Tag Archives: LAUSD

Stalled California Charter Schools

29 Feb

By Thomas Ultican 2/29/2024

In California, from 2021 to 2023, 31 new charter schools opened but 63 closed. Since inception in 1994, charter school enrollment grew ever year until 2021. For the first time, charter school enrollment fell. This December, KIPP SoCal announced they were closing three of their 23 Los Angeles County schools. Alliance for College-Ready Public Schools and Green Dot Public Schools have also closed LA area schools.

The charter industry is struggling…

California State Enrollment Data

Los Angeles Unified School District

Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) charter petitions used to arrive by the dozens but there were none this year. The 74 reported:

“Enrollment in the schools peaked in 2021, when the city’s charters enrolled nearly 168,000 students. Since then admissions have declined by nearly 11%, although not as fast as district schools.”

The “although not as fast as district schools” remark is disingenuous. In 2016, LAUSD enrollment was 639,337 and by 2023, had fallen to 538,295. This was a drop of almost 16% but over a much longer time period.

Since 2019, student enrollment in California declined by 5% and in Los Angeles County, the drop was 8.5% (California Data).

Howard Blum, reporting for the LA Times, stated:

“Twenty years ago, L.A. Unified had close to 740,000 students and was building schools as fast as it could. District-operated schools currently enroll about 420,000 students — a decline caused by reduced immigration, families moving out of L.A., lower birthrates — and, until recently, the growth of charter schools.”

Carol Burris and Network for Public Education (NPE) published Broken Promises in 2020. A stunning find was that almost 50% of charter schools had closed their doors within the first 15 years of operation (Broken Page 19).

About 50% of Charter Schools Closures by Year 15

Parents, sold a story about superior charter schools, often end up dismayed. A typical response to the closing of KIPP Poder comes from parent Gina Alonzo:

“I was very angry — very, very upset — disappointed, because we didn’t get a warning. We didn’t get a notification of what was going on — the issues that they were having.”

“We were grown as a community here. Everybody knows each other. This is all my son knows. So I’m upset and I’m thinking about the trauma that this is going to cause him.”

Besides new state policies and falling student populations, people in the choice community see the LAUSD board as hostile to charter schools. In 2022, Rocio Rivas won the district-2 seat in a tightly fought battle, not called until two weeks after the election. With a pro-public school board member, replacing termed-out Monica Garcia, the board shifted away from school choice.

In 2017, billionaires (Hastings, Broad, Rock, Fisher and, multiple Waltons) poured huge dollars into the LAUSD election, outspending their opponents 2 to 1 in America’s most expensive school board election ever. They spent more than $6 million in just the 2020 district-7 race to maintain control of the board. The 2022 results flipped the script and billionaires lost control.

John Angeli is executive director of the Los Angeles Coalition for Excellent Public Schools, a group that represents some of the city’s largest charter operators. He points out that in 2024, two incumbent school board members are running for reelection with two retiring board members, leaving open seats. Angeli believes the board could tip back to his favor in November.

School Choice – A Bad Choice

Some charter schools are abominations but most of them are reasonable. Like public schools, they are staffed with excellent or mostly decent teachers and a few who should not be in the profession. Their standardized testing results are similar to those of public schools with two deficiencies. They are likely to close their doors anytime while a public school never closes mid-school year, with no notice. Also public schools unify communities while charter schools divide them.

Birthed in the bowels of the 1950’s segregationist south, school choice has never been about improving education. It is founded on white supremacy, profiting off taxpayers, cutting taxes, selling market based solutions and financing religion. School choice ideology has a long dark history of dealing significant harm to public education.

Steve Suitts’ book, Overturning Brown, provides overwhelming evidence for the segregationist legacy of “school choice.” “Brown v Board” has been effectively gutted with “choice” as the white supremacists’ most potent strategy. In the 21st century, choice is being wielded to maintain segregation and destroy separation of church and state.

