi disparaged Ocasio-Cortez, Tlaib, Omar, and Pressley as a mere “four people” who don’t “have any following.Pelosi’s comments to the Times came in response to continued progressive outrage over her decision to cave to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and pass a $4.6 billion border funding bill without any safeguards for immigrant children.”
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I saw Newsom on Bill Maher a few times. My impression was that he is bright, attractive and articulate. When he mentioned something about a “public-private partnership,” my impression of him changed. My concern is he is another smooth talking neoliberal, and we have been there and done that. Time to move on!
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Kamala Harris is on Rachel Maddow tonight…..if only someone with more influence than I have would join me in what I have already done……tell Rachel to raise the subject of Charter schools….and start finding out if there are differences in the opinions about the value of education….Buttegeig has already praised their value as laboratories….Biden probably would not criticize Obama or arne duncan or bill gates…….get education to be automatically looked at as an important subject!
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Rachel Maddox has ever expressed any interest in education or the thefts and scandals of the privatizers.
Mayor Pete lives in a state rampant with charter corruption. He should know better. But then, he is a data-driven McKinsey guy.
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I seem to recall that you’d wanted to be on her show, Diane…&, when broached, she changed the subject.
The only two I like on MSNBC are Lawrence O’Donnell & Chris Hayes.
That having been said, I haven’t watched Hayes’ show in a while, so I hope he hasn’t become a Chris Matthews (who should not be on a news channel at all; his reporting in 2016 was so anti-Bernie & slanted that it was like watching the Dem Party Fox Channel–&, besides, his wife was running for office on Dem money, & that was all about decimating Bernie, too} or a Maddow or Williams.
I try to watch the last word of “The Last Word” nightly–about 2-5 minutes…always interesting.
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That is true and dates back to 2010
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I wrote to Maddow- no interest.
Pete’s campaign has joined with Silicon Valley.
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Maddow is a shallow, long-winded loudmouth. Never understood why so many liberals pay attention to her. I quit doing so months into her show.
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Explanation- a shortage of Bill O’Reilly types on the left?
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Pete is a McKinsey guy.
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Rachel Maddow makes 7 million a year from Comcast/NBC, which has a decades-long relationship with Gates and other billionaires. MSNBC literally stands for Microsoft NBC. NBC also is the home of such bile as the “Education Nation” charter school infomercials. She’ll never say anything that makes them too uncomfortable. I hope she at least asks Kamala about her plan to keep an occupying force in Afghanistan in perpetuity – but somehow I doubt it.
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Schools should not be laboratories for anything.
We should not be experimenting on children.
Anyone who believes we should is just sick.
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Private charter schools are laboratories of monetization. They have a proven history of being very creative in the many and varied ways they extract profit from public tax dollars. That is their biggest “innovation.” The students are just a means to an end for many charter operators.
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And that, Poet, should be “the last word!”
Brilliance from you, as always!
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AB 1505 passed the Senate Ed Committee yesterday but has been substantially gutted. Most notably ithe provision that would have eliminated appeals to the State Board of Education, which is a virtual rubber stamp was removed. By the way you can check the red queen in LA article on charter money in CA and you will see that Glazer, one of the members of the Senate Ed Committee whom you are urging people to contact is one of the top recipients of charter money in the state. Quite a sellout by Newsom, who aligned himself with the CTA and was willing to accept their contributions so he could defeat Villaraigosa in the promary and Cox in the general, but appears to have changed his tune now that he is actually in office.
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Nevermind the fact that charters are under-enrolled.
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Yes! & see the upcoming post “California Charters are the Day Lilies of Education,” whereby the parents are expected to get more students to fill these schools, so they don’t have to close!
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