October 26 I'll be discussing Wall Street banker Marshall Tuck on Dr. James Miller's The War Report on Public Education radio

Sunday, October 26, 2014 at 14:00 PST (2:00PM)
The War Report on Public Education
Call in number: (888) 627-6008

Host: Dr. James Miller
Co-Host: Lucianna Sanson

Guest: Jonathan Pelto (2:00PM) Democrats vs. Democrats vs. Teachers

Guest: Robert D. Skeels (3:00PM) Experienced educator Torlakson vs. business banker Tuck, the SPI race in California

I'll be discussing how Wall Street banker Marshall Tuck is supported by anti-public school billionaires and charter industry moguls. Moreover, I'll be discussing the various violations exposed by the MALDEF and Public Counsel cause of action filed against Tuck in the context of his vicious war on students and their families.

Smoking Gun! Wall Street Banker Marshall Tuck violated student and parent civil rights!

"...raises significant concerns that [Marshall Tuck run] PLAS continues to disregard state law, regulation, and LAUSD policy and is failing to implement transparent and uniform procedures to ensure parent and student rights are protected." — MALDEF / Public Counsel

Those of us who have had the great misfortune of watching Eli Broad's protegé, Wall Street Banker Marshall Tuck, operating in Los Angeles over the years have witnessed numerous nefarious activities. From Tuck's thinly veiled white supremacy, to his cutting of vital health education classes, to his gutting ethnic studies, to his overall failure as an administrator, no reasonable person would ever support Tuck, if they were aware of his actual record. Unfortunately the corporate media have had no interest in discussing what Tuck actually did rather than what he says he did. If the media were doing their jobs, there were plenty of things that they could have done some investigative reporting on. In addition to Tuck's corporate, top-down management, there were persistant rumors of California Education Code violations, civil rights violation, and more, but we had difficulty finding people willing to come forward.

Back in July, a high profile bilingual education activist sent the following to a group of us.

I know that LAUSD and PLAS, under the leadership of Marshall Tuck, had a Uniform Complaint filed against them in 2009 for their actions at Ritter Elementary School. The complaint, on behalf of the parents, was filed by the Office of the Public Counsel (OPC) in conjunction with MALDEF. The complaint was upheld, remedies were directed, but no change of procedures or actions ever took place. How can I track down the UC? Do you think I should contact the OPC and the lawyer I was working with on behalf of the parents of the students in their now defunct Dual Language Program? Any advice would be appreciated.

The last few months have seen us encounter myriad dead ends trying to obtain documentation of the successful Uniform Complaint, but once we finally got copies last weekend, it became obvious why people have been trying to hide it. The Uniform Complaint Cause of Action filed jointly by Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF) and Public Counsel Law Center on behalf of families whose civil rights had been violated by Marshall Tuck is perhaps the most damning documents I've ever seen. United Teachers of Los Angeles' Cheryl Ortega has already written a piece: Marshall Tuck Betrays Latino and African American Parents, that outlines the history, background, and details surrounding this tragedy at Ritter Elementary School. Therefore, I want to look at some of the more salient points in the Uniform Complaint against Tuck.

A. Failure to Provide Notice of Placement in an English Immersion Program

Here the lawyers discuss how Marshall Tuck and his Partnership for Los Angeles Schools (PLAS) lieutenants violated state law, and cite a common law case supporting their interpretation of PLAS's violation.

B. Failure to Notify Parents of Their Right to Apply for a Parental Exception Waiver.

The attorneys outline how Marshall Tuck and PLAS ignored the California Education Code. I love how the section ends with: "...violated the parents' rights under California law."

C. Failure to Form an Alternative Language Class When 20 Waivers in a Given Grade Have Been Provided.

MALDEF and Public Counsel show unequivocal evidence that Marshall Tuck failed to adhere to the provisions of the California Education Code.

D. Failure to Provide Required Response to Waivers, to Assess Each Waiver on Its Individual Merits, or to Provide Notice of the Right to Appeal if the Waiver is Denied.

Citing numerous violations of the California Education Code, Proposition 227, and other state laws, the lawyers take Marshall Tuck and his corporate team to task for blatant law breaking. Tuck, as demonstrated above, would eliminate any program that he believed was interfering with preparation for standardized tests. Students weren't important, their test scores were. Like all neoliberal corporate education reformers, PLAS and Tuck were entirely ignorant on pedagogy. The Uniform Complaint's answer to PLAS's insistence that Dual Language Programs hurt test scores is instructive:

PLAS's response that the existing program at Ritter Elementary was not producing the desired results is insufficient. There is ample evidence in LAUSD and statewide that Dual Language Programs, when implemented by a competent school-site team, not only produce far superior results in terms of academic achievement for all participating children but result in children who can speak and write in two languages, a clear assest in our world economy, and who may also have better appreciation of cultural and linguistic differences. It was PLAS's responsibility, in keeping with its goal of creating an excellent school, to create an excellent DLP, not to abolish the existing program.

