To be sure, Steve Barr lost his position because of the malfeasance of the missing $51,000 scandal, his embarrassing falling out with Michele Rhee during Green Dot Public [sic] Schools' negotiations in D.C., and his constant wrangling with the one man at Green Dot who is greedier than he is -- Marco Petruzzi. The money grubbing Green Dot Public [sic] Schools machine would have discarded the Silver Lake snake oil salesman completely, except their decade long public relations campaign portraying Steve Barr as the "friendly face" of the neoliberal dismantling of public education by corporate interests has been so successful, it would have harmed the corporate charter-voucher establishment in the long run. In the interest of "market share" Green Dot kept Barr on to serve as the corporate spokesperson for the sycophantic right wing business press and other corporate sociopaths to dote on him while they eliminate the last vestiges of the public commons, and give themselves bailout financed bonuses.
Steve Barr's corporate charter-voucher establishment in Los Angeles, like all EMO/CMO factory schools with their unelected and unaccountable boards, have been a paradigm of parent and community disenfranchisement. Recent definitive studies citing both charter school racism and CMO charter-voucher school discrimination and exclusivity toward children with special needs are further proof that the decades long failed experiment of the corporate CMO supporters must end.
Steve Barr's astro-turf parental "involvement," via LAPU/PR under wealthy Ben Austin is highly suspect as well. Aside from unsavory incidents of class oppression and racism the Green Dot/LAPU/PR tactic of organizing parents in front of LAUSD was typified in that he allowed parents to count it against their contractual "community services" clause they signed to get their children into Barr's factory schools. In addition to paying massive salaries to executives like Ben Austin Green Dot and its marketing division LAPU/PR is funded by nefarious billionaires like the Waltons, Gates, Milkens, and Broads, who dump millions into corporate CMO/EMO charters since it furthers their extreme right wing agenda and fuels their Milton Friedman cum Ayn Rand fantasies.
"We need to say no to the neoliberal fatalism that we are witnessing at the end of this century, informed by the ethics of the market, an ethics in which a minority makes most profits against the lives of the majority. In other words, those who cannot compete, die. This is a perverse ethics that, in fact, lacks ethics. I insist on saying that I continue to be human...I would then remain the last educator in the world to say no: I do not accept...history as determinism. I embrace history as possibility [where] we can demystify the evil in the perverse fatalism that characterizes the neoliberal discourse in the end of this century." -- Paulo Freire and Donaldo Macedo, "Ideology Matters"
1 comment:
Polemic much?
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