Tag Archives: ALEC

GA State attorney general tries to order private citizens not to oppose charter school amendment

Pushers of the charter school amendment must be desperate!
Blurring the line between public officials and private
citizens, state Attorney General Sam Olens wrote:



Local school boards do not have the legal authority to expend funds
or other resources to advocate or oppose the ratification of a
constitutional amendment by the voters. They may not do this
directly or indirectly through associations to which they may
belong….

As
Jim Galloway wrote yesterday for the AJC in

Sam Olens orders local school boards to stay out of charter school fight,

That means organizations like the Georgia School Boards Association,
and perhaps, the Georgia School Superintendents Association, would
be barred from speaking out against the proposed constitutional
amendment.

And would that include organizations like PAGE,
which produced
the slides
that

a local middle school teacher used last week?
What about that teacher, or

Dr. Troy Davis, speaking a few weeks earlier,
both on their own time?

Olens’ letter would apply to what

the VDT said was in the VBOE and LCBOE joint resolution,
at least the part about “The resolution explicitly states that the boards
are asking voters to not support the Constitutional Amendment relative
to state charter schools.”

But what does Olens mean, duly elected local school boards don’t
have authority to express opinions about educational matters
that would directly affect the people who elected them?

Why has Sam Olens suddenly gotten religion about this now,
after he was silent last year when both VBOE and LCBOE adopted

resolutions against the school “unification” referendum?
Where was he when both boards of education hosted numerous
forums opposing consolidation?

Will he next be telling the Valdosta City Council it can’t

pass a resolution opposing a referendum?
What exactly is the difference between that elected body and
an elected school board as far as expressing such an opinion?
And all of those resolutions were non-binding opinions.

Will Sam Olens next be telling the VDT it can’t
editorialize against the charter school amendment?

How desperate are the pushers of the charter school amendment?

Continue reading →

Charter school referendum preamble is Parent Trigger jargon

 

A pressure group for privatizing schools is the origin of the jargon
in the charter school referendum on the November Georgia ballot.
And yes, it’s tied to ALEC.

In

Our south Georgia school tax dollars would go to Virginia rich people,
Karen Noll asserted “…the wording that
is on the preamble comes straight out of ALEC documents….”
The preamble to the charter school amendment on the November ballot reads:

Provides for improving student achievement and parental
involvement through more public charter school options.

Where else is that wording found?
Combinations of the three phrases “student achievement”, “parental involvement”,
and “charter school” actually are not very common, according to google.
But the Parent Trigger wrote in

Empowering Parents,



Policy initiatives that empower parents are likely to increase
parental involvement and satisfaction and raise student achievement
by inviting parents into the process.

What process?

The designers of the California Parent Trigger made a grave mistake
by leaving tepid reform modules in the bill and allowing districts
to override the parents’ reform choice.

The Georgia constitutional amendment wouldn’t leave school districts
any ability to decide anything.

What would the parents’ reform choice be?

Continue reading →

Democrats and Tea Party: both against charter school amendment



In the same month, both the Lowndes County Democratic Party
and the Valdosta Tea Party
had speakers explaining how bad the charter school amendment is.
Neither group took a vote, but it seemed pretty clear most of the
attendees at both meetings were against that referendum on the November ballot,
and mostly for the same reason: nobody wants an unelected state committee
taking away local control and local tax revenue.
Parental choice is one thing, and charter schools are another,
but nobody seemed to like Atlanta taking away local control.

As the
PAGE slides say,



This isn’t a Democrat vs. Republican debate.
Legislators voted across party lines to put the constitutional amendment on the ballot.
Republican and Democrat voters must defeat it together.

You can watch for yourself.
Here are the two presentations:

If you don’t want Atlanta taking away our educational control and local tax dollars,
vote No on the charter school amendment in November.

-jsq

The charter school amendment is about control —Dr. Troy Davis @ LCDP 2012-09-10

Lowndes County Schools Assistant Superintendent Troy Davis
gave his personal opinion:
“it’s about control”.
The charter school amendment on the November ballot is not about
charter schools, which any community in the state can create now.
It’s about control by the state of local schools and resources.

Dr. Davis pointed out Georgia already has 350 charter schools, up from
160 three years ago.


