Tag Archives: ALEC

Propaganda for charter school amendment 1 paid for by out-of-state donors

Who can afford to pay for these two glossy mailers pushing
the charter school amendment?
Who are GeorgiaHope2012.org and BrighterGeorgia.org, anyway?
Recipients of millions from Alice Walton and the Walton Family Foundation
to push a bill sponsored in the statehouse by ALEC’s “our state legislators”.
Will we believe Alice Walton and ALEC, or will we believe
our Georgia educators, who overwhelmingly

oppose Amendment 1?


Two glossy mailers pushing the charter school amendment

GeorgiaHope2012.org’s mailer (the big one) says in really light grey type:

Paid for by Families for Better Public Schools Edward Lindsey Chairman

We’ve heard of them before.
They raised

$486,750 by September, about 96% from outside Georgia,
including Alice Walton ($250,000),
K12 Inc. of Virginia ($100,000),
Charter Schools USA of Florida ($50,000),
J.C. Huizenga and National Heritage Academies Inc. of Michigan ($25,000 each).
Their spokesman Bert Brantley (who went to Lowndes County public schools)
claims

the bogus preamble
to the charter school amendment,
the one that uses ALEC
Family Trigger jargon
and asserts things that just aren’t in either of the authorizing bills;
he claims that preamble

is “factual”.
His previous PR campaign was pushing the T-SPLOST transportation tax
that failed by a landslide.

Families for Better Public Schools
is still playing the

charter school bait and switch in their mailer
by pretending Amendment 1 is needed for charter schools:


EVERY CHILD DESERVES A CHANCE!
VOTE YES!
for Public Charter Schools on November 6th.

We don’t need this amendment to create charter schools.
Any local school board can already do that.

BrighterGeorgia.org’s mailer (the smaller one)
says in grey on grey type:

Paid for by Georgia Charter Schools Association

GCSA got $700,000 from the Walton Family Foundation last year,
and is a member of

Continue reading →

Two more charter school polls: Amendment 1 still losing support

Two more polls about the charter school amendment show conflicting
results, but even the most optimistic still shows decreased support
since September.
Opponents of the Amendment 1 power grab are winning.


Charter school Amendment 1 polls through 25 October 2012

Wayne Washington wrote for the AJC 12 October 2012,

Poll shows tight race for charter schools amendment,

Continue reading →

Support plummeting for charter school amendment

Support for the charter school amendment,
previously falling, is now dropping like a rock.
Saba Long wrote the Saporta Report 15 October 2012,

Latest polls show the Charter School Amendment vote will be close,
but the actual poll results, when compared to previous polls,
including those before T-SPLOST lost by a landslide,
say Amendment 1 is going down in flames.


Georgia Charter School Polls 2012-10

That poll conducted 4 and 5 October showed 34.2% saying they would definitely
vote no and 18.06% saying probably no.
That’s 52.26% No, which is far higher than

26.2% only a month before.

The pollsters, HEG-GPS, say,

Re: October 4-5 Charter School Amendment Survey,
15.35% responded Probably Yes and only 9.30% said Definitely Yes.
That’s 24.62% Yes,
far down from the 48.3% Yes of a month before.

Yet only 23.12% responded Unsure,
which is hardly changed from 25.5% a month before.
It sure looks to me like this is not just undecideds switching to No.
It looks like a lot of formerly Yes votes are switching to No.

It looks even worse compared to T-SPLOST.
Two weeks before the 31 July Primary election,

Continue reading →

Vote No on Amendment 2 —Charlie in Peach Pundit

Let's cut to the chase on what Charlie

wrote for Peach Pundit 18 Oct 2012:

Georgia needs significant ethics reforms. There needs to be greater
transparency for those who do business with the state. Trust must be
restored. Good governance must be demonstrated.

Paying slightly higher rates for a few more years is a small price
to pay to avoid giving away 20 year favors to today's patronage
class. Vote no on this amendment. That is the best way to save
Georgians money.

Georgia is the worst state for legislative corruption.
Do we want those legislators committing us financially
for 10 or 20 years?
If knowing

it's an ALEC bill wasn't enough for you, maybe this will be.
Vote No on amendment 2.

-jsq

ALEC’s “our state legislators” behind multi-year GA constitutional amendment referendum


Ronnie Chance
Look who sponsored

Georgia Senate Resolution 1231 which put
the second referendum question on the ballot!
Two of ALEC’s “our state legislators”,
Senators Ronnie Chance of the 16th,
and
Senate Majority Leader Chip Rogers of the 21st,
are among the sponsors (Chance is the first sponsor).

