Bill Raden of Capital & Main identifies the culprit who stripped charter reform bills of anything that offended the powerful charter lobby: Ann O’Leary, Governor Gavin Newsom’s chief of staff.
O’Leary previously served as senior education Advisor to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign and made sure that the candidate stuck to the charter industry script (for-profit bad, nonprofit good). She has a long Association with the Center for AMERICAN Progress, the DC think tank that still adheres to the failed ideas of Race to the Top, including charter advocacy.
And so a bold effort to roll back the legal protections for an unregulated industry that is ridden with scandal and corruption is blocked by faux progressive Democratic insiders.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
We need to do a better job of learning about the education policy heads of our political candidates. Tells a lot more than their public statements. So disappointing about Governor Newsom. Let’s not let Democratic presidential candidates get away with hiding Ed Reformers on their staffs.
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Look at staff background
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Do we have any current breakdowns, Diane? The media isn’t helping.
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Sherrod Brown’s legislative aide for education is rumored to be former TFA. She’s a graduate of the $70,000 a year private, George Washington University.
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yes; make every person on a candidate’s staff be “seen” for every connection
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The evasiveness of political candidates when it comes to public education, masquerading for the privatization reform movement should serve as litmus tests and red flags.
Double-talk, pandering to win votes, and a lack of clarity can only serve to hurt our nation and our public institutions, and harm the future of our children.
Gavin Newsom and his hire Ann O’Leary are a prime example of this type of danger.
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We all knew this was going to happen as soon as Ann O’Leary was appointed Chief of Staff/Ed advisor. She tells him what to do and he just goes along with it. What possible workaround is there for that kind of charterey gatekeeping?
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Ann O’Leary fits Jezebel’s description of Sheryl Sandberg- she relishes “an image built for rich white women who seem only to view feminist progress in terms of their individual success climbing the corporate ladder and making bank- –capitalist empowerment feminism.”
Some Black people sold out their communities’ democratic rights at the direction of corporate and tech tyrants. The female CAP staff, current and former, sold out children and members of their own sex.
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Rich white men govern the U.S. and, to their shame, corporate feminists making bank for themselves aid them.
It took a female journalist (Miami Herald) to bring Epstein to justice. It took a Diane Ravitch to stop the decimation of a career that has lifted the most women into financial independence.
It’s America’s shame that the women at New America, at CAP, at the 74, at Students First, exist.
In a better world, CAP’s damage to the U.S. would have stopped after their anointed Democratic candidate for President lost to Trump.
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That “anoited Dem candidate” by those DFERS and not so super super delegates gave us the dump. Now the daughter is doing the same, and her husband is a GOP Hedge Funder. Who qualified her to speak to teachers? Bet she’s getting her script from the “anoited” crumb.
Go Bernie.
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‘Disappointing’ is not strong enough a word. California governors seem determined to keep California public education at the bottom of the barrel for the rich to get richer. Newsom just stuck his finger in the eye of every public school student, teacher, and family in the state to make his billionaire oil and sweatshop buddies happy. That will come back to haunt him. Don’t ever bother trying to run for national office, Gavin. You’ll lose.
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So sorry to see California go down the same road of bad decisions….again.
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Thank you. I keep saying to myself, “At least Newsom isn’t as bad as Villaraigosa.” And he is. But one day soon, California needs a true people’s governor instead of the lesser of two evils. It won’t happen until Washington does some serious progressive taxation and trust busting to break the enormous wealth and power of California’s blight of billionaires. We need a New Deal. Go Bernie, and grow the Squad.
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“And he is not,” that should have read.
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This is why the striking Oakland teachers settled far too soon for far too little. Ann O’Leary was Newsom’s ed policy person before the strike began. She was a known political agent after her work with Hilary, and should have been on everyone’s horizon vis a vis strike demands and strategies and guarantees etc. Teachers should not have gone back as long as she was at Newsom’s ear biding her time to undermine public schools. Nationally, the series of teacher strikes was remarkable for scale and solidarity and community support. They paralyzed the society around them which cannot function unless 3mil k-12 public schoolteachers supervise 50mil kids daily. They had the govt., the authorities, the privatizing foundations and advocates cornered but then settled too soon for too little when they had the power to make real gains to recover from the decades of deep damage to the public sector, to their students and their communities. This lesson is not being discussed anywhere I can read. There is a reflexive ritual of celebrating the striking teachers who were doubtless brave and smart, and the rest of the story is ignored.
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Jeffrey Epstein’s friend, Larry Summers, is the poster child for CAP’s values and intelligence. Reportedly, during Hillary’s campaign, his tactical advice was to emphasize her closeness with Wall Street’s bankers rather than distance herself from them.
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Media reported at the time about the observations of CAP’s Neera Tanden who described CAP’s invitation to Netanyahu as leading to a “riven staff” and a “hatred” of her by the “extreme left”.
It’s interesting that the destruction of public education didn’t upset CAP’s staff.
This from news today, “Trump-ally Netanyahu is mulling whether Omar Tlaib can enter Israel”.
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One of the weirdest ironies today is that Israel is governed by a kleptocratic fascist regime. Netanyahu cozies up to Orban in Hungary, Putin in Russia, Bolsonaro in Brazil, and the current occupant of the White House. They implement a policy against Palestinians that is Nazi-adjacent. And then, surprise, surprise, they cynically invoke the specter of anti-Semitism as a blanket justification for their policies. But make no mistake, they are fascist to the core. CAP and Tanden should hang their heads in shame and repent, but they will double down.
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Tanden, in her defense of the Netanyahu invite said, it would put to rest any anti-Semite labeling of the organization.
A well-tread strategy of the richest 0.1%- they create PR for pseudo anti-bigotry policy and hire demographically selected individuals as a front. The ruse enables oligarchs to steal goods and services owned by the American people.
America’s predators employed the tactic to achieve school privatization and to legitimize neoliberal policy by politicians like Rahm. The plan has the added bonus of distracting from the evidence-based bigotry of fascists like Trump.
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“Hundreds of charter schools – which are independently controlled, but publicly funded – around the state are, like the A3 schools, “non-classroom based.” In A3’s case, the schools were virtual and operated almost completely online. In other cases, non-classroom-based schools employ an “independent study” method. Students at independent study schools might show up once a week to meet with a teacher and get new assignments.
Here are three vulnerabilities the alleged A3 scam exposed in how California tracks attendance and allocates funding that could be exploited by bad actors.”
There’s a bigger problem here. They scam the attendance system so they are double reporting in the state as a whole. The public school would count “1” and at the same time the charter school would count that same student as “1”. Same kid. That means the number of students attending charter schools – broadly- has to be inaccurate.
California doesn’t know how many students actually attend charter schools, as opposed to public schools. The (total) charter school number is not accurate- it can’t be. Some part of the charter school number is invented to get funding.
https://www.voiceofsandiego.org/topics/education/charter-school-case-exposes-big-loopholes-in-how-the-state-funds-schools/
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