DFER Reactionary Gloria Romero Jumps on the Hostile Takeover Bandwagon in Compton

Barr's parent organization gave... a grass-roots visual... And his paid staffers hit the right rhetorical notes... while identifying themselves to reporters and officials only as parents. — Howard Blume (Los Angeles Times)


Here's my comments on Howard Blume and Teresa Watanabe's latest glowing, gushing piece on everyone's favorite corporate school privatizers.

Good to see the reactionary pro-corporate Gloria Romero side with of parents that signed the petition and utterly ignore the wishes of parents and community members that opposed it. Why did you want to "prevent opposition" Senator? Is it because giving the parents all the facts and multiple choices instead of a hand picked single choice would have prevented the well heeled Vielka McFarlane from increasing her market share? Or is it that you and your fellow wealthy elitist Ben Austin felt those parents weren't capable of making informed decisions outside of those you already made for them?

Can't wait to see the DFER 990 filing to see how well Romero is compensated for her loyal devotion to the lucrative corporate charter-voucher industry.

One thing Austin, Romero, Barr, and Schwarzenegger don't mention is that their petitions can legally contain parents who won't send their children to the school including: parents sending their kids to parochial schools and parents that will move before their kids attend a school. They also don't bring up the fact that community members (ie. taxpayers that finance the school) have no voice in the corporate trigger process. In other words, a tiny minority of the 'stakeholders' have sway over the process. How convenient for the well financed proxies of the charter-voucher sector, like Parent Revolution, are able to use this carefully crafted legislation to subvert any semblance of democratic processes. That's how corporate America rolls, right?

Lastly, I'm hope all the McKinley parents with special needs children will be sure to thank Ismenia Guzman for essentially casting their children to the curb. Given the dearth of Celerity's special education capacity, that future Guzman speaks of will be quite grim for the neediest children of all. But charter-voucher supporter don't care about 'those' kids. Greedy, heartless, and selfish doesn't begin to describe...

With less than 1/5 of CMO/EMOs outperforming average public schools, you've got to wonder why all the "free market" kooks support them. How does railing against "big government" schools explain the fact that 83% of public schools are better than charter-voucher schools. Further, unlike charters, public schools are required to educate every child, and they still outperform their privatized counterparts. Sadly these charters eschew responsibility to special needs children for no other reason than it cuts into profitability. That's a coup de grace argument against the private sector, but corporate charter supporters ignore the facts for of one of two reasons.

There's a camp getting obscenely wealthy from charter bubble. charter CEOs are making whopping six figure salaries, and others are scoring big too. Real estate and vendor contracts are so lucrative that the hedge fund parasites and even the big dogs like Goldman Sachs and Tilson Funds are in on the action.

Then there's a camp ideologically wedded to privatization despite the overwhelming evidence it doesn't work. While this includes extremist right wing think tanks like Cato, AEI, and Hoover, it also includes so-called philanthropists manipulating behind the scenes. Unfortunately this camp hasn't figured out that Galt and Rourke are fictional characters from a depraved woman's mind.

DFER Reactionary Gloria Romero Jumps on the Hostile Takeover Bandwagon in Compton

Vielka McFarlane and Ben Austin orchestrate hostile takeover in Compton

"We don't want to focus on how the history of the country has been checkered but on how do we dress for success..." — historical revisionist and Celerity CEO Vielka McFarlane on why she insists on hiding the history of Emmett Till's brutal murder at the hands of white supremacists.


First read Teresa Watanabe and Howard Blume's obsequious homage to the corporate school privatizers in this story. Here's my quick response:

Big news! Ben Austin helps the wealthy Vielka McFarlane, owner of the Celerity corporate charter-voucher chain, increase her market share and revenue stream. Too bad for the community. For anyone deluded enough think that Ben Austin cares about anyone's kids, try taking a look at Part VII of his 501c3's 990 form.

Austin's quote about transferring power to the parents is laughable considering that parents are POWERLESS over CMO charters -- maybe the parents should have asked how much decision making power they would have once the school was seized by McFarlane and her board. Of course, Austin never addresses those questions. Remember when Austin and his privatization junta hid cowardly while parents from his previous parent organization were cast to the curb when Marco Petruzzi shut down Animo Justice by fiat declaration? Was that a "unapologetic transfer of raw power?" The community, on the other hand, protested the gross injustice at the hands of the corporate charter-voucher sector's elite executives.

Give Austin some credit, for a guy on the corporate payroll, he sure finds creative ways to co-opt the language of struggle. A "revolution" funded by Wal-Mart and Microsoft? Please!

Wait until McFarlane and company start pushing out children impacting their inflated API scores like they have in all their other schools. Sorry, but if a school takes public funds, it should be OBLIGATED TO EDUCATE EVERY CHILD.

Today we've seen yet another "unapologetic transfer of" public funds into private hands.

Vielka McFarlane and Ben Austin orchestrate hostile takeover in Compton

Rhee, the Evil Princess of Privatization on Teabagger Transition Team

Right wing reactionary Michelle Rhee is finally working with her own ilk — the racist Teabaggers! Corporate darling Rhee, along with a host of other far right ideologues will work on teabagger-white supremacist favorite Florida Governor-Elect Rick Scott's transition team.

That Rhee was immediately picked to head the education transition team of a teabagger/tea party politician should come as no surprise. Her ability to put the needs of corporations before communities, to call hard working people "special interests," and to make conditions favorable for the get rich quick schemesters in the charter-voucher sector fit right in with the reactionary, market driven, racist teabagging world view.

In this regard so-called edreformers like Michelle Rhee, Ben Austin, Gloria Romero, and Eric Lee hold a ton of common ground with the teabaggers. Check out this piece on David Harmer Tea Party Frontrunner: Abolish Public Schools. No surprise that the teabaggers hold the exact same principles as the hedge fund founded DFER does for education: markets, choice, competition, etc. What is it that Ben Austin always says? "We'll make schools great by forcing them to compete?" Good to know Ben Austin and David Harmer share 18th century values. I thought Harmer was channeling Austin when he said: "In this quintessentially American approach, free people acting in a free market found a variety of ways to pay for a variety of schools serving a variety of students"

Here's the Evil Princess of Privatization's recent appearance on The Steven Colbert Show.

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Michelle Rhee
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes 2010 Election March to Keep Fear Alive

[Click if you can't view the video]

Ms. Rhee gets one thing partially right. American schools were better during the 1950's, but let's look at some of the "inconvenient truths" the corporate edreform crowd leaves out. What was the state of infrastructure of all the other leading industrial nations Rhee refers to in the 1950's? Hint, there was a world war a few years prior. Here are two more questions to ask smug Harvard graduates and TFA alumni: what was the corporate tax rate during the 1950's? What was the tax percentage on the wealthiest Americans during the Eisenhower administration? Answer those questions, and you come to the only cogent explanation for the decline in public education, which as Dr. Stephen Krashen always puts it: "The Problem is Poverty."

