The Seventy Four, founded by controversial advocate, takes over LA School Report
The Seventy Four, an organization whose co-founder is a controversial education advocate, has taken over LA School Report, a website that has focused on covering the Los Angeles Unified School District.
The name is a reference to 74 million students attending public schools in the United States. The site was founded by former CNN anchor Campbell Brown, who is part of a lawsuit seeking to overturn tenure protections for teachers in New York.
The group’s entry into Los Angeles has alarmed union leaders and some supporters of traditional public education. They say it could undermine trust in the reporting of education controversies.
The Seventy Four, based in New York City, describes itself as a nonpartisan news site with the mission of exposing an education system “in crisis…to challenge the status quo, expose corruption and inequality, and champion the heroes who bring positive change to our schools.”
The group's funders include a roster of charter school supporters, such as the Walton Family Foundation, the Doris & Donald Fisher Fund and Bloomberg Philanthropies.
Critics call the Seventy Four an advocacy effort on behalf of a pro-charter school, anti-union agenda. The organization, critics say, uses opinion pieces and reported stories to promote charter schools and to find fault with traditional campuses and teachers unions.
Not so, said co-founder and Chief Executive Romy Drucker.
“We try to highlight what’s working,” Drucker said. “Part of the mission also is highlighting what’s broken and needs to be fixed and highlighting the solutions.”
No type of effective school is favored; no type of ineffective school is spared, said Drucker, who had been a top New York City schools official under former Chancellor Joel Klein.
Klein is closely associated with what critics call “corporate reformers,” meaning they believe that school systems should be run more like successful businesses.
Charters are independently operated and exempt from some rules that govern traditional schools. Most are nonunion.
Charter school growth has become a flash point in Los Angeles, which has the most students enrolled in charters, about 101,000, of any school system in the nation.
A confidential document, obtained last year by The Times, laid out a plan, spearheaded by the Broad Foundation, to more than double the number of local charters, pulling in half the district enrollment over the next eight years. Potential funders included the Walton Family Foundation, which was set up by the heirs to the Walmart fortune.
That plan, were it to go forward, could push the nation’s second-largest school system into insolvency, according to an independent panel of experts.
“Is there a connection between the Seventy Four’s takeover of LA School Report and the Broad-Walmart plan to privatize LAUSD schools? Of course there is,” said Alex Caputo-Pearl, president of the local teachers union, United Teachers Los Angeles.
Broad is not listed as a funder on the Seventy Four's website.
“Campbell Brown is not about fair coverage," Caputo-Pearl said. "She is about ‘reform,’ which is often a code word for criticizing teachers and advocating that public schools get turned into charter corporations.”
Drucker, of the Seventy Four, said that its news stories are fair and fully reported and should not be confused with opinion pieces, including those by Brown.
LA School Report was launched three years ago during the run-up to school board elections. It was greeted with some skepticism because owner and founder Jamie Alter Lynton had been a large campaign contributor to a slate of candidates backed by corporate-style reform advocates.
She said she directed her editors to play no favorites.
“From the beginning there was a lot of hand-wringing about whether my personal views The Seventy Four, founded by controversial advocate, takes over LA School Report - LA Times:
