Did Los Angeles board member Nick Melvoin share privileged information with the representatives of the charter school industry?

Please sign this petition to call for an investigation.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Los Angeles, Privatization

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Los Angeles parent says:

September 20, 2019 at 9:01 pm

This is trumped up accusation by charter school haters digging for dirt on Nick Melvoin!

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- dianeravitch says:
  
  September 20, 2019 at 10:16 pm
  
  People don’t have to dig deep. Michael Kohlhaas has published emails showing Melvoin collaborating with the California Charter Schools Association.
  
  Reply
  - LeftCoastTeacher says:
    
    September 20, 2019 at 10:32 pm
    
    Bernie wrote the damn bill; Nick wrote the damn emails.
  - Los Angeles parent says:
    
    September 21, 2019 at 12:50 am
    
    Michael Kohlhaas is a troll who claims to “be as mean as I possibly can to everyone who thrives and grows fat on the blood of their fellow humans and drink their tears”. It’s a shame you are re-posting his garbage.
  - dianeravitch says:
    
    September 21, 2019 at 7:16 am
    
    No one has questioned the validity of the emails Kohlhaas has posted. They were released to him by the lawyer for the Green Dot charter chain. Who is lying? Give your name so we know why you are attacking Kohlhaas. If not, you are the troll.
  - Jack says:
    
    September 21, 2019 at 11:28 am
    
    Michael Kohlhaas is a troll who claims to “be as mean as I possibly can to everyone who thrives and grows fat on the blood of their fellow humans and drink their tears”
    
    Hmmm …
    
    “everyone who thrives and grows fat on the blood of their fellow humans and drinks their tears”
    
    That sounds like a uncannily accurate description of the school privatization billionaires who bankrolled Nick’s 2017 campaign for LAUSD School Board.
    
    Kohlhaas is more spot on than ever.
- Carl Petersen says:
  
  September 21, 2019 at 10:44 am
  
  When the LAUSD tried to improve accessibility to school buildings for children with special education needs, they were sued by the CCSA. Board Member Nick Melvoin gave the district’s opponent confidential information in those court proceedings.
  View at Medium.com
  
  Reply
- Robert D Skeels, JD, Esq * rdsathene says:
  
  September 22, 2019 at 1:30 pm
  
  If #LAUSD’s Nick Melvoin did engage in acts of moral turpitude…
  
  Reply
Linda says:

September 21, 2019 at 9:48 am

So far, it’s 169 (petition signers) against 1, “LA Parent” who likes the grifting charter school industry.
“They are the few who are billionaire funded, while we are the many”.

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Ellen Lubic says:

September 21, 2019 at 12:04 pm

There is hard evidence that Nick Melvoin met secretly with CCSA to benefit them as they were, indeed, in a lawsuit with LAUSD.

His participation with this charter group which is financed by Eli Broad and his billionaire Wall Street associates who see charter schools as a huge investment opportunity, smacks of moral turpitude as well as potential law breaking.

As an elected member of the LAUSD BoE Melvoin’s first sworn duty is to the real public schools of the district.

His secret collusion with those such as Caprice Young, former leader of CCSA and a director of Gulen Charter Schools, and others who are in leadership at CCSA, must be investigated fully.

Billionaire investors Eli Broad, the Waltons, Bloomberg, and allied billionaire charter school supporters poured approximately $10 million into getting Nick Melvoin elected to the LAUSD BoE and they are determined to get their money’s worth.

These power mongers also in this time period, and in a secret back room deal with the past charter majority BoE (which is being investigated for potentially violating the Brown Act), had Austin Beutner, another of their Wall Street uber wealthy colleagues, appointed/hired as the Supt of LAUSD. He has proceeded to work assiduously to divide the district into 32 small districts and pick them off, one by one, to privatize, all based on the Broad business model.

In LA, the FIX is on and follows the goal of Broad’s hastily constructed 501c3 Great Public Schools Now, which they funded rapidly. It is a giant attempt to takeover the entire district which is the second largest in the nation, for complete privatization.

This hidden assault on our real public schools is coming to light bit by ugly bit..

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Ellen Lubic says:

September 21, 2019 at 1:34 pm

BTW…the person calling themselves ‘LA parent’ and posting stupidly, showing simplicity of mind and morality, is possibly another Broad puppet and long time charter supporter, BoE member, Monica Garcia, who is mendacious and conniving to further her own agenda. She intends to run for higher office in LA but the community she is supposed to serve, distrusts and despises her. Gatcia and Melvoin were able to get 174% raises for BoE members (now the highest paid in the nation when LAUSD claims to be on the verge of bankruptcy), and she now makes about $250 K a year for doing damage to the district. That amount would be the salary of five teachers, or 5 nurses, or 5 librarians which the district badly needs.

Reply
- Jack says:
  
  September 21, 2019 at 3:29 pm
  
  Ellen,
  
  Speaking of Monica Garcia, did you see her performance last week at the LAUSD Board’s public meeting? It came after the presentation of the report showing that charter operators assiduously avoid special ed kids as if they were victims of leprosy.
  
  Quick background:
  
  a report detailing L.A. charter schools under-enrollment of Special Ed. kids, as compared to traditional public schools — and the impacts of this — just came out.
  
  This report took over a year to write — in part because Monica Garcia and her allies in the charter school privatization industry within LAUSD stonewalled on releasing the otherwise easily accessible data from LAUSD.
  
  A representative from UTLA made a presentation, citing how L.A.’s chatter schools were blocking Special Ed. kids and the front end, or later dumping the ones who eluded that initial filter. This, in turn, burdens the traditional public schools with hundreds of millions of dollars of extra costs, and leaves the charters with more money and less kids, and less challenging kids to teach.
  
