Jack Covey, a regular reader and contributor, posted the following comment about the latest revelation from blogger Michael Kohlhaas in Los Angeles. Kohlhaas (which may be a pseudonym) somehow gained access to a treasure trove of emails between the Green Dot charter chain and the California Charter Schools Association, as well as between these entities and public figures like school board members. He has published a small number of these emails, and he continues to drop them like bombs (think emails from Wikileaks). What we are learning from these data dumps (drip, drip, drip) is that certain school board members and public officials were more loyal to the charter industry than to the children and public schools of Los Angeles.
Covey writes:
Blogger and L.A. political gadfly Michael Kohlhaas shares confidential emails detailing how CCSA’s Cassy Horton was only one of two people who where provided with the text of (then-indicted-&-future-felon) LAUSD Board Member Ref Rodriguez’s LAUSD board resolution pertaining to charter school oversight, with Horton being provided that by none other than Ref himself.
Mind you, as detailed in Horton’s email, only two people were provided Ref’s board resolution:
Dr. Richard Vladovic, LAUSD Board Member
AND
Cassie Horton of CCSA (California Charter Schools Association lobbyist)
Not the five other board members
Not the LAUSD Charter Schools Division (CSD)
Not UTLA (Perish the thought!)
At this point, more private emails show that CCSA’s Cassie Horton then EXTENSIVELY RE-WROTE the board resolution so it would be more to CCSA’s / Horton’s liking, with Ref dutifully accepting and not challenging Horton’s extensive rewrite in any way. The rewrite, of course, gutted LAUSD’s ability to exercise oversight or properly regulate charter schools.
In essence, YOU HAVE DOCUMENTED PROOF (emails) showing a totally unelected charter school partisan and lobbyist effectively doing the work of, and exercising the effective power of an actual LAUSD Board Member … because one of those LAUSD Board Members, now-convicted-felon Ref Rodriguez was letting her to do.
Ref was basically Horton’s and the charter school industry’s cowardly (see parenthetical BELOW) ventriloquist mannequin.
(By the way, CCSA backer and Netflix billionaire Reed Hastings was, at the time, paying the full costs of Ref’s multi-million-dollar criminal defense lawyers, who ultimately got him what many consider was a sweet deal for pleading Guilty, but all of that probably didn’t influence Ref’s dealings with Ms. Horton in anyway. <—- SARCASM)
The mind boggles.
After Kohlhaas started tweeting about this, Horton jointed the Twitter thread, and incredibly tweeted that her doing all this was totally legal and proper:
(Hey, nothing wrong with Ref giving Horton a “heads up,” along with a request for Horton’s input? Right?)
https://twitter.com/Cassy_Horton/status/1145389749764419585
And no Kohlhaas blog article would be complete without a snarky cartoon one of the blog’s subjects:
(in this case, former LAUSD Board Member & convicted felon Ref Rodriguez)
http://michaelkohlhaas.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/ref_rodriguez_ccsa_cartoon.png
Kohlhaas wrote:
KOHLHAAS: “And yeah, it’s true that Ref Rodriguez is long gone, is a convicted felon, and so on. He’s off the table. But none of the other players here are gone. And the system that allowed the CCSA and the baby-sacrificers in the charter industry it serves to insinuate themselves this deeply into what’s meant to be a democratically controlled system, that allowed them to insert their wholly-controlled puppets into power and then to pull their strings so that they dance to the tunes called by their zillionaire masters, that system outlived Ref Rodriguez and will, unless these privatizers are specifically defanged, will outlive all of us.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Liberal education reformers sometimes argue that privatized schools can be regulated properly in the more liberal states that regulate everything more.
California disproves that theory. Washington DC does too.
If they can’t even properly regulate the schools they have how likely is it the schools will be properly regulated when the goal is reached and public schools are eradicated? Then there will be 7 or 8 government contractors lobbying against regulation of their companies and we’ll be wholly dependent on them.
It’s a bad governance model. They created a bad government. They all sneer at existing public school governance schemes but the ones they create behind closed doors are a disaster. It’s loaded with perverse incentives and it guarantees to get worse as it grows.
