Schools Matter: LA Times will support John Deasy so long as their customers are corporate advertisers, rather than LAUSD schoolchildren

First published on Schools Matter on October 03, 2014

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I was interested in the fact that the scandal over Deasy's PhD hit the headlines at the same time he was hired by Gates. His financial connections with Robert Felner date back to his Santa Monica days — Susan Ohanian

Reaching dizzying heights of comedic apologetics for beleaguered Broad Superintendent Academy graduate John Deasy, the Los Angeles Times has penned daily editorials and articles pleading the public to pressure our elected school board into laying down and ignoring Deasy's latest batch of failures. Like any first year law student I've been very busy. Too busy to respond to all of their wrongheaded propaganda, but today's editorial forced me to divert my attentions. I responded thusly:

Another breathtakingly mendacious editorial by the stenographers of plutocracy—also known as the Los Angeles Times. Ignoring the vicious attacks on our elected school board members, and the poisonous vitriol towards our working class teachers this ham-fisted screed metes out, let's look at some of the lies of omission regarding the individual who was ignominiously run out of both Prince George's County and Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School Districts.

Putting aside Deasy's relationship to convicted felon Robert Felner, and the concerns regarding the irregularities of Deasy's academic credentials, here is a "greatest hits" list of Deasy's tenure at LAUSD.

• Implemented costly and academically discredited DIBELS®, a product of a company called the Dynamic Measurement Group, which is neither State nor Federally mandated.
• Squandered an additional $18 million on SAP consultants to fix issues that happened under his predecessors, rather than demand contract performance from original deal.
• Spent countless millions implementing his widely discredited VAM/AGT scam, a pseudoscience that recently saw even the American Statistical Association release a scathing report about.
• Deasy's callous and improper handling of the Miramonte scandal.
• The MiSiS disaster, which any competent administrator would have avoided. Even the somewhat conservative AALA severely criticized Deasy's many missteps on this.
• The unethical, improper, and possibly illegal handling of the Pearson plc and Apple Inc. contracts. The details of which could result in indictments.

Any one of these would have ousted a Superintendent, but because Deasy has Eli Broad immunity, He has been able to avoid termination, and perhaps even criminal prosecution. It's time for this reign of incompetence to end.

Dr. Cynthia Liu, of K12NN fame, had some additional Deasy "hits" that I failed to list. They are reproduced here.

Two things from K12NN if you're writing to the LA Times to urge that Deasy resign:

Examples of gross incompetence by Deasy: 4th largest CA school district Fresno USD conducted an external FCMAT tech review of their district's needs before embarking on any new purchases or upgrades. Second largest CA school district, San Diego USD, did its own year-long tech review and spoke to teachers, parents, students, IT support staff, other school staff, and administrators about the technology strategic plan, then used a specific tech bond to fund the rollout.

• Why Didn’t LAUSD Perform A Tech Review Before iPad/MiSiS Purchase?
• Los Angeles Unified Must Refocus: Five Ways Bad Ed Tech Deals in LAUSD Hurt Kids Right Now

The Los Angeles Times keeps insisting their obsequious support for Deasy is based on "his sense of urgency". There's a word for urgency without intelligence, reasonableness, or forethought — that word is recklessness. The last thing our school district needs is an individual whose recklessness remains unabated and unchecked. Deasy needs to resign. Now.

Schools Matter: LA Times will support John Deasy so long as their customers are corporate advertisers, rather than LAUSD schoolchildren

Schools Matter: Tami Abdollah and John Deasy gush that 'Size Matters'

"Just continue to follow the money. This Race to the Trough will make the Reading First crooks under Bush look like dopey Boy Scouts." — Professor Jim Horn

The neoliberal cabal at Southern California's KPCC can't cheerlead for school privatization loud or frequently enough. Not content with Pat Morrison lobbing softballs to Broad Superintendent Academy graduate and former Gates Foundation employee John Deasy once a week, KPCC's intrepid education beat reporters are always looking for the latest anti-public-school story angle.

