Billionaires Vs. Teachers in Los Angeles

The Los Angeles teachers' strike isn't all about wages. At its core, the strike is a fight against a hostile takeover of public schools by the superrich.

People rally in the streets of downtown in the pouring rain during a United Teachers Los Angeles strike on January 14, 2019 in Los Angeles, California. , Barbara Davidson / Getty Images

Unlike many labor actions, the Los Angeles teachers’ strike is not really about wages or benefits. At its core, this is a struggle to defend public schools against the privatizing drive of a small-but-powerful group of billionaires. The plan of these business leaders is simple: break-up the school district into thirty-two competing “portfolio”networks, in order to replace public schools with privately run charters. As firm believers in the dogmas of market fundamentalism, these influential downsizers truly believe that it’s possible to improve education by running it like a private business. Not coincidentally, privatization would also open up huge avenues for profit-making — and deal a potentially fatal blow to one of the most well-organized and militant unions in the country, the United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA). As union leader Arlene Inouye explains, “This is a struggle to save public education; the existence of public education in our city is on the line.” It’s always important to “know thy enemy.” But this is especially true for the educators’ movement in Los Angeles, which is directly challenging an unholy alliance of the some of richest individuals in the United States. Here’s a short primer on the corporate “who’s who” aiming to destroy public schools in LA — and across the nation. The Walton Family In a watershed moment for the drive to take over Los Angeles public education, pro-charter billionaires spent an unprecedented $9.7 million to buy the 2017 Los Angeles school board elections. A key funder of this campaign to elect charter school acolytes was none other than the Walton Family, best known as the founders of Walmart.

NPE Action Endorses Tony Thurmond for Superintendent of Public Instruction in California!

By dianeravitch 

October , 2018 

The Network for Public Education Action Fund endorses Tony Thurmond for Superintendent of Public Institution in California!

California is a mess because of the intrusion of billionaires into education, billionaires who do not send their own children to public schools but want to control and privatize them. They pour millions into school board races, and they are now pouring millions into the state superintendent race, in hopes of capturing that important position. 

Tony Thurmond’s opponent, Marshall Tuck, has a long history in the charter industry. Although he claims to be a Democrat (as in DFER), Tuck was endorsed by the California Republican party. Thurmond won the support of 95% of the delegates to the California Democratic party convention. Tuck was also endorsed by Arne Duncan, and Duncan’s endorsement means support of charter schools, high-stakes testing, and misuse of test scores to evaluate teachers. 

California desperately needs accountability and transparency for its unregulated charter sector, not a fox in charge of the henhouse.

, Broad, and the other billionaires, should spend their money to improve schools rather than to attack teachers.  https://capitalandmain.com/charter-school-donors

From the Sacramento Bee

Fresh off a Supreme Court loss that stripped them of millions of dollars in an annual revenue, California public employee unions are finding that they still have the big money they need to run statewide political campaigns.

It just might not be enough cash to keep up with their opponents.

The first test of California public-sector union spending after labor’s June defeat at the Supreme Court in Janus vs. AFSCME is unfolding in the race for state superintendent, a contest that typically attracts intense interest from education unions and groups that want to embrace charter schools. 

Why Do Billionaires Want Charter Schools ?

Eli Broad and Edyth 

Harold Meyerson:

The billionaires, apparently, we shall always have with us — even when we decide how to run the state-funded schools where they rarely send their own kids.

In the Los Angeles school board elections earlier this month, a number of billionaires, including Eli Broad, Netflix founder Reed Hastings and two Walton family siblings, poured millions into the campaigns of two charter-school advocates. These billionaire-sponsored candidates defeated two badly outspent opponents who took a more cautionary stance on expanding charters, lest they decimate the school district’s budget. In total, pro-charter groups outspent teacher unions, $9.7 million to $5.2 million. (In the 2016 state legislative campaigns, the charterizers outspent the unions by a far larger margin, $20.5 million to $1.2 million.)
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Though a number of the billionaires who’ve involved themselves in the charter cause are conservatives and Republicans, the actual election battles they join almost always pit Democrat against Democrat — in part because nearly all big cities are now overwhelmingly Democratic. In California, where Republicans’ numbers have ebbed past the point of power, the lion’s share of billionaires’ legislative campaign contributions have gone to more centrist Democrats, who not only are reliable votes on charter issues but also often oppose environmental and other measures advanced by their more progressive colleagues.
Charter billionaires have settled on a diagnosis, and a cure, that focuses on the deficiencies of the system’s victims, not the system itself.


Of all the issues billionaires could choose, why charters, and why now? One reason commonly adduced is that they’ve noticed something troubling: Public school graduates lack the skills necessary for employment. Many of those needed skills, however, are the kind that students acquire in vocational educational programs, not at charter schools.


That there are huge problems in the education of low-income students is beyond dispute — but this is hardly a recent development. The real recent development is the rising share of such students as the middle class has waned.

If the Waltons, say, decided to redirect more of their fortune to raising Wal-Mart workers’ wages, that in turn might enable hundreds of thousands of families to have more economically secure and stable lives, which could have a greater effect on student performance than charterization.