Rhee, the Evil Princess of Privatization on Teabagger Transition Team

Governor Elect Brown: Please remove Ben Austin from the State Board of Education

Dear Governor Elect Brown:

One of the first things you can do to help the people of our beleaguered California is help restore balance to the State Board of Education. Please consider removing recent appointees Ben Austin and Alan Arkatov, both of whom are employed by the charter-voucher school sector, and neither of which have any substantial background in education.

The distinguished Ralph Shaffer, Professor Emeritus, History at Cal Poly Pomona, makes a cogent case for a generalized reason why these appointees should be denied:

We need to remove the monopoly grip charter schools have on the state board of education. There’s probably no more powerful, and certainly no more successful, lobby in California than that which promotes the interests of charter schools. Consider the biographies of those currently serving on the state board. Four of the nine are deeply involved in charters. That’s why they are on the board. The governor has just appointed two more charter advocates – one of whom has been the head cheerleader for the most powerful charter school corporation in the state, if not the county. Charters have no more than 5% of California’s students, yet with these appointments they will have a lock hold on the board. Who will speak for the overwhelming majority of our students, the 95% of our kids that the state board is slighting with its rush to expand charters, who already are draining the state education budget to the tune of a billion dollars a year.

We need a State Board of Education that represents the people of California, not an exclusive club of wealthy executives that operates essentially as an extension of the California Charter School Association. The lucrative charter-voucher industry has too many ways it can manipulate and game the system as it is. They shouldn't hold the State Board of Education hostage as well. For too long have corporations held all the reins of power in California, this is an opportunity to give some power back to the people.


Advocating Public Education

Robert D. Skeels

Governor Elect Brown: Please remove Ben Austin from the State Board of Education

Coalition for Educational Justice (CEJ) Annual Fundraiser Party December 4, 2010

UCLA Community School
3201 W. 8th St. Los Angeles, CA 90005
Saturday, December 4, 2010 from 6:00 — 10:00 PM


Information for this event
Informacion en Español tambien

Dear Friends and Supporters,

Coalition for Educational Justice NEEDS YOUR HELP! We've been fighting for educational justice for over a decade, and the political and economic struggles we face in public education have never been so intense. At the same time that we are fighting the privatization of our schools through charter give-aways and campaigning to obtain more desperately needed school funding, foundations that used to support CEJ are tightening their belts and not giving as generously as before. We have had to go from having a full time director to a part time organizing director. We no longer have an office and we are being as frugal as possible with our limited funds. PLEASE RESPOND TO THIS LETTER WITH A GENEROUS DONATION TO CEJ. THANK YOU!

The good news is that our part time organizing director, Frances Turner, is awesome! She started as a student organizer 7 years ago at Crenshaw High School's CEJ chapter. She now inspires and helps guide new CEJ students at LA High, Crenshaw, Dorsey, Jordan, and YOU. Frances brings her dynamic personality and powerful leadership skills to our organization and we are very excited and pleased to have her as our staff person. Byron Gudiel continues to volunteer as a steering committee member of CEJ and Frances' husband, Jesse Turner, is also a very active and contributing steering committee member.

Another piece of CEJ good news is our upcoming annual Fundraising Party in December. It will be held, as it was last year, at the:

UCLA Community School
3201 W. 8th St. Los Angeles, CA 90005
Saturday, December 4, 2010 from 6:00 — 10:00 PM

We're Bringing Back Old School and will highlight the Left's victories through the decades, from the 50's up through the 90's.

We'll never be able to build the movement we need without parents and students in the lead. CEJ is one of the few organizations of parents and students that is working directly with the teachers' union, specifically on a comprehensive anti-privatization strategy. Many other parent and student groups have become part of different anti-union and quasi-privatization efforts. But in CEJ we are exposing the bottom-line motives behind the move to privatize and de-unionize our schools. We have been steadily gaining allies and making progress in our efforts and we continue to stand strong.

Since our last fundraising appeal, we went through the first round of Public School Choice, which we describe as a school give-away to charter companies, and we won a significant battle by keeping 32 out of 36 schools within LAUSD. Three of our schools went to the Mayor's Partnership (PLAS) within I-Design of LAUSD, and 3 others went to various charter organizations. Surprisingly, the LA School Board overwhelmingly supported home-grown school reform plans that CEJ members, in some cases, helped create, and that all of CEJ supported. Through community forums with strong CEJ parent participation, we were able to build support for our plans. In the advisory votes that were later taken last winter, the support for the home-grown reform plans was tremendous and clearly influenced the School Board.

All our CEJ chapters joined a state-wide Day of Action on March 4, '10, and demonstrated with thousands of students, pre-k through adult school, including university students who led the effort throughout California, in Pershing Square, in downtown Los Angeles, one of many locations throughout the state where large mobilizations were held. A Dorsey CEJ student spoke on the podium in front of thousands of demonstrators and a vibrant and enthusiastic group of CEJ students, parents and teachers marched and chanted alongside our sisters and brothers in the struggle, holding our CEJ banner aloft.

Last spring, and during the past two years, CEJ, along with its allies, was very involved in the fight against budget cuts, and was a part of making sure there were minimal RIFs (lay-offs) in order to prevent further deterioration of the teaching profession and the quality of student learning in Los Angeles. CEJ teachers are assisting UTLA in formulating the union's strategic plan and are involved in the Teacher Effectiveness Work Group that is proactively recommending progressive alternatives to evaluating teachers that do NOT include the use of student test scores, but WILL improve the quality of teaching and learning.

This past summer, CEJ developed its own strategic plan which we have begun to enact this fall. We have two city-wide campaigns with which our 6 CEJ chapters and our steering committee have engaged. The first is our State Budget Justice campaign where CEJ members, including many CEJ parents and students, spent more than 100 hours phone-banking and precinct-walking in targeted neighborhoods, promoting two state propositions: 24 and 25 earlier this month. We were unsuccessful in passing Prop 24, which would have closed corporate loopholes and redirected 2 billion dollars to our schools, but we DID help pass Prop 25, a HUGE victory, changing the way California will handle its annual budget from now on. By allowing 50% +1 to pass the state budget, instead of requiring 2/3rds as it has been in the past, Republicans will no longer be able to hold the process hostage, forcing our state to borrow at a high rate of interest for months beyond the budget deadline in order to stay solvent, and compelling the Democrats to cut deals that help the rich and hurt those most in need.