Southern segregationists often condemned “integration as the work of communists” (Suitts 32). Adopting the language of University of Chicago libertarian economist, Milton Friedman, they began denouncing the “monopoly of government schools”, calling it “socialism in its purest form” (Suitts 59). This is the basis of so-called school choice.

A Brookings Institute study of segregation in schools reported:

“Charter schools are more segregated than TPS [traditional public school] at national, state, and metro levels. Black students in charter schools are far more likely than their traditional public school counterparts to be educated in intensely segregated settings. At the national level, 70 percent of black charter school students attend intensely segregated minority charter schools (which enroll 90-100 percent of students from under-represented minority backgrounds), or twice as many as the share of intensely segregated black students in traditional public schools”.

This is a big problem concerning all races. Professors Linda R. Tropp and Suchi Saxena along with many other sociologists and educators have conducted research identifying the clear benefit of and need for school integration. They state, “New social science research demonstrates the importance of fostering sustained interracial contact between youth in order to prepare them to thrive in a multiracial society”.

UCLA Professor Gary Orfield coined the phrase “apartheid schools” for schools with a White student enrollment of 1% or less. A personal 2019 study of Washington DC charter schools revealed that 64 of the 116 charter schools could be classified as “apartheid schools”.

Yesterday, Peter Greene posted an insightful article about the coalition-promoting school choice and their splintering. One of the points he made was:

“But what the alliance didn’t produce was results. Choice did not provide a sudden lifting of all boats, despite some data-torturing attempts to show otherwise. Data-driven instruction didn’t improve the data generated by either students or teachers. Underserved communities that were supposed to be rescued from failing schools by charters and choice too often had education policies done to them rather than with them. And then there was the gross miscalculation that was Common Core, which drew attack from all across the political spectrum”.

For the Catholic Church and Evangelical Christians, like Betsy DeVos, publicly provided vouchers for private religious schools open a path to taxpayer support for their organizations. It is lamentable for their cause that every recent large scale study of vouchers showed students perform worse when transferred to voucher schools.

What is the main motive behind mega-rich spending to undermine public education? Professor Maurice Cunningham of the University of Massachusetts claimed they really want “lower state and local taxes.”

John Arnold is the billionaire Enron trader who did not go to prison when that company collapsed. He has joined forces with the billionaire CEO of Netflix, Reed Hastings, to sell the nation on the portfolio model of school management.  To achieve their goal, they created The City Fund. After its founding in 2018, billionaires Bill Gates, Michael Dell and Steve Ballmer all made significant contributions.

In brief, the portfolio model directs closing schools that score in the bottom 5% on standardized testing and reopening them as charter schools or Innovation schools. In either case, they will no longer come under the purview of an elected school board. It is a march to oblivion for public schools because there will always be a bottom 5%.

Two central ideologies behind school choice are markets always make superior decisions and the cost of local control of schools is poor outcomes. Both ideas are demonstrably untrue but big money and power politics keep them alive.

It is good for America that charter schools are starting to struggle but it is heartbreaking for parents, hornswaggled by billionaires. Americans have always had school choice. If taxpayer funded public school are not wanted, there are always private schools, without the choice encumbering taxpayers.

Let’s join with the Network for Public Education and thoughtfully role back choice schools and put them under democratic control.

Stop fleecing taxpayers to finance privatized schools.

Tags: , , , , ,

California Plutocrat Education Election Spending

20 Sep

By Thomas Ultican 9/20/2020

Unlike 2018, fewer of the wealthy class appear to be spending so freely to control California school policy, but their spending still dominates campaign spending. Large amounts of money are being spent in an attempt to regain political control of the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) and there appears to be a concentration of money directed at key county school boards. They are also spending liberally on California state senate and assembly races.