They never really grappled with the universality of public schools. They are people who natter on and on about “systems thinking” but those words mean something. It doesn’t matter if they reach their privatization goals with a collection of contractors. It’s still a universal system. It has to be. That’s why it’s DIFFERENT than higher ed, or a food truck, or health care. We don’t have universal systems in those areas. We have ONE- public schools.
One of ed reforms top lobbyists, David Obsborne, DEFENDS privatization by promising, vowing, to turn K-12 education into health care. This is serious ed reform work in the Washington Post. No one questions it.
Are they out of their minds? The plan is to replace a free public universal system with an expensive patchwork system loaded with perverse incentives that doesn’t cover 25% of people AT ALL? That sounds great! Let’s definitely do that. Then we can battle for 25 years to “extend” K-12 education to the whole country and make it universal. That’s going great with healthcare, where we have lots of places without providers let alone anyone who can pay for it.
They actually know this. There are two places in Michigan where they privatized the entire system and had periods where people didn’t know if they would have a school AT ALL. They would have to move.
DeVos is even worse. She refuses to admit it IS a universal system. Her vision is that of 1860. That’s the federal government position. They pretend there’s no K-12 system guarantee. That’s how they dealt with that problem- they ignore it. It’s nuts.
Maybe it is time to seek redress in the courts. There must be some basis in law in which it is illegal to substitute a separate and unequal private school mostly for children of color for an authentic public school with all the rights therein. I am not a lawyer, but it makes no sense to stand around and let new laws or practice for that matter undermine democracy. There must be some lawyers with imagination that can use existing civil rights law or other laws to start a lawsuit.
Because let’s think ed reform’s plan out all the way. Say I’m in a city of 7500 and it’s predominantly Catholic. 70% of people take an ed reform voucher and head off to the religious school. In this fantasy they have, there’s still a solid public school with a comprehensive program of study? Who goes there? In the fantasy are there still X numbers of students in the school? As many as pre-privatization? That public school CHANGES with privatization. Profoundly. It can’t NOT change.
DeVos and the rest of the federal employees are telling these people a fairy story. They’re telling them they can have the same public schools they have now with two whole new publicly-funded sectors added. That is not true. It is a lie. They could LOSE and they could lose BIG. She won’t tell them that because the fairy story is essential to her marketing pitch. “Win/win!” “No risk! No money down!” It’s nonsense. She has no earthly idea how this will radical restructure will play out and neither do any of the rest of them. They are baking in some collateral risk that they refuse to tell anyone about. And it’s substantial because ed reform schemes are irreversible. When public schools are gone, they’re gone. That’s it. No backsies.
When Obama reformed health care he said he wished he a universal public system to build on, but he did not. He had a fragmented private system that didn’t cover anyone.
Ed reform, amazingly, flips that. They want to eradicate a universal public system – deliberately NOT build on it, and instead pitch it in the trash- and replace it with a fragmented system LIKE HEALTH CARE. The health care that is a disaster and which both Republicans and Democrats either pretend to reform or actually attempt to reform every single year. Just to reach “universal”. Just to get to the minimum.
You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to turn that down. It’s a bad deal. period.
Run, don’t walk, away from that deal. Keep. Hold. Build on your investment – your ASSET- rather than going with Bernie Maddow. That way is madness. Only billionaire ed reformers can handle that much downside risk. Regular people can’t.
I can’t believe Beutner and the smoke filled room charter scumbags on the board are not able to do their jobs as public servants properly; they can’t even write their own memos; they have to get the CCSA to let them copy during the quiz. Pitiful. They don’t know how to tie their own shoelaces.
This is par for the course in Philadelphia. Story on how charter operators were consulted on new performance framework. This is just one example. https://thenotebook.org/articles/2018/06/11/philly-school-district-nearing-new-accountability-rules-for-charters/
“After Kohlhaas started tweeting about this, Horton joined the Twitter thread, and incredibly tweeted that her doing all this was totally legal and proper”
Evidently, Horton believes if you tell a lie enough it becomes the truth just like Giuliani and his master, Donald Trump.