Our second campaign is Social Justice Schools, not Privatization, in which we are actively highlighting our best practices in education, like Crenshaw High School's Social Justice Academy and the UCLA Community School (a pilot school) where CEJ teachers are finely tuning their craft, and working on writing REAL school reform plans for schools on the give-away list this year. We are also preparing the fight for our schools that have just come out on the list for next year, 3 of them being CEJ schools: Dorsey, Los Angeles and Jordan High Schools! We're planning community forums to help educate folks about charter schools and privatization and to inform the community about the teacher/administration/community school plans that should be supported and voted for in community votes in January. We'll hold the forums in the targeted neighborhoods we phoned and then walked in, door to door, during the election campaign, and residents, who indicated their interest earlier, will be invited. After the final School Board decision, determining which school plans will be accepted, CEJ members will once again engage the same communities in promoting a pro-student and pro-teacher school board member in the School Board elections in March, 2011. We have worked closely with UTLA and PEAC (Progressive Educators for Action) in both these campaigns, as well as with the state-wide California Alliance.

CEJ parents, as well as students, have been hugely involved in these two campaigns. UTLA officers, leaders and staff have been very impressed with the grass-roots nature of our organizing. CEJ is unique in its ability to bring parents and youth into this work, side by side with teachers.

Our CEJ chapter work, which is overseen by Frances, is continuing to thrive. Our 5 high school chapters meet regularly and have been instrumental in helping us meet the goals of our two campaigns. At Allesandro Elementary School, in addition to maintaining our fruit and vegetable bars at lunchtime and planting a new batch of vegetables and flowers in our greenhouse, the students, parents and teachers of Allesandro CEJ are teaming up with the Sierra Club in an effort to get Los Angeles off of coal by 2020. At their recent Halloween festival, Allesandro CEJers helped run a booth that gave prizes of LA Beyond Coal tee shirts and buttons to folks who signed petitions and letters to move the campaign forward.

So, as you can see, CEJ remains a strong force in support of public education and in support of equity and racial and socio-economic justice in our communities. We are in need of your support. Please send us a donation, using the form below, and/or come to our annual fundraising party at the UCLA Community School on 8th Street, west of Vermont. See you there!

Sincerely,
December Fundraising Committee of Coalition for Educational Justice (CEJ)

Coalition for Educational Justice (CEJ) Annual Fundraiser Party December 4, 2010

Advocating Public Education Roundup 10W46

"Public Charter" is an oxymoron. — Steve Neat


Dr. Diane Ravitch's The Myth of Charter Schools in The New York Review of Books is nothing less than a cogent and complete dismantling of the propaganda piece by the smug mendacious hipster Davis Guggenheim.

In Charter Schools and Civil Rights: What Kind of 'Movement' is This? Brian Jones takes on all the civil rights pretenders in the charter-voucher industry, whose only rights they're worried about are corporate rights. Some highlights:

Third, while it has black faces perched in important places, the charter school "movement" is not a "black movement" for education. Whereas folks participated in the civil rights movement at great personal risk, many of the influential black supporters of charter schools stand to profit handsomely.

While everyone knows about Reverend Al Sharpton taking hundreds of thousands from hedge fund managers to push the charter-voucher agenda, and I'm sure everyone is familiar with Guggenheim's darling, who as the article points out "pays himself half a million dollars a year." However, we do have some local opportunists who have traded civil rights for corporate rights as well. Reverend Eric Lee and Reverend K.W. Tulloss are Los Angeles based shills for the highly profitable charter-voucher school sector. Reverend Lee, with the backing of all the right wing school privatization organizations, is running against community favorite and public school supporter Marguerite Poindexter LaMotte. District 1 is the only LAUSD Board seat the nefarious billionaires including Eli Broad, William Gates, and heirs to the Wall*Mart throne haven't been able to buy yet.

Reverend Tulloss sits on the board of the most unscrupulous and unprincipled 501C3 in Los Angeles, Ben Austin's corporate, er Parent Revolution (née LAPU). Austin's personal record on race relations is spotty at best, and he and his organization have been called into question several times for this. In addition to Code Words and Green Dot’s Pandering to Westside Racism we have several more examples of this, see the links under the heading "A preference for a "certain kind of folk."

Brian also addresses the corporate edreformer's ridiculous idea that "it is a "movement" that claims that the interests of adults (specifically, teachers) are in conflict with the interests of children (students)." That false Austin-esque dichotomy is often at the heart of the AEI/Cato/Hudson/Heritage/Hoover talking points, and Brian dispatches it with unmatched ease and grace. In the privatized charter-voucher versus public schools debate there is only one true division, either you're for corporations or you're for communities!

The whole article deserves careful attention, as it provides a wealth of facts to dispel even to most pernicious of edreform mendacity. See all of Brian's posts on Huffington Post and Socialist Worker.

Our friends at Black Agenda Report posted this incredibly awesome short video by Teacher Sabrina.



[Click if you can't view the video]

Hedge fund filth in action! Predatory parasite Whitney Tilson of Tilson Funds in regards to the lucrative charter-voucher industry he helped create:

"hedge funds are always looking for ways to turn a small amount of capital into a large amount of capital." A wealthy hedge fund manager can spend more than $1 million financing a charter school start-up. But once it is up and running, it qualifies for state funding, just like a public school... "It is extremely leveraged philanthropy," Mr. Tilson said. — Joel Klein’s Lesson Plan

At least the pariah is finally being honest about the real purpose for the corporate charter-voucher "movement," just like we so-called "defenders of the status quo" have been saying all along. Profit is the only superman they've been waiting for. For more on this see: Goldman Sachs Gets Serious About (profiting from) Charter Schools. None of this will matter so long as these privatizers keep charter-voucher schools on pace with their other big money makers, like the prison industrial complex. Of course these days its hard to tell the difference between corporate charter-voucher schools and prisons. Check out this latest egregious CMO offense: Detention First at Segregated Charter School Chain Gangs.

Dr. Danny Weil takes on Kaplan, Phoenix, ITT and other for profit predators leeching pubic funds in his latest Truthout piece Removing Plaque at the Gum Line: For-Profit Universities, Emboldened by the Midterm Elections, Seek to Prevent Any Regulations

Here's yet another example of charter-voucher lavishness with public funds. Friendship Tech Prep Academy is going to drop $410,000 to purchase iPads for its exclusive student body. I'm glad to see the lucrative charter-voucher industry using pubic funds so wisely. What is it that AEI/Cato/Heritage informed greedy hedge fund managers, CEOs, bankers, and other business types say about charter-voucher schools being more efficient than pubic schools again?

While we all want children to have access to technology in schools, this is clear evidence of the kind of segregation charter-voucher schools espouse in principle and practice. Until the poorest school in DC has equal access to the same resources, we should consider this incident for exactly what it is — discrimination.

Megan Driscoll's short piece Strong New Films Go After the Much Hyped "Waiting For Superman" and Its Simplistic Educational Analysis takes on smug mendacious hipster Davis Guggenheim's hedge fund pr0n "documercial." The article mentions several real documentaries that begin to address several of the root causes for problems in education today.

Leading the charge for our schools is an interesting short on SW worth the read, if not for the fact that the perspective on a working class person's day is something completely alien to the wealthy elites like Vielka McFarlane, Ben Austin, Whitney Tilson, Antony Ressler, and Marco Petruzzi.

