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Re-Electing Alicia Munoz & Rick Shea to the San Diego County Board of Education Matters

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These two down-ballot races will help determine the course of San Diego’s public education system for years to come.

Last week, after I wrote about the billionaire boys club behind the California Charter Schools Association pouring millions of dollars into Antonio Villaraigosa’s bid for governor, even more cash flowed into their campaign war chest the very next day.  

As the New York Post reported:

Mike Bloomberg has plopped down $1.5 million to help elect former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa as California’s next governor.

Bloomberg wrote the seven-figure check to a PAC called Families & Teachers for Villaraigosa, a big supporter of charter schools.

That’s a big issue for Bloomberg, who championed charter schools as an option for students during his three terms as New York City’s mayor.

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Newest Existential Threat to Oakland’s Public Schools

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A “Systems of Schools” plan has been introduced by the destroy public education (DPE) forces in Oakland, California. The plan basically posits that with 30 percent of students in charter schools, the system has become inefficient. Therefore, the school board needs to review resources and close schools in areas with too many seats and overlapping programs.

However, since Oakland’s school board has no authority over charter schools it is only public schools that can be closed or downsized unless charter schools voluntarily cooperate.   [Read more…]

Antonio Villaraigosa: A Candidate Backed by the Billionaire Boys Club and Trump Megadonors

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Getting bored yet with all the glossy Anthony Villaraigosa commercials touting the utopia that will be California if only the former mayor of Los Angeles rises from the basement in the polls and becomes our next governor?   Just a few weeks ago, Villaraigosa was languishing at 9% in the polls, having fallen behind the no-name Republicans in the race to see who would compete against Gavin Newsom in November. Now the airwaves in the Golden State are awash in all things Antonio all the time.

What gives?  

Well, as in everything political, the answer comes down to money.  In this case, a small group of rich folks want to buy your next governor and are doing everything they can to resuscitate Villaraigosa’s dying campaign.   [Read more…]

DeVos ‘Corruption Racket’ Continues as Education Dept Shuts Down Probes Into Predatory Colleges

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“The U.S. Department of Education sells out to the for-profit college industry.”

By Jake Johnson / Common Dreams

Continuing her policy of turning a blind eye to the predatory behavior of private colleges at the expense of defrauded students, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has reportedly derailed a special investigative unit within her department that was tasked with probing abuses by for-profit schools.

According to the New York Times, which first reported on DeVos’s efforts Sunday, members of the team—established at the tail-end of the Obama administration—”have been marginalized, reassigned, or instructed to focus on other matters, according to current and former employees.”

“The unwinding of the team has effectively killed investigations into possibly fraudulent activities at several large for-profit colleges where top hires of Betsy DeVos, the education secretary, had previously worked,” including DeVry Education Group, the Times reports.

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Charter Schools Threaten the Existence of Public Education

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Privately-run, mostly taxpayer-funded schools financially harm public education.

By Jeff Bryant / People’s Action Blog

Proclaiming May 6-12 National Charter Schools Week, President Trump kicked off a huge public relations campaign by the charter industry to ballyhoo the supposed success of these schools, although that success is a matter of bitter and ongoing dispute.

But one outcome of these privately-run, mostly taxpayer-funded schools certainly produce is they financially harm the public education system.

“The term ‘existential threat’ is way overused, but charters and vouchers really are a threat to the existence of public education,” Brad Miller tells me. Miller is a highly-rated practicing attorney and a former U.S. House of Representative from North Carolina.

While in office, he warned Congress of the risks of the subprime mortgage market in 2004, five years before that market melted and brought about the collapse of the housing loan and banking industry and the Great Recession.

The facts back Miller up.   [Read more…]

Los Angeles Chooses a Billionaire Privatizer for Superintendent of Schools

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Eli Broad and friends have picked his wealthy business partner, Austin Beutner, to lead LA schools. Their kindred spirit from San Francisco, Reed Hastings, is chipping in for the cause as are Fisher, Walton, Bloomberg and several other billionaires. The selection of Beutner signals another existential crisis for America’s second largest public school district.

In May of 2017, these pro-privatization forces bankrolled a successful destroy public education (DPE) take-over of the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD). For the first time ever, a pro-charter school voting bloc is in control.

