Broad's LAUSD WMDs - Badass Teachers Association

Badass Teachers Association:

Broad's LAUSD WMDs 

by Geronimo, NBCT, Honorary BAT

The forces that Eil Broad represents are relentless. Their money buys them access and political clout. We are engaged in an endless war with the privatizers.

Eli Broad’s methodology is much like TFA’s. You work and groom your people and offer them to the system so that they can implement their corporate ed reform policies from the inside. 

John Deasy’s tenure at LAUSD is the perfect example. Groomed in the Gates/Broad laboratory, he was offered to former Mayor Villaraigosa who stashed him in LAUSD for detonation within the school system to cause massive disruption and casualties.

Deasy performed his destructive function brilliantly and the collateral damage from his tenure still roils the district. 

After LAUSD was battered by his reckless and arrogant tenure, Deasy escaped the district without answering publicly for his crimes to education. He found cushy asylum with Broad who currently harbors him in the inner sanctum of his foundation. Deasy remains a Napoleon in his luxury skybox Elba but still manages to dictate policy.

The intense bond between him and Arne Duncan is legendary and both advise each other on policy matters. 

When Broad’s 50% plan to charterize LAUSD was reported, it was as unsurprising as learning Dick Cheney wanting to go topple Iraq. The writing had been on the wall for years and Broad’s Foundation has the cash and resources to bulldoze his way to that end.

Broadism is all about the ENDS. Deasyism is about the MEANS.

These two cowards will not come out to debate their positions in anything but a FOX NEWS friendly audience. They are much like the Koch Brothers in this way and use their money and connections to bypass the public and go right to the politicians who will make the rules.

Broad and Deasy are shrewd at the political game. Their entire careers are testaments to how well they have courted the rich and powerful.

Engaged citizen activists are the ONLY thing standing in their way from the control they have mapped out from Day One.

For Cheney it was Baghdad.

For Broad it is Beaudry.

  

Broad Trumps Trump

 
by Geronimo, NBCT

We all may think Donald Trump is a buffoon and a bizarre spectacle for our insatiable Ringing Brothers' amusement, but we all owe him a debt of gratitude for ripping the charade off how “business” is done in America.

In Thursday’s GOP debate, Trump quite honestly stated that he buys politicians and expects favors in return. He calls everyone else naive and idiots if they don’t know how the system works.

John Deasy was the Trojan Horse in the world of LA’s public education.

After he was installed in LAUSD, Deasy proceeded to implement the business model he was weaned on all his life over the city's education system.

This grotesque Trump-style "economic" pedagogy was enacted by Deasy throughout his tenure at LAUSD. Deasy's entire career was Badass Teachers Association:

Los Angeles Unified School District Debates Whether to Shoot Its Own Students–With Department of Defense Weapons

Los Angeles Unified School District Debates Whether to Shoot Its Own Students–With Department of Defense Weapons:

Los Angeles Unified School District Debates Whether to Shoot Its Own Students–With Department of Defense Weapons

On Thursday, July 30, 50 Black and Latino students wearing mock bullet proof vests with stickers that stated #StudentsAintBulletProof #End1033, from the Strategy Center’s Fight for the Soul of the Cities, once again asked the Los Angeles Unified School District to give us a list of the weapons they received from the Department of Defense 1033 Program, to return 61 M 16 assault rifles we believe are still in their possession, and to apologize for being in the program in the first place. Students said, after 3 public comment testimonies, four long letters (September 2014, November 2014, May 2015, July 2015), over 3,500 petitions, appeals, and every other method of persuasion “Why is the LAUSD trying to kill us?” This campaign is part of the Strategy Center’s No Cars in LA and the U.S., No Tanks in LA and the U.S. (see Huffington Post http://huff.to/1P7TkHS)

Shortly before the board meeting Manuel Criollo, the Center’s director of organizing and I received a letter from LAUSD Superintendent Ramon Cortines informing us that “the Los Angeles School Police Department discontinued its participation in the DoD 1033 Program. This decision was made prior to the release of the May 2015 Presidential Order 13688 limiting or restricting law enforcement agencies nationwide participation in the aforementioned program.”

We wrote back saying that language was very vague—what did “discontinued its participation” mean? Was the LAUSD completely out of the program? What military grade weapons had it received from the DOD, which weapons and when had it returned (such as the DOD MRAP tank) and which weapons, such as the reported 61 M-16 Assault Rifles, it still retained and when it planned to return them. We did not receive a reply.

When we talked to new LAUSD Board President Steve Zimmer and other board members there was ambiguity about what they knew and what they were told–and they agreed to at least find out the answers to our questions. But we wrote back that we needed more than that.

We needed a commitment that they would introduce a motion supporting the demands we had been raising for a year—including calling on President Obama to end the entire program.

But we also raised deep concerns about what we believed was the board’s disrespectful behavior towards the public during “public comment–in which students and parents pour their hearts out but board members do not comment, empathize, or offer encouragement. Instead, after each person speaks, the chair says, “next!” turning “public comment” into a sterile exercise of sham democracy. We believed we had the commitment of one board member to change that behavior, to respond to Strategy Center’s demands we have raised for more than a year, to introduce a motion to make a full accounting of the process and the weapons, to let us know if they had any remaining weapons, and to commit to returning every one down to the last bullet.

But the students did not get a positive response or from most board members, any response at all.

One LAUSD Board member did address the group—in response to students’ demands from the audience. Sadly, Dr. George McKenna (the sole Black member of the board) aggressively defended the tanks, M 16s, and other lethal weapons in the schools. He argued that gangs, drugs, terrorists are all a threat to the public safety, that he wanted to keep the weapons, and added, provocatively, that he would ask for Los Angeles Unified School District Debates Whether to Shoot Its Own Students–With Department of Defense Weapons:

Special Nite Cap: Catch Up on Today's Post 8/14/15

SPECIAL NITE CAP 

CORPORATE ED REFORM

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YESTERDAY

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