VOICES-The LA Times is on a roll. This week, in their lead editorial, they put the blame for the LAUSD dysfunction squarely on the Board of Ed for questioning Deasy about the wasted costs of approximately $500 million for the iPad debacle, and for the current MiSiS fiasco which still has students waiting for class assignments.
They had the nerve to use the words of Eli Broad and his cohorts to say this Board is "political and is micro managing." They avoid and distort the legal status of our elected BoE whose job it is to manage the Superintendent in the name of the voters who elected them to be our representatives.
Deasy works for the Board. The Board works for the taxpayers.
In LA, we have had a lingering triple digit heat wave and many classrooms are without AC and are packed with children on the verge of heat sickness, but the LA Times does not connect the dots to Deasy's use of the Construction Bond funds for his notorious "civil rights" escapade which used that bond money to buy overpriced and obsolete tech rather than upgrading the inner city schools and making sure they have adequate AC, clean bathrooms and kitchens, and the many other construction issues so desperately needed.
They also avoid commenting on the spiteful and costly action of Deasy in hiring Beverly Hills attorney, Harvey Saferstein, to investigate the LAUSD Board of Education. We do not know to what end Deasy pursues this, nor who is paying the bill for this high priced lawyer.
A day after the glowing support of the Times/Deasy editorial, this main LA print news media does another commentary in favor of the privatizers who forced the hiring of Deasy. Now we have a double whammy with the Times coming out for Marshall Tuck in his race against Tom Torlakson for State Superintendent.
You don't need any advanced degrees to see that their spin is in answer to the facts Howard Blume reported on the Deasy mismanagement of LAUSD. They surely got the word from Eli Broad and his sidekick lawyer Keiffer from Manatt (both quoted in the Sunday editorial) to reverse the actual news, and to spin how wonderful Deasy is, and further, how much we need Marshall Tuck as the state schools chief.
Tuck is the same guy who was kicked out of Green Dot as their director, ostensibly for mismanagement of finances. He is %100 in favor of turning public schools into charter school investments for Wall Street profit.
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We need the public to fight back on this huge problem in Los Angeles. Every time the public and the 'fighting back' muckrakers make progress, the only major media in town spins it all. We do NOT have a free press here.
Every reader of the LA Times can raise your voice by sending letters to the editor expressing your disgust at their self serving editorials which present only the opinions of the privatizers.
Every taxpayer can email each of the 7 Board of Education members and demand an immediate external audit, and a Grand Jury investigation … and that Deasy be fired now.
(Ellen Lubic is Director of Joining Forces for Education and a public policy educator in Los Angeles. She is an occasional contributor to CityWatch. Her views are her own.)
-cw
CityWatch
Vol 12 Issue 76
Pub: Sep 19, 2014
