Blogger Michael Kohlhaas received a huge trove of leaked emails from the Green Dot Charter School organization in Los Angeles.
He has been releasing them as he reviews them.
No one has disputed their accuracy.
Yesterday, Kohlhaas released one of the most startling of these documents, in which the charter lobby reveals its ultimate goal: by 2030, every student in the state of California will attend a charter school or a “charter-like public school.”
He writes:
It’s not clear at all what they mean by “charter-like public school[s]”. It’s especially unclear given the amount of time they spend ranting about how charter schools are in fact public schools, so presumably charter schools are the most charter-like public schools of all, but whatever. The point is that this is an acknowledgement by the CCSA that they are in fact trying to destroy public education in California by removing ALL students from it or, if that’s not possible, making public schools be so much like their private charters that there might as well be no public education. In any case, please read the whole document. It is a revelation.
And they’re not just trying to destroy all public schools in California by taking away their students and, with them, their funding. They’re also trying to take away all their land. On a local level they have been working with LAUSD Board Member Nick Melvoin on a proposal to take facilities away from putatively low-performing schools and hand them over to putatively high-performing schools. And before facilities can be confiscated on the basis of performance, a ranking system is necessary. Melvoin’s recent school performance ranking proposal is step one in this playbook.
And the CCSA and its member schools don’t just want control or ownership of the property to help them educate children. Real estate is a key element of the private charter school investment market. The more real estate charter schools control the more money the private investors can make. This is a huge business.
Thank you, Michael Kohlhaas, for performing a public service.
And thank you, also, to the anonymous leaker who provided this frightening insight into the nefarious machinations and goals of the charter school lobby.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The BIG HEIST! Terrible.
Thank you, Michael Kohlhaas for exposing this fraud.
The deformers want a nation of dummies so they can do their dastardly deeds.
Modern charter schools were intended as an escape hatch for the “deserving” few rather than doing the hard work of improving schools for the many. However, the charter-schools-for-all-model has three different goals: 1) Eliminate democracy as the governance mechanism; 2) Open all schools to unregulated profit taking; 3) Do away with unions. Note: none of this has anything to do with how to best educate all children for life, work, and citizenship in a democracy.
As we are rapidly moving away from the democratic model, it will no longer be advisable to educate citizens for democracy.
Whose advise would that be?
The difference between California and most red states that give private charter schools preferential treatment is that there is a pro-public education group working inside the government. In red states most proponents of public education have been kicked to the curb, and there is no way to uncover the plot against public education. Here in Florida the governor is manipulating the courts by appointing right wing judges that will green light the destruction of public education and freeze out any democratic input.
This looting of collectively-owned assets by the rich reminds me of what happened in Russia when the Soviet Union collapsed.
Yes, Ponderosa, and the same happened in all Soviet Block countries: the Communist politicians and directors of companies bought the comapnies and land for very little money, and to this day they are the wealthiest capitalists in their countries.
Here’s another DATA BREACH! Pearson SUCKS.
Boulder Valley School District
Breach affects about 60,000
Third party accessed data used by Pearson, which district uses to monitor student progress
By Amy Bounds
Staff Writer
Boulder Valley School District recently mailed about 60,000 letters to current and former students to alert them their names and birthdates may have been exposed in a Pearson data breach believed to have happened late last year.
“In this day and age, data is a concern for all of us” said Andre Moore, Boulder Valley’s chief information officer. “We take that seriously. We do everything possible to ensure the data is safe.”
A third party accessed a data set used by Pearson’s AIMSweb 1.0 platform, used by Boulder Valley primarily to monitor student progress. Accounts at more than 13,000 schools and universities were affected.
Pearson, an education software company, learned about the breach in March. Pearson launched a review, including working with cybersecurity experts and the FBI. The breach appears to have taken place in November 2018.
Pearson notified Boulder Valley of the data breach on Aug. 1, Moore said. The district then launched its own investigation and decided to send letters notifying all potentially affected students.
In the St. Vrain Valley School District, a handful of students at a single school who attended during the
2010-11 school year might have been affected, said district spokeswoman Kerri McDermid. She said families of those students were notified earlier this month.
According to Pearson, there’s no evidence the students’ information has been misused. But, as a precaution, Pearson is offering a year of free identity or credit monitoring through Experian to those affected.
Names and birthdates, Moore noted, generally aren’t enough information to harm a person’s credit or steal an identity.
Along with covering the cost of identity or credit monitoring, Pearson is paying for Boulder Valley’s mailings.
Moore said it is up to parents, and former students, if they want to trust Experian with their information for monitoring.
He added that he is available to talk to parents one=on- one about their concerns about the breach and Boulder Valley’s policies.
“In general, parents have been very understanding of this,” he said.
While Boulder Valley still contracts with Pearson, the company has phased out the AIMSweb 1.0 platform — a decision that was made separately from the data breach, according to Pearson.
No additional district data was found to be at risk, Moore said, adding the district has contracts with vendors that stipulate they can’t sell student data and are responsible for notification costs in case of a breach.
And Pearson just got back the task to administer the state tests in Tennessee. How can we find out if TN students are affected by this breach?
