Tag Archives: Allison Polhill Holdorff

It Appears That Icky Sticky Nicky Melvoin Revealed Confidential Attorney Client Information From LAUSD’s Office Of The General Counsel To The California Charter School Association In A Secret Meeting In February 2018 — Having To Do With A January 2016 CCSA Lawsuit Against LAUSD Over Prop 39 Access To Facilities — In February 2018 CCSA Met With Melvoin About LAUSD Facilities Policy — At This Meeting Melvoin Told CCSA — The Adverse Parties In The Freaking Lawsuit — That LAUSD’s General Counsel Was “Confident In Lawsuit Position” — And Therefore Was Disinclined To Settle — Two Months Later CCSA Conceded And Dropped The Suit Without A Settlement — Perhaps Their Decision To Pursue This Course Was Informed By Confidential Information Obtained From Melvoin — It’s Hard To Imagine It Could Be Otherwise

July 31, 2019 Mike Leave a comment

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about an episode in January 2018 when the California Charter School Association actually drafted a resolution for then newly elected, then and now bought and paid for, LAUSD board member Icky Sticky Nicky Melvoin,¹ to present to his colleagues on the school board. It was and is a complicated story, and I promised at the time to lay it on you in increments.² That first post was about the CCSA-drafted resolution and how they passed it on to Nicky in January 2018.

Today we’re moving along to February 20, 2018. On that date Nick Melvoin, his senior advisor Allison Holdorff Polhill, and his policy director Danielle Tenner met with Cristina de Jesus of Green Dot Private Schools, Emilio Pack of STEM Preparatory Schools, Caprice Young of the creepiest cultiest charter chain, that is Magnolia Charter Schools, and Cassy Horton, Ebony Wheaton, and Jason Rudolph, all the last three from CCSA, all met to discuss the resolution.³

Also at that time, explained below, CCSA was suing LAUSD. And, amazingly, it seems that in this meeting Melvoin passed on a great deal of privileged information about LAUSD’s legal strategy to the charter advocates. He also agreed to intervene with LAUSD’s lawyers to further CCSA’s interests. This is on its face appalling behavior from an elected official, sworn by oath to faithfully execute the duties of his office, a violation of which oath this behavior pretty clearly is.⁴ As always, the details are complicated.

We know about this meeting from an email sent the next day, February 21, 2018, by the aforementioned Jason Rudolph to his co-conspirators de Jesus, Pack, Young, Horton, and Wheaton. This email is interesting in itself, and it is reproduced below in full. Much, much, muchmuchmuch more interesting, though, is the attachment to the email, consisting of Rudolph’s notes on the previous day’s meeting.⁵ This document is endlessly complex. I expect that the next four or five posts in this series will be on this document.⁶ Continue reading It Appears That Icky Sticky Nicky Melvoin Revealed Confidential Attorney Client Information From LAUSD’s Office Of The General Counsel To The California Charter School Association In A Secret Meeting In February 2018 — Having To Do With A January 2016 CCSA Lawsuit Against LAUSD Over Prop 39 Access To Facilities — In February 2018 CCSA Met With Melvoin About LAUSD Facilities Policy — At This Meeting Melvoin Told CCSA — The Adverse Parties In The Freaking Lawsuit — That LAUSD’s General Counsel Was “Confident In Lawsuit Position” — And Therefore Was Disinclined To Settle — Two Months Later CCSA Conceded And Dropped The Suit Without A Settlement — Perhaps Their Decision To Pursue This Course Was Informed By Confidential Information Obtained From Melvoin — It’s Hard To Imagine It Could Be Otherwise →

LAUSD

In January 2019 Larchmont Charter School Supreme Commander Amy Dresser Held Wrote To LAUSD Board Member Icky Sticky Nicky Melvoin — And A Bunch Of His Most Seniorest Staffies — Allison Polhill Holdorff — Sarah Angel — Clayton Rosa — Expressing Solidarity In What She Called “Some Crazy Crazy Times” — The Craziness Being Anti-Charter Sentiment — And She Was All Like Do Not Be Bullied — She Actually Said Bullied — Which Demonstrates Her Utterly Characteristic Contempt For Democracy By The Way — Into Passing A Cap On LAUSD Charter Schools — It Is — Says Amy Dresser Held — “The First Step In Killing Charters” — So Even The Enemy Knows This Strategy Will Work! — And Nicky Wrote Back And Was All Like — Mmmm! You Are Right! Thank you Amy!! — Note That He Actually Did Use Two Exclamation Points!! — Cause That Is The Depth Of His Gratitude Towards Amy Dresser Held!!!

June 11, 2019 Mike Leave a comment

So you probably remember that one of the welcome outcomes of the courageous and world-shaking January 2019 strike against the Los Angeles Unified School District by the United Teachers of Los Angeles was a resolution to be considered by the school board on freezing the approval of new charter schools in Los angeles. This was considered and passed by the board on January 29, 2019, with pro-charter board member icky sticky Nicky Melvoin casting the lone vote against.⁷ This resolution, not really binding on anyone, is of course but one step in a journey whose ultimate goal is the elimination of charter schools in California.