See my Schools Matter post, Tami Abdollah and John Deasy gush that 'Size Matters', for the rest of this essay.

Published 2012-08-15 on Schools Matter, please read it there and share widely.

Schools Matter: Tami Abdollah and John Deasy gush that 'Size Matters'

Recall Monica Garcia! Picket outside LA Chamber of Commerce

Recall Monica Garcia! Picket outside LA Chamber of Commerce

Protesting the Mónica García Privatization Celebration Event

On the morning of Friday July 13, 2012 wealthy charter corporation heads, billionaire funded 501c3 "non-profits," and well heeled business leaders celebrated a "Decade of Corporate Education Reforms" courtesy of LAUSD President Mónica Garcia.

Community members, students, educators, and social justice activists showed up on last minute notice to let Ms. García know that her tenure has been, and continues to be, unbearable to those suffering under her neoliberal regime of privatization and school closures. Several members of United Adult Students were on hand to remind everyone that García has stolen many students' futures have closed so many of our Early Education Center, Adult Education Schools, and SRLDP programs!

The Chamber of Commerce was the perfect place for the chief school privatizer—Mónica García to join her fellow one-percenters, profiteers, privatizers, and poverty pimps, since none of them are about education, they're all about business and revenues instead. Joan Sullivan, Marshall Tuck, Angelica Solis, Elise Buik, Veronica Melvin, and a host of other charter school bandits were on hand to salute Eli Broad and Philip Anschutz's avatar.

We're fighting back. http://www.recallmonicagarcia.com

Protesting the Mónica García Privatization Celebration Event

July 15 Recall Mónica García South Central, Trinity Park

This Sunday, July 15, 2012 from 9:00am — 1:00pm, South Central, Trinity Park, corner of Wall Street & 25th Street (3 blocks from Santee Educational Complex), 90011

Information: Vera Padilla marver69@hotmail.com or (323)236-0595

See the complete summer schedule

July 15 Recall Mónica García South Central, Trinity Park

Recall Mónica García June Press Conference

Students, Parents, and Community Activists provided an update on the recall campaign and other activities to save LAUSD SRLDP, Early Education Centers, Adult Education, and to prevent further privatization, reconstitution, and closures of our local neighborhood schools. http://recallmonicagarcia.com

Recall Mónica García June Press Conference

Want to see Mónica García's 15 Minutes of Infamy come to an end?

Want to see the schoolboard member most responsible for privatization and cuts to services crucial to immigrant and impoverished families get her own personal pink slip? All it will take is FIFTEEN of your Dollars, FIFTEEN Hours of your time, and for you to Tell FIFTEEN of your Friends.

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Donate 15 Dollars to the recall campaign

Of course we won't be mad if you add a zero or two to that figure, but we'll take what we can get. It costs money to print petitions, and we don't have any "big funders" like Mónica García does. Donate now at recallmonicagarcia.com. If you want to donate offline, we can do that too.

Donate 15 Hours to the recall campaign

We need volunteers to collect signatures, help organize, and a host of other tasks. If you are a registered voter, we'd love to have you circulate the recall petitions. We have a bunch of jobs that need community members driven by their pasion to restore School Readiness Language Development Program (SRLDP), Early Education Centers (EEC), Elementary Arts, and the Division of Adult and Career Education (DACE). Sign up as a volunteer at recallmonicagarcia.com

Share the recall campaign with 15 friends

Share the recall website recallmonicagarcia.com, our facebook page, and our twitter account. Talk to your friends, colleagues, and family members. If you're an activist or educator in District 2, let parents know that people are fighting back against the budget cuts and privatization. The more people we can get to give 15, 15, and 15, the better chance we have of successfully recalling the Board President.

This campaign is about sending a clear message!

The recall campaign isn't about García as an individual. Instead it's a repudiation against budget priorities and policies that are not in line with our community. All of the LAUSD Trustees need to know that they will be held accountable for decisions that are harmful to the ninety-nine percent. We want LAUSD to answer to every nieghborhood, not just 10900 Wilshire Boulevard!

