Urgent Memo to the LA School Board

VOICES-LAUSD Board members, I am sending you all two items to review.  

First is an article from Salon.com which expands on the Deasy fiasco with iPads, and on his many other failures as LAUSD Superintendent.  LAUSD has become the laughing stock of the country under his mismanagement. The Broad Academy is looked on with the disdain it deserves as a training ground for public school CEOs who impose business models on school districts in their goal of privatizing all public education.  

Second is from Hemlock on the Rocks. I would hope all 7 members of the LAUSD BoE would watch this video of Jackie Goldberg telling the truth.  This is what the public expects from the Board today, both TRUTH, transparency, and real decisions. It is clear that the public wants to you to fire Deasy now.  

Jackie Goldberg would be an excellent interim Superintendent, and she has not only valid academic credentials from the best universities in the Nation, but she served on the School Board and was President, and she was a long time teacher in the inner city, and was elected to the LA City Council with her district larger than the student body population of LAUSD.  She is the rare person with all the positive credentials for this office. 

She is far more prepared to lead LAUSD than the current failed Superintendent, John Deasy, who should be fired for all of his mismanagement.  Since Deasy, to again deflect the attention of the public, has hired the BH lawyer, Saferstein, to investigate the BoE members, if should be the final coffin nail to replace him.  This BoE does not "micro manage" him as in the words of Eli Broad, but rather too often folds to his costly and failed decisions. 

If the BoE acts in collusion with Deasy and Broad, as the Board clearly did last Oct. 29, with all the orchestrated street theater paid for and managed by the biased, Deasy/Broad allies, Parent Revolution and United Way, who bussed in the inner city actors for a day of fun (all of their planning emails to this end can be found online, as is my report of the whole farce of a day which I observed first hand).... and then, the Board specifically did not allow any speakers who wanted to present anti Deasy information (as first person into the Board Room, I was turned away by the Bd. monitor, Vanessa, when I requested a speakers' form, and was told that they were only to be given to the "daisy wearing people" who were chosen by the theater performance leaders), then only allowing the daisy wearing, bussed in 'actors' to speak glowingly in his favor, this BoE will never recover the respect, nor any trust, of the community. 

Not only the greater LA community, but the whole Nation, is watching LAUSD now.  The public voice will only get louder in confronting the issue of removing John Deasy as Superintendent of LAUSD. His mentor and trainer, billionaire Eli Broad, should not be the person who runs LAUSD and the public education system, not in LA, and not across the United States.  His choice of free market profit over free universal education is disgraceful.  No more Broadies running LAUSD!

 

(Ellen Lubic is Director of Joining Forces for Education and a public policy educator in Los Angeles. She is an occasional contributor to CityWatch. Diane DeBoer is a 32-year high school educator and college counselor.)

-cw

 

 

CityWatch

Vol 12 Issue 79

Pub: Sep 30, 2014