Little Sis Map of Plutocrat Spending for Independent Expenditures

In this election cycle, the three PACs mapped in yellow appear to be the main conduit for billionaire money going to independent expenditures. These expenditures are unlimited as long as no coordination can be shown with a candidate’s campaign. The wealthy real estate developer from Manhattan Beach, California, William E. Bloomfield is pouring his money directly into private campaign companies normally hired by the PACs to produce their media and campaign mailings. The Campaign Company Group shown above is a fictitious company showing the total funding Bloomfield has spent with seven different companies to produce campaign materials for candidates he supports or opposes.

The Battle for LA

LAUSD is by far the largest school district in California and nationally it is second in size only to the New York City School District. Since the introduction of charter schools in the 1990s, LAUSD has become approximately 20% privatized. There are more charter schools in Los Angeles than any other city in the country. Political control of the LAUSD is seen as key to either slowing the privatization train or accelerating it.

In 2020, the four odd numbered LAUSD board seats were up for election. Since the charter school industry already has three board members not up for reelection, they only need to flip one seat to regain control of the board. In 2019, they lost control of the board when Jackie Goldberg received 71.6% of the vote in a special election to replace district 5 board member Ref Rodriquez who pled guilty to conspiracy charges.

During the March primary election both District 1 Board Member George McKenna and District 5 Board Member Jackie Goldberg ended their campaigns for reelection by receiving more than 50% of the vote thus winning the seat. In district 7, incumbent Richard Vladovic was term limited from running. Teacher’s union favorite Patricia Castellanos and the charter industry supported Tanya Ortiz Franklin were the two top vote getters in the primary. They will face off in the general election for the district 7 seat.

The most contentious school board race is between district 3 incumbent Scott Schmerelson and Granada Hills Charter High School employee Marilyn Koziatek. During the primary race, LA Times reporter Howard Blume opened an article writing, “A million-dollar attack campaign is underway portraying Los Angeles school board member Scott Schmerelson as greedy, corrupt and determined to score fast cash by exposing children to deadly vaping and McDonald’s French fries.”

Alex Caputo-Pearl, Teachers Union President, said the ads were an “attempt to eviscerate Scott, a lifelong educator and champion of our public schools…. Scott’s likeness is literally made into a caricature, with clear anti-Semitic overtones.” Scott Schmerelson would hardly be the first Jew in Los Angeles to face anti-Semitism. 

Schmerelson finished his educator career as principal for 10-years at Johnnie L. Cochran, Jr. Middle School in South Los Angeles. He is also a former leader in the Association of California School Administrators.

Schmerelson probably became a more important target for the forces working to privatize public education when he vocally opposed investment banker Austin Beutner as the next Superintendent of LAUSD. He said he wanted a school chief with education experience.

Marilyn Koziatek’s campaign web address says,

“Marilyn is the only candidate who currently works in a public school. She leads the community outreach department for Granada Hills Charter, one of the highest-performing public schools in California.”

First of all, charter schools are not public schools. They are private businesses with a contract to provide services to the government. The public has no democratic influence over them. Secondly, Koziatek has never taught. She does PR for a private company selling education services which pales in comparison to her opponents almost 4 decades working in classrooms and leading schools.

The LA times reported in 2003, “The Los Angeles Board of Education voted Tuesday to convert Granada Hills High School, which has among the best academic records in the school district, into an independent charter school.” (Emphasis added) The article also noted, “Board President Caprice Young hailed the vote as a victory for the charter movement.”

There is a rumor that Koziatek was forced into running by the highly paid Executive Director of Granada Hills Charter, Brian Bauer. The charter’s last tax form 990 (EIN 05-0570400) listed Bauer’s 2017 salary as $271,287. He is also on the board of the California Charter Schools Association.

The independent expenditures for Marilyn Koziatek and opposing Scott Schmerelson by the organization Families and Teachers United is sponsored by the California Charter Schools Association. The Students, Parents and Teachers group supporting Scott Schmerelson and Patricia Castellanos is sponsored by the LA Unified Teachers Union.