Want to see Mónica García's 15 Minutes of Infamy come to an end?

Highs And Lows? More like a Year of Woe! Deasy has got to go.

I was interested in the fact that the scandal over Deasy's PhD hit the headlines at the same time he was hired by Gates. His financial connections with Robert Felner date back to his Santa Monica days — Susan Ohanian

Last week the Los Angeles press was effusive with anniversary homages to Eli Broad and Bill Gates' personally selected poverty pimp, Superintendent John Deasy. Short on facts and long on neoliberal cheerleading, the articles paint the man who has shuttered libraries and killed programs depended on by countless desperate poor and immigrant families as some kind of thoughtful hero. The Huffington Post jumped on the bandwagon, paying political tribute to the pirate king. My comments on The Huffington Post's Lucy Blodget's gushing love letter to Deasy are duplicated here:

The debut has been disastrous. Deasy squandered hundreds of millions of dollars on highly discredited programs like VAM/AGT. He spent millions more on costly tests that aren't mandated. Meanwhile, programs critical to impoverished and immigrant communities were cut entirely including: SRLDP, EEC, Elementary Arts, and Adult Education. I document much of Deasy's 1% spending spree in NCL: http://blog.ncladvocacy.org/2012/03/on-adult-educations-critical-role-in-social-justice-2/#notes

Peer reviewed academic studies find only three things improve student performance when poverty is accounted for. Reduced class size, teacher experience, and access to books. My Schools Matter writing colleague Professor Krashen has done expensive research on the latter. Deasy's response to allowing poor children access to books? Close countless school libraries and fire numerous librarians, while telling poor children to buy iPads. I discuss this tragic incident in: http://www.schoolsmatter.info/2011/09/john-deasys-queen-antoinette-moment-let.html

Others mentioned his stealing Title I and III funds to pay for his VAM/AGT white whale, and elimination of the only voice community and parents had in councils. Eliminating parental input, he brings in the vile Maria Casillas, whose long career in service to the lucrative charter-voucher industry belies Deasy's purposes.

On balance Deasy has been everything one would expect the plutocrats Broad and Gates to unleash on the working people of Los Angeles. We need a schoolboard that will eliminate him and get a superintendent that will place pupils above profits.

I also took issue with another Deasy fanfare in the Los Angeles Times, but chose to comment on a single turn of phrase which was incredulous, even by their standards.

One of you penned: "...diverse organizations as the Chamber of Commerce, the United Way, the Urban League and InnerCity Struggle, an Eastside community group."

Since both Urban League and Inner City Struggle are funded by the United Way, just how "diverse" are these groups?

Moreover, outside the plutocrat Billionaire Boys Club that comprises United Way's Tocqueville Society, the vast majority of their donors are the well heeled and quite reactionary members of the Chamber of Commerce.

In other words, diversity would be the last word that one would use to describe an essentially monolithic set of groups with an identical right-wing privatization agenda.

Two recent essays speaking truth to Deasy's power are valuable and enjoyable reads.

LAUSD’s Dark Lord, Dr. John Deasy

by John Mears

LAUSD Superintendent of Schools John Deasy Must Go

by Joseph K.

Of course, if my current endeavors are successful, one of the first things I'll do is push to start a search for a qualified Superintendent for LAUSD, since no such search was conducted when Ramon Cortines stepped down.

The Susan Ohanian piece quoted above says: "Many speculate that the Gates job was just a holding pattern for the Los Angeles appointment, which will give him the opportunity to turn LA in to the Gates model district." The broad base of community members, parents, and educators that I work with on a constant basis don't want a "Gates model district," we want a social justice model district.

Highs And Lows? More like a Year of Woe! Deasy has got to go.

