Billionaires with Agenda to Privatize Public Schools Buy LAUSD School Board Election for $10 Million - California Teachers Association

Billionaires with Agenda to Privatize Public Schools Buy LAUSD School Board Election for $10 Million - California Teachers Association

In his first interview after declaring victory in the LA Unified school board election, Nick Melvoin vowed to protect parents’ choices in education and to move the district beyond the charter school versus traditional school narrative.

“I would like the first thing we try to tackle to be moving beyond this what we call the school, who governs the school and respect parents’ choices and respect educators’ choices,” he said soon after his acceptance speech Tuesday night as he paused from greeting supporters to talk to LA School Report.

Melvoin delivered an upset victory in Tuesday’s election, unseating a school board president, something that hasn’t happened in at least two decades. Together with Kelly Gonez who won in District 6, they will be part of the strongest reform majority that the board has seen. Melvoin defeated Steve Zimmer in the District 4 race with about 57 percent of the vote, according to unofficial results.

Other top priorities include a unified enrollment system and transparency in the district’s finances and facilities. He said he would work to reform the co-location process in which charter schools share campus space with traditional schools. He also wants to push for more autonomies for district schools like those granted to charter schools.

Melvoin’s brief acceptance speech didn’t include charters, but in the interview afterward he professed his support for independent charter schools, which are publicly funded and run by nonprofit organizations. LA has more charter schools than any other district in the nation, with about 16 percent of LA schoolchildren enrolled in independent charters.

Melvoin had the backing of deep-pocketed philanthropists who have supported charter school growth, including Reed Hastings, the CEO of Netflix, Eli Broad, and former LA Mayor Richard Riordan.

How Long Can Big Money Keep Democrats in the Charter School Camp ?

Jeff Bryant
It’s obvious 2016 is an election year when Democratic candidates need to draw a bright line to differentiate themselves from Republican opponents.

With Donald Trump leading the GOP ticket, and most leaders of his party getting in line behind him, it’s doubtful Democrats will find urgent need to “meet in the middle” on issues such as civil rights, women’s reproductive health and equal pay, immigration, minimum wage, gender equity, and climate change.

There may be some issues that still tempt Democrats to collude with conservatives in order to woo mythological “swing voters.” But the number one fear among top Republican strategists is that Democrats will run “a base campaign, directed toward liberals, maximizing that vote, and electing a devastating ticket.”

How then, do you explain the results of the recent California primary?

A Toxic Mix

As Harold Meyerson recently wrote in an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times, while the Democratic Party’s presidential candidates, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders and former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, ran on populist platforms denouncing “the corrosive role of money in politics” and “condemning the plutocratic consequences of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision,” many Democratic Party candidates down ticket funded their campaigns with big money from two corporate interests.

Corporate Titans throw Millions into Tuck Campaign

Corporate school  “reformers” have raised over $4 million from the very rich during the last week to contribute to the campaign to elect Marshall Tuck as Superintendent of Public Instruction.  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.

This anti union efforts 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 case.

A handful of ultra-wealthy donors who support school privatization and cutting public pension systems are behind a flood of spending supporting former Wall Street Banker Marshall Tuck's campaign for state schools superintendent, campaign disclosure records show.

Far from "Parents and Teachers for Tuck," the $4.7 million collected so far comes instead from sources that support school vouchers, privatization of public pension systems and using disruptive business tactics to overhaul public schools.

Major funders include:

$500,000 from Carrie Walton Penner, whose family made its fortune running anti-union, low-wage paying Wal-Mart. The Walmart 1% website reports that Penner's biography includes serving on the board of the Alliance for School Choice - a school voucher advocacy group.

How Wall Street Power Brokers Are Designing the Future of Public Education

 as a Money-Making Machine

by Anna Simonton.  Alternet 

December 5, 2013  |  

Given that Arthur Rock has a net worth of $1 billion, lives in California and spends his time heaping money on tech startups (with the mantra, “Get in, get out,” as his guide), a local school board race in Atlanta, Ga. seems an unlikely candidate for his attention.

Yet there is his name, on the campaign finance disclosure reports of four candidates—two of whom were elected in November, and two who won a runoff[3] on December 3—for the board of Atlanta Public Schools. On each report, two columns over from his name, the sum of $2,500 is listed, the maximum allowable amount.

The APS race was a pivotal one for Atlanta, a city still dealing with the fallout of a cheating scandal [4] that thrust its public school system into the national limelight. Only two incumbents were re-elected to the nine-seat board.

Charter Schools and school reform

Stan Karp March 12, 2013 New Jersey Education Association (NJEA) It's time to refocus public policy on providing excellent public schools for all.
	Somewhere along the way, nearly every teacher dreams of starting a school. I know I did. More than once during the 30 years I taught English and journalism to high school students in Paterson, I imagined that creating my own school would open the door to everything I wanted as a teacher: * Colleagues with a shared vision of teaching and learning * Freedom from central office bureaucracy * A welcoming school culture that reflected the lives of our students and families * Professional autonomy that nourished innovation and individual and collective growth * School-based decision-making that pushed choices about resources, priorities, time and staffing closer to the classrooms where it matters the most. But reality can be hard on daydreams, and I got a glimpse of how complicated these issues are when my large comprehensive high school embraced the reform-trend-of-the-day and moved to create small theme academies inside the larger school. As the lead teacher of a new Communications Academy, I soon faced a host of thorny questions: Who would our new academy serve? What would the selection process be? How would the academy share space and resources with the rest of the school? How would our academy team be formed, and what impact would overlapping circles of authority have on teachers' contractual and evaluation processes? What would be the effect of the new academies on the larger school around us, which still opened its doors to everyone?