Teach for America (TFA) attempts to censure more than 58,000 real teachers as TFA struggles to take total control of the narrative like a good autocratic, despot, fascist, overlord, dictatorial, imperious, rigid, strict, totalitarian, tyrannical authoritarian organization always does.
A few days later, all comments were deleted and the ability to make any additional comments was disabled. TFA then published two additional articles about the comments BATS had made. The authors of these new articles then attempted to debunk what had been written about them but was too dangerous to be left for their readers to see for themselves.
The Waltons, the Broads, the Paul Tudor Jones family, and other hedge fund managers and equity investors are the billionaire families behind the growth of corporate Charter schools. They are not for quality public schools for ALL children. Their schools will exclude children with disabilities, English language learners, students returning from prison, and children with behavior problems. All of these children will be dumped in the public schools, while their more fortunate peers are skimmed off. The price to do things their way is to surrender our transparent, non-profit, community based public schools to them—and of course only our best children, who will then be treated as if they are in a totally autocratic Marine Corps boot camp.
The billionaires’ front group called “Families for Excellent Schools” has enlisted the actress Jennifer Hudson to support their campaign for charter schools. She probably thinks these are regular families, not realizing that the “Families” are the Waltons, the Broads, the Paul Tudor Jones family, and other hedge fund managers and equity investors. These are the billionaire families, not the people who need quality public schools for ALL children. Their schools will exclude children with disabilities, English language learners, students returning from prison, and children with behavior problems. All of these children will be dumped in the public schools, while their more fortunate peers are skimmed off. Then the boasting begins. FES is the same organization that has tried to derail Mayor de Blasio’s progressive agenda for children and heaped tens of millions on charter schools, not public schools. Please, Jennifer Hudson, don’t be fooled!
This post is about Eli Broad’s Hostile Takeover of the democratic Los Angeles Unified School District and his goal to control and own the media in Southern California.
Who is Eli Broad—he isn’t the image created by his propaganda machine? Eli Broad wants to buy the Los Angeles Times and the San Diego Union. Why does he want to own and control the two largest newspapers in Southern California? –Politico Media
Scholastic.com says, “Broad, who made his fortune in home building, is worth $6.3 billion, putting him 55th on the Forbes 400 list. That can’t compete with Gates, first on the list with $66 billion. And so the Broad Foundation is much smaller—and more strategic—than the Gates Foundation; it’s more aggressive and disruptive in many ways, and as a result more upsetting to those who disagree with its approach. … For example, Broad is a fan of the so-called parent trigger, which many other foundations and reform groups have not yet endorsed and many district administrators find threatening and unhelpful. He is a big supporter of Teach for America, which has won its share of both accolades and criticism. And he’s a fan of former D.C. schools chief and reform firebrand Michelle Rhee … he tends to fund efforts that bypass, or even blow up, existing systems.”
Now this California autocratic billionaire, who clearly despises and hates the democratic process, is enlisting other wealthy backers in a $490 million scheme to place half of the students in the Los Angeles Unified School District into for-profit, corporate 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 very public “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.”
The document outlines the following three objectives that would serve to overthrow the current public system. – Common Dreams.org
I wonder if Broad thinks his autocratic, boot-camp, opaque, for-profit, corporate Charters will solve the following two challenges for Los Angeles and the nation.
If Broad plans to copy New Orleans corporate Charter school model, how many children will end up booted out of his corporate Charters and end up on the streets when there are no public schools left that can take them in?
And what will happen to the gang culture, violence and crime in Los Angeles because of Broad doing that? Children who aren’t in school are on the streets—the street to prison pipeline.
I taught for thirty years in a public school district located in Los Angeles County in an area dominated by street gangs with a very high poverty rate—nothing short of the U.S. Marines moving in and declaring martial law will change this culture of poverty, drugs, crime and violence. The only chance these kids have are the public schools that offer havens of safety in a community of violence. Once kids lose those democratic, transparent, non-profit public school havens, the gang culture WILL spiral out of control.
Los Angeles has been nicknamed the Gang Capital of America, with an estimated 120,000 gang members as of 2007. According to a May 2001 Drug Threat Assessment by the National Drug Intelligence Center, Los Angeles was home to 1,350 gangs.
To police this area, the LAPD has less than 10 thousand officers. They are heavily outnumbered and heavily outgunned, and to solve this, Broad plans to use the Bill Gates rank-and-fire teachers test culture in his autocratic corporate Charters to get rid of difficult to teach children.