Schools Matter: When Capricious Young says no experience required, she requires no experience

"We are told that this 'reform' alliance of everyone from Rupert Murdoch to the Walton family to leading hedge funders spends huge amounts of money pushing for radical changes to public schools because they suddenly decided that they care about destitute children, and now want to see all kids get a great education." — David Sirota


In Los Angeles, nobody has been more adept at stuffing public money into their pockets via charter-voucher sector windfalls than Caprice Young. Her early career showed a trajectory of opportunism and greed that would place her in ever more lucrative positions as time progressed.

In my new Schools Matter article When Capricious Young says no experience required, she requires no experience I trace her nefarious career in which she has worked for people ranging from the racist, bigoted, anti-immigrant nativist Steve Poizner to the predatory capitalist and junk bond felon Michael Milken. We also see how she and her husband have both cashed in at the public's expense at the charter-voucher cash cow. Most importantly, we feature an informative letter from a reader who explores Young's newest hustle — EnCorps, Inc. — an odious organization designed to deprofessionalize teaching.

Published 2011-10-01 on Schools Matter, please read it there and share widely.

Schools Matter: When Capricious Young says no experience required, she requires no experience

Schools Matter: John Deasy's Queen Antoinette moment: "let them eat ebooks"

First published on Schools Matter on September 24, 2011

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"Right now, only higher-income readers can afford ebook readers and ebooks." — Dr. Stephen Krashen

On September 14, 2011 former Gates Foundation executive and Broad Superintendents Academy graduate John Deasy gave a much ballyhooed speech at Occidental College. While I may have time in the future to critique his mendacious stream of business-speak, which amounted to a clever corporate couching of school privatization in the language of "civil rights," it was his aloof response to an attendee's pertinent question on school libraries that deserves an immediate response. Here's a quote from an attendee who endured Deasy's verbal assault on public education:

"[O]ne of Rosemary's questions about his shutting school libraries got through. He said libraries would be irrelevant soon as books will move to electronic format. This was after he lamented about the plight of a homeless student living in a tent. I kid you not. I guess the kid in the tent will have to access books on the $800 I-Pad he can't afford."

A pointed and poignant question indeed to Los Angeles Unified School District's (LAUSD) Superintendent John Deasy, a man who deliberately gutted LAUSD's libraries in defiance of California's Assembly Bill 114, which was supposed to mandate the district spend its copious surplus funds on retaining the very personnel Deasy and company gleefully laid off. Laid off in a most ignominious fashion by the way, as Hector Tobar's The disgraceful interrogation of L.A. school librarians chronicled. Deasy's vapid and vacuous response to the library question sums up everything about corporate education reforms and shows why Deasy was hand selected to implement the neoliberal agenda in Los Angeles.

As disgusting as Deasy's quote about libraries being irrelevant was, it wasn't surprising considering his astonishing wealth and privilege. For wealthy white males like Deasy, poverty is something you see on television and it's easily solved by applying forms of the meritocracy myth via vile "no excuses" rhetoric and corporate privatization policies cloaked as promoting "high expectations." Deasy's own phrasing of the threadbare right-wing no excuses rhetoric reads as follows: "I actually believe that no other issue—circumstances of poverty, one parent, no parent, race, language proficiency, special need—none of that has a greater affect on the achievement gap than our belief about the ability of youth."

More to the point, Deasy's flippant remark that electronic format books would soon replace libraries has no grounding in reality. Such thinking and policies exacerbate the inequality of access to books in a way that is both classist and racist. A brief, but fact packed essay by Schools Matter's own Dr. Stephen Krashen entitled Kindelizaton: Are Books Obsolete? patently disproves everything Superintendent Deasy claims. Let's look at some of the important facts the essay presents.