SourceWatch’s ALEC Exposed

found Ronnie Chance on ALEC’s International Relations Task Force.
Rogers himself told CBS News how much he values ALEC,

Who is ALEC?
By Mark Strassmann and Phil Hirschkorn 30 June 2012.
Rogers spelled out the same thing ALEC itself told me:
it considers people like Chance and Rogers
“our state legislators”.
“Our” as in belonging to ALEC, not representing you the voters and taxpayers.


Chip Rogers
Guess who sponsored the bill that put the charter school amendment on the ballot,
HB 1162 in its Senate form?

Chip Rogers.
And who sponsored the companion bill that would suck money out of public
schools and give more per pupil to charter schools, using our local tax dollars,
HB 797 in the Senate?

Chip Rogers.
And House sponsors Jan Jones (R 46th) and Edward Lindsey (R 54th) of both bills

are also ALEC’s “our state legislators”.

I don’t always agree with Adam Smith, but when I do, I quote The Wealth of Nations from 1776:

Continue reading →

Wall Street’s next big thing: privatizing public education

What’s really behind the charter school amendment referendum?
Corporate greed.

Jeff Faux wrote for AlterNet 15 October 2012,

Education Profiteering: Wall Street’s Next Big Thing?
Wall Street’s involvement in the charter school movement is presented as an act of philanthropy, but it’s really about greed.
He reviews some of

the evidence that charter schools don’t improve education,
especially when forced on states.
Then he gets into why so much money is flowing into charter schools
anyway.

Education privatization would not, per se, create a net new stimulus

Wall Street greed
for the economy. But by diverting large existing flows of money from
the public to the private sector it would create new profit-making
ventures that could be capitalized and transformed into stocks,
derivatives and leveraged securities. The pot has been sweetened by
a 39 percent federal tax credit for financing charter school
construction that can double an investor’s return in seven years.
The prospect of new speculative opportunities could well recharge
the animal spirits upon which Wall Street depends.

Some “liberal” privatization promoters claim that charter schools
should not be considered private. But that’s an argument the
management companies that run the schools only use when they are
asking for more government funding. At the same time they argue in
courts and to legislatures that as private enterprises they should
not be subject to government audits, labor laws and other
restrictions.

These companies rent, buy, and sell buildings; make contracts for
consulting, accounting and legal services, food concessions, and
transportation; and pay their managers far more than public school
principals earn. In cases where city governments have given land to
charter schools, for profit real estate companies have ended up
owning the subsidized land and buildings. In states where charter
schools are required to be nonprofit, profit-making companies can
still set them up and then organize a board of neighborhood
residents who will give them the right to manage the school with
little or no interference.

In 2008 Dennis Bakke, CEO of Imagine Schools, a private company that
managed 71 schools in eleven states, sent an email to the firm’s
senior staff. It reminded his managers not to give school boards the
“misconception” that they were “responsible for making decisions
about budget matters, school policies, hiring of the principal, and
dozens of other matters.” The memo suggested that the community
board members be required to sign undated letters of resignation.
“It is our school, our money, and our risk,” he wrote, “not theirs.”

Yet in Georgia it’s our tax money they want to use to fund those
“public” private charter schools.
That’s the “large existing flows of money” they want to divert
into their profiteering pockets.
No wonder ALEC is so big into charter schools!
And look who else:

Continue reading →

Score high on ALEC policy, score low on education

 

According to ALEC’s own website, states that score high
on ALEC’s education policies score low on education.
Remember,

ALEC is behind the Georgia charter school amendment
on the November ballot.
If you didn’t believe

Stanford Credo’s study that showed
adding a charter school authorizer, as that amendment would do,
reduces academic learning,
how about ALEC’s own data?

Bill Simon write for The Political Vine today,

Charter Schools and ALEC: The Facts ALEC Doesn’t Want You To Know,

If you take the state performance rankings and match them up to each
state’s education policy rankings, you come-up with an entirely
different picture of how little (if any at all) a state’s degree of
conservative education “policy” translates into actual
education performance.

I did this (
PDF copy available here)
and this is what the 2012 Top 10 states in Performance looks like,
and their corresponding Policy ranks:

2012 Performance/Policy Rank


ALEC's 17th Report Card on American Education

  1. Massachusetts / B-
  2. Vermont / D+
  3. New Jersey / B-
  4. Colorado / B
  5. Pennsylvania / C+
  6. Rhode Island / C
  7. North Carolina / C
  8. Kansas / C-
  9. New Hampshire / C+
  10. New York / C-

The numbers are ALEC’s performance rankings,
and the letters are ALEC’s policy grades.

