smf: A MIDWEEK ASSIGNMENT IN CONNECTING-THE-DOTS + SOME RAMBLING FAR AFIELD

Without going into too much detail, here are three articles from today’s LA Times:

PARENTS PRESENT SIGNATURES TO TAKE OVER A COMPTON SCHOOL: Using the new 'parent-trigger' law, they take the firs... http://bit.ly/hrV37D

MAYOR UNDER FIRE FOR CHOICE OF N.Y. SCHOOLS CHANCELLOR: Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg's pick to oversee New York's ... http://bit.ly/gKykSW

Steve Lopez: $50 MILLION SCHOOL GIFT PAYING OFF - http://bit.ly/eZZ5ma

For extra credit you can go back to yesterday’s Times:

PARENTS PUSH FOR CHANGE? …OR CHARTER LEVERAGES TAKEOVER AT COMPTON SCHOOL? - In the first test of a new law, cha... http://bit.ly/gC34Lt

…or even Google about and find yesterdays Fox News fair+balanced local coverage (consider the source) about the wonderfulness of the Compton School takeover. Read+see for yourself.  

EdSect Arne Duncan – another 4LAKids favorite - has a well-lit staged puff piece on PBS with captive appreciative+photogenic audience here.  What Arne never says is that Singapore, China, Finland and Canada don’t do - and we in the US do-do (OK- attempt to do) is to educate ALL students from age 6 to 18 in the same (or similar) college preparatory standards curriculum.  Universal Free Public Education is not about the best-and-brightest: it’s about all.

And, unless I misheard her, didn’t LAUSD Board President Monica Garcia announce at yesterday’s board meeting that LAUSD’s graduation rate had improved last year  …when really it had not?  I realize that the data is subject to interpretation – but when the mantra is “100% Graduation” we don’t really want to hear:   “it isn’t how you play the game – it’s who keeps score that counts!’

What we are seeing  is some first class media manipulation, spin, framing and Rovian messaging.

In the Compton Story you see how the poor mis-served Compton parents – aided only by billionaire benefactors and a PR juggernaut operating behind-the-scenes - are able to drive their story to the front page. The telling quote is this one:

“Former state Sen. Gloria Romero (D-Los Angeles), author of the parent-trigger legislation, said staying under the radar was necessary to prevent opposition from mobilizing.”

We wouldn’t want any opposition! Or debate. Or transparency.  The Green Dot Parent Revolutionaries used to bus-in the parents to their photo-ops in chartered shiny white Fast Deer coaches …the advent of rented yellow school buses is a nice touch!

In the story about the New York Mayor’s operation of NYC schools and the Lopez column about Mayor Tony’s operation of his subset of LAUSD we see how Mayoral Control 1 (in NYC) and Mayoral Control 101 (in LA) work.

• Note how the LA Mayor’s partnership uses his funding to send teachers and administrators to NYC to study at the feet of the master.
• Note how he doesn’t send parents. There is a reason for that. Parents have no voice whatsoever in the day-to-day operation of NYC Schools. As Mayor Bloomberg infamously said: “If parents don’t like the way I run the schools they can boo me at parades.”