Los Angeles charter operators want "actual building titles for the public schools"

[madfloridian]

And they just may get those facilities under an agreement with Democratic LA Mayor Villaraigosa unless a lawsuit filed by the teachers' union can win the day.

This is taking public property paid for by schools districts with taxpayer money...and turning it over to the private educational management organizations.

Corporate Charters Pillage Public Property

The effort is all part and parcel of the capitalist “reform of education” that is sweeping the nation below the radar screen of any national news. It includes using the government, which the neo-liberals say they abhor, to asset strip the public realm; in this case to orchestrate the legal seizure of actual public buildings that house public schools paid for over the decades by public taxpayers.

There is more of what the Los Angeles district is doing.

The insurgency is brutish and the mugging unconscionable as the hostile takeover of public schools is happening precisely at the same time that many schools are being closed and shuttered under the insidious No Child Left Behind provisions that allow for such pernicious disinvestment. Of course the efforts of the neo-liberals are hastily moving along with the disastrous loss of public funds for public schools and the horrific budgetary crisis slamming the state like a virtual Tsunami. Feasting on disaster is the model for these corporate market fundamentalists who see huge profits in the for-profit or non-profit ownership and management of public schools by educational maintenance organizations who want the actual building titles for the public schools and thus the imminently the facilities themselves. This is asset stripping done in broad daylight, a public pillaging that goes unreported by national media on both the ‘left’ and the ‘right.’

There is more yet.

Reconfigurating education in accordance with Race for the Top will also, of course, be a godsend to the makers of canned curriculum (“best practices”) that will need to be produced in alignment with the new state and federal standards to assure students pass the regimented tests which scores will be then used to rate the teachers and the new primary providers, the charter school EMO’s. Then there is the test prep industry that will dine like vultures off the new assessment obligations imposed on the states by Race to the Top.

Canned curriculum and regimented tests...not tools of real learning.

Luckily the teachers' union is fighting back. They filed a law suit over charter plans

The corporate charter school movement is getting ready to rear it's ugliest face as LAUSD prepares to action off 250 schools (with part of this process headed by former Broad Resident Parker Hudnut). Media outlets in LA have frozen out the voice of teachers, painted union members as totally crazy, and refused to take any kind of critical look at this rapid expansion of charter schools despite a growing body of evidence that should give us reason to pause.

...."LOS ANGELES—A teachers union has sued the Los Angeles Unified School District over a plan to allow a new campus to be run as a charter school.

The lawsuit was filed Monday by United Teachers Los Angeles on behalf of a group of instructors at the chronically overcrowded Garfield High School.

The suit says the district violated state law by not allowing teachers to vote on whether a school built to relieve overcrowding at Garfield should be a charter.

The new Esteban Torres High School in east Los Angeles is among 24 new schools set to open in September that school officials have proposed handing to charter operators

The push is on with no attention from the media. Only a few bloggers cover this attempt to take public property and let it go under private corporate ownership.

Los Angeles prepares to bid off as many as 250 of its public schools that way. And there is no conversation about it.

[Hannah Bell]

1. k/r: PRIVATIZING THE COMMONS, STEALING FROM THE PUBLIC, UNION-BUSTING,

CONTINUATION OF BUSH POLICIES.

[madfloridian]

5. Taking public assets...

not good.

[JDPriestly]

23. Eli Broad, Walmart, Hewlett, Ford Foundation and Wasserman Foundation

are behind this.

This is shocking.

By Howard Blume
December 16, 2009


Private money is paying for key senior staff positions in the Los Angeles Unified School District -- providing needed expertise at a bargain rate, but also raising questions about transparency and the direction of reformsin the nation's second-largest school system.

The highest-level outside-funded position belongs to Matt Hill, whose salary is covered by the foundation of billionaire philanthropist Eli Broad. Hill is overseeing the district's high-profile effort through which groups inside or outside L.A. Unified could take over new and low-performing schools.

The pay of more than a dozen others is funded by a nearly $4.4-million grant from the Wasserman Foundation, a $1.2-million grant from the Walton Family Foundation and smaller amounts from the Hewlett and the Ford foundations.

