Austin Beutner’s No Superintendent; He’s An Agent Of Austerity And Deception
For a financial whiz-kid, Austin Beutner seems strangely uncomprehending of numbers and inordinately fond of trumped-up figures.
Monday morning last he floated the patently absurd hypothesis that “…3,500 people were taking part in pickets at the schools”. Considering that UTLA is 34,000 strong (in LAUSD; that figure seems a little hard to pin down though so call it 32K +/- 2K), and 98% of the 81% voting members elected to strike, that makes for approximately 25K (+/- 2K – see above) union members alone as a base for Monday’s strike, and that number’s only risen since then. Beyond that minimum is a small army of ancillary supporters– students, families, numerous allied local unions, even charter school union members. They’ve all been pounding the pavement in “support” of our teachers. Which in itself is a bizarre concept considering there ought to be no antagonists at the table here.
So who’s this money maven helming LAUSD’s ship as it has careened toward calamitous closure?
He’s exactly the sort of guy feared when the term “Wall Street” is invoked. An “econ” major from Dartmouth’s class of 1982, he’s one of those “Smartest Guys In The Room”, a financial “whiz-kid”, a “vulture capitalist” and venture philanthropist who essentially swings from one corporate liana to the next, leveraging buyouts into IPOs and sticking the rest of us with his hundred-million-dollar landings.
Beutner’s resume is not an educator’s, it’s a Wall Street Wolf’s. From Dartmouth CONTINUE READING: Austin Beutner’s No Superintendent; He’s An Agent Of Austerity And Deception – redqueeninla
