CommentsBILLIONAIRES AT THE GATE-Over a decade ago, when there was a push to break off the vast San Fernando Valley from LAUSD, and for the Valley to form its own school district, I was not in agreement. However, with approximately 675,000 students in the 7 district areas that comprise LAUSD, I find I am now changing my mind, as have many of us who are education professionals and who follow and write about public education.
This huge LAUSD enterprise, with a yearly budget of over $7 billion, has been mired in confusion, corruption, and inefficiency for many decades, and seems not to be manageable. I now tend to agree with some Angelenos who are pushing to reconstruct LAUSD into multiple independent districts. However, the danger is that it would further segregate the inner city students.
Right now, the multitude of charter schools (LA has the most in the nation) pick and choose among students of color, leaving behind those who are hard to teach, English Language Learners, and/or those who are personally handicapped and have special needs. They have contributed to the almost total re-segregation of students of color despite the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education landmark decision by the US Supreme Court.
It would be very costly to have all these new districts with a multitude of administrators. One of the greatest economic problems at LAUSD is the nepotism which has, for so many years, caused the hiring of many unnecessary middle managers whose large salaries are now built into the budget. They do little to deserve this taxpayer largesse.
Many lifelong Los Angeles residents -- particularly those of us who are also professional educators -- are beleaguered by the lack of public input allowed by the district, as well as the lack of transparency shown by the district and the Board of Education in a system where highly financed candidates get elected to the BoE…people who either are not educators and/or also are not skilled in business management.
We do not need more ‘Voteria’-impacted (paying for votes through an illegal lottery), multi-millionaire charter school candidates and other toadies of Eli Broad using his directives to run LAUSD. It is “We the People” who pay all the freight and this is the only thing that is "public" about Broad's latest permutation. In his new takeover scheme for “charterizing” the district, Broad tries to hide his name by calling it Great Public Schools Now, a plan that is actually designed to convert public education into a business model, a vehicle for free market profiteering. But the taxpayers are still footing the bills, so this is not a 'robber baron' solution to funding and running public schools -- it is not geared to educate the entire student base but, rather, only carefully selected students.
The audacity of these billionaires boggles the mind. They have appointed a hardball charter school lobbyist to run their new 501c3 non-profit, rapidly tossed together after a major teacher and public protest at the Broad Gallery on the day of its opening. Broad's paid articles and editorials have been run in the LA Times, suggesting that their hired gun (hired to kill public schools in favor of free market profiteering) should give the new Superintendent of Schools “a seat at their table" and thus be able to participate in this destruction of public education. It is the greatest form of sophistry we have witnessed yet. It is off the charts in terms of any democratic structure...and public education has always been the crux of our democracy.
We do need more people willing to run for the BoE, people who have some training in business management plus a background in education. We got lucky that Scott Schmerelson, who, with his many decades of experience as a teacher and senior administrator, was willing to come out of retirement to run for and win a seat on the Board. He has become the major hope on the BoE to make reasoned decisions while also holding back the Broad deformers from taking over the district.
We had hoped that George McKenna and Richard Vladovic, each with similar credentials to Schmerelson, would also function positively to protect the public schools against the billionaires’ charter onslaught, but it seems that these two men have become stuck in their own personal issues.
Monica Ratliff, who is both a Columbia-trained attorney and an elementary school teacher, has been a staunch defender of public education as a member of the BoE, but she has been pushed into a background role by the testosterone overload on the Board. I still have faith that she will vociferously support Schmerelson’s position when he speaks loudly against the “Broad-billionaire clique” takeover. Once Steve Zimmer (photo above) completes his role as a BoE member and as the current President of the Board, there will be a far fairer changing of the guard.
For now, however, it is imperative for the public to raise a loud voice in support of our public schools. The outsider cash donated by Broad, the Waltons, Bloomberg, Murdoch, Anshutz, and others, to the now multi-million dollar LAUSD BoE elections that only a decade ago required a candidate to spend just $30,000, must be stopped.
The push by these few golden boys and girls to take over all of our American institutions, expecting the rest of us to conform to their form of rule, turns all of us into serfs for Eli Broad and his band of invaders. It would be more productive and fair if these privatizers would donate to programs that strengthen the public schools…programs that would hire back teachers, aides, nurses, counselors, janitors, and fund the arts and special education, as well as academics.
(Ellen Lubic, Director of Joining Forces for Education is a Public Policy educator/writer. Views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the views of CityWatch or its ownership.) Edited for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.
-cw
CityWatch
Vol 14 Issue 7
Pub: Jan 22, 2016
Dismantling the LAUSD Behemoth - But Who Should Run Our Public Schools?