Marshall Tuck abolished the existing program.

As the Uniform Complaint document segues into the section that outlines Marshall Tuck and PLAS's ongoing violations, there's one more passage that I want to reproduce. Bear in mind that these events had been going on for over a year, and that both PLAS's executive team, headed by Chief Executive Officer Marshall Tuck, and PLAS's unelected Board of Directors had been entirely intransigent and uncooperative for that entire duration. The community, parents (and their lawyers), teachers, and everyone else tried to work in good faith with PLAS, but that good faith was not reciprocated.

Public Counsel and MALDEF expected that this year PLS would make every effort to ensure it followed state law, regulation and LAUSD policy consistently and uniformly. This appears not to have happened.

Please read the entire document to get and idea of how egregious Marshall Tuck and his cabal really were. The opening quote of this essay, reproduced from page one of the Uniform Complaint, shows exasperation with Tuck's lawlessness. Ironically, Tuck's entire campaign has centered around the abject lawsuit filed by reactionary millionaire David F. Welch. The Welch suit was designed to strip teachers of their bare modicum of protections they currently have, including their small degree of academic freedom. The suit, which used students who for the most part weren't even public school students, is being appealed, and hopefully will be overturned in its entirety. Tuck is quick to talk about the rights of students, but as it has been demonstrated, he methodically violated the civil rights of both his students and their parents on an ongoing basis.

The cretinous GOP candidate for California, a banker just like Tuck, keeps insisting (with no substantive evidence) that "Jerry Brown is betraying the children of California." Perhaps he's alluding to the two charter schools Brown has ties to. But here we have a clear, unequivocally documented case of multiple betrayals, deceptions, and malfeasance by another candidate for a different office:

Marshall Tuck betrayed parents and ignored the law!

Let's reelect State Superintendent Tom Torlakson

Smoking Gun: Marshall Tuck Violated Student and Parent Civil Rights! by Robert D. Skeels

Wall Street and Marshall Tuck - TuckForWallStreet.com

Our public schools should be places where kids want to learn and teachers want to teach. Marshall Tuck has the wrong vision for California schools. He’s spent years working on Wall Street. Tuck's education is in bringing in profits on Wall Street — and so he wants to increase high-stakes testing and expand corporate charter schools. Is there any doubt Tuck will put the bottom line for his friends on Wall Street above what our kids need?

Wall Street Banksters Giving Big to Elect Mark Pollard and Other Corporate Charter Advocates

With the caps off contributions, the charterites and the ed industry are going all in to corner the three-quarters of a trillion dollars that Americans spend each year on education.  Notice that Pollard can no longer remember any names from his Park Avenue meetings.  From the NYTimes:

Mark H. Pollard was a little-known candidate for New York State Senate in Brooklyn facing the herculean feat of ousting a 26-year incumbent. But then he got an unexpected telephone call saying that a group of wealthy investors who supported charter schools wanted to meet with him.

So in June, Mr. Pollard, a Democrat, found himself in Manhattan, sipping wine on a Park Avenue patio with people whose names he can no longer recall. Then “the checks started rolling in,” he said, and by July he had received more than $100,000.

“They made my campaign viable,” said Mr. Pollard, a lawyer who supports the charter school movement. The windfall has made him a legitimate contender, allowing him to hire a veteran campaign manager and print thousands of pamphlets. . . .

From the Asinine File...

The Little Dictator says:

Here’s the context: While discussing the proposed tightening of regulation of Wall Street, [Mayor Bloomberg] noted that some of the union protesters who staged a rally against budget cuts this week outside City Hall had railed about “getting even with bankers.”

The mayor suggested that since taxes from Wall Street earnings and bonuses pay for their salaries, “our cops and firefighters and teachers they should be out there defending the bankers.”

Yes, Mr. Bloomberg, our teachers should take to the streets to defend the casino capitalists and corrupt traders making billions off of things like credit default swaps, hedges, and other highly speculative derivatives. Keep in mind, Mr. Bloomberg, that these same hucksters pay very little in taxes despite the trillions of dollars trading hands, and they'll fight to the death to prevent any regulation, taxation, or transparency.

