Archives for category: Broad Foundation
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DeVos Cancels Charter School Visit to Los Angeles! Sad!

By dianeravitch
April 30, 2017 //
35

Only hours after the U.S. Department of Education put out a press release announcing Betsy DeVos’ visit to the Schwarzenegger Charter School, the visit was suddenly canceled.

Wonder why? The L.A. school board election is coming up soon. California doesn’t like Trump or DeVos. Would her appearance create a problem for the pro-charter candidate Nick Melvoin and the California Charter School Association? Did Eli Broad ask her to postpone her visit until after the election to avoid embarrassing the pro-charter forces who call themselves Democrats? This might not have been the right moment to have DeVos appear in Los Angeles lauding the glories of charters.

Here is the latest press release:

From: “U.S. Department of Education” <ed.gov@public.govdelivery.com>
Date: April 30, 2017 at 3:55:39 PM PDT
To:
Subject: UPDATED ADVISORY: U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos’ Visit to CHIME Institute’s Schwarzenegger Community School
Reply-To: ed.gov@public.govdelivery.com

[US Department of Education]

MEDIA ADVISORY
EVENT DATE: May 1, 2017
Contact: Press Office
(202) 401-1576 or elizabeth.hill@ed.gov

UPDATED ADVISORY: U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos’ Visit to CHIME Institute’s Schwarzenegger Community School

Due to an unforeseen scheduling conflict, U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos’ visit to CHIME Institute’s Schwarzenegger Community School has been cancelled.

For more information, please contact Liz Hill, elizabeth.hill@ed.gov

Categories Betsy DeVos, Broad Foundation, Charter Schools, Los Angeles

California: Eli Broad and Betsy DeVos Agree that Charter Schools Trump Local Control

By dianeravitch
April 18, 2017 //
100

On the day before the vote on Betsy DeVos’s nomination, billionaire Eli Broad announced that he opposed her nomination to be Secretary of Education. It was a joke. He knew that his statement was meaningless and that she would be confirmed, but he was pretending to be a Democrat. The reality is that Broad and DeVos are on the same page when it comes to privatization. He is trying to grab control of half the children in Los Angeles for privately-run charter schools, and she approves. No doubt, she wishes California also had vouchers, because in her view, you can never have too much school choice. She and Broad consider local school boards a hindrance to their plans. Results don’t matter either. Nor does segregation. Choice over all.

In response to the unfettered expansion of charters–and to the ongoing financial scandals that crop up in this unregulated sector–several bills were introduced in the legislature to rein in the charters. One of them said that local school districts should make the final decision about whether to authorize new charters. Under current law, if the local school board says no, their decision may be reversed by the county board of education. If the county board of education says no, their decision may be reversed by the state board of education. If the governor is charter-friendly as Jerry Brown is, the state board can be counted on to say yes to almost any charter, no matter how much local opposition there is, and no matter how badly the new charter will damage existing public schools, skimming its students and sucking away resources.

So a bill was written–SB808– to give the local school boards the authority to block new charters that are neither needed nor wanted. The bill was supported by the California Teachers Association. It was opposed by the California Charter School Association, the lobbyists for the billionaires who love privatization.

The bill’s author just pulled it; it will not be introduced to the Senate Education Committee. The bill’s author, Democrat Tony Mendoza, met with charter school supporters last week and had second thoughts.

No doubt, Betsy DeVos is thrilled.

How many millions or billions will Eli Broad and his friends in the CCSA spend before they admit that all they accomplished was to destroy public education?

This will be Eli Broad’s legacy: not his museum; not the buildings where he has carved his name. But his destruction of public education in Los Angeles and across the state of California.

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Broad Foundation, California, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Los Angeles, Privatization

Los Angeles: Final Results of the Voting

By dianeravitch
March 8, 2017 //
9

Final results are in for the LAUSD school board election, where the billionaires outspent everyone else in their attempt to grab control of the district and put at least half of the students into charter schools:

Monica Garcia, chief charter cheerleader, defender of John Deasy and enabler of the $1 Billion iPad debacle, defeated Lisa Alva and Carl Petersen, with 57% of the vote. A big loss for public schools.

Steve Zimmer, president of the board, came in first in his district with 47.5% of the vote and will face a run-off against the billionaire’s favorite, Nick Melvoin, who received 31.2% of the vote.

In District 6, charter teacher Kelly Fitzpatrick-Gonez came in first with 36.1% of the vote. She will face Imelda Padilla in the runoff, who received 31% of the vote.