  In short, it rigs the charters to succeed, while kneecapping the traditional public schools, and causing them to fail (i.e. special ed kids don’t get high test scores, and the much higher costs of educating them drains funding from the funding of regular ed. kids.)
  
  Anyway, after the UTLA rep presented this — with incontrovertible evidence supporting the report — LAUSD Board Member Monica Garcia, from the Eli Broad-bloc on LAUSD’s School Board, let loose with the single most incoherent and non-responsive six minutes of diversion and denial in (my opinion) LAUSD School Board history, with Garcia bringing up countless totally irrelevant claims from the past and present, and the words “Special Ed.” or “Special Education” are not uttered even once by Ms. Garcia.
  
  Her performance is akin to a politician in the 1850’s following and responding to a devastating speech on abolition of slavery by instead talking about countless irrelevant topics, including canal construction and the Andrew Jackson’s establishment of the U.S Bank.
  
  When I say the “single most incoherent and non-responsive” tirade, that says something, as I’ve watched hundreds of hours of Board meetings, both at home on TV and in person sitting in the audience. The report is called “State of Denial”, and Garcia unwittingly proved the point of the report’s title.
  
  Watch both UTLA’s presentation, and Garcia’s idiotic response back-to-back.
  
  The latter really has to be seen to be disbelieved. It includes over a dozen tangents that are totally irrelevant to the report just witnessed by the rest of the Board, and by the audience in the viewing area.
  
  First, here’s UTLA’s presentation, full of bar graph’s, data, and fully-supported conclusions::
  
  Second, here’s Monica Garcia’s utterly bizarre and incomprehensible and totally non-responsive response to this repor, given just after the report:
  
  For example, what the fark does …
  
  … “the success of our (school) building (construction) program” …
  
  .. have to do with the substance of the report that was just given?
  
  DITTO: “the overcrowding” (twenty years prior, that’s long since been ameliorated) in some LAUSD Schools?
  
  DITTO: “the percentage of students of color” in LAUSD schools?
  
  DITTO: the fact that “some teachers send their kids to non-LAUSD schools” (btw, a lot of them live 1-2 hours away from LAUSD, so that they could own a home, and thus, send their kids to a school where those children can walk to and from their home)
  
  DITTO: “the race and class” issues withinLAUSD?
  
  DITTO: “the lower numbers of students in probation camps?
  
  … and on and on …
  
  Again, Monica Garcia doesn’t even utter the words “Special Ed.” or “Special Education” even once. (!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!)
  
  LET ME REPEAT THAT AGAIN:
  
  Monica Garcia doesn’t even utter the words “Special Ed.” or “Special Education” *even once. (!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!)
  
  Sweet Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!!!
  
  The only vague mention to the above presentation from UTLA was Garcia’s dismissive remark …
  
  “Our labor partner presentations are what they are …”
  
  … but then Ms. Garcia DOESN’T UTTER EVEN ONE WORD actually addressing the actual presentation, but instead goes off on one of — and I’ve counted, folks — over a dozen irrelevant tangents that had and have NOTHING TO DO WITH the issues of charter schools under-serving of Social Ed. kids, and the consequential burdens place on the traditional public schools.
  
  In short, Board Member Garcia is simply carrying out her corporate masters’ marching orders, which is to confuse and obfuscate the truth of what’s going on with charter schools refusal to serve special ed kids… so as to protect the interests of the charter school and privatization industry that funded all of her campaigns, and controls her like a puppet.
  
  Calling someone a political “whore” may seen inflammatory and too personal of an attack, but is it really? You pay a prostitute for sex acts, and Monica Garcia’s billionaire, school privatization backers pay her for votes on LAUSD Board resolutions, and also to give god-awful, despicable speeches like the one just above. If I were a Special Ed. parent, I would go ballistic watching that video while knowing its true context, and the true intentions of the speaker and her billionaire backers., who despise or at least, don’t give a sh#% about their children.
  
  Now, after ten years after performing political prostitution as a Member of the LAUSD School Board, Ms. Garcia is moving up to run for a seat on the L.A. City Council, and, her billionaire backers are rewarding her with millions of campaign donations to get her elected … you know … the money left on the dresser after a trollop delivers the goods.
  
  Vote for anyone but Monica Garcia for the Los Angeles City Council.
  
  Reply
Jack says:

September 22, 2019 at 3:26 pm

Two different parents have now before the LAUSD School Board demanding an investigation of Nick Melvoin.

This never happens.

FIRST, here’s parent Traci Cook making her demands, and correctly comparing Melvoin and the charter industry’s “corruption” with that of Trump & Trump’s allies.

Ms. Cook even quotes from an email which Melvoin sent to her and other parents promising that he will provide transparency to Ms. Cook and the rest of the parents in Melvoin’s district.

She then cites his documents that were recently leaked that show actual behavior on Melvoin’s part blatantly violating that promise to parents, with Ms. Cook describing how Melvoin — an elected representative of LAUSD — met in secret with, and shamelessly divulged confidential information to an an adversarial organization that is suing LAUSD, effectively sabotaging the interest of LAUSD and its public schools, those same interests which he was elected to protect, and to which he has taken a vow to defend.

She wants an investigation, not just by the LAUSD Board, but also by the California State Bar:

SECOND, here’s another parent, Emiliana Dorr (sp?) who talks about other issues first, but then makes her own demand for an investigation of Melvoin at 2:39

(at 2:39)

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Jack says:

September 23, 2019 at 10:18 pm

And here’s YET ANOTHER parent calling for an investigation of Nick Melvoin:

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