And you may also recall that recently I obtained a huge, huge set of emails from the thermonuclearesque privatizers at the Larchmont Charter School.⁸ I used these the other day to write about how Amy Dresser Held, supreme Larchmontane shot-caller, used her publicly funded power and position to hook up some kid she knows privately with an internship with LAUSD in the sticky one’s office.

And today’s story has to do with an email that Held sent to Melvoin in the quasi-early morning of January 29, right before the fatal board meeting, expressing solidarity with whoever and saying a lot of fairly kooky stuff about how she was thinking of Nicky and these were crazy times and thanks Nicky for caring about kids and don’t be bullied into voting for this charter cap crap because to zillionaires political pressure to do what they don’t want equals bullying.

Most importantly, Held states in a remarkably self-contradictory sentence that a charter cap is “the first step in killing charters and there’s no good argument for it.” She is right, of course, that this is the first step in killing charters. Somehow⁹ she misses the point that this very fact is the good argument for it. And because of that tired nonsense about bread, butter, sides, and so on,¹⁰ El Ick-Stick got right back to Held with this little email here. Took him a mere 17 minutes to send this response.¹¹ And he was really feeling it, yes indeed, thanked her profusely!

And because why waste a good email she didn’t just send this email to Nick M. but also to a bunch of his senior staffies, with a slightly different subject line and other minor mods. But their response was much more muted, and I won’t speculate on why that might be.¹² Read on, friends, for transcriptions of the Held/Melvoin part of this exchange!
Continue reading In January 2019 Larchmont Charter School Supreme Commander Amy Dresser Held Wrote To LAUSD Board Member Icky Sticky Nicky Melvoin — And A Bunch Of His Most Seniorest Staffies — Allison Polhill Holdorff — Sarah Angel — Clayton Rosa — Expressing Solidarity In What She Called “Some Crazy Crazy Times” — The Craziness Being Anti-Charter Sentiment — And She Was All Like Do Not Be Bullied — She Actually Said Bullied — Which Demonstrates Her Utterly Characteristic Contempt For Democracy By The Way — Into Passing A Cap On LAUSD Charter Schools — It Is — Says Amy Dresser Held — “The First Step In Killing Charters” — So Even The Enemy Knows This Strategy Will Work! — And Nicky Wrote Back And Was All Like — Mmmm! You Are Right! Thank you Amy!! — Note That He Actually Did Use Two Exclamation Points!! — Cause That Is The Depth Of His Gratitude Towards Amy Dresser Held!!! →

LAUSD

Larchmont Charter School’s High-Concept Constructivist Educational Programs “Help [Students] Continue To Grow [And Become] Able To Gain Entrance To The College And Career Path Of Their Choice” — And Amy Dresser Held — Supreme Boss Of The LCS — Will Use All The Force Of Her Personal Relationships With Stratospherically Elite LAUSD Staff To Get A Family Friend An Ultra-High-Powered Internship In Nick Melvoin’s Office — Which Is A Much More Realistic Picture Of How The Ruling Class Reproduces Its Power Than All That Booshwah About “Gain[ing] Entrance” Through Education

June 9, 2019 Mike 2 Comments

Here’s the short version of charter school theory from the point of view of the privatizers: people who run public schools are dumb and incompetent which is harmful to kids therefore pay a bunch of zillionaires and their usefully idiotic minions to create private schools and run them with essentially no oversight and they’ll innovate the hell out of everything and also the kids will be better off, so yay!

Just for instance, consider the Larchmont Charter School, a self-proclaimed fermentatory constructivist¹³ hotbed of quantumly cosmic disruptive innovation, diverse by design, guided by the idea that racially integrated classrooms are good for the kids of color, who gain all the apparently myriad benefits of going to school with the white kids.¹⁴ And what they claim is that they’re going to teach these putatively disadvantaged¹⁵ kids how to pull themselves via an extraordinary education right on up:

The high expectations of Larchmont Charter School’s High School Program prepare students for college … rigorous college preparatory humanities, mathematics, and science instruction from quality educators who focus on the unique needs of the learner through the constructivist lens … positively address challenges occurring in the world around them … leadership and arts opportunities … grow as well-rounded, successful persons, able to gain entrance to the college and career path of their choice.

And although around this blog we never ever take any of these people at their word for anything because it’s turned out always, every last time, that they were lying, well, at least I’ll admit that if we were naive enough to take them at their word in this case all this nonsense wouldn’t be so bad. Teach poor kids, kids without the social connections to skip to the head of the line, kids whose parents can’t afford to pay a zillion dollars in bribes to get them into USC, teach them the skills they need to get into “the college and career path of their choice.”