Supporters of public schools have their work cut out for them to assure victories for Zimmer and Padilla in the runoffs.

Categories Billionaires, Broad Foundation, Charter Schools, Los Angeles, Privatization

When Jennifer Berkshire (AKA EduShyster) Met Lisa Alva, Candidate for LAUSD School Board

By dianeravitch
March 5, 2017 //
8

The election for the Los Angeles USD school board is Tuesday. Once again, the charter industry is trying to buy control of the school board. Once again, the charter billionaires are dumping obscene amounts of money into the races in different districts.

In District 2, Charter QueenPin Monica Garcia is facing tough competition from two strong opponents: parent Carl Petersen and teacher Lisa Alva. If Garcia does not get 51% of the vote, there will be a runoff.

The Network for Public Action Fund has endorsed both Petersen and Alva, hoping to force a runoff and ready to back Garcia’s opponent. Garcia has never seen a charter she didn’t love or a public school that she did.

Jennifer Berkshire (the writer formerly known as EduShyster) describes her meeting with Lisa Alva. Alva is interesting because she was deeply embedded in the reform movement and then had an “aha!” moment (much like my own). She realized that “reform” was not about the kids. She was a teacher and she is about the kids. Alva won the endorsement of the Los Angeles Times, which usually sides with charterites.

Berkshire writes:

In the endorsement that Alva scored from the LA Times, she’s described as espousing an “interesting mix of beliefs, including some that align with the school reform movement and others more in line with the positions of the teachers unions.” I’d put it a different way. Alva thinks teachers deserve to have more of a voice, in part to push back against misguided reform policies, like the botched experiment that played out at Roosevelt High School. In 2010, Roosevelt was broken up into seven small schools, each with its own principal and schedule, which created some, um, logistical challenges for a high school with thousands of students. “It was this microcosm of bad policy and bad decision making,” says Alva.

By 2013, five of Roosevelt’s small schools had been re-combined—the only way that the school could remain viable, said Marshall Tuck, then CEO of the Partnership for Los Angeles Schools, which took over the school in 2008. “He basically said ‘I guess we made a mistake,’” recalls Alva. Tuck is long gone; he ran for state superintendent in California as the charter guy in 2014 and lost. He’s currently accelerating the effectiveness of new teachers here. As for Roosevelt High, well, let’s just say that the patient has yet to recover. The money to pay all of those new administrative salaries had to come from somewhere, and that somewhere was classes, services for students and whole programs, like the one that trained students for careers in culinary arts. The small schools model was effective in making Roosevelt smaller; enrollment has plummeted since the Partnership assumed control of the school.

What makes Alva’s emergence as a thorn in the side of Tuck et al is that she was once an #edreform insider herself. She was a member of the Partnership’s Board of Directors, as well as a TeachPlus fellow, and a member of the teaching advisory board for Educators for Excellence, as well as Teachers for a New Unionism. She was, in other words, the reformer’s dream version of what a teacher should be: seeking out leadership opportunities and steadily improving herself in order to [insert aspirational goals here]. But Alva’s romance with the reform movement ended dramatically in 2013 over an incident that she recounted publicly here. In short, she was deeply disturbed by how quickly the alphabet-soup’s assembly of reform organizations in LA pivoted away from their self-proclaimed mission(s) to rally support for embattled superintendent John Deasy. Alva broke up with education reform, a decision she explained in a single, satisfying sentence: “The best place for an educator to protect and promote public education is the teachers union.”

Categories Broad Foundation, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Los Angeles, Privatization

Los Angeles: Billionaires Huddle to Take Down Steve Zimmer

By dianeravitch
March 2, 2017 //
50

Steve Zimmer is the president of the Los Angeles Unified School District board. I know Steve. He is a good guy. He is smart and thoughtful. He started in education as a TFA teacher and stayed for 17 years. He ran for School Board and against the odds, was elected. His critics on the left complain that he has not fought charters as hard as he should. He has tried to keep the district focused on improving. He has not pleased everyone.

Despite his efforts to accommodate the billionaire bullies, they are out to get him. Eli Broad has targeted him and gathered millions of dollars from his billionaire buddies to knock Steve out. The Broad billionaires are trying again to gain total control of LAUSD so they can achieve their goal of putting half of the kids in private charter schools. They are pulling out all the stops. They want control.