Maybe to solve this challenge, Eli Broad is planning to take over the LAPD too. What are his goals—to own the schools, own the newspapers, and eventually own the police?
Los Angeles Is The Poorest Big City
The Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim area had 17.6 percent of people living under the poverty line. – laist.com
“Who elected Eli Broad, a man who has said publicly that he knows nothing about education, to redesign the public schools that belong to the people, not to him?” —Diane Ravitch
Lloyd Lofthouse is a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam Veteran, with a BA in journalism and an MFA in writing,
who taught in the public schools for thirty years (1975 – 2005).
Date: November 2009 Purpose: to support Hillsborough County as part of a cohort of Intensive Partnership Sites to improve teacher effectiveness to transform outcomes for low-income, minority students Amount: $100,000,000 Term: 80 Topic: College-Ready Regions Served: GLOBAL|NORTH AMERICA Program: United States Grantee Location: Tampa, Florida Grantee Website: http://www.sdhc.k12.fl.us/
The grant was to be paid in 80 installments; if such installments were monthly, then the grant would be paid over roughly seven years, with the final payment made at the end of the 2015-16 school year.
Of course, Gates had some ideas about how this “teacher effectiveness” business should work. The report linked above has as its second sentence, “A teacher’s effectiveness has more impact on student learning than…
Megan Zander at She Knows wrote a post with this headline: Teacher’s aggressive note on 7-year-old’s homework goes viral, and many of the comments are critical of teachers and schools for what the alleged teacher wrote in red ink – the title of this post.
First, I was a public school teacher for thirty years, and I required my students to write their first and last name on every written assignment in addition to the period they were in and the date. When they didn’t write all that information, I wrote in aggressive red ink explaining to them why they lost some points from what the assignment was worth.
How can I justify being so aggressive? Well, I worked with almost 200 students in five or six classes often working 60 to 100 hours a week—25 hours teaching and the rest correcting work and planning lessons (not counting all the usually useless meetings teachers have to attend). All the work had to also be done in blue or black ink. Why would I have an aggressive rule like that? Well, the English department voted on it, and it was unanimous, because it made our jobs easier. Work written in pencil was more difficult to read and correct and teachers are correcting papers every night for several hours a night and on the weekends. To make sure my students knew this aggressive rule, there were large posters on the walls in my classroom reminding them that the work had to be done in blue or black ink, and I reminded them daily at the start of every written assignment.
For those reasons, when my students turned in work written in pencil, I wrote in aggressive red ink that if they wanted to earn credit for that assignment, they’d have to do it over in blue or black ink and turn it in the next school day.
Oh, and there were always kids who didn’t even bother to write their name on an assignment. Guess what happened to that work.
Without knowing all the details I will NOT condemn the ONE teacher who wrote that note in aggressive red ink or—for that matter—the entire education system in the United States.
Why am I refusing to rush in where so many fools have already gone?
The answer is simple—in the United States there are more than 3.5 million public school teachers, more than 15,000 public school districts in 50 states (the states are supposed to be responsible for public education—not the US Congress, the White House, a corporation or a CEO) teaching 50+ million children (not counting the territories), and to use this one incident to condemn everyone else in the public school systems that are not a monopoly is wrong on so many counts.
In fact, corporations build monopolies. Public schools with community based democratic school boards that are state controlled by 50 states are not monopolies. The public school system is made up of more than 15,000 individual school districts that are controlled by the local communities through elected democratic school boards that answer to the voters/parents.
What kind of school did this teacher work for?
What kind of teacher training did this teacher have—TFA, traditional or a full-time, yearlong urban residency?
Was this teacher under contract or a substitute teacher with no teacher training?
How many years has this teacher been in the classroom?
Was the school an underfunded, transparent, community-based, democratic, non-profit public school, a private school, or an autocratic, opaque, boot-camp like (see Success Academy), for profit (no matter what you call the school) corporate Charter school paid for by taxpayers but allowed to do whatever the CEO/manager of the school wants behind closed doors, and if a parent complains, the child is often kicked out of the school?
What state was it in—was it in Florida, Ohio or one of the other states where the public schools are under threat of a hostile takeover by corporate America?
If this teacher worked in a community based, democratic school, then there should be an elected school board and if those elected representatives, who are mostly parents from the same community, want to do something about the eleven words this teacher wrote in aggressive red ink, then they will, because that is the democratic process when it comes to public schools.