Wall Street: Massively Fraudulent Sociopaths

Here's the link to the Bill Moyers interview with Bill Black. It runs about 25 minutes. Here is a clip:

. . . BILL MOYERS: Why did it take so long for the Securities and Exchange Commission, the SEC, to kick into gear on this? I mean, have they kicked into gear?

WILLIAM K. BLACK Well, they haven't kicked into gear fully, or they'd be naming Blankfein and other senior leaders of Goldman. And they've, as you just mentioned, they've only gone after a junior person. And there would be, if they were really in gear, there would be criminal charges here. And if they were really in gear, there'd be a broad investigation, not just of Goldman, but of all of these major entities.

In the last three weeks, we have finally done a half-baked investigation, mind you. Not -- nothing like we did in the Savings & Loan days -- of Washington Mutual (WaMu), Citicorp, Lehman, and Goldman. And we have found strong evidence of fraud at all four places.

And we have looked previously at Fannie and Freddie and found the same thing. So the only six places we've looked, at really elite institutions, we've found strong evidence of fraud. So where are the other investigations? Why are there no arrests? Why are there no convictions?

BILL MOYERS: Well, Bill, where are the other investigations? Why have there been no arrests? Why have there been no convictions?

WILLIAM K. BLACK Because we have still Bush's wrecking crew in charge of the key regulatory agencies. Why are they still in place? They have abysmal records as major causes of this crisis.

BILL MOYERS: You talk about the Bush appointees still being there, but Goldman's former lobbyist, his treasury secretary, Timothy Geithner's chief of staff, the head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, Gary Gensler, who may soon have new power over derivatives, worked for Goldman.

So did the deputy director of the White House National Economic Council, the under Secretary of State is a former Goldman employee. Goldman's hired Barack Obama's recent chief counsel from the White House on his defense team. I mean--

WILLIAM K. BLACK Don't forget Rubin.

BILL MOYERS: Robert Rubin, whose influence is all over the place, who used to be--

WILLIAM K. BLACK It's his prot�g�s that are in charge of economic policy, under Obama.

BILL MOYERS: So is this administration, which still has some Bush holdovers in it, and now has a lot of Goldman people in it, is this administration going to be able to pass judgment on Goldman Sachs?

WILLIAM K. BLACK Well, so far, they haven't been able to do it. They can't even get themselves to use the word fraud.

There's a huge part that is economic ideology. And neoclassical economists don't believe that fraud can exist. I mean, they just flat out -- the leading textbook in corporate law from law and economics perspective by Easterbrook and Fischel, says -- I'll get pretty close to exact quotation. "A rule against fraud is neither necessary nor particularly important." Right?

Notice how extreme that statement is. We don't need laws. We don't need an FBI. We don't need a justice department. We don't even need rules like the SEC. The markets cleanse themselves automatically and prevent all frauds. This is a spectacularly na�ve thing. There is enormous ideological content. And it fits with class. And it fits with political contributions.

Do you want to look at these seemingly respectable huge financial institutions, which are your leading political contributors as crooks?

BILL MOYERS: TheHill.com website says Goldman Sachs is uniquely positioned to fight this case, that it spent $18 million over the last decade lobbying members of Congress, and put millions more in their campaigns. I mean, you've said elsewhere. That's smart business, right, to invest in the politicians who are going to be investigating you?

WILLIAM K. BLACK I would tell you, the Savings & Loan crisis, our phrase was, "The highest return on assets is always a political contribution."

BILL MOYERS: Well, all right. You're a member of Congress. The Supreme Court has said, "Goldman Sachs can spend all it wants in November to defeat you." Are you going to take them on?

WILLIAM K. BLACK Absolutely, but I would never be elected to Congress because of that. So let me -- in terms of that Supreme Court decision, if corporations are going to be just like people, let me tell you my criminologist hat. Then let's use the three strike laws against them. Three strike laws, you go to prison for life, if you have three felonies. How many of these major corporations would still be allowed to exist, if we were to use the three strike laws, given what they've been convicted of in the past?

And in most states, they remove your civil rights when you're convicted of a felony. Well, let's take away their right to make political contributions that they're found guilty of a violation.

BILL MOYERS: Bill, are you describing a political culture, that is criminogenic?

WILLIAM K. BLACK It's deeply criminogenic. And this ideology that both parties are dominated by that says, "No, big corporations wouldn't cheat. Fraud can't happen. Market's automatically excluded," is insane. We now have the entitlement generation as CEOs. They just plain feel entitled to being wealthy as Croesus with no responsibility, no accountability. They have become literal sociopaths. So one of the things is, you clean up business schools, which right now are fraud factories at the senior levels, right?