Let’s be clear: Eli Broad is the Betsy DeVos of California. Although he went to public schools, he looks down his nose at them. He wants privatization. He wants control. He doesn’t care about your children. He cares about power.

Read this article and learn about the bundling tactics of the billionaires.

Give Like A Billionaire – Protecting The Power Of Their Purse: How Billionaires Obscure Contributions And Command Influence

Only billionaires could be so arrogant as to think that they know better than everyone else. Most of them don’t live in Los Angeles. None of them has children in public schools.

Los Angelenos: Tell the billionaires to take a flying leap off a high peak.

Tell them your schools are not for sale.

Re-elect Steve Zimmer.

Categories Billionaires, Broad Foundation, Charter Schools, Los Angeles

Jeff Bryant: How DeVos Strengthened Progressive Forces in Education

By dianeravitch
February 11, 2017 //
37

Jeff Bryant pulls together persuasive evidence that Betsy DeVos energized a movement that was previously scattered and disconnected. People who had no idea that the privatization of public schools is a genuine threat became informed. Groups began forming at the grassroots level to defend their community’s public schools. Supposedly “progressive” Democrats supported privatization by charters because they were hoodwinked by fake reformers promising fake miracles. For those of us fighting privatization, DeVos clarified what is at stake: the survival of democratically-controlled, community-based public schools, responsible for all children.

Even Senators like Michael Bennett and Corey Booker voted against DeVos, even though they fundamentally agree with her view of school reform by school choice.

Make no mistake: School choice was born in racism and it promotes racism.

Jeff Bryant writes:

“Betsy DeVos may have won her contest in the Senate to become the new U.S. Secretary of Education, but her opposition wasn’t the only thing that went down to defeat that day.

“For decades, federal education policies have been governed by a “Washington Consensus” that public schools are effectively broken, especially in low-income communities of color, and the only way to fix them is to apply a dose of tough love and a business philosophy of competition from charter schools and performance measurements based on standardized tests.

“Since the 1990s, this consensus among Democrats and Republicans has enforced all kinds of unproven “reform” mandates on schools, and by 2012, as veteran education reporter Jay Mathews of The Washington Post noted that year, the two parties were “happily copying each other” on education.

“Democrats have in recent years sounded – and acted – a lot like Republicans in advancing corporate education reform, which seeks to operate public schools as if they were businesses, not civic institutions,” writes Valerie Strauss, the veteran education journalist who blogs for the Washington Post. “By embracing many of the tenets of corporate reform — including the notion of ‘school choice’ and the targeting of teachers and their unions as being blind to the needs of children – they helped make DeVos’s education views, once seen as extreme, seem less so.”

“But with the election of President Donald Trump and the ascension of DeVos to secretary, that consensus appears dead.

“She would start her job with no credibility,” Education Week quotes Democratic Senator Patty Murray of Washington. “A vote for Betsy DeVos is a vote for a secretary of education who is likely to succeed only in further dividing us on education issues.”

“The DeVos vote reflected the tribal, dysfunctional, polarized nature of our politics,” writes Woodrow Wilson Center senior scholar Linda Killian in USA Today. “It is a harbinger of things to come.”

“But what looks like the death of a political consensus on education could be the beginning of something else: an opportunity for progressives to press a new education agenda. Here’s what should they do.”

He proceeds to write about next steps. Read them.

Here is one you can take right now. Join the Network for Public Education. DeVos caused a huge spike in our membership. She has made parents and educators and graduates of public schools aware that they must stand together and fight the DeVos-Trump agenda of charters, vouchers, cybercharters, for-profit schools, homeschooling. Just remember when she speaks soothing words about public schools, she wants to take funding away from them to share with all those private choices.

When Eli Broad talks about charters, he is endorsing the DeVos agenda. When Democrats for Education Reform, Families for Excellent Schools, Stand for Children, Bill Gates, and other billionaires sing the praises of charter schools, they are singing from the DeVos privatization hymnal.

When Anthony Cody and I started the Network

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Broad Foundation, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Democrats for Education Reform, Education Industry, Education Reform, For-Profit, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Privatization

UTLA Writes a Letter to Eli Broad about Betsy DeVos

By dianeravitch
February 9, 2017 //
12

The United Teachers of Los Angeles sent this letter to billionaire Eli Broad. Broad has been a major funder of privately managed charter schools in Los Angeles, Detroit, and other districts around the nation. He currently is promoting a $450 million plan to put half of all students in Los Angeles in charter schools. He also donates large sums to candidates who advocate the replacement of public schools with charter schools.