The following Guardian piece by Paul Thomas The corporate takeover of American schools is best summed up by its own tag line: "The trend for appointing CEOs to the top jobs is symptomatic of a declining commitment to public education and social justice."

Check out this great comment in response to charter-voucher cheerleader Gabe Rose who works with his fellow privatization specialist, the insatiably greedy Ben Austin. Whoever wrote it sounds like they may have attended school with Rose.

John Merrow wrote a surprisingly refreshing piece in Open Classrooms v. Charter Schools. It doesn't only take on the smug mendacious teacher hating hipster Davis Guggenheim, it actually points out that there are many excellent public schools that we can look at as models. Since only 17% of charter-voucher schools do better than public schools, saying we can learn a lot from them is vapid, vacuous, and specious, especially since "they only do better by skimming the strongest students and purging the low-performers, sending them back to the neighborhood schools." Instead we should be looking to public schools as the model, especially like the one Merrow discusses which is the feature of this video:



[Click if you can't view the video]

See Mike Klonsky for After 15 years of mayoral control in Chicago. Dr. Krashan spanks Jay Mathews in Another attempt to show American children are bad at math. The Perimeter Primate featured a guest post recently: We Should Be Careful With Our Words. Lastly, Larry Cuban dispels edreform nonsense in Serviceable Myths about School Reform.

Advocating Public Education Roundup 10W46

Early Education is Key to Raising America Winter 1991

A piece I wrote way back in 1991. Obviously, my writing has improved exponentially since then — I was in still in Junior College when I wrote this. My politics have also improved as well, shifting from a liberal-populist perspective to that of a leftist. I cringe when I read some of the passages in this piece, which show me still being under the spell of mixed consciousness resulting from years of being exposed to ruling class ideology.

What is missing from my 1991 essay of course, is a clear class analysis of why the U.S. doesn't fund early education, and how instead of investing in children early it prefers to train workers on the cheap. Hence the big push today for charter-voucher schools. Narrowing curriculum and focusing on teaching working class children to "work hard - be nice" are precursors to them being the laborers in the profit system. A liberation pedagogy differs from this in so many ways.

Recently, some of the poverty pimps and privatization pushers of the charter-voucher camp have insinuated that I've only been concerned with these issues over the past few years. Early Education is Key to Raising America was written in 1991. I wrote this when the vast majority of so-called edreformers were still in high school or middle school — back before Ben Austin or Michelle Rhee had ever considered phrases like education reform or even knew what words like pedagogy (actually they still don't know this one) meant. So who are the "Johnny Come Latelys" in this debate again?

Early Education is Key to Raising America

[Click if you can't view the document]

Early Education is Key to Raising America Winter 1991

Open Letter to LAUSD VP Flores regarding Anthony Krinsky

Vice President Flores-Aguilar:

I don't know if this right-wing troll Anthony Krinsky works directly for you [1], Eli Broad, the CCSA, DFER, Green Dot, Parent Revolution or is a friend of someone like Bill Grundfest. However, you don't need a CORO fellowship to know how to back search a blogger URI, which Krinsky had linked to his facebook account. Remember I attended UCLA just like you Ms. Flores, it's just that I majored in Classical Civilization, while you seemingly majored in Self Colonization Studies. I've known who this Krinsky guy is for some time, but really paid no mind since his poorly conceived writing is reminiscent of a disinterested teen enrolled in one of those charter-voucher institutions you're so fond of. Nor does it surprise me that you, a Gates Foundation employee, would follow the blog of a guy that idolizes Jim DeMint and Meg Whitman.

However, his Wednesday post crossed the line in several regards. Vice President Aguilar, since you are in contact with Mr. Krinsky please do me the favor of forwarding this letter on to your fellow right wing reactionary colleague.

[1] You do after all, follow his blog. For authentication see both the enclosed image and pdf files.

============

Mr. Krinsky:

I was somewhat amused to learn you attended Harvard, given that your prose reads like the screed of an angry forth grade charter school dropout. I'm also glad to see that you're finally using your real name as of yesterday instead of hiding behind aliases like 'the edobserver Anthony.' I of course, have always used my full name when engaging in polemics for the past two decades, since I have nothing to hide and am not afraid of speaking truth to power.

Up to now I've tolerated your childish and baseless accusations, but your vile and disgusting post on Wednesday has forced me to speak out.

1) You accuse me of taking money from UTLA or another union one more time and my Public Interest Lawyer will do exactly what you write is your fear. Let's say that you and Melissa will be cleaning my bathroom for decades to pay off that kind of settlement. I am not paid by any unions, nor am I a member of a union.

2) I have never stalked any of you reactionary privatizers in my life. I've never photographed any of you right wing dolts in the park or at your homes. What I have done, is openly photograph ed-deformers at political events serving political roles at public places like LAUSD and UTLA. I'm a widely published freelance writer. Taking photographs of politicians, public figures, and 501c3 staffers working political events isn't stalking -- it's photojournalism.

Let's be clear, I don't stalk or sneak. If I see someone in public and want to confront them, I walk up to them like a man and talk to them. Just ask Ms. Flores-Aguilar's staffer Ron Palacios what happened when I saw him trying to undermine the Trinational Coalition To Defend Public Education event last year.

Likewise, please feel free to make arrangements to call me a thug, creep, or a stalker in person instead of just on your blog. To be sure, I never call anyone something in my prose that I would be afraid to say to their face. In your bizarre-stream-of-consciousness-blog, you write that you have concerns and deep fears about my specialized military training. You need not be concerned with that. I'm a peaceful man.

With the deepest possible contempt

Robert D. Skeels -- a Public Education Advocate

Open Letter to LAUSD VP Flores regarding Anthony Krinsky

Rebutting comments on "Educating for Democracy: If Doctors Were Treated Like Teachers"

"One result of 30 years of neoliberalism is the a widespread assumption that if you're unhappy dominating or exploiting your fellow human beings, it must be because you're stupid or incapable." — Mike Marqusee

Professor Joel Shatzky's Educating for Democracy: If Doctors Were Treated Like Teachers was a sharp critique of the way the corporate "edreform" crowd have set up teachers as the ultimate straw man for the real causes behind public education issues. His article emphatically points out the absurdity of both the language and ideologies employed by the poverty pimps and privatization pushers that front for the burgeoning charter-voucher school industry.

I posted a link to Shatzky's essay on facebook and received the following, probably well intentioned, but woefully misinformed comment:

"...any teacher that is doing a good job would be happy to be rated and have it published."

Here's my response:

The problem with this is that how do you rate something that is for the most part is entirely subjective?

Like Professor Shatzky points out, do we judge doctors by mortality rate — even if they serve high risk neighborhoods? While his piece is meant to be humorous, he builds a cogent case against using subjective methods for measuring things that are qualitative.