Data shows that "ebooks appear to be capturing some of the paperback book market, but certainly not all of it, and not the hard cover or tradebook market. Thus far ebooks make up only a tiny percentage of total school library collections." [1] In other words, while ebooks are making inroads in the profitable popular paperbook sector, there hasn't been a great deal of investment in the more costly and lower volume textbook and hardcover sectors. As a consequence "ebooks only account for one-half of one percent of school library collections, and this is predicted to increase to only 7.8% in five years." [2]

It isn't just that ebooks aren't widespread enough to be considered a suitable replacement for school libraries. It's that access to ebooks is strictly class based:

The problem is the expense. Right now, only higher-income readers can afford ebook readers and ebooks. Kindles, for example, cost at least $100 each, and ebooks cost about $10, beyond the budget for those living in poverty. [3]

A table in Krashen's paper shows only four percent of people with household incomes under $30,000 owned ebook-readers, and that percentage remained constant for the nineteen months prior to publication of the paper. Krashen's conclusion is equally revealing:

The cost of ebook readers and ebooks makes them much less available to students from high-poverty families and under-funded school libraries. (Note that it is usually not possible to share ebooks.) Ebooks are allowing the print-rich to get even print-richer. [4]

It isn't surprising that people who get doctoral degrees from Cracker Jack boxes, or worse, purchase them from convicted criminals like Robert Felner in exchange for six figure grants, might be unaware of such research. More cynical readers might be tempted to suspect Deasy's deep ties to monopolistic software moguls like Bill Gates and technobabble charlatans like Tom Vander Ark as possible explanations for his intentional razing of school libraries in favor of profitable, but income exclusive, ebooks. Those things said, one would like to think the head of one of the largest school districts in the country would have a grasp of the basic fundamentals surrounding pedagogical issues and would be immune from pandering to his deep pocketed associates. Given the frightening lack of capacity of California's schools, outlined in UCLA Institute for Democracy, Education, and Access "The Train that is about to Hit," Deasy's notion of "let them eat ebooks" borders on criminal.

Research emphatically puts to lie Deasy's assertion that "libraries would be irrelevant soon as books will move to electronic format." In a state where the ratio of students to librarians is nearly 5,500 to 1 [5], Deasy's outright dismissal of the importance of libraries and books, combined with policies that exacerbate the problem, strongly convict him in his role in neoliberal dismantling of public education. Of course that's Deasy's capacity, he wasn't brought in by the Broad/Gates/Walton Triumvirate to fix LAUSD, he was brought in to destroy it. Collectively we need to reject Deasy's false narrative and demand he spend our funds on libraries and classrooms, not he and his fellow administrators' lavish lifestyles! Collectively we need to fight the privatization of public education!

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NOTES

[1] Krashen, Stephen. 2011. Kindelizaton: Are Books Obsolete?. Books and Articles by Stephen D. Krashen. Accessed September 20, 2011. http://www.sdkrashen.com/articles/kindelization.pdf

[2-4] Ibid.

[5] This wonderful infographic from the UCLA IDEA article mentioned above illustrates what the plutocrat class has done to California's education system.

Schools Matter: John Deasy's Queen Antoinette moment: "let them eat ebooks"

Schools Matter: A match made in privatization purgatory? Capricious Young and A.J. Duffy!

"Improving education is not the goal. Privatization is the goal... Private interests are just that – private." — Bruce A. Dixon (Managing Editor, "Black Agenda Report")


I recently posted a short essay on political opportunist and public education turncoat A.J. Duffy jumping on the privatization bandwagon. In that essay I mentioned how the Los Angeles Times was using the episode to push their vile privatization agenda via an odious editorial. Right on the heels of the Times' gleeful hit-piece, expounding on their love for all forms of corporate rule, they gave Duffy's newfound partner in poverty pimping, Caprice "Capricious" Young, a platform to further pimp privatization. Young, an unelected board member of Duffy's lucrative foray into the privatization pool was quick to lay on the corporate charter spin. My Schools Matter essay entitled: A match made in privatization purgatory? Capricious Young and A.J. Duffy! looks at Duffy's newfound neoliberal colaborator. Remember Caprice Young is a devil. For a reminder see her endorsement on the back cover of this book on union busting and community exclusion.

Published 2011-09-07 on Schools Matter, please read it there and share widely.

Schools Matter: A match made in privatization purgatory? Capricious Young and A.J. Duffy!