A few days before the vote to confirm Betsy DeVos, Broad announced that he opposed her.

UTLA wrote to Eli Broad:

Dear Mr. Broad:

UTLA and public education advocates, parents, students and community members have been fighting against Betsy DeVos’ nomination as Secretary of Education months before your letter, dated Feb. 1, was sent to all US Senators, in which you asked them to vote against her confirmation, which just took place today.

You were late to that struggle. We are not surprised.

If you are, according to your letter, “a believer in high-quality public schools and strong accountability for ALL public schools, including traditional and charter,” then you can do something right now: Immediately withdraw your financial support for the California Charter Schools Association (CCSA).

CCSA is a lobbying arm of the charter school industry that has amassed more than $170 million to fight the very existence of our neighborhood public schools.

Instead of continuing to fund CCSA, you should take responsibility for the damage you have caused, through your funding, to the school systems in California, Detroit, and New Orleans. In the latter two places, you worked hand-in-hand with Betsy DeVos.

To repair the damage, send your generous donations with no strings attached to the democratically elected school boards in California, especially the Los Angeles School Board, as well as schools in New Orleans and Detroit. School boards and school communities will invest this money appropriately.

In your letter, you say you “have never met Mrs. DeVos” and you have “serious concerns about her support of unregulated charter schools and vouchers as well as the potential conflicts of interests she might bring to the job.”

Forgive us as we take a moment to put this statement in context.

Last year, as one of the largest donors to CCSA, you helped thwart common-sense legislation like SB 322, which would have protected charter school students from unfair expulsions. You, through donations to CCSA, also intensely lobbied against AB 709, an accountability and transparency bill, which would have required that charter schools comply with the same state laws governing open meetings, open records and conflict of interest that traditional public schools do.

You and DeVos teamed up to fund legislative races in Louisiana, a state that, post-Hurricane Katrina, became the poster child for unregulated charter growth and the systematic destruction of the civic institution of public education.

Since 2008, you gave $212,500 to DeVos’ lobbying organization founded and chaired by her called “Alliance for School Choice.” It is a Washington, DC-based lobbying firm that, similar to CCSA, undermines public education and pushes for expansion of unregulated charter schools and school vouchers.

You and DeVos both funded the Educational Achievement Authority in Michigan, which oversaw the mass charter-ization and de-unionization of Detroit public schools, resulting in a wasteland rife with student equity and access violations, recently documented in a front page story in the New York Times.

While you claim to have never met her before, you have worked with her on multiple fronts, in multiple cities.

In 2016, with a donation of $2 million to CCSA Advocates, you were the most generous among California’s
elite handful of billionaires, including the Walton family of Walmart, Reed Hastings of Netflix and Doris Fisher of Gap, Inc. Your friend and former Los Angeles mayor Richard J. Riordan donated $50,000 to CCSA. He has also given
$1 million in the school board district race against School Board President Steve Zimmer.

You have so much money, maybe there is confusion around what legislation and which candidates your
vast wealth is actually fighting or supporting.

Because of your torrential financial support, last year CCSA far surpassed all other funders in state political races, including groups backed by the energy industry and real estate developers.

You and members of your billionaire club gave more than $27 million to various PACs like the Parent Teacher Alliance (PTA), the title of which is sneaky and confusing to parents. PTA has amassed $8 million this year alone. EdVoice amassed another $9 million. You gave more than $1.5 million to both of these PACs.

These independent expenditures help fund groups like Speak UP, Parent Revolution and Great Public Schools Now, as well as countless CCSA-backed candidates, who then work to undermine public education on your behalf.

When DeVos was first nominated, on Nov. 23, CCSA released a statement with high praise for Trump’s pick, and even said “Mrs. DeVos has long demonstrated a commitment to providing families with improved public school options and we look forward to working with the administration on proposals allowing all students in California to access their right to a high quality public education.”

CCSA and Great Public Schools Now have since backed off their enthusiastic support for DeVos,sensing it would be unpopular. We hope you have a deeper reason behind sending out your letter to the Senate, and that it will signal a shift in your financial support.

In your letter, you say DeVos is “unprepared and unqualified for the position.” You further say that we must have someone “who believes in public education and the need to keep public schools public.”

We couldn’t agree more.

Our public schools are in great need, many of them suffering from the years of unrelenting attacks from people like you.

Make amends. Join parents, students, educators and community members in our fight to save public education.

