School district in Marin County agrees to desegregate in settlement with state
The state settled a racial discrimination case Friday with a desegregation plan for a tiny Marin County school district whose nonwhite students were mostly enrolled in a struggling, underfunded elementary and middle school.
Attorney General Xavier Becerra’s office announced the settlement with leaders of the Sausalito Marin City School District. The district said it was “an opportunity to openly and transparently acknowledge past failures” and to “put an end to inequitable education.”
The district had 528 students in 2018-19, about one-third of them white and the rest black, Latino, Asian-American or multiracial, according to district records. One of its two schools, Bayside Martin Luther King Jr. Academy in unincorporated Marin City, had 119 students, eight of them white.
Becerra said state investigators found that the district had intentionally created Bayside MLK Academy in 2013 as a racially and ethnically segregated school for grades kindergarten through eight. The district “cut critical classroom programming” at the school while providing stable funding for its other school, Willow Creek Academy, a publicly funded charter serving students in Sausalito, Becerra said.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Calf. AG Becerra said about Marin County (a hotspot for privatization), “Depriving a child of a fair chance to learn is wicked and warped.”
I presume, Becerra won’t be receiving campaign money from the hedge funds and tech tyrants.
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It’s complicated whether Marin (where I grew up and where my family still lives) is a hot spot for privatization. Sausalito-Marin City has been an outrageous case, and a classic example of liberal/progressives supporting an operation based in far-right principles as long as it (as they perceive it) benefits their own pampered darlings by keeping them at a safe distance from disadvantaged children. The distinction is that the district has a section of public housing with a largely black/Latinx population.
The people of San Rafael, the county seat and largest town, successfully fought off a charter proposal in a hugely controversial battle. There’s a charter in the Ross Valley district in Central Marin that’s widely opposed, and mainstream homes have anti-charter signs in their front yards. I think there are just a couple of other small, groovy, fake-progressive charters around. In general a wealthy, majority-white county isn’t that likely to be a target for privatizers, though.
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The Pahara Institute is in the San Francisco Bay Area. (Pahara is funded by Gates.) It’s founder claims she founded or co-founded TFA, New Schools Venture Fund and Bellwether.
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I had to look it up, but it’s based in he town of Walnut, in Los Angeles County.
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Well…the Pahara site claims that’s where they are. One has to wonder why they make that claim, when it appears the location is much farther south in Walnut, Calf.
Truth and privatization- such infrequent companions.
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New Schools Venture Fund is based in San Francisco, though. There’s lots of privatization action in the Bay Area — just not in Marin County specifically.
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For the students in the financially starved school, it was “a lot”.
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Where does Kim Smith, founder of NSVF, Pahara,…live?
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I don’t know where Smith lives, and you’re correct that Pahara says it’s based in the Bay Area even though its actual address is Southern California. Anyway, the story is that Sausalito-Marin City is an anomaly in Marin, but it’s an anomaly because of the juxtaposition of a rich white town against a poor black-Latinx community, and the response by the privileged of setting up a charter school for those with social capital.
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Carolinesf, a word of caution… don’t be so quick to discount the magnitude of charter privatization even within small districts and “progressive enclaves”, especially Marin.
After watching and researching what is going on in privatization over the past four years, it strikes me that the CCSA seems to be running a “lab” on how to convert public schools to privatized charters – in all kinds of different districts throughout California – to develop a playbook for the rest of the country.
So while suburban Marin might seem like small potatoes, strategies that are applied here are a test-bed for rollout in similar school districts all over the US.
In 2016 CCSA’s annual conference was titled “March to a Million” (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2016/09/09/how-messed-up-is-californias-charter-school-sector-you-wont-believe-how-much/?noredirect=on) – Indeed CCSA approached this campaign with some urgency.
What happens when the reach 1 million, will they stop marching?
Couple this with Eli Broad’s “Superintendents Academy” to tackle the big fish, and you have a systematic toolkit for privatizing public schools (https://www.rethinkingschools.org/articles/boot-camp-for-education-ceos-the-broad-foundation-superintendents-academy). And Broad graduates have done wonders in Oakland, LA and other urban areas.