I wonder what the schools were like in Orwell’s “1984”?
Well, Duh …
For the life of me, I do not know how the parents of Nick Melvoin’s district vote for that guy!
2011, Education Next, “Catholic Ethos, Public Education…several trends in American education …made a Catholic operated public school seem increasingly possible…(one was) a burgeoning charter school movement”. In 2018, the superintendent of the Los Angeles diocese of Catholic schools became a Fellow of the Gates funded Pahara Institute which was founded by the same person who founded or co-founded TFA and New Schools Venture Fund.
Ohio gives welfare to the tune of $50 mil. to $130 mil. to private schools through vouchers, a scheme that was found to have no positive effect on student outcomes.
Most of the money goes to Catholic schools.
It’s great they got the documents but I think this has been obvious for a long time.
You know how you can tell? They never invest in public schools. Ed reformers barely mention public schools other than to compare them (always unfavorably) to charter or private schools.
They’re phasing your kid’s school out. Without letting either public school parents or students in on this plan.
They didn’t ever hide it. Read ed reformers. There are two goals of ed reform – 1st priority “choice” and 2nd priority “accountability” (testing).
If you’re in a public school ask yourself what these folks have provided public school students over the last 20 years- tests. That’s all you get.
There’s only two policies- charters/vouchers and tests. Only one of those concern public school students. If they were actually committed to public schools they would invest in them/add value to them. They don’t. Don’t take it personal. Your child just happens to attend a school that is in the unfashionable public sector, during this planned transition.
Gotta break some eggs to make this ideological omelette! Once we reach “choice nirvana” these growing pains will be forgotten.
If the ed reform Grand Privatization Plan fails can we get public schools back?
No. Once they’re gone they’re never coming back. Yet another sector changes hands from the public to private ownership and control.
They’re grateful you donated all this public investment to government contractors, though! And in some very valuable real estate markets! So generous of you. Obviously it was easier for them because you didn’t know it was happening WHILE it was happening, so it’s not TECHNICALLY consent, but close enough for ed reform.
Let the deed transfers begin!
Green Dot is the charter chain with the company union, right?
Wow. We haven’t seen those in this country in 75 years. I thought the phony, company-owned “union” gambit ended with the robber barons. Back then they were called “yellow” unions because it was a farce. The company owns and runs the union.
Very historically accurate of ed reformers to follow their ideological forefathers.
Is the brain trust in ed reform ever going to make the slightest effort to reconcile their lockstep cheerleading and promotion of private school vouchers with their public school agenda?
They know that lobbying to exempt the private schools they promote from the accountability requirements they impose on public schools is completely incoherent, right?
So there will be the (disfavored) public sector schools that are mandated to follow ed reform testing regimes and then the special favored private sector schools?
So we just throw out everything they said about “accountability” for the last 30 years?
Are private school students just inherently better people? No tracking for them?
They had a choice- ideologically correct or coherent. They chose “ideologically correct”
It just gets crazier from here. This “movement” contradicts itself. They are currently “public school advocates” who do no advocacy for students in public schools, and they espouse “accountability” for one set of publicly-funded schools and deliberately exempt another.
They’ll all end up where DeVos is- 100% vouchers. She’s the only truth-teller among them. It can’t end anywhere else. They get there fast or they get there slow, but this theory doesn’t make any sense unless you take it to its end conclusion.
If the vouchers enrich Catholic schools as they overwhelmingly do in Ohio, it’s important to note that nationwide, the schools don’t walk the talk of social justice. In 2012, it was reported that the majority of Catholic schools were non-union.
Left unchecked private charters will continue to grow everywhere. When profit is the objective, where there are laws that support charter expansion, where there is little oversight or accountability, opportunists will continue to emerge to make more money. Lax oversight results in endless profiteering and manipulations for a larger share of the market. The charter industry and lobby enable a free market free for all that may undermine the fiscal health of public schools and even states. Pennsylvania has its credit rating downgraded due to reckless charter expansion and profiteering.
Chester Finn of Fordham (2014), “There’s opportunity ahead for Catholic schools…weakening of teacher unions”.
California is a heavily Democratic state. I find it hard to believe that the state government would ever move to entirely privatize education in the state. It is not impossible. Just very hard to believe.
The key is that charter supporting billionaires like Eli Broad and Reed Hastings claim to be Democrats and give heavily to buy Democratic legislators.
THERE is the key William is looking for: what makes a “Democrat…”
Hard to believe Ohio’s politicians dole out taxpayer-financed welfare to Catholic schools with estimates ranging from $50,000,000 to $130,000,000 even after a top GOP politician, who never met a common good she liked, called vouchers senseless. But then, the same politicians gave even more to ECOT whose operator financed the state GOP party. And, the attorney general is in slow mode to collect in the related lawsuit against the operator.
Oligarchy, what option do citizens have in response to those who say, “let them eat cake”, except revolution.
One of the things is that the privatizers push the canard that they’re not privatizing education.
No, charter schools are public schools. They’re just a new and different kind of public school.