Immediately suspend your financial support of CCSA. Give your generous donations with no strings attached to public schools in California, Detroit, and New Orleans, and leave the educational decisions to our elected school boards and local stakeholders, who — unlike billionaires — are truly accountable to our communities.

Sincerely,

UTLA President
Alex Caputo-Pearl

Cc:
United States
Senators

—
Anna Bakalis

UTLA Communications Director
(213) 305-9654 (c)
(213) 368-6247 (o)
Abakalis@UTLA.net
http://www.UTLA.net

Categories Betsy DeVos, Broad Foundation, Los Angeles, Supporting public schools

The Dirty Tricks of California’s Charter Industry

By dianeravitch
February 9, 2017 //
5

The Los Angeles Times endorsed two strong supporters of charter schools for the Los Angeles Unified School District board, both favored by the California Charter School Association. The rationale was simplistic: new voices are needed.This is bizarre. It doesn’t matter whether a voice is old or new. What matters most is what the voice is saying. Will a new board try to turn Los Angeles into New Orleans? Will it be Eli Broad’s puppet? His voice is the oldest of all. It would be truly refreshing if the LA Times told him to keep his hands off the public schools since all of his experiments have failed (e.g., Michigan’s Education Achievement District). Why don’t they tell him to stick to art and medical research and stop meddling in the schools?

However, the Times published an article by columnist Steve Lopez that offers a clear-eyed analysis of the CCSA’s dirty tricks. The CCSA and its billionaire buddies have decided that it is time to take out Steve Zimmer, chair of the LAUSD school board. They are raising millions of dollars to push him out, even though he has not been hostile to charters. But the billionaires don’t want a fair-minded board president who has classroom experience (Zimmer came into education through Teach for America but remained a teacher for 17 years). The last time they tried to beat him, they outspent him 5-1, but he prevailed. His winning issue apparently was the $1 million from former NYC Mayor Bloomberg, which gave the appearance that a New Yorker was trying to buy control of the LA schools. So this time the $1 million came from former LA Mayor Richard Riordan.

So here’s the dirty trick. CCSA created a phony group called LA Students for Change to demand Zimmer’s ouster. Once again, like Families for Excellent Schools in New York City, which is composed of billionaire families who will never see the inside of a public school, the charter industry finds it necessary to deceive voters. Worse, CCSA printed up flyers for their student-props, blaming Zimmer for John Deasy’s $1 Billion iPad fiasco.

How comical is that? The embarrassing iPad scandal caused Deasy to resign, with a cloud over his head. Deasy now works for Eli Broad. Broad is the city’s charter kingpin and a major financier of CCSA. and now CCSA’s student group is pinning Deasy’s mess on Zimmer.

I salute the Los Angeles Times for recognizing that it’s time for Monica Garcia, the board’s most fervent charter advocate, to go. The Times endorses Lisa Alva, a classroom teacher who would be a valuable addition to the board. She and Carl Petersen are running against Garcia, and here’s hoping that they pull enough votes to force her into a run-off and defeat her.

Los Angeles should have a great public school in every neighborhood. That won’t happen as long as charters continue to drain away the students they want and drain away resources, leaving LAUSD with the students most expensive to educate and less money to meet their needs.

The district needs that vision, not just new voices and faces for the sake of novelty.

Categories Broad Foundation, California, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Los Angeles, Privatization

Billionaire Eli Broad Opposes DeVos

By dianeravitch
February 1, 2017 //
29

Does anyone care? A day late and many dollars short, charter champion Eli Broad came out in opposition to Betsy DeVos.

Why did he wait until after she passed the GOP-controlled Senate committee? She has been under discussion for two months. Why the silence when it might have mattered?

Is he trying to protect charters from competition with vouchers?

Does he want to protect the charter brand from being mingled with the Trump brand?

Whatever his motive, he is not acting to protect public schools.

Would you rather be privatized by charter or voucher? Would you rather be hung or shot?

Categories Betsy DeVos, Broad Foundation, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Privatization, School Choice, Vouchers

Los Angeles Teachers Plan a Tweetstorm Against Trump and DeVos

By dianeravitch
January 4, 2017 //
17

The UTLA is organizing a tweet storm in opposition to Trump, DeVos, Walmart, and Broad.

 

The hashtag is #schooltrump

 

Please support them!

Categories Betsy DeVos, Broad Foundation, Corporate Reformers, Privatization, Trump
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