Now to teachers. The reason Shatzky's analogy is so apropos is that ALL current methods being proffered as a means to "rate" teachers are flawed through and through. Whether we're talking about the highly discredited "value added method," raw APIs, or test scores in general, there is an overwhelming preponderance of evidence that linking such scores to teacher performance alone are specious and biased. Education experts like Diane Ravitch, Alfie Kohn, Linda Darling-Hammond are an excellent place to start if you are actually interested in reading up on this. Ravitch's watershed The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education., especially chapters 2, 6, 8 and 9 present watertight arguments against the "ratings racket" peddled by the so-called "ed reform" crowd.

I respectively disagree with your second assertion. I personally know at least a dozen teachers that had their so-called ratings go from bad to good or good to bad, simply because they transfered from one school to another. Did these teachers suddenly become exceptional or mediocre overnight? Isn't it much more likely that the real factors that effect student performance — like poverty and access to books — are the real issue? Dr. Stephen Krashen writes extensively on this. Here's a recent post he made discussing Bracey's research. The problem is poverty: Evidence from Gerald Bracey

What's more, do we reduce education in general to an arbitrary measure of children's proficiency in the narrow confines of Math and English? Aside from reducing children to mere test scores — and hence diminishing their humanity, we rob them of the opportunity to be exposed to the widest curriculum possible. Rest assured, an obsession with testing, narrowing of curriculum, and avoidance of teaching critical thinking skills isn't how schools for the children of the wealthy operate.

I suppose if there was a fair and objective way of rating teachers, then you might be right in your assertion. However, this is far too nuanced and complex an issue to apply reductionistic methodologies in spite of what hedge fund managers, bail out recipients, talk show hosts, and convicted predatory monopolists would have us believe.

Rebutting comments on "Educating for Democracy: If Doctors Were Treated Like Teachers"

Obama and the “Superman” School Predators | Black Agenda Report

"I don't know any reasonable person who would champion charter schools as a model, when only 17% do better than conventional public schools, and only do better by skimming the strongest students and purging the low-performers, sending them back to the neighborhood schools." — wseadawg

Black Agenda Report's executive editor Glen Ford speaks truth to corporate charter power!



[Click if you can't listen to the audio]

In addition to listening to the radio show, check out the full transcript of Ford's incredible commentary!

Obama and the “Superman” School Predators

Excerpt:

“Waiting for Superman” is a scam and a sham, that has been catapulted into the national political conversation by a $2 million marketing grant from the Emperor, himself, Bill Gates. In the most perverse sense, it is appropriate that Washington, DC’s Seed School is featured, since Gates and the hedge fund billionaire parasites consider their cash contributions to charter schools as “seed money” from which will grow a hybrid, publicly-funded school system where profiteers will flourish. In the last decade, these finance capitalists have enlisted a cadre of Democratic politicians to wage war against teachers and against the very idea of public education, exploiting the historical grievances of Black parents, especially.*

-----
Emphasis mine.

Black Agenda Report's coverage of the corporate onslaught against public education has been peerless. Simply searching for the word charter on their site produces a wealth of articles that name names and call thing what they really are.

Obama and the “Superman” School Predators | Black Agenda Report

Discussing School Privatization, Propositions 25 and 24 with Inglewood residents

...to decide once every few years which member of the ruling class is to repress and oppress the people through parliament--this is the real essence of bourgeois parliamantarism. — VI Lenin


I usually don't get too involved with electoral politics [1], but the budget cuts have been so devastating in our communities that I got involved volunteering along with many CEJ/PEAC/UTLA members with SCOPE and the California Alliance in building support for Propositions 25 and 24. I spent a couple of Mondays phone banking on these ballot propositions, which while not the broad reforms we need, are at least steps in the right direction towards a more progressive tax structure and budget fairness.

This Saturday I participated in SCOPE's door to door campaign in a get out the vote effort for yes on Propositions 25 and 24, and to talk to people about building local public school forums. Inglewood is heavily targeted by the charter-voucher industry's front groups like the so-called Parent Revolution [2] and nefarious politicians like SCLC pretender Eric Lee who are entirely bought off ideologically by lucrative charter-voucher school sector, so the second reason for the walk was actually more important than the ballot propositions.

I thought I would be able to pair up with someone I knew, but the organizers wanted to match up politically experienced people with individuals new to community organizing. I was paired up with a young woman who is a Crenshaw High School sophomore. She had never done anything like this, so I was told to train her as we went door to door. We had great discussions about politics, poverty, and oppression between going to peoples' doors. Our precinct consisted of a rough square bordered by Harvard on the East, Western on the West, and 81st to 85th North to South. We got into some very interesting discussions. The Crenshaw student was especially impressed by a family from Belize, that really spent a lot of time talking to us.

Aside from the few people that didn't want to discuss voting, most people intuitively knew the value of Propositions 25 and 24. Many brought up the real problem is Proposition 13, which allows corporate crooks and the super wealthy to pay little to no property taxes, while the bulk of the tax burden falls on working class people. It wasn't a hard sell to say we wouldn't have problems with our schools if people like Eli Broad, Jed Wallace, Vielka McFarlane, and Marco Petruzzi paid their fair share of taxes.

I was surprised how vocal many people were when we discussed charters. They were vehemently against giving public funds to private corporations and were surprisingly savvy about the misleading and mendacious language used by astroturf groups like Families in Schools, Alliance for a Better Community, and Parent Revolution. In fact, some people had sharper critiques of corporate charter schools than I do! Bravo to the good people of Inglewood for realizing their emancipation will come from below, and that it's not something that will be bestowed on them by billionaires with white savior syndrome or smug mendacious hipsters like Davis Guggenheim. Not one of the Inglewood residents I spoke with favored school privatization via charters and vouchers. Many expressed legitimate concerns with improving public schools, but none expressed the teacher hating, corporate gushing, pro-privatization rhetoric we hear spouted by the supposed leaders of parental sentiment.

I was also very impressed by SCOPE and CEJ's grassroots organizing. Unlike the utterly astroturf "Parent Revolution" headed up by the disingenuous Ben Austin and his cadre of white male right wing executives like CORO fellow Gabe Rose, whose answer to all poverty and budget issues is to privatize public schools [3], there is the progressive stance. That stance is to tax the rich and fully fund our communities. Organizations like SCOPE and CEJ actually get it, and I was proud to volunteer for them. Check out this awesome flyer by CEJ with a cogent critique of corporate charters: Coalition for Educational Justice flyer on 24, 25, and combating corporate charters.

Many people have been asking me for a voter's guide. I don't do that, but you can do much worse than following the Peace and Freedom Party's Workers' Voter Guide, or Green Party guides.

Don't forget to vote yes on 24 and 25!
_____
NOTES
[1] Being the lowest form of politics Do elections matter? http://socialistworker.org/2007-1/615/615_06_Elections.shtml
[2] Word on the street is privatizer Shirley Ford has been busy in that district vying for corporate trigger takeovers and pushing the reactionary Eric Lee as a corporate friendly CMO/EMO/Charter-Voucher alternative to community favorite and public school supporter Marguerite Poindexter LaMotte.
[3] In the process making wealthy corporate charter operators all the more wealthy.