In District 7, two Latinas are facing off, Patricia Castellanos and Tanya Ortiz Franklin. Neither candidate appears to have deep experience in education. Franklin taught elementary school for five years and worked part time at Antonio Villaraigosa’s Partnership for Los Angeles Schools while she attended law school. Castellanos was a community organizer and works as the Workforce and Economic Development Deputy for LA County Supervisor Sheila Kuehl.

In direct campaign contributions, as of 9/14/2020 Castellanos had almost a two to one advantage in contributors 581 to 347 and a money advantage of $206,562 to $95,146. Franklin has a large advantage from independent expenditures with Bill Bloomfield’s $3,327,483 to Castellanos $767,551 from the teachers union founded Student, Parents and Teachers.

In a way, the contest for school board seat 7 is between 27,000 LAUSD teachers and an extremely rich man from Manhattan Beach.

Last month, former assistant US Secretary of Education Diane Ravitch posted, “Los Angeles: Vote for Scott Schmerelson and Patricia Castellanos for LAUSD School Board.” She asks if LAUSD will be controlled “by cabal of billionaires who favor privatization by charter schools,” or by parents of the 80% of students who attend public schools?

Spending Directed at the California State Legislature

Campaign data was accessed from the California Secretary of State between September 14 and 17. Total spending for the California State Assembly and State Senate candidates was tabulated for the three PACs and seven plutocrats in the map above. The data is presented in Tables 2 and 3. All 80 Assembly seats are up for election as are the twenty odd numbered Senate seats.

A reasonable analysis of the spending pattern indicates that candidates for State Assembly receiving $5,000 or more are being supported to drive the school privatization agenda. Candidates receiving more than $10,000 probably fall into the category of being heavily influenced and those receiving more than $20,000 are owned.

The candidates receiving less than $5,000 are likely getting those donations to insure they answer the phone and listen.

The spending in the Senate mirrors the spending in the Assembly and the analysis is similar with the exception of the even number candidates. Those candidates who are not on the ballot must be supporting the plutocrat agenda as equally as the candidates receiving more than $10,000.

Kevin Kiley ran for senate seat 1 and lost in the primary. His $30,200 dollars came from 6 plutocrats and EdVoice for the Kids. For the general election EdVoice has sent Brian Dahle, the incumbent who beat Kiley, $1500. Maybe Dahle will not be inclined to answer the phone.

Jim Walton skewed a little from the public school privatization agenda to make 24 direct contributions to republicans running for the California state legislature.

Billionaires Spending on Key County School Board Races

A significant amount of the spending by the three PACs shown in the Little Sis map above was concentrated into the race for five county school boards. The largest amounts were directed toward Alameda, Orange and Riverside counties. Table 4 details the spending.

Some Conclusions

Former Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis said, “We can either have democracy in this country or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.”

On the other hand Abraham Lincoln is quoted as saying, “You can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.”

Obviously, democracy is compromised when seven plutocrats have the resources to skew election results in their direction. In this election two of the seven identified plutocrats are from Bentonville, Arkansas not California. However, it is becoming harder and harder to convince people to continue privatizing their public schools, to continue wasting money on standardized testing and to continue cutting taxes for plutocrats.

There is some good news. Fewer plutocrats are supporting the privatization agenda than in 2017 and 2018.  In 2017, billionaires spent more than $10,000,000 dollars to swing the LAUSD election and the following year they spent more the $40,000,000 dollars trying to elect Marshall Tuck as Superintendent of Public Instruction. This year the spending is not as intense or as widely distributed.

Residents of Alameda, Orange, Riverside, Sacramento and San Joaquin counties can use Table 4 to identify who to vote against. Residents in the Los Angeles Unified School District can follow Diane Ravitch’s advice and vote for Scott Schmerelson in district 3 and Patricia Castellanos in district 7.  

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,

LA Makes a Billionaire Privatizer Superintendent of Schools (Updated)

25 Apr

By Thomas Ultican 4/25/2018

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 would signal another existential crisis for America’s second largest public-school district.