On April 16, Howard Blume reporting for the Los Angeles Times said, “Austin Beutner has emerged as a leading contender to run the Los Angeles school district, with backers saying he is smart enough and tough enough to confront its financial and academic struggles.” However, the selection has been surprisingly stalled.   [Read more…]

SanDiego350 Educates Southwest High School Students on Urgency of Climate Action

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SanDiego350’s Presentation Team has been busy spreading the word about climate change throughout communities in the San Diego area. Team volunteers Beverly Harju, Ron Schneider, and Nancy Cottingham spent April 11 with students in Michelle Roberts’ Biology classes at Southwest High School. Michelle is a SanDiego350 member and is dedicated to teaching the next generation about the serious issues facing our planet and the concrete steps they can take toward building solutions.   [Read more…]

A Rotten Peach Poisoning Atlanta Public Schools

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Sadly, the Atlantic Public Schools (APS) are careening from one destructive tragedy to the next. On the heels of the great cheating scandal of 2009, APS hired a leader of the destroy public education (DPE) movement as schools’ chief. Her “district turnaround” model includes making APS an all charter system.

Somehow, I got included in an email conversation between Ed Johnson, well-known education activist from Atlanta, Georgia, and a group of professors who study education issues. Mr. Johnson who ran for the Atlanta school board and has had opinion pieces published by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, shared data from the just released NEAP testing. He provided eight graphs supporting the following conclusions:

“This preliminary look at APS offers the immediate data story that, in recent years, APS White-Black academic gaps have been made worse. It is the same data story the Georgia Milestones Assessment System also tells; details differ, of course. So-called school transformation, school turnaround, school reform, school choice, and closing public schools and opening charter schools must be considered negative contributing factors, as they promote bold, disruptive change; scripted teaching; instruction delivery; personalized mechanistic learning; and rigid academic performance. These matters are contrary to purposeful, systemic improvement of APS as a public institution or public good.”

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Putting My Love in Play

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I recently wrote a rhyme about all the love I’ve enjoyed for 80 years, and now I’d like to share how I’ve put that love in play.

Regarding that, I have to say that loving has been easy for me because my life’s work has been dedicated to schools which are perfect places for spreading love.

And my intent, all along, has simply been to make my world more just for all human beings – beginning, in a moment in time, when I was in grade school myself.

I can still picture the day. There was a sweating fan blowing across a little container of water as though that could affect the temperature in a classroom in Tucson, Arizona, the first weeks of school.
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Fake Teachers, Fake Schools, Fake Administrators; Time to End the Charade

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The destroy public education movement (DPE) has given us Teach for America (Fake Teachers), Relay Graduate School (Fake Schools) and from the Broad Superintendents Academy (Fake administrators). None of these entities are legitimately accredited, yet they are ubiquitous in America’s major urban areas.

There was a time in the United States of America when scoundrels perpetrating this kind of fraud were jailed and fined. Today, they are not called criminals; they are called philanthropists. As inequitable distribution of wealth increases, democratic principles and humane ideology recedes.

It is time to fight the 21st century robber-barons and cleanse our government of grifters and sycophants.   [Read more…]

Destroy Public Education Proponent Advocates Vouchers

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Late in March (2018), the Center for American Progress (CAP) released a report on vouchers. CAP, a neoliberal leaning think tank, sums up Their report with this quote, “How bad are school vouchers for students? Far worse than most people imagine.”

After reading the report, I distributed it through my twitter feed. I am not a big fan of CAP, but felt the report was valuable except for their continued support for the charter school choice agenda. I guess they are only half as bad as DeVos.

The next day Corey A. DeAngelis, a policy analyst at the Cato Center for Educational Freedom, replied to my tweet with a link to his post refuting the CAP study.   [Read more…]

Shedding Light on Marshall Tuck’s Shady Money Trail

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Recently, when the San Francisco Chronicle endorsed Marshall Tuck for Superintendent of Public Instruction, they did so because, according to their editorial board, he has “the skills and vision to bring about needed change” and would stand up to “the status quo” (read: teachers’ unions).  

While it has become quite common for mainstream corporate media outlets to blindly parrot the rhetoric of corporate education reformers, in this case, it is an exercise in doublethink of Trumpian proportions.  Far from being a populist outsider fighting the establishment, Tuck is the pure product of the billionaire class.

A few weeks back, I wrote about how Tuck’s bid for Superintendent of Public Instruction should not be allowed to slide under the radar because his effort to defeat his opponent, stalwart progressive Assemblyman Tony Thurmond, was a case study of the ways right-wing money is trying to infiltrate Democratic politics.  More specifically, I noted that “it’s not just the usual California members of the billionaire boys club that are backing Tuck this time.  

Updated 2018-10-09   [Read more…]

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