A school system filled with nothing private sector charters is still a public school system. It’s just a new different kind of *public school system.
Schools that Fordham sponsors in Ohio promote themselves as public when they know the Ohio Supreme Court ruled they aren’t.
Even “liberal” journalists like Huffpo’s education reporter refuse to stop calling contractor schools “public”.
As an analogy, its like calling private parks, public. Where’s the FTC and state attorneys general in stopping the fraud?
The phrase “charter-like public schools” reminds me of disgraced, fast talking used car salesman, former Broadie LAUSD Superintendent John Deasy, who turned many LAUSD schools into hybrids, where teachers surrendered rights to “innovate”.
“Innovation” is the oligarchs’ hammer. The Stanford Social Innovation Review makes it clear through articles written by villanthropists’ staff who explain the scaling up plans to dominate.
Here’s a great tweet / thread that from Jennifer Berkshire’s Twitter, which begins with an “eye-popping” admission from the charter school industry’s secret meetings, contained within one of the emails docs uncovered and released to the public by Michael Kohlhaas, and discovered by Berkshire:
and also this:
However you parse it, it looks like the school system is still releasing student data to a 3rd party vendor which is using it to make money. Of course, 3rd party vendors always keep their promises and never get hacked, but who is harmed and who is liable when they don’t and they do, respectively?
Of course, ALEC has a plan to make charter school creation and operation easy in every state.
These amendments and addendum change the Next Generation Charter Schools Act as currently constituted. The proposal makes changes to the composition and power of the Board or Commission that authorizers charter schools, eliminates special distinctions between virtual and non-virtual charter schools, removes a reference to “best practices” of authorizing as determined by the National Association of Charter School Authorizers, and sets forth standards for revoking an authorizers’ ability to open charter schools. It also consolidates this Act with other ALEC model policy on charters, such as the Charter School Growth with Quality Act.
https://www.alec.org/model-policy/amendments-and-addendum-the-next-generation-charter-schools-act/
And here is an article from 2001(!) about a plan for “all-charter school districts” by Paul Hill
School superintendents have proposed making Seattle and Portland, Ore. both “charter districts,” and Cincinnati is taking steps in this direction. Four small California districts advertise themselves as all-charter, as does Inkster, Mich., which has brought in for-profit Edison Schools to manage the district. Pennsylvania intends to charter all the schools in Chester-Upland, one of the state’s lowest-performing districts. In Florida, the Volusia and Hillsborough districts are becoming all-charter, and four others have been authorized to move in that direction. President Bush has recently proposed chartering at all levels of the education system—between the federal government and states, states and districts, and districts and schools. And, during the 2000 campaign, Al Gore proposed using the charter district concept in the most distressed urban school districts.
https://www.crpe.org/publications/charter-school-districts
Paul Hill, in a Hoover Institute publication, describes school districts in 2030. He begins
Districts do not run any schools at all but sponsor them via chartering,
contracting, and other partnership agreements with providers of all kinds,
including teacher cooperatives, colleges and universities, nonprofits, and
professional management companies.
and then it all goes down Hill 🙂 from there.
Click to access reinventedschooldistricts_hill.pdf
They call it Hoover because it sucks …
The attack on public schools arises because public school teacher leaders have redefined “democracy” as socialism. Socialism does not work by teaching individual virtue, but only asks for obedience. That is totally antipathetic to the root value in America of freedom. The root value of socialism is equality of wealth. It never succeeds.
Don’t be surprised. When you attack freedom, you will get counterattacks.
I attack the “freedom” of the few to make way to freedom to all—the basis for democracy. Democracy is possible only if freedom is equally distributed. Socialism occurs nowhere in this dicussion. In Scandinavian and Western European countries, freedoms are equally distributed without having socialism.
In other words, I dunno what you are talking about.
Harlan,
You make sweeping statements about what public school teachers do.
What is your evidence?
You have none. You are blowing smoke.
What does “socialism” have anything to do with public school teachers? Looks like we just saw a victim of mercury haze, obviously coming from toxic political affiliation dump site.
The GOP (and, yes, the Corporate Owned Dems) value individual freedom and virtue the way the NRA, XLV, Charles Manson, and other sociopaths value individual freedom and virtue, namely, their freedom to do whatever the hell pleases them no matter what destruction it visits on others.
Well, our laws, in particular the Constitution, let them do that.
The Constitution and the Law mean what their Interpretation and Enforcement make them mean. The Emoluments Clause was once interpreted and enforced in such a way as to force President Carter to put his family-owned peanut farm in a blind trust to avoid any potential conflict of interest.
But outlaws put outlaws in office today and so the law is in the crapper.
“The Constitution and the Law mean what their Interpretation and Enforcement make them mean. ”
I think that’s an excuse for not to change the Constitution and laws to make them more modern, more precise.
Trump violates the Emoluments Clause daily at his Trump Hotel in DC where foreign emissaries pay huge fees to rent suites as a form of tribute.
Will Trump get away with renting out his Doral Resort in Miami to foreign leaders for the 2020 meeting of G-7?
Can’t wait to see if he invites Putin to be his guest in the closing days of the election.