Update: When I originally published this article, a board member who had voted against Beutner, Scott M Schmerelson‘s came to the mic on Friday, April 27 and announced that no decision had been made. He said the next board meeting would be May 1. That was subterfuge.

1. The vote to hire Beutner was taken on April 20th.
2. Board member Richard Vladovic who was considered opposed to Beutner voted to hire him.
3. It was a 5-2 vote for his contract.

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. Now, they appear ready to select Beutner as their leader.

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.

April 20, Blume updated the story for the LA Times. He speculated Beutner would be selected that day. Blume wrote, “Some of the city’s power brokers seem to be invested in Beutner, 58, who is himself one of L.A.’s more influential leaders.” However, later in the day, the Daily News reported, “The board met for hours Friday but announced shortly after 7 p.m. that it would be reconvening at 11 a.m. May 1 to resume the discussion”.

Four Finalist in Superintendent Bid

In the April 16 LA Times article, Blume also stated that in addition to front runner Beutner, three finalists are in contention. He noted:

“Interim Supt. Vivian Ekchian, who has been managing the district since King left on medical leave last fall, also made it to the second round, according to insiders. The other two apparent finalists are more difficult to confirm, but several sources have named Indianapolis Supt. Lewis Ferebee and former Baltimore Supt. Andres Alonso, who teaches at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.”

Popular LAUSD Superintendent Michelle King resigned on January 5th. She had been fighting cancer since the summer of 2017 and had been on medical leave since the fall.

Superintendent Candidates

Four finalists for LAUSD Superintendent: Alonso, Beutner, Ekchian, Ferebee.

Lewis Ferebee

Ferebee has been the Superintendent of Schools in Indianapolis, Indiana since 2013. Influenced by The Mind Trust, Indianapolis has become a model for the DPE movement. The fact that Ferebee, who is a member of Jeb Bush’s Chiefs for Change, is a finalist speaks volumes about the direction the new LAUSD board is charting.

The 74, a noted DPE oriented publication started by Campbell Brown, said that when first appointed he looked like a strange choice then continued,  “But since he stepped into the role of superintendent in 2013, Ferebee has developed stronger relationships between traditional district and charter schools, grown the city’s network of innovation schools, and worked toward giving principals more decision-making power.”

Last week Ferebee removed himself from consideration. On April 18, the Indianapolis Star quoted him:

‘“Recently, I was announced as one of the finalists for the Los Angeles Unified School District superintendent position,’ Ferebee’s statement said. ‘After further discussing this endeavor with my family, the Indianapolis Board of School Commissioners, and those handling the search process, I have withdrawn my name from consideration. It was an honor to have been considered for an opportunity of this magnitude.”’

Austin Beutner

He has no educational training or experience. His only qualification seems to be his willingness to do the job and the support he has from LA’s power elites. They claim his background in investment banking will lead to a solution to the charter school induced deficits plaguing LAUSD.

Beutner grew up in Grand Rapids, Michigan just thirty miles up the road from Holland Michigan and the DeVos clan. His father, Roger Earl Beutner, was the Vice-President of Operations at AmWay. He and his siblings Sheryl and Brian all attended East Grand Rapids High School, a public school.

He went to Dartmouth in the fall of 1978 majoring in economics. That seems to be the extent of his formal education.

His Revolvy biography states,

“After graduation in 1982 he went to work at Smith Barney as a financial analyst. At the age of 29, he became the youngest partner at The Blackstone Group, one of the largest private equity firms in the world. In the 1990s he co-founded the investment banking group Evercore Partners which went public in 2006.”

Dartmouth magazine noted, “In the mid-1990s President Bill Clinton asked him to advise Russia on transitioning to a free-market economy. (During his three years in Moscow, Beutner met with both Yeltsin and Putin.)”

