TUSD went through a rough-and-tumble board election last year, but compared to what’s going on in the Los Angeles school board race, it was a half-hearted shoving match on the school playground. Two seats are up for grabs in Tuesday’s L.A. school board election, and so far $12 million has been dropped into the races. Between Wednesday and Thursday, two of the candidates pulled in another $800,000.
Looking at the major battles over education being waged in Arizona as well as L.A., New York, Chicago and other hot spots, not to mention the national-level furor over Trump’s Ed Sec Betsy DeVos and her privatization priorities, it’s clear to me we’re at a pivotal moment. The nation is fighting over the very soul of education. What happens over the next decade could very well decide how we educate our children well into the future.
What’s unusual about the education battles is, unlike most national issues, they don’t divide along neat political lines. Arizona’s statewide educational fight is pretty straightforwardly conservative/progressive, Republican/Democratic. But the TUSD board battles created some mighty strange political bedfellows, and the L.A. education wars are even more complicated.
Unlike TUSD where all the board candidates are lumped together and the top vote getters are elected, L.A. board seats are divided by district. Each of the two hotly contested district seats has a pro-charter candidate and an . . . it’s not correct to say an anti-charter school candidate exactly, more like a candidate who wants to slow down charter growth. Some of the pro charter money has come from the usual conservative sources: two members of the Walton (Walmart) family and the conservative co-founder of the GAP. But giving big money to the same side are former N.Y. mayor Michael Bloomberg and Steve Jobs’ widow, neither of whom are firmly in the conservative camp. And at the center of the L.A. pro-charter movement is Eli Broad, a very rich Democrat who is a major player in the “education reform”/privatization movement and has a goal of opening up enough L.A. charter schools that they’ll enroll half of the local students. The candidates on the other side are getting lots of their money from teachers unions and their allies in the labor movement.
If the two pro-charter candidates win, they and their allies on the board will take over the majority, which is critical to the rapid expansion of charters in the L.A. area since, unlike Arizona, most California charters are approved by their local school districts. With Eli Broad and his wealthy allies pushing for as many new charters as possible and providing financial help to get them up and running working alongside a pro-charter school board majority to approve the new schools, charters could start shooting up like California poppies in spring, or cropping up like toadstools along the roadside—choose whichever metaphor suits your educational inclinations.
If the L.A. board retains its current majority, its slow moving charter wars will continue. If the majority shifts, it will be the place to watch for charter school expansion, the same way Arizona has been the place to watch lately for voucher expansion.
This article appears in May 11-17, 2017.
Keep it up and Trump will win this too. People have moved from running on emotion to running on hate, and Americans are tired of it. Very tired.
15-20M dollars to make school policy? It must be an awful profitable business.
In order to control every generation of children before they become adults you must start when they are in the formative years and indoctrinate them into your scheme. Just as Hitler took control of the children of Germany and trained them to be good Aryans the pro-charter school advocates realize the power they will have over millions of American youth if they can just win enough seats on the education boards of this country’s schools. Once that goal is achieved all the dominoes will easily fall into place and once again Public Money will go towards Private Profits! Most Americans are asleep at the wheel and are not mentally equipped to comprehend what the hell is going on. This country is basically screwed and you can thank the Republican conservative political machine which has been working overtime since the 1980’s to convert our Democracy to an Oligarchy.
Great report David. You should read it. Great job California!
http://www.ocregister.com/2017/05/15/charter-schools-are-climbing-up-the-ranks-2/
Charter school have gone from acceptance to excellence, and now are outperforming their traditional public school counterparts, multiple recent school rankings revealed.
In addition, magnet schools, public schools with specialized instruction, such as a focus on math and science or the arts, comprised three of the four remaining spots in the top 10. In other words, nine of the top 10 schools were schools of choice.
Taken together, charters and magnet schools took up 60 percent of the top 100 schools, despite representing just 16 percent of the roughly 6,000 schools U.S. News deemed medal-winning. Schools were ranked based on factors such as graduation rates, performance on state assessments and student participation in and performance on Advanced Placement tests, U.S. News reported.
It’s unclear whether Safier is trying to imply that the struggles over the TUSD Board were cast in the same mold (“privatization,” or public district / union vs. charter) in which he says the L.A. struggles are cast. If he is implying that, he is wrong. Neither “faction” / coalition in the TUSD Board battles was pro-Charter, pro-privatization.
There are in fact many different kinds of “education wars” going on both locally and nationally. When it comes to figuring out what’s going on or how to vote at the local level, it comes down to understanding the details of the business — and the conditions in the schools — in the districts in question. Some public districts are well managed. Others are not. This whole “privatization” narrative has the effect in some cases of throwing a cloak over instances of mismanagement by lumping all public districts in with the “good guys” in their fight against the “villainous privatizers.” That’s a unique form of B.S. that has developed in our contemporary education media scene that voters would be well advised to develop a way of detecting. If they don’t, they may in many cases waste their votes on poor “leaders” who will, in office, do more to undermine the cause of public education than to support it, in spite of what they say during their campaigns.
My daughter attends a public high school in Tucson az. She came home complaining that her History teacher was instructing the students in the doctrine of the Muslim faith. According to her, the teacher doesn’t even mention the history of America. He spends most of his time bashing President Trump and American values.. He insists that the Muslim faith is a peaceful religion and the students are given assignments and shown ‘You Tube’ videos in the study of Islam. According to my daughter, if anyone of the students contradict him in any fashion, he retaliates by giving the student a failing grade. Most of the students of the district are predominantly Roman Catholic. With this mind, he has cleverly placed a picture of the Virgin of Guadalupe in the class room. However, the teacher involved never mentions a single word in reference to the religious photograph. In my opinion, he’s deliberately and with malice deceiving the students by making seem as though he’s a friend of Catholicism and therefore opening a door of communication and trust between student and teacher for the introduction of the Muslim faith. Parents beware, get involved with your children, take the time to ask your sibling what they’re being taught in your school district. P.S. My child will not be attending public school as of 2/24/2017.