Neoliberalism has long lusted to destroy public education. Public schools create literate, educated citizens, and neoliberalism wants the unalloyed rule of the 1%, without those pesky restraints called democracy and justice for all.
Enter one of the creatures of neoliberalism: an NGO (non-governmental organization) which calls Itself LA's Promise. It claims that It magically transformed a bunch of failing public schools in Los Angeles into paragons of achievement.
Trusteth not Its heavily-juked and cherry-picked charts, for It lies.
Here's the real story. Public education in the US has suffered from 35 years of bait and switch. First, the public sector is starved of needed funds, because waging flagrantly illegal, trillion-dollar colonial wars and spending trillions more on an utterly useless and wasteful military-industry complex is so much more important than educating children... right?
Next, foundations created by billionaires show up promising magical solutions: the problem isn't lack of public funding, so they argue, the problem is those inefficient state bureaucrats and especially those darn teacher unions. Fire 'em all, institute some magical software gizmo run by some corporate jackal with an MBA who spouts nonsense about teacherwise goal-specific enhancementology, and test scores will magically go up.
It never works. Scores may go up, then down again, but there's never any sustained improvement. Why? Because, as experienced education experts like Diane Ravitch point out, (1) education is a long-term social good, requiring massive and sustained investment over time into schools and communities, and (2) test scores are a lousy way to measure achievement. If you don't spend the long-term resources on children, they won't learn.
LA Promise took over a bunch of schools in 2008 with much fanfare. Their magical programs didn't work, and by 2011 the Los Angeles school district had to retake control of the system.
What was LA Promise doing? Why, working people harder and paying them less. LA education board member Marguerite Poindexter Lamotte wrote this article, pointing to the dubious track record of the group. Reporter Howard Blume writes:
The nonprofit's once-solid relations with the teachers union reached a new low in recent months, when the group forced many teachers at Manual Arts and Muir Middle School — which L.A.'s Promise just took over — to seek jobs on other campuses. Administrators also put more pressure last year on Manual Arts teachers with stepped-up classroom observations and critiques.
Students complained about lack of resources, classes were overcrowded, etc. So what was LA Promise's response to all this? A fund-raising letter to fellow oligarchs, which stated baldly: "As you know, the innovation Los Angeles' students need cannot start within a rule-bound bureaucracy". Translation: the beatings will continue until morale improves.
But then things get really nasty. LA Promise has been endorsing candidates in an attempt to gimmick the system and pack the LA education board with subservient hench-creatures. Can you imagine? This is a group claiming to be a neutral NGO, but they endorsed candidates who ran against Lamotte and another council member, Luis Sanchez (the head of LA Promise, Meg Chenin, hosted a fundraiser for Sanchez' opponent). Not even Yeltsin's neoliberal Russia was this structurally corrupt.
Fortunately, the voters of Los Angeles sent LA Promise's creatures down to flaming defeat, but you just know they're going to try again.
This begs an obvious question: who exactly is behind LA Promise, and what makes them qualified to run a school system, anyway? Here's the board of directors:
- Meg Chanin (corporate lawyer, former head of LA Promise, also wife of Peter Chanin, big-time Hollywood producer).
- Stephanie Christie, executive at Wells Fargo's mortgage division (Wells Fargo is one of the too-big-to-fail banks currently plundering America)
- Erik Feig, head of Summit (part of Liongate, a major TV production company)
Rick Hess, executive at CAA (does film finance -- Hollywood films are financed by the equivalent of floating hedge funds) - John Kissick, founding partner at Ares Management (big hedge fund)
- Elizabeth Mann (works at Mayer Brown, one of the largest legal firms in the world)
- Frank Marshall (founded Kennedy/Marshall, producer who made a mint on the Indiana Jones franchise)
- Brian McNamee (VP human resources at Amgen)
- Veronica Melvin (current CEO of LA Promise, a fan of charter schools and other neoliberal shibboleths which simply do not improve educational outcomes)
- Vanessa Morrison (President of Fox Animation, owned by billionaire troglodyte Rupert Murdoch)
- Stephen Prough, founder of Salem Partners (specializes in 'wealth management', i.e. a hedge fund for the super-rich)
- Alison Temple, senior VP of Creative Content at Fox Animation (see above)
- Emma Watts, President of Production at Fox Animation (see above)
Not one person from the world of education, just financial executives and Hollywood moguls, whose primary business models consists of Federal Reserve-subsidized financial oligopolies and state-chartered media pipelines. Apparently, state subsidies are just fine when they benefit their own corporations, but are outrageous violations of all that is sacred when they go to children.
I seriously doubt that any of these folks has the slightest idea of how hard life has gotten for us 99Percenters, how many sacrifices we teachers make, how miserable our working conditions have become (even for those of us at universities -- I'm at a top-rank university but my own salary is just barely in five digits), or how committed we are to the success of our students.
That said, we've reached a point in this country's political history where we shouldn't worry what the 1% or its paid apologists think of us. We're nothing but a bunch of costs and liabilities to them, after all, as they wage their invisible financial war on anyone outside of their gilded club.
But instead of getting mad, we should be getting organized. Welcome to Battlefield LA, where the monsters of neoliberalism are going up against parents, teachers, students, staffers and ordinary citizens -- only in this movie, we have to write the happy end ourselves.
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