Michael Kohlhaas, blogger in Los Angeles, writes here about a charter leader who harassed a teacher who protested his staff’s lack of qualifications.
Excelencia Charter Academy is yet another creepy little charter school run by yet another shockingly unqualified creepy little galaxy-brained grifter, this one known as Ruben Alonzo, going about the place making creepy little announcements of delusionally impending disruptive excellence while lining his creepy little pockets with public money1 at the expense of the actual human children that the state legislature, for reasons they’re going to have to answer for eventually, has seen fit to place into his care.
In this regard Alonzo is much like Sakshi Jain, shockingly unqualified founder of the ill-fated GANAS Academy, whose plan to co-locate on the campus of Catskill Elementary School conjured up such a monumental hurricane of activist opposition and scorn that, it appears, she has had to put her school’s opening on hold while she slinks back to her lair to soothe her metaphorical wounds with a salve made of equal parts boorish self-pity and Walton family megabucks.
Unlike Jain, though, Alonzo did actually manage to open his school. In the Fall of 2018 as it happens and, like Jain’s fiasco, co-located, in this case on the campus of Sunrise Elementary School in Boyle Heights. And like Jain’s folly Alonzo’s weirdo little project conjured up some opposition, most publicly from Sunrise Elementary teacher Mimi Guzman-Duncanson.
Duncanson famously parked her SUV out in front of the school covered in flyers advertising the appalling lack of qualifications of Excelencia’s teachers, let alone Ruben Alonzo, the self-proclaimed founder. Duncanson’s protest was covered in the Los Angeles Timesand by Jason McGahan, writing in The Baffler.
You can see a picture of Maestra Duncanson2 with her minivan somewhere near this sentence.That picture and another like it came from a huge set of emails released to me recently by Alonzo pursuant to the California Public Records Act.3 And if it looks like hostile photography, like surveillance, well, that’s because that’s precisely what it is. It turns out that aggressively callow hellbaby Ruben Alonzo just could not deal with the fact that anyone at all dared to question his galaxy-brained 29 year old self.
You kind of have to prepare yourself for “Michael Kohlhaas’s” unrestrained style. But (under a pseudonym) this Los Angeles blogger is the god of public-records dumps and has exposed shocking and sometimes amusing hidden shenanigans. I follow him even though I’m 450 miles away in San Francisco.
This profiteering absurdity occurs in a state that is firmly blue. It shows that Democrats can be just as corrupt and profligate as members of the right wing.
Greed knows no party, no race, no religion, no ethnicity, no zip code.
“Excelencia”? Seriously? What member of the illiterati coined this monstrosity? It makes me ashamed to work in the field of Educationalia.
Exactly my thoughts, marks. If it walks like a slime & acts like a slime…it’s not excellent. Oops, I mean, “Excelencia.”
It’s just the Spanish word for excellence…
Thanks, bethree5–and please see below.
I always cringe when I see or hear the word “scholars,” too…as if there is any true scholarship proliferated around these sham schools.
First off, I thank bethree5 for correcting me on “excelencia.” I thought the word in Spanish was “excellente,” which it is, for the adjective; “excelencia” is the noun “excellence.” In general, such locutions start to sound like brand names–which in this case I suppose they are.
Calling kindergartners (or, for that matter, anyone not in post-secondary or even, arguably, post-graduate education) scholars is indeed an atrocity, and I am always surprised when I hear trained educators use this clear misnomer. So I couldn’t agree more with you, LG.
Me too, LG & mtt. I have a new addition to PreK Span clients this year– not a sham school, it’s pretty good, but the kids often answer “¿Cómo te llamas?” with what sounds like an abbreviated title, e.g. “Me llamo ‘S.’ Liam, ‘S.’ Audrey etc. All Fall & I still haven’t asked a teacher what it stands for cuz I just don’t want to hear that…
LG,
I agree! Calling children “scholars” is repugnant to me. Might as well hang a plastic stethoscope around their necks and call them “Dr.”