After recovering from a serious biking accident, Beutner started looking for new challenges outside the banking industry. In 2009, LA’s economy was in the tank, companies were leaving town and business insiders were not happy with Mayor Anthony Villaraigosa’s “feckless response.” Former mayor and billionaire, Richard Riordan, hosted a breakfast for city movers and shakers to discuss the issue. In a 2011 puff piece about Beutner, Gabriel Kahn of Los Angeles Magazine provided a description of the event:

“Riordan wanted to bring together some of the most prominent people in L.A. to see what could be done. Among those attending were Michael Milken, Eli Broad, and Disney senior executive Jay Rasulo, along with [George] Kieffer [from the LA law firm Manatt, Phelps & Phillips], City National Bank chairman Russell Goldsmith, and Jay Carson, who was chief deputy mayor at the time. Beutner also had a seat, though few of the guests knew him well. One after the other they rattled off ways to address L.A.’s most glaring problems: slash the lengthy business permitting process, do away with arcane business taxes, tackle runaway pension costs. Then Beutner spoke up. The proposals were all fine, he said, but until a person inside city hall is charged with implementing them, nothing would change. Those present took notice.”

Villaraigosa appointed Beutner to a new position he created, Deputy Mayor. He was given an extensive portfolio of responsibilities. Kahn wrote, “Beutner, who had decades of experience in investment banking but none in local government, was granted oversight of 12 city agencies, from the Port of Los Angeles to the Housing Authority.” He was the supervisor of 17,000 city employees.

Kahn ended his LA Magazine article with:

“No matter what happens, Villaraigosa says he wants someone doing Beutner’s job. After all, someone’s got to run the city.”

In February 2016, the San Diego Reader reported,

“Last May, when Chicago-based Tribune Publishing bought the San Diego Union-Tribune from developer Douglas Manchester, Austin Beutner seemed poised to take the city by storm. Appointed publisher of both the U-T and the Los Angeles Times, the former Wall Street wheeler-dealer and Democratic ex-deputy mayor of L.A. and friend of Bill and Hillary Clinton pledged to make over failing newspaper models and personally oversee everything from interviews with governor Jerry Brown to daily editorials.

 “Then Beutner was suddenly gone, dumped in September by Tribune after a reportedly failed attempt by his onetime associate, Democratic billionaire Eli Broad, to buy out the Times and U-T as part of Broad’s effort to build a personal Southern California newspaper empire.”

No training or experience in education but lots of money and connections. Isn’t this the requirement for top management positions in banana republics?

Andres Alonso

This finalist was the Superintendent of education in Baltimore, Maryland for six years. He resigned in 2013. Before Baltimore, he was chief of staff and then deputy chancellor for Teaching and learning during the first phase of New York’s Children First reforms. [Update: A reliable source says Alonso actually had no supervisory authority in NY. The information cited is from his Harvard biography.]

In his doctoral thesis Danial Voloch studied the Children First reform. He begins,

“During the first decade of the 21st century, Chancellor Joel Klein and Mayor Michael Bloomberg oversaw a radical transformation of the New York City Department of Education (NYCDOE) into a portfolio management district in which the primary responsibility of the NYCDOE was not to develop the capacity of school leaders or teachers, but instead to create a marketplace through which strong schools could be created and failing schools could be closed.” (emphasis added)

Alonso was an early practitioner of the DPE favored portfolio management theory with its associated churn and disruption.

Upon his resignation the Baltimore Sun wrote of Alonso’s performance:

“Under Alonso’s leadership, city schools saw growth in test scores, graduation rates and enrollment, but his administration was dogged by fiscal problems and cheating scandals.

 “The first half of his tenure was marked by a series of reforms: closing more than one dozen failing schools and programs and creating several others that have thrived; decentralizing the system by cutting the headquarters staff by more than half; giving principals power over budget decisions; creating choice for city families, and competition among middle and high schools; and signing a landmark pay-for-performance teachers’ union contract that was hailed as a model in the nation. (emphasis added)

 “Test scores stalled, and a series of cheating scandals — found by the state to have taken place during the year the district’s progress was most celebrated — cast a cloud over the success story.