Continue reading →

Video Playlist @ LCC 2012-10-09



The big item at Tuesday’s Lowndes County Commission Regular Session
was, same as

at Monday’s Work Session,
the waste management railroad,

terminating in a decision.
Other topics included citizen Karen Noll speaking

against the charter school amendment.

Here’s

the agenda
with links to the videos and a few notes, or links to separate posts.
Apologies for the poor sound on the first videos;
we didn’t have the usual camera.
Of course, if the Commission did its own videoing and posting, that problem
would be unlikely to occur.




  1. Call to Order
  2. Invocation
  3. Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag

  4. Minutes for Approval

    1. Work Session — September 24, 2012
    2. Regular Session — September 25, 2012



  5. Public Hearing — REZ-2012-15 Glenn O’Neal,     Pecan Plantation Rd. & US Hwy 84 W E-A to C-H, County
    Water & Septic, ~4.5 acres
  6. For Consideration


    1. Bevel Creek Lift Station Pump Repair
    2. Alapaha Waterline size Increase

    3. Beer License — Naylor’s Pantry — 8777 E. Hwy 135
    4. Refunding Revenue Bonds

    5. Solid Waste Management Request for Proposal
  7. Reports




    1. Community Planning Month Proclamation


      Plus recognition of two planners from Moody AFB.

    2. Employee Health Fair



    Chairman Ashley Paulk interjected not on the agenda




    • some comments about recently deceased former VSU president Hugh C. Bailey,

    • and noted the fire chief had a new fire truck, which was parked outside.
  8. Citizens Wishing to be Heard Please State Name And Address





    • Karen Noll spoke against the charter school amendment,
      saying it would implement taxation without representation Karen Noll @ LCC 2012-10-09 and would take more tax dollars from our public schools to give twice as much money to special charter school students.


    • Ken Klanicki never actually even approached the podium.
      After being asked by the chairman to come to the podium or leave the room,
      he wandered to the back of the room and was escorted out by a deputy sheriff.
      He called me by name as he left, but I have no idea what he was trying to
      accomplish.
      He called me later, but when I asked him that, he had no explanation.

Here’s

a video playlist.
It shifts from the first camera (good video, poor sound) to the second camera (video with no closeups, good sound) in the middle, when I arrived with the second camera.
The rest of the first camera videos are tacked onto the end.
Next time we’ll attempt to have the good camera.


Video Playlist

Regular Session, Lowndes County Commission (LCC),

Video by Gretchen Quarterman for Lowndes Area Knowledge Exchange (LAKE), Valdosta, Lowndes County, Georgia, 9 October 2012.

-jsq

 

Videos: Water, water, water, waste! and planning? @ LCC 2012-10-08


The big news
was the
waste disposal railroad, but the Lowndes County Commission also
heard about three water issues (one a rezoning), plus a beer
license, revenue bonds, community planning month, and a health fair
at its Work Session this morning.

Here’s the
agenda, with links to the videos and a few notes, or links to
separate posts.

LOWNDES COUNTY BOARD OF
COMMISSIONERS
PROPOSED AGENDA
WORK SESSION, MONDAY, OCTOBER 8, 2012, 8:30 a.m.
REGULAR SESSION, TUESDAY, OCTOBER 9, 2012, 5:30 p.m.
327 N. Ashley Street — 2nd
Floor

Continue reading →

A rezoning, wastewater pump repair, solid waste RFP, and community planning month @ LCC 2012-10-08


2974 Pecan Plantation Road
A rezoning for well and septic,
Bevel Creek is back with a lift station pump repair,
and something about an Alapaha waterline:
water, water, water.
Plus a beer license, refunding revenue bonds, and
the long-awaited waste management RFP.
And an employee health fair, whatever that is,
and apparently this is community planning month.
All that at the Lowndes County Commission, Monday morning
and Tuesday evening.

Here’s

the agenda.

LOWNDES COUNTY BOARD OF COMMISSIONERS

PROPOSED AGENDA

WORK SESSION, MONDAY, OCTOBER 8, 2012, 8:30 a.m.

REGULAR SESSION, TUESDAY, OCTOBER 9, 2012, 5:30 p.m.

327 N. Ashley Street — 2nd Floor

Continue reading →