“Even If He Did Do It, It Wouldn’t Be a Crime”: Rudy Giuliani on President Trump
… “I am telling you,” Giuliani said during an interview, “that their investigation is so ridiculous that, even if he did do it, it wouldn’t be a crime.”
https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/even-if-he-did-do-it-it-wouldnt-be-a-crime-rudy-giuliani-donald-trump-robert-mueller-moscow-buzzfeed
“Rudy Giuliani: Paying Stormy Daniels Was Not a Crime”
“Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani cites John Edwards as a precedent that the $130,000 hush money payment to Stormy Daniels was not a violation of campaign finance laws.”
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2018/12/16/rudy_giuliani_paying_stormy_daniels_is_not_a_crime.html
http://michaelkohlhaas.org/wp/2019/07/15/in-january-2018-just-mere-months-after-millions-of-dollars-in-charter-school-money-bought-icky-sticky-nicky-melvoins-election-to-the-lausd-school-board-he-asked-the-california-charte/
According to Kohlhaas, this article / (formerly) confidential email from Kohlhaas is just an overture for the opera that is to come (some of that opera already has come.).
The latest involves LAUSD Board District (4) Member and alleged agent of privatization Nick Melvoin, and it’s brutal stuff.
Take the worst fears that people had about how Nick Melvoin would act once he began serving on the LAUSD Board, — acting as a privatization puppet, privatizing, union-busting, letting charters co-locate and destroy public schools that have been serving students for over a century, etc. —- and then multiply that by TEN, and that’s what these latest emails from Kohlhaas are showing.
Email documents prove that the California Charter Schools Association (CCSA) and CCSA’s top charter operators actually write Nick Melvoin’s Board Resolutions — not just re-write, as was described in an earlier Kohlhaas’ piece (the subject of this thread), where they re-wrote Ref Rodriguez’ piece to their liking, and Ref just presents it as his own.
No, in this case, Nick just emails CCSA and asks them to write it — you charter honchos can collaborate if you wish amongst yourselves, first, if you want, then just give me the final draft to present. They then write it in its entirety, then Melvoin will just present it at a live LAUSD Board meeting, and act as if it was his idea and act as if it was Nick himself who wrote the motion, when he most certainly did not.
You see Nick Melvoin is such “an independent voice”, who is all about “putting kids first.” (SEE BELOW)
This all a secret from the general public, btw, as CCSA’s Cassy Horton is careful to say in all her emails (contained in the Kohlhaas’ piece)
“We ask that you please do not forward or otherwise share this document.”
… and also say in the emails’ subject lines
“CONFIDENTIAL DRAFT FOR YOUR REVIEW”
… hmmm… “confidential” ? Not anymore it’s not. 😉
Kohlhaas sets up this story by pointing out how
1) The L.A. Times endorsed Melvoin, in large part, because he “is an independent voice” that is needed on the LAUSD Board.
2) Melvoin, in his inauguration speech, said that everything that he will do while serving on the LAUSD Board will be about about “putting kids first.”
Then Kohlhaas tells the story totally contracting these claims, providing smoking gun emails to back up this accusation.
He always has a snarky cartoon with a word balloon. In this case, here’s Nick Melvoin (with Kohlhaas providing the dialogue, of course)
CCSA ‘s resolution … errr… excuse me … Board Member Nick Melvoin’s (COUGH! COUGH!) resolution Is about setting up a system and favorable conditions for charter orgs not just to invade traditional public school campuses via co-location. This is about ways for them to seize the land outright, and permanently turn it over to private interests.
The system will be “performance-” or test-score-based. Traditional Public Schools will lose the campuses — some of which they’ve existed on those campuses on for over 100 years — to the CCSA charter school orgs that bought Melvoin’s election. Those poor TPS’s will lose their campuses simply because their students have lower test scores compared to the students in those test-prep-factory charter schools.
Hunger Games for school campuses!!!