They create the new monsters that take control and destroy massive enterprises and cause global economic crises, cause the great recession. And very, very close to causing the second Great Depression. We just barely missed that. And there's no assurance that we've missed it five years out.

BILL MOYERS: This brings us back to what the president said this week. He said the crisis was born of a failure of responsibility from Wall Street to Washington. You've just described that. That brought down many of the world's largest financial firms and nearly dragged our economy into a second Great Depression. But he didn't name names. He doesn't say who specifically was responsible. You have. But the president doesn't name names.

WILLIAM K. BLACK No, and one of the most important things a president has is the bully pulpit. We have not heard speeches by the president demanding that the frauds go to prison. We have not heard speeches from the attorney general of the United States of America, Eric Holder. Indeed, we haven't heard anything. It's like Sherlock Holmes, the dog that didn't bark. And that's the dog that is supposed to be our guard dog. It must bark. And it must have teeth, not just bark.

BILL MOYERS: Bill Black, thank you for being back on the Journal.

WILLIAM K. BLACK Thank you.

Meier, Mullen, and Markets

From Deb Meier:

Free Market Schooling

"This is a perilous moment. The individualist, greed-driven free-market ideology that both our major parties have pursued is at odds with what most Americans really care about....Working families and poor communities need and deserve help because the free market has failed to generate shared prosperity — its famous unseen hand has become a closed fist." Bill Moyers and Michael Winship, and I, agree. But the public seems just as suspicious—if not more so—about public institutions as the private ones. Thus the relative lack of alarm over the extraordinary shift in "ownership" of our public schools. We are witnessing more federal intervention at virtually all levels of schooling, more power in the hands of private wealth, and more "market-driven" decisions — at the same time! And there is almost no well-funded opposition, except for teacher unions who are then villainized as being anti-reform, self-interested, too protective of their bad apples.

What epitomizes the latest "true reform" is that it cuts off both teacher professional and parent/family judgment about what goes on in publicly-financed schools. Above all in urban areas, but overtime perhaps to rural and suburban communities too.

...

Continued here.

In case you missed it, Anthony Mullen's, "The Scarlet T," captures the feelings of many teachers as pink slips continue to come down the pipe amid the news of corporations paying very little, if any, in taxes while the unregulated Wall Street casino capitalists play poker with the national and world economy in their endless quest for cash, the public be damned. Politicians will always pay lip service to teachers as a way to score political points, claiming to hold the profession in high regard, on the one hand, while the other hand grips the knife slicing apart any form of professionalism.

In their epic quest to score political points and appeal to parents, these politicians and businessmen will outsource schooling to nonprofits with self-appointed boards and minimal, if any, accountability. Moyers notes, and Meier concurs, that both political parties have embraced the free-market ideology looking to eradicate any and all government, including all vestiges of one of America's greatest inventions: our public schools. It was our last Democratic President that proudly helped usher in the corporation, choice, and testing insanity, and the current administration appears unwilling to deviate from that path.

"The enemies of public education are well armed, well organized, and well funded," Jerry said at the Fighting Bob Fest (among other places). Ain't that the truth.

GA Management Organizations Profiteering via Non-Profit Front Groups

Yesterday, the Georgia Charter School Commission awarded seven charters to various groups, including 4 for-profit schools (two of them are described here). Of course, they're not actually listed as for-profit schools on their applications - they use the same trick as the Imagine folks and set-up non-profit 501(c)(3) organizations (which are rarely denied or investigated by the IRS, as this Stanford report clearly, clearly indicates).

You can add Mosaica Education, Inc and Charter Schools USA to the list of for-profit organizations thriving in the current pro-charter chain climate (they were big to begin with, but hey, there's always room for growth!). Here's a clip from the application of the Heron Bay Academy:

HBA will be governed by an independent, fiscally responsible governing board with a breadth of experience, and will be operated by Mosaica Education, Inc., an educational service provider with 76 school programs in seven states, the District of Columbia, and the Middle East.

Included in HBA's charter application, available here, is a nice little description of Mosaica:

Mosaica Education, Inc. manages 76 public charter school programs, serving 14,000 students in seven states, the District of Columbia, and the Persian Gulf country of Qatar. It was founded in January 1997 by Dr. Dawn Eidelman (currently MEI’s Chief Education Officer and the President of the Paragon Division) and her husband, Gene Eidelman. Michael J. Connelly was named Chief Executive Officer in 1998.

