Echo Park Moms leading the way. Demand your right to vote! No more LAUSD privatization without representation!

First published in EchoParkPatch on 2011-05-10

"Supporters of the controversial [PSC] plan say it is part of a much-needed reform effort that takes decision-making out of the hands of bureaucrats and special interests and puts it in the hands of parents and the community." — Connie Llanos


LAUSD Superintendent John Deasy and Tamar Galatzan — one of Philip Anschutz's preferred LAUSD Board Members — want to remove the last vestiges of democracy from an already undemocratic process that gives public schools away to private charter corporations.

There is now an online petition to sign if you think that removing the public advisory vote from the deceptively named Public School Choice resolution (PSC) is a move that disenfranchises and disempowers communities.

KEEP the Parent Advisory Vote, The Only Voice parents have in the CHOICE process

The first resistance to the removal of the community advisory vote was by non other than Echo Parque's very own Echo Park Moms 4 Education group. They sent out an open letter to the Los Angeles public decrying the pending loss of the public advisory vote portion of the PSC process.

Echo Park Moms 4 Education: URGENT - Parent Wake-Up Call on Tuesday May 10th!!!

The open letter urges everyone to contact the School Board and demand they keep the advisory vote. Those sentiments were endorsed by several more organizations including

• Coalition for Educational Justice Echo Parque/Historic Filipinotown (CEJ)
• People's Assembly for Popular Education & Liberation (PAPEL)
• Chicano/Latino Artists for Social Equality (CLASE)
• Congreso Internacional de Mujeres Activistas de las Americas (CIMA)
• Congreso de Estados Mexicanos en el Exterior (CEME)
• The Senate Select Community Committee on California's Correctional System (SSCCCCS)

Maria Casillas, president of the right-wing school privatization advocacy group called Families in Schools (FIS) was commissioned to provide LAUSD with a position paper on the advisory vote. The report, entitled A Report on the Public School Choice 2.0 Advisory Vote Process is perhaps one of the most biased and dishonest accounts of the community advisory votes one could imagine. FIS recommends removing the last semblance of democracy from an already undemocratic process called Public School Choice discusses that document LAUSD is using to justify this move.

On Tuesday May 10, 2011, a group of parents, led by Echo Park Moms 4 Education will protest in front of LAUSD headquarters. Please get involved and let the board know we will not be silenced.

When PSC was first being debated, charter-voucher school advocates like Ben Austin were saying "The collective decisions of hundreds of thousands of parents doing right by their own child gets us to a better place than where we are now ... completely captured by bureaucrats." Notice that neither Austin's right wing privatization organization nor any other so-called "parental engagement" non-profits are protesting the pending loss of the advisory vote, putting to lie all their bluster about parent power. From the beginning their only designs were to increase charter school market share.

We need to show these astroturf groups what real parent and community power looks like. Whose schools? Our schools!

Echo Park Moms leading the way. Demand your right to vote! No more LAUSD privatization without representation!