But whatever the delusional conscience-easing narrative according to which these Larchmontane privatizers have managed to convince themselves they’re operating, the truth, as revealed by a massive steaming heap of emails I recently obtained from these antisocial parasites on the public realm,¹⁶ turns out to be quite different. Behold 27 emails, mostly between LCS supreme boss Amy Dresser Held and senior supremo-slash-advisory Icky Sticky Nicky¹⁷ staffer Allison Polhill Holdorff.¹⁸

These reveal a much, much different set of rules. When it comes to students, not even LCS students, who are friends of the family, Held is not so much about hard work, education opening doors, and so on. Instead she’s all like phone a friend for the kid, get her an internship. A service, I am going to go out on this limb now, I would wager, access to which she does not facilitate for the students whose career-path-choosing skills she’s meant to be cultivating, that she’s paid out of public funds to cultivate.

And even worse than that from Holdorff’s side, two months after she started in with these conversations between her and Held about internships LAUSD posted the position, presumably inviting members of the public to apply, but the fix was in, as you’ll see below. Many organizations have rules requiring jobs to be posted widely, precisely to preven the kind of nepotism you’ll see unfolding here. The conversation kicked off on December 14, 2017, when Held wrote to Holdorff thusly:
Continue reading Larchmont Charter School’s High-Concept Constructivist Educational Programs “Help [Students] Continue To Grow [And Become] Able To Gain Entrance To The College And Career Path Of Their Choice” — And Amy Dresser Held — Supreme Boss Of The LCS — Will Use All The Force Of Her Personal Relationships With Stratospherically Elite LAUSD Staff To Get A Family Friend An Ultra-High-Powered Internship In Nick Melvoin’s Office — Which Is A Much More Realistic Picture Of How The Ruling Class Reproduces Its Power Than All That Booshwah About “Gain[ing] Entrance” Through Education →

LAUSD

The California Charter Schools Association Is Not Just An Insidious Privatizing Pro-Zillionaire Lobbying Group — They Also Evidently Facebook-Stalk Anti-Charter Folks On Social Media And Then Distribute Their Findings To Their Members — Like Memes About How Damn Much Money These Charter Bosses Make — And Icky Sticky Nicky Melvoin’s Staffer Allison Holdorff Thinks Normal Political Speech Is “Disconcerting”

March 29, 2019 Mike 1 Comment

My new charter school project is starting to pay off to some extent. Just this morning, for instance, Ms. Dr. Pam Magee, well-esteemed and intensively bowed-down-before head honcho of that otherworldly bastion of zillionaire privilege known to the world as Palisades Charter High School sent me a big pile of emails between her profusely respected self and the Los Angeles Unified School District in some date range that’s presently escaping me. And for your viewing pleasure I popped the whole steaming pile up to Archive.Org and you can take a look at it right here.

And as expected, for such is the nature of CPRA-fueled public interest voyeurism, most of it is tedious chaff. But as is often the case there’s a little bit of gold to be found in there. And the text for today’s sermon is this anxious little exchange between Keith Dell’Aquila, who’s some kind of lobbyist with the California Charter Schools Association, and various “charter leaders” flipping out over a meme he found on the internet about how much charter bosses get paid. He sent the first email on January 18, 2019. Right in the middle of the strike.

And man! Keith Della’Aquila is not just upset by the meme. He’s getting ready for bread riots, for the last charter school director being strangled with the guts of the last zillionaire, and so on. These privatizers were really worried that the UTLA strike was the beginning of the freaking revolution. Here’s what El Dude had to say about it, and then turn the page for a transcription of the rest of the conversation, including a really unprofessional comment from Icky Sticky Nicky Melvoin’s senior advisor Allison Holdorff Polhill:

From: Keith Dell’Aquila <KDellAquila@ccsa.org>
Date: Friday, January 18, 2019 at 2:16 PM
Cc: Cassy Horton <chorton@ccsa.org>, Chris Copolillo <ccopolillo@ccsa.org>, Jason Rudolph <jrudolph@ccsa.org>, Luis Figueroa <lfigueroa@ccsa.org>
Subject: Your Organization Featured in Online Posts

Good afternoon, Charter Leaders,

We wanted to let you know that the names of your schools and reported salaries of senior leaders are being circulated in UTLA-aligned online communities (Twitter and Facebook groups). This post does not appear to have been shared widely and does not appear to have been shared by official UTLA accounts or reflected in any media coverage. Still, we want to flag it for you in case it get gains additional traction or if your organizations receive additional attention.

Please let us know if you need any support or if you and your schools have been targeted in any way.

Thank you for continuing to serve LA students and families well during this challenging time.

Keith Dell’Aquila

Director, Regional Advocacy, Greater Los Angeles
213-864-6310 | kdellaaquila@ccsa.org

Continue reading The California Charter Schools Association Is Not Just An Insidious Privatizing Pro-Zillionaire Lobbying Group — They Also Evidently Facebook-Stalk Anti-Charter Folks On Social Media And Then Distribute Their Findings To Their Members — Like Memes About How Damn Much Money These Charter Bosses Make — And Icky Sticky Nicky Melvoin’s Staffer Allison Holdorff Thinks Normal Political Speech Is “Disconcerting” →