Hypocrisy of Eli Broad, Billionaire and Education "Reformer"

The Philanthropic Hypocrisy of Eli Broad, Billionaire and Leading Education Reformer

http://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/18830/eli-broad-los-angeles-philanthropy

 

February 28, 2016

,  

Ignacio Thomas

 

2

[Reprinted with permission from In These Times [1]. All rights reserved.]

The Broad, an immaculate white postmodern structure, is the latest architectural jewel representing the revival of downtown Los Angeles.
The self-titled museum is a “gift” from Eli Broad, the billionaire Angeleno property developer-turned-philanthropist. Broad is attempting to use his gifts to the arts and a high-profile push to shake up the city’s education system as a way to etch his name deep into the streets of Los Angeles.
But Broad’s philanthropy is two-faced. While publicly making dramatic, self-aggrandizing gestures supporting Los Angeles’ poor children and their schools, Broad’s private business practices and political machinations cripple the very communities he claims to support. The $140 million museum, meant to be a symbol of Eli Broad’s public largesse, is actually a symbol of his philanthropic hypocrisy.

The man who wants to transform public education by bringing market discipline to schools has no problem gorging at the public trough to beef up his namesake museum.
In 2011, Broad syphoned off $52 million [2] of public tax dollars meant for Los Angeles’ poor communities to subsidize his museum’s parking garage—more than all of South LA’s 800,000 mostly low-income residents received from the same public fund that year.
For Broad, it’s all about the gestures. While South LA’s schoolchildren fight for a roof over their head, at least they’ll have a nice place to park when they come to see Broad’s personal art collection.

Eli Broad, who is estimated to be worth $7.4 billion, styles himself an advocate for poor black and brown children. Urban education is his pet project. Decrying the underperformance of poor children of color, Broad points the finger at unionized public school teachers and bureaucracy, claiming educators simply aren’t working hard enough to improve academic outcomes. To save the children, Broad wants to reform education along a corporate model—privatizing schools, busting teachers’ unions and imposing punitive accountability systems. Broad is calling for—and helping fund [3]—a complete transformation of the American education system. And he wants it done in his name.

He trains school leaders to apply business practices to schools through the Broad Residency at the Broad Academy, and rewards compliant school districts with the Broad Prize, of $250,000. Broad’s latest headline-grabbing proposal is to pull 50 percent of Los Angeles’ schoolchildren (what one report refers to as “market share” [4]) into privately managed, non-union charter schools over the next eight years.

Dan Walters Argues for More Testing - Again and Again

Dan Walters continues to use his position as a major editorial writer in the Bee in support of corporate style school control in support of the fake school reform industry and consultants.  (Sac Bee, Nov. 15, page A3) He does this by regularly describing neoliberal charter advocates such as Gloria Romero and Michelle Rhee  and others as advocates of “school reform”.

In reality they are advocates of more testing and test driven change.

High-stakes standardized tests, and the new curriculum they have spawned, require  teachers to avoid thinking deeply about the information  we’re sending to students.  The aim of testing is to provide demonstrable, measurable evidence that work is being produced — that teachers and students are not thinking creatively  when they should be lecturing, memorizing, studying. The idea is that a teacher’s job is to get information into the heads of students, and a student’s job is to write it out, unchanged, on a test.

Charter Schools Fuel Inequality and Hinder School Reform

by Jimmy  Franco Sr.

Charter school interests led by the Broad Foundation have recently unveiled an expansion plan called “The Great Public Schools Now”. This plan is proposing a huge increase of privately operated schools within the Los Angeles School District with the creation of 260 new charters during the next eight years at a cost of 490 million-dollars. The approval and implementation of such a plan would eventually double the number of LAUSD students attending privately operated charter schools and this would comprise almost half of the LAUSD’s students. According to this plan such a massive expansion of charters would also require the services of about 5000 teachers to staff these new schools, however, the

Real estate billionaire Eli Broad and his charter foundation want to privatize half of the public schools within the LAUSD.

proposal makes no mention of recruiting any teachers presently employed by LA Unified who are unionized and generally more experienced. Instead, this Broad Foundation plan proposes to hire recent college graduates as its instructors who will be trained by ‘Teach for America’and other private groups. These young college graduates and prospective charter teachers are generally inexperienced, paid less and non-union, all of which keep business costs down for the privately operated charters. If the Broad plan is approved and implemented, this loss of tens of thousands of students to these new charter schools could possibly result in the elimination of  thousands of jobs for LA District’s teachers, administrators and non-teaching employees. The reaction of the present school board to this proposal has been mixed. Charters are businesses that privately operate public schools and use public school sites and tax monies to fund their for-profit operations. The first privately operated LAUSD charters were created and approved during the 1990’s by the school board which was under heavy pressure to reform the District’s schools. The Board’s rationale for this action was that the charters could provide a choice for parents and students to attend a school with a better educational program or a safer campus instead of their traditional home school. Rather than comprehensively reform and fix the regular schools at that time, this critical Board decision to approve charters would create an escape valve for academically motivated students to eventually leave their traditional campuses and open the door to a steady increase over the years in the privatization of the District’s public schools. In addition to the charter schools, the LAUSD had already created magnet schools during the 1970’s as a result of an earlier anti-segregation lawsuit filed against the District called “Crawford vs Board of Education, Los Angeles”. This successful lawsuit compelled the District to integrate its students and subsequently magnet schools for voluntary integration were created as a means to do so. These special magnet integration programs offered programs in science, math or other specialties in order to entice white parents to enroll their children into these integrated schools and thus bring the LAUSD into compliance with the Crawford court order. After almost four decades, these specialized magnet schools many of which are for gifted students, still exist even though their original intent of integrating large numbers of students is no longer feasible as white flight and a change in demographics have left the LAUSD student population at over 85 percent minority. Both tiers of Magnets and charters also have the benefit of being able to carefully select the students that they admit.

Broad Plan : How to Take Over Public Schools in Los Angeles

Billionaire’s Secret Plan: A ‘Hostile Takeover’ of LA Public Schools Deirdre Fulton September 23, 2015 Common Dreams   Last week the Los Angeles Times obtained a secret 44-page proposal drafted by the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation and other charter advocates, that according to one critic would "do away with democratically controlled, publicly accountable education in LA." With the aid of a billionaires’ club of supporters, the plan is designed to charterize 50% of LA public schools.      More than 1,000 teachers, students, parents, and community members protested at the opening of the Broad museum in downtown Los Angeles Sunday. , Mayra Gomez/UTLA Facebook photo,      A California billionaire is enlisting other wealthy backers in a $490 million scheme to place half of the students in the Los Angeles Unified School District into charter schools over the next eight years—a plan at least one critic says would "do away with democratically controlled, publicly accountable education in LA." The Los Angeles Times obtained a confidential 44-page proposal, "The Great Public Schools Now Initiative," drafted by the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation and other charter advocates. "Los Angeles is uniquely positioned to create the largest, highest-performing charter sector in the nation," the executive summary reads. "Such an exemplar would serve as a model for all large cities to follow."

Outside spending in Education Race now reaches $10 million.

Note the arguments in the blog post  below about how outside money is designed to structure education in California.
Here is an update on the  amount of money.   http://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article3356114.html

Corporate so called "reformers" throw millions into the effort to elect an anti union Superintendent of Schools

Your vote will make the difference.  

Corporate school  “reformers” have raised over $4 million from the very rich during the last week to contribute to the campaign to elect  anti union leader Marshall Tuck as Superintendent of Public Instruction in California.   According the Sacramento Bee The fund includes $1 million each from Los Angeles businessmen Bill Bloomfield and Eli Broad, a major financier of efforts to overhaul public education. The Gap co-founder Doris Fisher and Laurene Powell Jobs, philanthropist and widow of Steve Jobs, have each contributed $500,000.

Incumbent  Tom Torlakson is a former teacher and is  supported by both major teacher unions.  He supports extension of Prop. 30 taxes passed in 2012 which have restored funding to California schools after the devastation of the national  economic crisis when over 30,000 teachers were dismissed in the state.  Schools in other states without new taxes currently continue to reel from austerity budget cuts.

This effort by many anti - union  philanthropists and a group of  Democrats,  to gain control of this office  raised in just one week  dwarfs the $2 million raised by teachers’ unions in favor of Torlakson.

Corporate advocates want Tuck in office to  support the anti tenure decisions and anti teacher due process  procedures of the Vergara  v. California case.

Broad Foundation Wants to Step on the Gas

Broad Foundation Wants to Step on the Gas:

The Broad Foundation wants to step on the gas….A recent memo from The Broad Center (TBC) proposes a series of strategic shifts in the foundation’s education programs designed to “accelerate” the pace of “disruptive” and “transformational” change in big city school districts, and create a “go to group” of “the most promising [Broad] Academy graduates, and other education leaders, who are poised to advance the highest-leverage education reform policies on the national landscape.”

Ed.note.  The Superintendent of Sacramento Unified Jonathon Raymond is a Broad Graduate. The Broad Center Board includes Joel Klein, Michelle Rhee, Margaret Spellings, Larry Summers, and Andy Stern, among others. 

Broad Foundation’s plan to expand influence in school reform

by Ken Libby & Stan Karp

Re-posted from The Washington Post Answer Sheet
The Broad Foundation wants to step on the gas.
The California-based foundation, built on the housing and insurance empire of billionaire Eli Broad, has made “transforming K-12 urban public education” a major priority. Its training and placement of top administrators in urban districts across the country and support for charter schools, school turnarounds, merit pay and other market-based reforms have put it at the center of a polarized national debate about education policy.
A recent memo from The Broad Center (TBC) proposes a series of strategic shifts in the foundation’s education programs designed to “accelerate” the pace of “disruptive” and “transformational” change in big city school districts, and create a “go to group” of “the most promising [Broad] Academy graduates, and other education leaders, who are poised to advance the highest-leverage education reform policies on the national landscape.”