 Since leaving Baltimore, Alonso has been teaching at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He does have extensive experience and training, but his philosophy of education leadership is deeply flawed.

Vivian Ekchian

Her LAUSD biography informs us that Ms. Ekchian is a 32-year veteran of L.A. Unified and has served in a variety of roles: teacher assistant, classroom teacher, principal, director of instruction, chief of staff to the superintendent of schools, chief human resources officer, chief labor negotiator, local district superintendent, associate superintendent, and acting superintendent. In January, LAUSD Board of Education voted unanimously to appoint Ms. Ekchian as interim superintendent.

She was awarded a bachelor’s degree and teaching credential from California State University, Northridge, as well as a master’s degree in educational administration from the University of California, Los Angeles. Currently, Ekchian is working toward a doctorate in educational leadership through the University of Southern California.

She is a naturalized Armenian-American born in Iran to Armenian parents. Ekchian was raised and educated in Heidelberg, Germany so she naturally understands the challenges facing students with diverse backgrounds.

Of the four finalists for the position, Ekchian is the most experienced and most committed to seeing LAUSD succeed at its mission to maintain high-quality professionally run public schools in every neighborhood. Unfortunately, the new LAUSD board appears committed to the DPE path.

Who Does the LAUSD Board Represent?

It is widely acknowledged that the last LAUSD board election was the most expensive school board election in history. The spending by the DPE movement was approximately double that of the teacher’s unions. However, this is misleading.

Over 7,000 teachers voluntarily contributed and average of $9.50 a month for a total of $67,000 starting in January 2017. By the election in May, those 7,000 people had contributed over $300,000. On February 22, 2017, the former mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg contributed $500,000.

Broad Hastings Cartoon Coopmike48

Graphic Courtesy of the Big Education Ape

Howard Blume and Ben Poston wrote a post-election piece describing the sources the money spent on the election. They said,

“It’s an oversimplification to say the outcome was all about money, but charters spent more ($9.7 million compared with $5.2 million), and their candidates finished first in both races on Tuesday’s ballot.”

 “Based on spending since the March primary, pro-charter outside groups and individuals spent $144 for every vote cast for one of the charter-endorsed candidates. Unions spent $81 for every vote received by teachers union-backed candidates.”

 “More information will be revealed with ongoing disclosure filings, but Reed Hastings, the co-founder of Netflix and a Democrat, appears to lead the pack with nearly $7 million donated since last September to California Charter Schools Assn. Advocates. Hastings, like others, does not appear in city filings as a contributor because he gave to the charter association. That association then spent money on the campaign or transferred funds to other pro-charter groups.”

 “How easy is it to figure out the source of the money in the school board races?

 “Not very. California Charter Schools Assn. Advocates, for example, files with state regulators, not the city, and the state requires only a semi-annual report. It won’t be possible to look up who gave in the five months leading up to the May 16 election until sometime after June.”

Major contributors are required to file their contributions with the State of California. The following table is of contributions in 2017, most of which came in before May.

Spending Table

Data on Campaign Giving by Major Donors in 2017

CCSA Advocates is an independent expenditure committee associated with the California Charter Schools Association. Ref Rodriquez, who is charged with campaign finance and charter school money fraud, is the forth vote for the DPE side. Marshal Tuck is the DPE backed candidate for state superintendent of instruction. Kellen Gonez and Nick Melvoin were just elected to the LAUSD board. Much of the independent expenditure money went to them. Ed Voice, Ed Voice for Kids and LA Students are all independent expenditure committees supporting the DPE movement. LA Students is Richard Riordan’s independent expenditure committee. It has nothing to do with students.

Melvoin and Gonez claim they are not ruled by these big money spenders. Their vote for the next LAUSD superintendent will be telling.

Tags: , , , , , ,