L.A. Charter School Backers Plan to ‘Take Back’ Mayor’s Office, Battle Teachers Union, Internal Email Shows
Memo to charter leaders: ‘It’s better to be feared than loved. Right now we are neither’ - Los Angeles Times - https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-edu-charter-leaders-confidential-planning-20190702-story.html via @latimes
Read the Complete memo sent to charter school leaders »
This is a proposed agenda:Read the Complete memo sent to charter school leaders »
In the wake of the Los Angeles teachers strike, a group of key charter school supporters, concerned about political backlash, worked on a plan to stem anti-charter sentiment and regain control of local education reforms.
The email was originally disclosed through a public records request submitted to a charter school group by michaelkohlhaas.org, a site that seeks to “collect and publish as many documents as possible about municipal politics in Los Angeles, with somewhat of a focus on Business Improvement Districts in Los Angeles.”
Annotations from The Times are in italics:
Subject: Important background for Wednesday’s Kids First Strategy Group meeting
From: Ben Austin+
+[Austin is the executive director of Kids Coalition, which describes itself as advocating “to translate ‘kids-first’ from a political slogan into a civil right and an educational reality for all LAUSD students.”]
Date: 3/3/19, 7:52 PM
To: [email addresses removed]
Hi all, below is material for Wednesday’s Kids First Strategy Group meeting: revised and refined goals, a proposed agenda, and a list of initiatives we could collectively adopt to begin backwards planning from our short and long term goals.
I want to acknowledge a tension in the work ahead of us: I think we all agree that we need to figure out how to work better and differently together so that over time we can make the whole greater than the sum of our parts. As Katie+ said at the last meeting, in many ways the work of this group could be considered a 10-year project. And as Ana and others mentioned: Alex Caputo Pearl has been working for far more than ten years to achieve the victories that are just now bearing fruit for UTLA. But we are also managing short term threats, challenges, and opportunities we cannot ignore.
+[Katie refers to Katie Braude, co-founder of the advocacy group Speak Up, which recruits and organizes parents and also publishes an online news site.]
While it may seem contradictory to work on both tracts simultaneously, hopefully we can walk and chew gum and even forge strategic synergy. In the short term we can learn to work better together, build collective power, and win short and medium term victories; while simultaneously reflecting, learning, and evolving as a community so that 5 and 10 years from now we aren’t in this same position.
Based on feedback I’ve gotten from many of you since the first meeting, I’ve attempted to translate our agreed upon collective goals into a format which we can use to measure progress in the short and long term. As you can see, I’ve broken them into a specific long term "moon shot" goal, and short-term goals that lay the foundation to achieve our long term goal:
* By 2030: A quality public education for every student in the LAUSD, agnostic to school model, measured by child outcomes. This is the goal we agreed upon in the last meeting, adding a deadline. The 2030 date is obviously random. But it feels far enough away that it forces us to think long-term (it’s more time than it took for America to figure out how to land on the moon), but soon enough that it’s urgent, non-theoretical, and will directly impact the children in the system today.
* By November 2020: Retake board majority, change public narrative/shift Overton Window,+ defend quality charters, establish legal rights for parents and students to translate asymmetrical organizing into legal rights and political power to advocate for kids. We had agreed to each of the above goals at the last meeting but not the specific 2020 deadline.
+[The Overton window is a term for the range of ideas tolerated in public discourse. Austin is suggesting in the memo that the teachers union has effectively defined the debate over education issues and that his side needs to recapture that space.]
In the wake of the Los Angeles teachers strike, a group of key charter school supporters, concerned about political backlash, worked on a plan to stem anti-charter sentiment and regain control of local education reforms.
Their strategy was to “take back” the Board of Education and the mayor’s office, develop a lawsuit against the school district and attack the local teachers union, United Teachers Los Angeles.
These strategies are laid out in a March email from education activist Ben Austin to an inner circle of charter backers. The email attempts to summarize their joint discussions to date and their agenda going forward.
Contacted early Tuesday morning, Austin declined to comment.
Read the full story on LATimes.com.
L.A. Charter School Backers Plan to ‘Take Back’ Mayor’s Office, Battle Teachers Union, Internal Email Shows | KTLA