In the case of the Ross Valley Charter, one of their board members for the last several years, Kristi Kimball, also sits on the board of the CCSA (https://www.ccsa.org/who-we-are). Kimball showed up shortly after RVC won state approval despite 2 attempts and being denied at the local and county level. She has since moved out of Marin but continues to sit on the RVC Board. There are other connections between charter groups in Marin. Further by way of connection to CCSA, the RVC “progressive little charter school” is connected to some seriously deep, dark money. (This diagram was put together by a local grass-roots organization Stand with Public Education researching these connections: https://coggle.it/diagram/WN_bdOqtdwABB-Hu/f8e5b506af9b2db7e2f2c100eb7ff0e6f430108fc04d0c7e7d74a5e2e2cfb360 )
With each little erosion of our public schools, it is very easy to overlook the little increments, like a farmer watching a field of corn grow, until one day he realizes that it is over his head.
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Rob, Yes. We should never ignore the small things because they are small. If we ignore them, then one day instead of a breeze, those small things become a hurricane and destroy all of us.
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Is the Ross Valley charter the reason the public school district is fighting back with pro-public-school banners over Sir Francis Drake Boulevard? I know that one has finessed its way in, amid great turmoil and controversy. I predict a collapse at some point, but we’ll see.
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The tiny rural Lagunitas School District in West Marin several years go fought off an effort to charterize their public school (which was already in the groovy progressive realm). The local parents (who have resources and talent*) mounted a campaign to get people who had signed a charter petition to remove their names. In poorer areas when something like this has happened, the courts have told parents they can’t remove their names, but you don’t tell empowered Marin parents that. Anyway, this is how they do that stuff in West Marin. *This is an area where a lot of people who work for Lucasfilm live, but I don’t know who these guys are or if they do. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ssspVf6v_k
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exposing that crucial truth about devastating reform invasions: not likely to beat the parent resistance in wealthy majority-white counties
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In cases where some of the wealthy white parents do want the charter, as with the groovy progressive Willow Creek charter in Sausalito, it gets more contentious and splits up communities. There’s one like that in a wealthy town in Silicon Valley, Menlo Park, too. But in general, the resistance of privileged parents does fight them off. The formerly gushed-over-as-a-miracle Rocketship charter chain has lost its luster now that privileged Silicon Valley parents have beaten their assault on districts.
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There is a charter for wealthy white parents in Los Gatos. Local families have fought it and lost. It is a private school that’s free except for the $5,000 per family “donation.” A bargain if you get in.
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Oh yeah, I got my towns mixed up. It’s this one. http://www.bullischarterschool.com/
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That’s it. The charter school for rich white kids. A private school paid for by taxpayers.
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Thanks for the post, Rob.
The Santa Barbara Superintendent, Cary Matsuoka, is a Pahara Fellow (Fall 2019)
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There was a discussion about the Willow Creek charter on my Facebook page some time ago. A happy Willow Creek parent posted that the only requirement is that parents donate XX work hours to the school per year (I don’t remember the number). Someone else posted: But it’s illegal to require that. The happy Willow Creek parents and supporters instantly vanished from the discussion.
The Sausalito-Marin City school board had been dominated by Willow Creek insiders until recently, and for a time had a superintendent, Steven Van Zandt, who’s been indicted in two Southern California charter scams, including that recent $50 million one involving fake students in virtual charters.
This inside-baseball article from the Marin Independent Journal gives an idea of the turmoil. https://www.marinij.com/2019/02/10/sausalito-marin-city-school-district-turmoil-intensifies/?fbclid=IwAR3HyYL8Us3NC-Qw3d_a58pYaqhUCN56mkUhaqE4RfxOJGAH5APaN7gHhWA
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Corrected name spelling — Van Zant and not to be confused with the pro-teacher, pro-union rock star!
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Why isn’t anyone going to prison?
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Because they’re rich.
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Campaigns by the wealthy against the vulnerable, seldom result in punishment. except for the vulnerable.
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How are they going to desegregate? They have school choice in place. How do they desegregate once there is a charter school?
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According to the Marin Independent Journal, the plan is reunification:
“On Thursday night, the board of trustees’ soon-to-be named “reunification subcommittee” announced a six-month timeline to come up with a proposal for “one school,” meaning uniting Bayside MLK with Willow Creek. The timeline includes a meeting next month with the Willow Creek board’s newly formed “consolidation committee,” followed by a series of community town halls in October and November. Sometime in December or January, those working on the issue are expected to come up with a recommendation to restructure the district.”
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That could be good. I hope they’re planning to consolidate the two schools under a public unified school district with a publicly elected school board so that the parents of Bayside MLK have a democratic voice.
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I hope that works out for the benefit of the kids. I have a feeling that the case will be made to privatize/charter-ize that entire district.
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Willow Creek is an independently run charter, and I predict that the leaders won’t want to run it if they can’t handpick the students or require work hours (and probably donations) from the parents. But we’ll see.
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