All but 19 were established and agreed upon by local communities.
There’s a successful one in Berrien County, established by the
Berrien County school board.
The process to create more is in place in every community.
If we wanted one in Lowndes County, all it would take would be for
one of the two school systems (Lowndes or Valdosta)
to approve one.

He suggested looking at the sources of funds for Families for Better Schools,
which is backing the amendment.
Top of the list is a Wal-Mart heir.
(It’s
Alice Walton.
Dr. Davis deferred to Al Rowell for that information,
and that’s also where I heard about Alice Walton.
And as I discovered,

the Walton Family Foundation put in much more
than that last year.)
He noted the bulk of the rest comes from for-profit school operators.
(They include

K12 Inc. of Virginia.)

He noted that the state of Georgia just passed this fiscal year
the third largest budget
in the history of Georgia, $19.1 billion.
Yet the public schools have been cut $6.6 billion (apparently since 2002).
And the Lowndes County school system lost nearly $8 million last year,
and $43 million in the past 10 years.
So he asked:

Continue reading →

Our south Georgia school tax dollars would go to Virginia rich people —Karen Noll

Received yesterday on

K12 CEO Packard: $5M in 2011, up 36% -jsq

Keep in mind that this company is based in Virginia, so our tax
dollars from say, South Georgia meant for our school teachers,
administraters, supplies, and educating our students, would go to


bolster the economy in Virginia and line the pockets of the very
rich. Meanwhile we have to raise taxes to simply educate the
students attending our public schools. This is clearly NOT a plan to
‘improve academic achievement’ as the preamble boldly lies.


The preamble is boldly inaccurate and completely biased. The wording
added to the question on the ballot implies that the amendment would
improve student achievement and parent involvement. My stars, what
breathing individual doesn’t want those things.

Facts are that by some measures charter schools perform 3% worse
than traditional public schools. We would hope that schools where
parents have to sign a commitment of parent involvement would have
superior parent involvement. Might I just add that students can be
kicked out of charter schools and all students are educated in the
Traditional Public School setting as per our Georgia constitution.

The ‘biased and inaccurate’ wording in the preamble to the charter
schools question is not found in

HB 1162, the law that allowed this
question to be placed on the ballot. It is not in

HB 797, the law
thaw would be enacted should the amendment pass. NO the wording that
is on the preamble comes straight out of ALEC documents, which are
the equivalent of ‘legislation for Dummies’ with a particular slant
as you might imagine.

-Karen Noll

Bill Moyers on ALEC

Bill Moyers takes on ALEC.

Posted yesterday On Bill Moyers’ website,

‘United States of ALEC’ Video Previews

This week, Moyers & Company (check local listings) presents


“United States of ALEC,” a report on the most
influential corporate-funded political force most of America has
never heard of — ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange
Council. A national consortium of state politicians and powerful
corporations, ALEC presents itself as a “nonpartisan
public-private partnership”. But behind that mantra lies a
vast network of corporate lobbying and political action aimed to
increase corporate profits at public expense without public
knowledge.

He said more

on Huffington Post Wednesday,

Continue reading →

K12 CEO Packard: $5M in 2011, up 36%

Does your school superintendent get paid $5 million a year?
Ronald J. Packard, CEO of K12 Inc., the second biggest
donor to the pro-charter school amendment campaign, does.
Is that where you want your tax dollars to go?

According to Bloomberg Businessweek,

Executive Profile,
Ronald J. Packard CFA,
Founder, Chief Executive Officer and Director, K12, Inc.


K12 CEO Packard made $551,539 in salary in 2011,
but was awarded other compensation totaling $5,002,933.
Which is even richer than the

approximately $3,266,387 total compensation
private prison company CCA’s CEO Damon Hininger got in 2010,
which, according to Bloomberg Businessweek, apparently only went up to

3,696,798 in 2011.

According to
Emma Brown for the Washington Post 9 December 2011,

K12 Inc. chief executive Ron Packard paid $5 million compensation package in 2011,

That’s nearly twice the $2.67 million Packard earned in 2010. It
includes $551,000 in cash, $4.2 million in stock awards and about
$290,000 in other compensation.