These employees and consultants are developing a new system to evaluate teachers and administrators; streamlining district operations; and developing a more transparent budget and enhanced student data.

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-lausd16-2009dec16,0,298804.story

[truedelphi]

40. That is really scary stuff. n/t

[clear eye]

25. That's what it sounds like to me, too. n/t

[waiting for hope]

2. Just left the home of a good friend, an

8th grade Algebra teacher who just got back from a week in Florida. Had a very long conversation about the Charter take over and she sees the real underlying reason, a chance to segregate the school systems again, pure and simple.

K&R

[madfloridian]

3. Yes, many think that is a element of it.

[proud2BlibKansan]

20. Definitely

That's what led to charters in the first place.

[BrklynLiberal]

43. Could very well be!!!!

[me b zola]

4. K&R

[amborin]

6. forcing citizens to purchase insurance from private corporations....ever increasing privatization

[Frank Booth]

7. Too bad Duffy and the rest of the idiots at the Teachers' Union fucked it up for the good, honest

teachers.

If they hadn't fought tooth and nail to keep the vocal minority of unqualified, lazy, uncaring teachers from suffering any consequences whatsoever, there might not be such a big push for charter schools. Teacher accountability is the primary issue that has allowed charter schools to gain acceptance.

[Hannah Bell]

8. that is bull.

[MadHound]

13. Bullshit,

You're once more blaming the ongoing privatization of our schools on the teacher's unions, and your attempts are getting more and more pathetic.

Do you really realize how easy it is to fire a teacher, even a tenured one? Incredibly easy, tenure is pretty much a fig leaf. Teachers are also held accountable in many different ways. There are records kept on teachers that cover test scores, student grades, office referrals, and so much more. All of this record keeping is brought to bear when teachers come up for contracts, tenure, promotion, raises and such.

You're just blowing smoke because you don't like education and teachers, leave your personal problems out of it.

[tonysam]

16. Just wait until schools are privatized

and lawsuits by teachers explode for wrongful termination, discrimination, etc.

"Tenure" merely puts a brake on unscrupulous administrators and prevents them from firing capriciously. They still do it, though, as I am living proof of it, as school districts will ALWAYS back the administrator versus the teacher, no matter how badly the administrator screws up.

[blondeatlast]

How's that RW spin tasting on the return trip? nt

[proud2BlibKansan]

22. Horsepucky

Unions don't hire or fire. Can I hold you responsible for your incompetent co-workers?

[LanternWaste]

24. Post hoc ergo prompter hoc... n/t

Post hoc ergo prompter hoc.

[DesertDiamond]

31. That is indeed bull. Less than 20% of charter schools score better than public schools.

[Karia]

9. For-profit charter schools are all about profit

The goal is not to educate, but to make money. As much money as possible.

Someone I know well used to teach at a for-profit charter school. She was an experienced, credentialed teacher who thought she believed in and supported charter schools until she actually worked at one. Basically, the men who ran it were very good at advertising and cosmetics. The school looked like a warm, inviting place, and it was kept clean and freshly-painted. All of the employees were thinnish, attractive & cheerful, and most were very young. It looked like an ideal school.

However no textbooks or teaching resources of any kind were provided (too expensive). There was no curriculum (too expensive). There were no training programs for teachers (too expensive). Any materials they had were printed from the internet or purchased from their own low wages. Teachers were basically on their own, making it up as they went along. A few rose to the occasion; most floundered.

This data is interesting:
http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/Files/rc/papers/2009/03_charter_lavertu_witte/03_charter_lavertu_witte.pdf
"In the most recent years of our study, the performance of charter schools is statistically indistinguishable from the performance of traditional public schools."

[JDPriestly]

27. Shall we just sell our schools to the Chinese or the Saudi Arabians?

Karia, you dare right, the goal of changing to charter schools is to permit private companies to profit from educating our children.