WTF???!!!
Never heard of that one … till reading Kohlhaas’ piece.
Read it:
http://michaelkohlhaas.org/wp/2019/07/15/in-january-2018-just-mere-months-after-millions-of-dollars-in-charter-school-money-bought-icky-sticky-nicky-melvoins-election-to-the-lausd-school-board-he-asked-the-california-charte/
Keep in mind that CCSA and its various backers, including Netflix billionaire Reed Hastings, pumped in $10 million to get Nick elected, and like a regular john with his favorite hooker, CCSA wants to get their money’s worth.
I love how Kohlhaas refers to Nick’s right-hand woman as “his utterly satanic senior advisor Allison Holdorff Polhill.”
Don’t mince words, Dude!
Kohlhaas promises that this stuff is just the first of long series of similar emails from and/or regarding Melvoin. If this is the case, it’s grounds for a recall, as the progressive voters whom Melvoin conned into voting for him, actually believed him when Melvoin denied being a paid agent and ventriloquist mannequin for interests out to privatize the system.
For example, before Melvoin ran for LAUSD Board, he wrote an infamous op-ed where openly cheered and salivated for (in his words) “a hostile (corporate) takeover” of LAUSD. Here’s Melvoin’s infamous “hostile takeover” op-ed.
https://www.the74million.org/article/opinion-maybe-a-hostile-takeover-is-precisely-what-the-los-angeles-unified-school-district-needs/
However, during the campaign, he flip-flopped and said that he re-thought his position, and that he no longer believed in the need for “a hostile corporate takeover” of LAUSD Schools, and would be a Board Member for all schools — public and private charter, all in a successful effort to trick Westside progressive voters into voting for him.
In short, Melvoin lied. … and these email documents definitively prove this.
I’ve talked to those folks about this latest stuff from Kohlhaas, and my anecdotal interviews show that — had they known that Melvoin would do all this (and also install a non-educator such s Beutner as Super) — those same voters said that THEY NEVER WOULD HAVE VOTED FOR NICK MELVOIN.
“We (the progressive Board District 4 voters) got played,” said one of them to me, and he sounded quite vexed.
“The L.A. Times endorsed Melvoin, in large part, because he “is an independent voice” that is needed on the LAUSD Board.”
So much for that idea.
http://michaelkohlhaas.org/wp/2019/07/18/ganas-academy-recruiter-ed-rodriguez-yes-the-guy-that-sakshi-jain-was-paying-a-bounty-of-850-per-student-signed-up-to-attend-her-creepy-little-charter-school-had-a-secret-recr/#more-27691
From the Ganas vs. Catskill Elementary saga, … previously written about on this blog:
https://dianeravitch.net/2019/05/03/california-parents-fight-to-save-their-school-from-charter-invasion/
Kohlhaas has someone obtained yet another blockbuster confidential email from one Ed Rodriguez, a veteran charter school operative to Ganas head honcho Sakshi Jain, in which he gives the details of the classic ed. reform text:
“How to Poach Students Away from Public Schools, and Get / Trick Them to Enroll in a Privatized Charter”
Okay, that’s not the real title, but OMG! you MUST MUST, MUST read this document. In another Kohlhaas email, Ed Rodriguez says that he charges $850 / per child successfully recruited.
He’s a charter school head-hunter of children. Yeeesh!
(I love the threatening “NOTICE” at the end, ordering folks: DO NOT copy, share, forward, etc … or else … it’s “strictly prohibited”
Or else WHAT?)
Click to access Memo%20Style%202_Redacted.pdf
Here’s the text from Ed Rodriguez:
(Look how much detail he goes into. Given those touted “charter school waiting lists”, why do they need to do all this?
This is Eva Moskowitz-level chicanery)
—————————————
Ed Rodriguez ed.rodriguez.oc@gmail.com
Monday, May 20, 2019 9:36 PM
Sakshi Jain; Jasmine Ruiz Ed Rodriguezpage
Good evening and my apologies for the confusion via text.