Discussing School Privatization, Propositions 25 and 24 with Inglewood residents

Are Charter Schools Really Public Schools?

Despite the booming corporate charter-voucher industry's expensive public relations campaign to convince us otherwise, the reality isn't what they portray at all. Only in the most contrived, and frankly, disingenuous fashion, could the definition of the word "public" be used to describe charter-voucher schools.

Criteria	Public School	Charters (CMO-EMO)
Take public funds	YES	YES
Allow children to attend for free	YES	YES
Have democratically elected public boards	YES	NO
Have open and public board meetings	YES	NO
Obligated to take all children including Special Needs, Students with Disabilities, Special Education, English Language Learners, etc.	YES	NO
Obligated to educate every child	YES	NO
Are subject to all state and federal mandates like NCLB, and all provisions therein	YES	NO
Allow community participation at board meetings	YES	NO
Subject to public scrutiny under Public Records Act	YES	NO
Subject to public scrutiny under The Brown Act	YES	NO
Accept donations and direction from nefarious outside entities like billionaires with ideological axes to grind	NO	YES
Have unelected boards composed of CEOs, hedge fund managers, investment bankers, and other ideologically biased and dubious professions	NO	YES

Are Charter Schools Really Public Schools?

"Waiting for Superman" subject's own words refute movie's tale

"Woodside High is a great school."

The movie “Waiting for Superman” tells the stories of five students around the country who are desperate to escape their “failing” public schools and get into the shining charters that are portrayed as their only chance of success — or at least that's the tale the movie tells.

One of those stories takes place in my neck of the woods, here in the San Francisco Bay Area. The one white middle-class student among the five kids in the movie is Emily Jones, who lives on the suburban San Francisco Peninsula. The story “Waiting for Superman” tells is that Emily is desperate to escape her district public high school, Woodside High, because she's a bright student who “doesn't test well,” and due to Woodside's antiquated and harmful tracking policies, she'll be tracked into lower-level classes that will doom her to mediocrity. She grasps at (as the movie shows it) her only hope — Summit Prep Charter, which does the opposite of tracking, requiring all its students to take six AP courses during high school.

Well, that story is false. Here's the proof. On this video clip, John Fensterwald of the Silicon Valley Education Foundation interviews Emily. The part in the movie illustrating how the horror of tracking sent her fleeing to Summit Prep features a graphic showing students on a conveyor belt, with the select few being elevated to higher-level classes and the rest being dropped onto a march to oblivion. Yet in the video interview, Emily chats freely with John for five minutes and mentions a number of reasons for wanting to go to Summit instead of Woodside — but never mentions or even alludes to tracking. Just after minute five, Fensterwald brings up tracking. Emily comments on tracking only after Fensterwald prompts her.

And in fact, here's what Emily says about Woodside High: “Woodside is a great school. I really liked it and I really wanted to go there before I saw Summit.”

That’s not what “Waiting for Superman” portrays. If the movie misled viewers with a false story about Emily, the line “fool me twice, shame on me” applies – we can't believe anything it shows us.

Meanwhile, parents at Woodside High have created a huge banner and posted it across the front of the school: “Woodside High School teachers — Man, You're Super! Thank you for teaching ALL the students in our community!”


— Caroline Grannan, San Francisco

"Waiting for Superman" subject's own words refute movie's tale

Dr. Diane Ravitch at UTLA, September 24, 2010

[Click if you can't view the video]

Dr. Diane Ravitch at UTLA, September 24, 2010

Advocating Public Education Roundup 10W42 - Commentopia

‎"Washing one's hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral. " — Paulo Freire


Alfie Kohn's How to Sell Conservatism: Lesson 1 -- Pretend You're a Reformer really calls out how manipulative and crafty the so called "education reform" crowd is. Here's an excerpt:

School reform, as these people understand it, and as I've discussed in a previous post, involves a relentless regimen of standardized testing; a push to direct funds to charter schools, many of them run by for-profit corporations; a weakening of teachers' job protection -- and the vilification of unions that represent teachers -- so that those who have failed to raise their students' test scores can be publicly humiliated or fired; threats to shut down low-scoring schools; initiatives to dangle money in front of teachers who follow orders and raise scores, or even in front of certain (low-income) students; and a contest for funding in which only (some) states willing to adopt this bribe-and-threat agenda will receive desperately needed federal money.

Here are the comments I posted under Kohn's article:

An outstandingly cogent analysis of how the so called edreform crowd implicitly supports the status quo.

In a recent exchange of polemics with one of Los Angeles' more wealthy Charter Management Organization CEOs, I was accused of "defending the status quo." I replied that for decades I've supported community controlled schools in contrast to the bureaucratic model (large districts) or the corporate model (charter-voucher). I then said "how is that a defense of the status quo?" There was no response. Frankly, the so called reform crowd is terrified of anyone that challenges the real "status quo."

This is why Arizona's Tom Horne has banned ethnic studies with AB 2281 and is trying to ban Paulo Freire! This is why Texas textbooks have become synonymous with fairy tale compilations. This is why Green Dot Public [sic] Schools was caught requiring their students to "demonstrate a belief in the value of capitalism." [1] This is why art, music, and bilingual programs have given way to what you astutely called "glorified test-prep centers."

I would go even further than saying the current crop of charlatans claiming the mantle of reform are defending the status quo, I'd say in many cases they pine for a return to 19th century pedagogical practices (at least for working class children).

[1] http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/03/18/ED3P1CHUEH.DTL

Sherry Wolf posted a great video in her post Teachers Fight Back vs. Superman movie on her SHERRYTALKSBACK blog.

I had the following comments:

Thanks so much for posting this Sherry. I take on Davis Guggenheim's embrace of the banking system of education in his charter-voucher informercial in my recent post Some thoughts on Rick Ayers' "An Inconvenient Superman".

Last night Dr. Diane Ravitch called Guggenheim's privatization propaganda piece a "pernicious movie."

I'm very excited about the pending release of The Inconvenient Truth About Waiting for Superman.

Patrick Goldstein's piece in the Los Angeles Times How did 'Waiting for 'Superman's' ' Davis Guggenheim become the right wing's favorite liberal filmmaker? states the obvious, but I couldn't let it go at that. Here's my response:

Davis Guggenheim is now the toast of The Cato Institute, Reason Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, American Enterprise Institute, The John Birch Society, The Hoover Institution, The Hudson Institute, and a whole host of reactionary right wing organizations.

It's great to know that the same failed economic principles that gave us the dot com crash, the housing market crises, and the current great recession are being proffered as solutions for our publicly funded schools. Who better than the slick, unscrupulous, hipster Guggenheim to try and sell us thoroughly discredited 'free market' ideology in the guise of reform.