Let's take that to its ultimate logical conclusion. Let's say that charter schools become a fairly attractive investment in time. A multinational company buys up one of them -- and then gets into financial trouble. The multinational is rescued by a large investment from, let's say Saudi Arabia or China or a wealthy Mexican. Now who owns your child's school?

The charter advocates would argue that charter schools have to be approved by state or local government and ultimately the voters. But all it would take to change the laws governing the oversight of charter schools would be a few dollars in the pockets of the right legislators. We have seen the lobbyists for multinationals and national insurance companies at work in Congress in the past few months. So, government oversight is no guarantee that, at some future date, our children could be proselytized for this or that religion (private companies are not subject to the First Amendment, remember) or propagandized against what is left of our democratic form of government.

So, charter schools could open the way to Muslim schools or Chinese Communist schools. Nobody should be supporting charter schools.

[lostnfound]

10. K&R nt

[lostnfound]

11. K&R nt

[bertman]

12. This government-mandated theft is disgusting. How is this happening under President Obama?

Yes, it was a rhetorical question. I know the answer is through the direct actions of Sec. Duncan.

This is off topic, but over the holidays my son-in-law and I were discussing the education level of college football players. He's a college coach and makes recruiting trips all over the country looking for good players for his college team. We were talking about how poorly educated many of the players are. He says they can't even construct a sentence, much less produce a paper that resembles an acceptable effort for high school kids when he was growing up in the 80's.

I asked him why he thought the performance level was so poor. He said that in many of the schools he visited, it seemed like "the inmates were running the asylum". Knowing that many of the players he recruited were from poor families, I asked him if those schools were inner-city schools. His comment was that quite a few of them were, but not all.

We didn't go into any discussion beyond that, but the "inmates running the asylum" comment made me wonder about the learning environment that exists in many of our public schools. I have heard complaints from teachers and parents over the years about a lack of discipline in the schools, but they were lucky enough to live in an area where education is highly valued, lots of money goes into the public schools, and the quality of the education is high.



Any thoughts on this?

[madfloridian]

14. "Schools are not businesses" a few interesting quotes.

"Nor do I admire their belief that schools will get dramatically better if they compete, just like businesses do. Maybe people in business win by competing, maybe competition produces better mousetraps, but that is not the way that schools function. Schools work best when teachers collaborate with one another to identify students who need extra attention or a different program or to mentor weak teachers; schools work best when they collaborate around common goals. Schools are not trying to build a better mousetrap. They are trying to educate our citizenry. Schools are not businesses, and we will continue to flounder so long as we put politicians and business leaders in the driver's seat on education policy."

—Diane Ravitch, Ed Week blog, Dec. 1, 2009"


"I love Arne. He must have the most compartmentalized brain in the country. 'We have too many bad tests,' he says. He also says we need data bases to link student performance to teacher performance. And what will be in those data bases? Scores from those bad tests."

—Gerald Bracey, e-mail, Sept. 28, 2009


"Today may actually be worse for poor children in the US than at any time in the last half century. This is because the lower classes are being kept from the liberal arts and humanities curricula by design. Using the argument that we must get their test scores up, we in the US are designing curriculum for poor children, often poor children of color but certainly, numerically, for poor white children, that will keep them ignorant and provide them with vocational training, at best. Their chances of entrance to college and middle class lives are being diminished, and this is all being done under the banner of "closing the gap," a laudable goal, but one that has produced educational policies with severe and negative side effects."

—David C. Berliner, Rational Responses to High-stakes Testing. .


"At a time when children are overwhelmed with tests, when NCLB has turned schools into test-prep academies, and when education is facing severe budget cuts, the last thing we need is Race to the Top with more standards and tests. If we are interested in picking up an extra 500 million, all we need to do is drop the state high school exit exam. Exit exams don't work: Studies have shown that that state exit exams do not result in improved academic achievement. In addition, recent research done by scholars at Indiana University has shown that state high school exit exams do not lead to more college completion, higher employment, or higher earnings by graduates. In fact, researchers have yet to discover any benefits of having a high school exit exam."