Below are our enrollment processes and next steps:
— Canvassing
o Recruiter will canvas the Carson and Wilmington community and local businesses
Recruiters will focus greatly on El Super located in Wilmington.
o Rent Fee per day is $150
— this is paid on a daily basis as requested by manager
— personal checks are not accepted ‐‐El Super requires cashier’s checks
— personal checks are not accepted ‐‐El Super requires cashier’s checks
— Ed will pay for it to expedite the process and request reimbursement to Ganas
Materials Needed
— Small table
— tablecloth
— 100 additional copies of enrollment applications
— tablecloth
— 100 additional copies of enrollment applications
— 100 additional copies of enrollment applications
—You may want to consider adding a page that asks families if transportation is required
— clipboards
— Parent Questions
o Parents are asked to call either the recruiter’s cell number or the Ganas number provided in the flyero Particular questions will be referred to the school ‐‐i.e. transportation, uniforms, etc.
o *Parents are asked to call either the recruiter’s cell number or the Ganas number provided in the flyero Particular questions will be referred to the school ‐‐i.e. transportation, uniforms, etc.
— Intake
o Distribution of Enrollment Applications
o Distribution of Enrollment Applications
— Recruiter will distribute enrollment applications in and around El Super (Carson/Wilmington)
o Collection
— Completed applications will be collected by recruiter at El Super on a daily basis
— A message by Ed to both Sakshi & Jasmine will be sent informing the team of any applications collected*
— A Google Doc page1image3815311360will be completed on our end for the following reasons:*
— to share all basic information of new applicant in order to expedite the process of the application by Ganas*
— to track all applications collected and completed dates*
— Invoicing purposes*
— It is encouraged that all parties maintain this Google Doc up‐to‐date as this will be used to market the spaces available for each grade level with community stakeholders*
— It will be Ganas responsibility to contact Parents to schedule the intake meeting and collection of all remaining documents.*
— It is imperative that all leads /applications are completed by Ganas within a 72-hour window of notification.*
— Incomplete applications will be collected by recruiter at El Super on a daily basis*
— The following pages will be filled by parent with the recruiter’s assistance*
Page 1: Checklist /Lista de Matriculacion
Ganas: Enrollment Intake…
page1image3815394896page1image3815395152page1image3815395408page1image3815395728page1image3815395984page1image3815396240page1image3815396560
— Page 2: Intent to Enroll Form (Prop 39) /Formulario de Intento
— Page 3: Ganas Academy Student Enrollment Form /Forma de Matriculacion
— A message by Ed to both Sakshi & Jasmine will be sent informing the team of any applications collected
— A Google Doc will be completed on our end for the following reasons:
— to share all basic information of new applicant in order to expedite the process of the application by Ganas
— to track all applications collected and completed dates
— Invoicing purposes
— It is encouraged that all parties maintain this Google Doc up‐to‐date as this will be used to market the spaces available for each grade level with community stakeholders
It will be Ganas responsibility to contact Parents to schedule the intake meeting and collection of all remaining documents.
It is imperative that all leads /applications are completed by Ganas within a 72-hour window of notification.
Please provide feedback if applicable regarding these steps.
‐‐
Ed Rodriguez
KOHLHAAS: ” … I believe I can sum it up fairly accurately as two long pages which boil down to:
Set up a table at El Super in Wilmington
Lie like a MFer (MFer is an abbreviation of “mother-f… you know the rest)
???
PROFIT!!
Oh, and also, El Super isn’t letting this happen for free. They charge $150 for people to pitch stuff to their customers from a table. And here’s another email from Sakshi Jain ordering her subordinate to cut five cashier’s checks for $150 each to cover the space rent.
It’s only money, friends, and it’s not Sakshi Jain’s money, so why the hell not?
Now, as I said, I don’t really feel qualified to do the sociology here. I will leave it to others to discuss and determine how these privatizers chose El Super as their primary base of operations.1 My forte is, of course, publishing records. Read on, therefore, for a transcription of Ed Rodriguez’s entire recruitment plan for GANAS Academy!