Packard’s pay reflects a new employment agreement negotiated in
September 2010 and good until 2014. The company had $522 million in
revenue in 2011, up nearly 36 percent percent from the year before.

“We determined that these awards were necessary and
appropriate to retain Mr. Packard as our Chief Executive Officer and
in recognition of Mr. Packard’s leadership and performance over the
term of his employment with the Company,” the filing said.

Do we want our tax revenue going to retain K12 Inc.’s CEO?
What if we retain our local schools instead?
After all, it’s dubious that charter schools would be any better

Continue reading →

Walton Family Foundation granted $1.05 million towards GA charter schools in 2011

The total amount of Walton family affiliate money backing the Georgia
charter school referendum is far larger than

Alice Walton’s $250,000.

In the Walton Family Foundation’s list of

2011 Education Reform Grants,
there are two Georgia organizations:


Georgia Charter Schools Association Inc. 700,000
Georgia Family Education and Research Council, Inc. 350,000

GCSA has

made the news quite a bit lately,


and its name makes its purpose pretty clear.
According to

the National Association of Charter School Authorizers (NACSA),
GCSA is a NACSA member.
You remember NACSA,

the organization that Zaid Jilani
discovered was an ALEC member, and that bailed out of
ALEC two days later.
That was in May 2012, after the Georgia legislature
passed the bill putting the charter school referendum on the ballot.

Georgia Family Education and Research Council, Inc. (GFERC)
is slightly less obvious. According

Continue reading →

Class action lawsuit against second largest donor to GA charter school referendum

K12 Inc. of Virginia has a class action lawsuit against it,
as well as allegations of lack of effectiveness of its courses.
K12 is the

second biggest contributor to the Georgia charter school
referendum which would privatize Georgia’s public schools.
Shades of

CCA desperately offering 48 states to privatize their prisons!
And we know there’s a connection:

ALEC helps push both private prisons and privatization of public schools.
We didn’t fall for ALEC’s privatized prisons:
let’s not fall for ALEC’s privatized schools.

Emma Brown wrote for the Washington Post 31 January 2012,

Shareholder lawsuit accuses K12 Inc. of misleading investors,

A shareholder in Virginia-based K12 Inc. has filed a lawsuit against

K12 Inc. CEO and Founder Ronald J. Packard, named in class action lawsuit
the virtual-schools operator in federal court, alleging that the
firm violated securities law by making false statements to investors
about students’ poor performance on standardized tests.

The class-action complaint, filed Monday in U.S. District Court in
Alexandria, also accuses K12 of boosting its enrollment and revenues
through “deceptive recruiting” practices.

Herndon-based K12 is the country’s largest operator of full-time
public virtual schools, a growing sector in which students as young
as five learn at home via computer.

The lawsuit comes after a spate of national news stories —
including in The Washington Post — raised questions about the
effectiveness of virtual schools, K12’s in particular. The firm’s
stock has since plummeted.

There’s more in the article, and in the actual

Harry T. Hawks, K12 Inc. executive vice president and chief financial officer, named in class action lawsuit

Class action suit against K12 Inc.
Named in the suit are

Ronald J. Packard (K12 Inc’s CEO and Founder) and

Harry T. Hawks, executive vice president and chief financial officer,
both pictured here.

-jsq

Q: Why are so many states pushing charter schools now? A: ALEC


Michigan, Massachusetts,
and


New Jersey,
plus Georgia.
Why are so many states attempting pro or con charter school referendums
this year?
Because many states have a push for charter schools,
especially

Louisiana.
Where’s that coming from, at the same time in so many states?
ALEC, that’s where.

Ed Anderson wrote for The Times-Picayune 12 January 2011,

Gov. Bobby Jindal says charter school proposal is based on Florida initiative,

Jindal said his proposal will be fashioned on

a Florida law known as
“Charter-Schools-in-the-Workplace Initiative” which also has been
introduced in 14 other states.

Excuse me?
Which “also has been introduced in 14 other states”?
Then it’s not just a Florida law, is it?
And who introduced it?

Mattreichel wrote for FireDogLake 5 April 2012,

Jindal Puts Louisiana’s Schools Up for Sale: ALEC’s Education Reforms Rammed Through

Continue reading →