While charter-voucher scandals [1] are a dime a dozen, and charter schools discriminate against the most needy of students, at least Guggenheim can rest assured that his well heeled executive friends in the corporate CMO/EMO charter-voucher industry are making a killing.

[1] http://charterschoolscandals.blogspot.com/

Of course, Kenneth Libby of Schools Matter does a much better job at revealing just who Davis Guggenheim's far right funders really are and their reactionary agendas. Philip Anschutz and Walden Media: What Kind of Agenda? reveals such a frighting list of extremists, it gave me chills.

Lastly, the vile Jill Stewart of that trashy masseuse and porn ad pennysaver also known as The LA Weekly ran another pro-privatization screed.

Stewart wouldn't post my comments in response to her bizare stream of illogical thoughts. However, 4lakids Scott Folsom reprinted Stewart's piece and my response to it. Here are my comments:

Another school privatization cheerleading piece by right wing reactionary Jill Stewart? Corporate charlatan Yolie Flores-Aguilar isn't just an "UTLA enemy" but an enemy of all those in favor of public education. Just how is the Gates foundation employee, who has spent her entire career serving corporate interests like those of the lucrative charter-voucher sector, a "advocate of the poor?" Flores has never done anything for our communities, other than hand public property over to private institutions. Yolie Flores is a corporation in the disguise of a human being.

I know that Randites like Stewart conflate reform with privatization, but the rest us are astute enough to see through such craftiness.

Zimmer, who is no real friend of the hard working women and men who teach our children, would hardly have lost against the Beverly Hills Barrister Ben Austin. The well heeled corporate spokesman Austin is a charlatan of the highest order. He is also an unabashed racist. Outside of the 501c3 groups funded by the Waltons, Broad, and Gates Foundations, Austin is a pariah. For more on Austin see:

http://dailycensored.com/2010/04/24/political-patronage-for-green-dot-public-schools-chief-propagandist/

http://dissidentvoice.org/2009/10/code-words-euphemisms-and-green-dots-pandering-to-westside-racism/

Jill Stewart should do us all a favor and read about pedagogy before subjecting us to more of her fact free rants. We appreciate that Stewart is making money off the charter-voucher sector, like her idol Yolie Flores. Flores isn't running because she is despised by the vast majority of her constituents in her district. Nobody is surprised that she was hired by a foundation started by a convicted predatory monopolist, she was working for the billionaire boys club long before that anyway.

I'd accuse The LA Weekly's Beth Barrett and Jill Stewart of yellow journalism, but you have to be able to write to be a journalist. Let's never forget that Jill Stewart's prose wouldn't be worthy of a disinterested high school sophomore. Maybe it's her own shortcomings combined with her John Birch Society ideology that fuel her inexhaustible hatred of teachers.

Advocating Public Education Roundup 10W42 - Commentopia

Mary Najara and Shirley Ford of Parent Revolution née Los Angeles Parents Union

Barr's parent organization gave... a grass-roots visual... And his paid staffers hit the right rhetorical notes... while identifying themselves to reporters and officials only as parents. — Howard Blume (Los Angeles Times)

Mary Najara and Shirley Ford of Parent Revolution née Los Angeles Parents Union

Dr. Stephen Krashen - The problem is poverty: Evidence from Gerald Bracey

The entire basis for the national standards/testing movement is our low scores on international tests when compared to other countries. Our scores, however, are only low because we have such a high percentage of children in poverty, compared to other countries that participate in international tests. When we consider only middle-class children who attend well-funded schools, our math scores are near the top of the world (Payne and Biddle, 1999).

Here is another analysis, using reading test scores, that comes to the same conclusion. The PIRLS test was given to ten year olds in 35 countries in their own language. Bracey (2009) presented this data, along with relevant socio-economic data on the poverty level of the schools American children attended (defined as participating in free or reduced price lunch programs):

American students attending schools with

• less than 10 percent in poverty averaged 589 (14% of students).
• 10-24.9% in poverty averaged 567 (20% of students)
• 25 to 49.9% in poverty averaged 551 (30% of students)
• 50 to 74.5% in poverty averaged 519 (21% of students)
• 75% or more in poverty averaged 485 (15% of students)

Clearly, students in schools with lower levels of poverty did better. Of great interest to us is the fact that American children attending low poverty schools (25% or less) outscored the top scoring country, Sweden (561). Bracey also points out that "if the students in schools with 24-49.9% poverty constituted a nation, it would rank fourth among the 35 participating nations" (p. 155).

The problem is poverty, not our teachers, our unions, the parents, or the children. The solution is to protect our children from the disadvantages of poverty, through health care, nutrition, and access to books. Geoffrey Canada claims that his approach is to attempt to do just that in the Harlem Children's Zone schools (NY Times, October 12, 2010; but see Krashen, 2010a,b).

Thus far, the Arne Duncan department of education has chosen to ignore this route (while praising the Harlem Children's Zone), and spend billions on useless national standards and national tests, focusing on measuring rather than helping.
_____
NOTES
Bracey, G. 2009. Education Hell: Rhetoric Versus Reality. Alexandria, VA: Educational Research Service.
Payne, K. and Biddle, B. 1999. Poor school funding, child poverty, and mathematics achievement. Educational Researcher 28 (6): 4-13.
Krashen, S. 2010a. A suggestion for Geoffrey Canada. www.schoolsmatter.info. October 12, 2010.
Krashen, S. 2010b. Shocking revelations from Goeffrey Canada's autobiography. www.schoolsmatter.info. October 13, 2010.

Dr. Stephen Krashen - The problem is poverty: Evidence from Gerald Bracey

Right wing reactionary "Guggenheim on Unions, Green Dot"

This article was first published on Dissident Voice

Just continue to follow the money. This Race to the Trough will make the Reading First crooks under Bush look like dopey Boy Scouts. — Jim Horn, PhD (Educator, Writer) 

EdWize has a short on the Walton Foundation's mouthpiece—the vile Davis Guggeheim—called Guggenheim on Unions, Green Dot. It mentions an interview in which the propagandist further vilifies the hard working women and men that teach in our communities. I had the following response:

That's nuance? If by "reasonable" Guggenheim means reactionary, then I suppose he'd have a point. Given his specious understanding of pedagogy and pubic education in general, it's no wonder he doesn't see just how damaging his privatization propaganda piece really is. Hiding behind his own union hardly disguises his intentions. "Waiting for Superman" heralds the return of McCarthyism.

What's more, Guggenheim's suggestion that yellow unions like Asociación de Maestros Unidos (AMU) are a model as opposed to real unions exposes him for what he is. Green Dot Public [sic] Schools' yellow, or company union, AMU is nothing to praise despite CTA certification. AMU doesn't even have its own office or website, all of its activities stem from Green Dot's corporate headquarters. This explains a dearth of activism from AMU's members in the midst of the worst budget cuts imaginable. This company unionism also explains why Green Dot teachers' average experience, while marginally higher than the CMO average of 2 years [1], is still less than 3 years. This in turn probably explains Green Dot's dismal performance [2], despite all the advantages it holds in extra funding, motivated parents, and exclusion of ELL and special education children.