—Stephen Krashen, Sacramento Bee online, Dec. 8, 2009


"Do American parents want schools to be run like businesses and their children to be treated as employees? Will they accept the idea of delivering their children into the hands of specialists in financial deal-making and cutthroat competition, who may or may not have completed college themselves and who view students strictly as "human capital" to be schooled in skills narrowly tailored to niches in today’s ever-so-transient corporate job market? "

—Geoff Berne, Barbarians at the Schoolhouse,CounterPunch, Dec. 4, 2009

http://www.susanohanian.org/quotes.php

[LWolf]

15. I hope the teachers are successful.

I see lawsuits increasing around the country. A win for Los Angeles is a win for us all.

[Dinger]

17. Tell Me those Teachers Will Vote For Politicians Who Allow This To Happen?

I think not. Not smart to piss off teachers.

[proud2BlibKansan]

26. Like teachers' votes matter?

LOL

[Dinger]

28. LOL, Point Well Taken

[TheKentuckian]

18. Unforgivably unacceptable

Where is Arne's army to defend the destruction of public education?

[scentopine]

19. The rush to privatize everything is accelerating. A big disaster for

middle class and government accountability. A big victory for fascism.

Guess who is keeping quiet? Our democratic leadership who stand to get a ton of cash from the corporations systematically taking over our schools. Soon Fortune 500 will be completely in charge of our education system and in charger of another massive amount of cash which they can use to support their lavish lifestyles.

Meanwhile as our taxes go up to pay for computers in kindergarten, and our kids get punished with absurd number of tests and homework, outsourcing is sending work overseas.

But not because kids from India are smarter.

FOrtune 500 corporations are training some 26 yr old in Bangalore who is using a computer for the first time in spite of a million more qualified workers here. Why? Because if he gets sick he get fired. No 401K, no regulations, low pay, no benefits. If a contract employee in India gets raped by their supervisor or held captive in an office for a 18 hour shift, - US corporations have zero liability.

The new democrats and neo-cons are going to keep educating us until we emulate 3rd world working conditions.

Instead of blaming teachers and children, democrats should DEMAND from CEOs who run large "public" corporations to be as accountable for their performance as they demand of our children.

The centrists and realists will never demand that. They'll just demand we accept privatization because its just another chess move for the greater good.

on edit - removed AT&T as a corporation who is training unskilled labor in India while laying off people here while claiming they can't find educated workers here since that might make trouble for DU.

on double edit- decided to not name Aetna and United Health and other insurance companies as training unskilled labor in India while claiming they can't find skilled labor here while using contract firms in India in a largely unregulated labor market. It just wouldn't be right to characterize these companies as maximizing profits by exploiting unregulated labor markets and using these profits to pay congress for legislation that rewards outsourcing in the for of tax breaks and other incentives.

on triple edit - for profit hospitals are now outsourcing x-rays and other diagnostic data to India for analysis. The fact that technicians and doctors in India are not subject to the same regulations and pay as in US has absolutely nothing to do with this fact. Its simply because we do not have enough skilled doctors in US and need to outsource to to the leaders of modern medicine - India and China.

[PufPuf23]

34. Great and realistic post.

Glad to notice you!!!

[scentopine]

36. Thanks- I wish I had time to write better and organize better...

its hard to keep up with the absurdities of our modern government. The truth is out there but its getting harder and harder to find. Being in high tech for 30 years I feel I am qualified to comment on outsourcing especially when "bad public schools" are to blame.

There is ZERO truth to the argument that we are just too stupid and unskilled to hire. The real truth is we cost more.

On Wall Street the $370,000 average salary not including bonuses is necessary to attract and retain the best and brightest.

Then, the best and brightest then tell everyone else to outsource to lowest bidder and pocket the difference in form of executive salaries.

[BrklynLiberal]

45. Great post. Could use its own thread...

:thumbsup: :applause: :applause: :applause:

[blondeatlast]

21. Mad, thanks for your tireless work on this. I'm glad Obama is prez--but Duncan is

an alarming mistake.

This is vile.