The Company opened its first school in September 1997. Five of the schools it currently manages were acquired by the Company in connection with its acquisition of Advantage Schools, Inc. in August 2001. All other schools were developed by community boards in partnership with MEI as the service provider through start-up initiatives. The Company is privately held and venture-capital funded. Included in its shareholder base are a number of prominent private equity firms, including Murphy & Partners, J.P. Morgan Partners, Credit Suisse First Boston, U.S. Trust, Fidelity Investors and Bessemer Securities. [My bold]

Good to know the Wall Street fools and banksters are getting their grubby little hands on public education funds. Mosaica will also provide the following services for the non-profit charter:

Administrative Services

For the term of the Charter, MEI will provide to the Academy the following administrative services:

Personnel Management. Management and professional development of all personnel providing Educational Services and Administrative Services;

Facility Operation and Maintenance. Operation and maintenance of the charter school’s facility (the “Facility”) to the extent consistent with any and all leases or other documents pertaining to the Facility;

Business Administration. Administration of all business aspects of the charter school;

Transportation and Food Services. Provision of transportation and food services for the students enrolled at the charter school, as required by the Board;

Public Relations. Any and all advertising and public relations with the community and the media;

Budgeting and Financial Reporting.

Maintenance of Financial, Business and Student Records.

Admissions. Implementation of the school’s admission policy;

Student Hearings. Administration and enforcement of student disciplinary and special education;

Semester Reports. MEI will provide to the Board on a semester basis, (or more often if necessary for the Board to satisfy its obligations under the Charter, the Code and other applicable laws and regulations) a report detailing (A) student academic performance, and (B) MEI’s performance on administering Educational Services and Administrative Services;

Rules and Procedures. MEI will enforce the rules, regulations and procedures adopted by the charter school not in direct conflict with the management agreement, the Charter, the Code and other applicable laws and regulations. MEI will recommend rules, regulations and procedures applicable to the charter school and its students; and

Additional Administrative Services. Any other services reasonably necessary or expedient for the effective administration of the charter school.

What's left for HBA to do? Well, their board can rubber-stamp all the decisions made by Mosaica.

If you haven't lost your breakfast yet, here's some info on the the Coweta Charter Academy, the charter to be run by Charter Schools USA. Their final application - which is painful to read partly because it's ENTIRELY IN CAPITAL LETTERS - spells out how Coweta will turn over most operations to CSUSA, which uses a heavy dose of phonics and Open Court materials to "educate" their kids. And, in what looks like a Bakke-lite version of local governance, check out this little gem from their application:

Coweta Charter Academy will have a two-tiered governance structure. The Georgia Charter Educational Foundation, Inc. is the Founding Board and maintains ultimate responsibility for Coweta Charter Academy.

Here's where it gets even more interesting. The connection between the Georgia Charter Educational Foundation and CSUSA isn't entirely clear, but the foundation has a whole bunch of info on their website about CSUSA (it's also quite evident, based on these minutes from the foundation's July 16th, 2009 meeting, that the two groups are mighty friendly with each other). Additionally, the Georgia Charter Educational Foundation, Inc is the actual petitioner for the charter, and their governing board is led by John McIntyre, Jr, the executive director at Morgan Stanley's Atlanta branch. The charter's application makes no qualms about CSUSA's intent to turn a profit:

Contracting with CSUSA is in the best financial interest of the charter school because their compensation philosophy is rooted in school performance. If the school succeeds, then fees are paid. If the school is not successful, then the management company will not make a profit. As defined in the sample management agreement, CSUSA proposes a whole management method for determining fees. This method is more consistent with their comprehensive style of education management and by its nature holds them accountable for performance across all facets of school operations.

Ah, and the rabbit hole gets even deeper when the charter begins talking about their facilities:

The Georgia Charter Educational Foundation, through Red Apple Development, has executed a purchase and sale agreement for a specific parcel of land in the region specified above. Due diligence is currently being conducted on the site and actual closing on the property is contingent upon approval of Coweta Charter Academy’s Start-Up Charter Petition.

Red Apple Development, LLC shares corporate headquarters with...Charter Schools USA! It's also owned by Jonathan Hage, the President and CEO of CSUSA. Before getting into the for-profit education game, Hage was a research assistant working on foreign policy and defense studies for the neocons at the Heritage Foundation, and worked for Foundations for Florida's Future, which was the brainchild of Dubya's little bro, Jeb Bush. I smell something stinky here, don't you?

Stay tuned for more corporate charter school developments and profiteering reports. It's certain to be a wild ride.