Nothing was more clear to demonstrate how powerless AMU was than when Marco Petruzzi made the fiat declaration that Green Dot was closing down Ánimo Justice HS. Teacher Judy Riemenschneider mentioned AMU's thin contract when she said "The ultimatum is at odds with Green Dot's principles, which call for teacher input into critical decisions." [3] Like any private institution, Green Dot felt no obligation to honor it's contractual obligations to its teachers or union. Like any private institution, Green Dot didn't care about the students, parents, or community when it shuttered Ánimo Justice. Like all charter schools, Green Dot was only concerned about their bottom line. Like Scott Folsom said at the time "The Animo Social Justice (?) Charter is closing for no other reason than Green Dot cannot show a return on their financial investment." [4]

When UdB held a community forum to halt the closure of several schools, including the above mentioned one by corporate charter darling Green Dot, I had a half dozen "unionized" AMU members tell me what it's really like working for a charter. [5] Maybe if Guggenheim spent time with teachers instead of millionaires like Geoffrey Canada and right wingers like Michelle Rhee, he would have heard reality. As a public education activist I get charter teachers telling me all the time what it's like to work for capricious EMO and CMOs. [6]

Guggenheim rails against unions and quotes "studies" by far right think tanks like Cato, AEI, and Hoover on how one can overcome "environmental issues like poverty." Thanks for the Ayn Rand free market lesson on pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps there Guggenheim! I hope you're enjoy all that money from the Waltons, Gates, and Broad foundations.

I'm always amazed that people shouting the loudest that race and class have nothing to do with academic performance are inevitably rich white males. Case in point -- the smug Davis Guggenheim.

_____
NOTES
[1] See http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/inside-school-research/2009/04/are_teachers_jumping_the_chart.html and http://www.catalyst-chicago.org/news/index.php?item=2637&cat=23 Of course, if Guggenheim was a real documentary filmmaker instead of a propagandist, he would have done his homework to discover this fact instead of making the ridiculously smug comment "I’m sure you’re going to find these teachers in these high-performing charters that burn out."
[2] as discussed by journalist Caroline Grannan http://rdsathene.blogspot.com/2010/01/14-of-15-green-dot-schools-are-failing.html
[3] http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-greendot23-2010mar23,0,1323354.story
[4] http://4lakidsnews.blogspot.com/2010/04/fremont-high-animo-green-dot-social.html
[5] http://blogs.uscannenberg.org/neontommy/2010/03/two-south-la-high-schools-unit.html
[6] http://rdsathene.blogspot.com/2010/04/advocating-public-education-roundup.html

Right wing reactionary "Guggenheim on Unions, Green Dot"

Thoughts on "Are Money and Profit Behind the Charter School Fever?"

"In one generation, we have completely reversed our idea of what a teacher should be from a humanizing mentor to someone who coaches kids through their first bureaucracy — Sean Leys (Social Justice Educator)

Yvette Carnell's Are Money and Profit Behind the Charter School Fever? piece on the Huffington Post was both excellent in content, honesty, and was a breath of fresh air given the site's constant pro-privatization stance. Remember, this is the same Huffington Post that prints charter charlatan Ben Austin's mendacity without fact checking and then censors all comments contrary to his lies. We all know what Austin thinks about parents that don't fit his idealized notions.

Carnell does a masterful job at pointing out the deep-seated greed of those in the charter-voucher school sector, and the real underlying motives of the cynical propaganda piece by Davis Guggenheim. Carnell calls out Oprah's one sided CMO/EMO charter-voucher school infomercial.

She even has the courage to call out fraud and millionaire Geoffrey Canada:

...aided by Geoffrey Canada of the Harlem Children's Zone, one of charter school's biggest advocates, who hustles American Express credit cards in television ads. The advertisement only highlights charter school's connection to free market principles. [1]

Carnell's short, but brilliant piece opened an interesting dialog. I had the following comments:

This marriage of discredited free market principals and charter-voucher schools is so intertwined, charters indoctrinate students with market ideology. While rich kids are taught critical thinking skills, inner city children are taught to "work hard and be nice." As Freire said, "Problem posing education does not and cannot serve the interests of the oppressor." It's no wonder the Broad, Gates, Ducan, Guggenheim, and Walton cabal are pushing charters so hard.

For example Green Dot Public [sic] Schools' original Alain Leroy Locke Charter High School petition contained language requiring students "demonstrate a belief in the value of capitalism." This was until Professor Ralph Shaffer wrote LAUSD demanding the disgusting language be addressed. Rather reluctantly LAUSD asked corporate behemoth Green Dot to remove their propagandistic and indoctrinatory language. After much resistance (AIG bailout recipient Eli Broad is their secondary funder) Green Dots' Daniel Chang, wrote a high handed screed to LAUSD and Prof. Shaffer with an official letter petitioning for the corporate charter capitalism love-fest language to be changed. Green Dot Public [sic] Schools' original Alain Leroy Locke Charter High School petition

Even more offensive are the extreme right wing reactionaries running American Indian Model Schools in Oakland. This school, which takes public funds, forces students to take a pledge to capitalism including the phrase "productive members in a free-market capitalist society." Time to regulate what charters are teaching

_____
NOTES
[1] Emphasis mine.

Thoughts on "Are Money and Profit Behind the Charter School Fever?"

Dr. Shaffer's Open Letter to Los Angeles Times on VAM

The Times' ill-conceived campaign to rate public school teachers on the basis of a badly-flawed and highly dubious process called "value added analysis" has claimed its first victim. Inexplicably, The Times has chosen not to offer an apology for the great pain it has inflicted on many teachers who now bear the stigma of "ineffective" or, as in this case, "less effective."

Supt. Ramon Cortines, however, has issued a hypocritical statement. Cortines, who had joined with The Times in demanding that value added analysis be a major part of the evaluation system, had the audacity to praise the deceased teacher as a "passionate and caring teacher" who made a difference in the lives of his students. "We need more teachers like him."

Good grief! Cortines and The Times declare the victim less than effective, but we need more like him. Yes, we do need more like the young man that irresponsible journalism and a hell-bent for "reform" LAUSD administration hounded to his death.

Let the journalists return to crusading for fewer potholes. Let the Superintendent and the one-track reform-minded crowd on the LAUSD board leave the evaluation of teachers to educators, not statisticians. Let The Times publicly admit its responsibility in this tragic event and turn its reporting on education over to those who know teaching because they've been there.

Ralph E. Shaffer
Professor Emeritus, History Cal Poly Pomona

Dr. Shaffer's Open Letter to Los Angeles Times on VAM

Dr. Diane Ravitch Speaks Truth to the Privatizers' Power

[Click if you can't view the video]

Dr. Diane Ravitch Speaks Truth to the Privatizers' Power