[nikto]

29. The SILVER LINING in Public School Privatization...

...is that it will dumb-down so many potential workers, soldiers and so-called "managers",
America will be unable to continue to run its empire, due to the extreme
economic and social problems and lackings of most of the citizenry.

America's power will hopefully collapse, along with its economy, which is SURE to collapse eventually.
Millions and millIons of Americans will lose EVERYTHING, with little or nothing more to lose.
Maybe all the banks will fail, or the dollar will completely crash, AND
THE GOV'T WILL NOT BAIL OUT REGULAR FOLKS OR PROVIDE SIGNIFICANT RELIEF TO THEM, as
it did so cheerfully and hastily with the Banksters.

Then, the dumbed-down masses will go after EVERYONE in Government,
making no distinctions of party or philosophy.

The GOP message of "Government is bad" will hit home gruesomely, as millions
of Americans take up arms against their government--The One that hurt them and their families.
Millions WILL take it personally.
Neither Party will be safe.


It will be a complete animalistic explosion of violent passions and desire for revenge.
ESPECIALLY among those who denied America's problems for a very long time.
Those folks will break especially hard.

There may even be rebellion within the military (hopefully).


It will be a national tragedy, ending in...????????????????????
Take your pick--Tyranny or Freedom??????????????

Who can say??

The French Revolution may end up looking like an ice cream social, by comparison.


But at least America will be focusing on ITSELF in its agonies.

We will no longer be an Empire.






















Yay!

[BrklynLiberal]

44. I believe quite the opposite. The dumber the public, the more easily they can be manipulated

by those who are able to wrest power and keep it..by any means necessary.

An ignorant public is totalitarianism's best friend.

An educated, aware and concerned public is the best part of a democracy.

[TK421]

30. K&R

[PufPuf23]

32. This is criminal and RICO worthy in a USA that respects law

neo-liberals and neo-cons differ little in war, economics, and civil rights.

Ruin the public institution and privatize at a discount.

The respect for law by those in power is arbitrary and biased.

I am a CA native and product of the CA public school system including a BS and MBA from Cal where "student fees" were never over $250 a period.

The present situation is a horror from kindergarten to UC grad schools and not for the people of CA (or the USA).

There is the planned decline of what was once one of the finest public systems of education.

[dysfunctional press]

33. and once they get away with it there- the same thing will happen across the country.

people are unwilling to step out and stand up to the corporatist rule- and they know it.

welcome to your brave new world.

[nikto]

35. The 3 best Edublogs covering Privatization and its Charter attack on Public Schools

The regular citizens who maintain these sites
are THE REAL MEDIA, regarding CURRENT Education issues.

Please be aware:
The Corporate Media is actually *financially inve$ted* in some of the venture capital groups
that are literally CONFISCATING Public Education from American Taxpayers.



This blog is a longtime teacher's gift to the world (look under "NCLB outrages"). It
is an edifice of pertinent info, NAILING the privatizers daily in gentle fashion:

http://www.susanohanian.org


Blog by a parent of 3 children put through Oakland
district schools, with some startling insights and disclosures:

http://perimeterprimate.blogspot.com/


A northeast Teacher's well-maintained record of the copious true stories
and DIRT, behind and within the Privatization movement:

http://www.schoolsmatter.info/

[dysfunctional press]

37. it's like pissing against a tidal wave.

and it's very sad & scary to see what's happening in and to this country.

[truedelphi]

39. Thank you for posting these links. n/t

[nikto]

41. You're welcome!

They make great reading, if you are a supporter of Public Education.

[madfloridian]

47. Those are good blogs.

There are several others linked from them.

[Nothing Without Hope]

38. Surely it isn't legal for corrupt school boards to give away public property!?

It doesn't belong to them, it belongs to the public that paid for it.

[BrklynLiberal]

42. How could the taxpayers of LA allow this kind of crap to happen? Are they all really that unaware..

or that stupid????!!!!!

At least the union is trying to do something about this!!!!

[LWolf]

46. Unaware, stupid,

and often cheerleaders. There are a few in this thread.

I hope there are enough well-informed tax payers with a conscience to help defeat this agenda.