But if this child was in a corporate Charter school there is very little that can be done, because parents have no rights in those schools, teachers live in fear because they have no job protection, and these schools have no elected school boards to complain to. In corporate Charters if a parent doesn’t like the school, their child will often quickly find themselves out on the streets or back in an underfunded public school if there are any left.
A Brenda Hatcher seems to have spread this note on Facebook, and she alleges that the mother is a military veteran. I am also a military veteran. I served in the U.S. Marines and fought in Vietnam before I went to college on the GI Bill and eventually became a public school teacher for 30 years. I’d like to talk to this alleged military mother.
Megan Zander’s conclusion said, “After all, a child who’s willing to bend the rules in school could grow up to be the one who makes the rules.”
I shuddered at the thought that children who bend the rules will end up being our leaders.
I hope Megan might want to know why I shuddered at that thought. Megan, did you know that the professions with the most psychopaths in them are the ones who make the rules?
Which Professions Have the Most Psychopaths? The Fewest? – Time.com
CEOs and lawyers belong to the profession with the most psychopaths alongside journalists and police officers.
Teachers are on the list for the professions with the least number of psychopaths alongside nurses, doctors and charity workers.
Megan Zanderis a former divorce attorney—a lawyer—turned SAHM to twin boys. She’s written for The Stir, Scary Mommy, Rare.us, Mommyish and Bustle.
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BLAME IT ON THE TEACHER AS USUAL
Lloyd Lofthouse is a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam Veteran, with a BA in journalism and an MFA in writing,
who taught in the public schools for thirty years (1975 – 2005).
The Walton Family Foundation gave away $375 million last year. It gave away $202 million to educational groups.
The foundation’s money is generated by the vast earnings of Walmart. The foundation was established in 1987 by Sam Walton. At least six of the Walton family members are billionaires, maybe more. As they die off, the foundation will grow larger.
The leader of the education part of the Walton Foundation is Marc Sternberg, a favorite of Joel Klein’s, who moved from New York City to Bentonville, Arkansas.
The foundation is not only very wealthy, it has an ideology. It is rightwing. It is reactionary. It does not like public schools. It favors privatization and deregulation, which is what you might expect of a powerful corporation that hates government telling it what to do (like paying its employees a living wage). It hates unions. It loves charters and vouchers.
One of the major victories of the Seattle Education Association was that it reached agreement with the district to eliminate VAM. Henceforth, teachers will not be judged by the test scores of their students. Ding, dong, the fake metric of teacher evaluation is dead! At least in Seattle.
Highlights of tentative 3-year contract:
Raises: 3 percent in first year; 2 percent in second; 4.5 percent in third (state cost-of-living raise is additional). More in 2017-18 for some teachers for collaboration, and eight hours of “tech pay” for all school employees.
Discipline: Half day of training on reducing disproportionate discipline for all school employees. Equity committees launched in 30 schools……
Testing: New joint union-district committee to review and recommend testing and testing schedule.
Teacher evaluations: Test scores will no longer play any role.
This sounds hopeful. California has established a new agency to help and monitor struggling schools, and it will be led by a veteran educator, Carl Cohn.
I know Carl Cohn. He is the paradigm of a sensible and wise leader. He opposes punitive measures. He understands that what matters most is capacity-building and that requires collaboration and trust.
Here is a snippet from the interview linked above:
Cohn says:
“I think this is a dramatic departure from the past. Most of those other efforts were driven by state capitols and the federal government, but this is a major departure. The reason that I’m involved is that it is an opportunity to prove that the state of California has it right to emphasize teaching and learning and support for schools as opposed to embarrassing and punishing and shaming, which is what some have been all about since No Child Left Behind.
Pennsylvania’s standardized test scores are a farce just like the scores in every state and territory throughout the country. They’re lies told by corporations, permitted and supported by lawmakers, and swallowed whole by the media and far too much of the public.
One of my dearest high school friends was a bit of a doofus.
Who am I kidding? So was I!
One of our favorite things to do after school was plop on the coach and play shoot ‘em up video games. “Smash TV” was a particular favorite.
We’d bob and weave while clutching controllers and rapidly jamming our thumbs on the buttons.
And at such times, we‘d talk.
No great philosophical problems were solved during these mid-afternoon gaming sessions. We’d talk trash, dissing each other’s gaming skills, bragging about our own, and occasionally quizzing each other with trivia on a shared topic of interest.
We both loved movies, so my buddy used to shout out cinematic quotations and ask me to name where they came from.
Crazy Normal - the Classroom Exposé 