Tag Archives: The Accelerated Schools

Accelerated Schools Board Meeting Shut Down — By President Juli Quinn — In A Petulant Gavel-Smacking Rage — Because Some Members Of The Public Spoke Some Truth In Her Presence — That The Board Members Are Racist — Incompetent — They Endanger Children — They Fired Hilda Guzman In Retaliation For Her Union Activity And Her Political Speech — TAS Violated The Brown Act At Least Three Times In Forty Minutes — Requiring Sign-In For Entrance And Illegally Holding Two (!) Separate Secret Meetings Out Of The Presence Of The Public! — Which May Actually Rise To The Level Of A Criminal Violation!

October 26, 2019 Mike Leave a comment

As you may know, Hilda Guzman was wrongfully fired by The Accelerated Schools in July 2019. Her union, SEIU Local 99, organized a powerful protest at the last board meeting in August and was poised to do so again last Thursday, October 24. You can read more about Hilda’s situation and the Union’s response here. You can also watch the whole meeting, only about 40 minutes, here on YouTube.¹

And as you may also know, TAS has an illegal policy of requiring members of the public to sign in prior to attending their Board meetings,² though, and it took the SEIU members so long to get through this process that president Juli Quinn had closed public comment by the time the SEIU members made it into the room where the meeting was being held.

Quinn tried to make this idiotic decision stand in the face of righteous outrage by the protesters, until she couldn’t bear the shame any longer and said “I’d like to ask the board if you’d like to take a quick recess.” Then she idiotically hit the table with her idiotic gavel³ and they all left the room. Which is so illegal. It’s jaw-droppingly illegal.⁴ All business of the Board must be conducted in public except for a short list of specific reasons, none of which apply here. Even if any of them had applied it’s not allowed to meet in private without agendizing it first.⁵

After about five minutes the Board came back in and Juli Quinn⁶ admitted that she and her stupid colleagues had made a decision while they were in the back.⁷ And the decision that she admitted that they had made is that they were going to reopen public comment for 15 minutes only. But, like the totalitarian martinet she is, Dr. Quinn decided to read the public comment policy out loud first.
Continue reading Accelerated Schools Board Meeting Shut Down — By President Juli Quinn — In A Petulant Gavel-Smacking Rage — Because Some Members Of The Public Spoke Some Truth In Her Presence — That The Board Members Are Racist — Incompetent — They Endanger Children — They Fired Hilda Guzman In Retaliation For Her Union Activity And Her Political Speech — TAS Violated The Brown Act At Least Three Times In Forty Minutes — Requiring Sign-In For Entrance And Illegally Holding Two (!) Separate Secret Meetings Out Of The Presence Of The Public! — Which May Actually Rise To The Level Of A Criminal Violation! →

LAUSD

Bobby Canosa-Carr — Director Of Secondary Education At The Accelerated Charter Schools — Admits On Camera That TAS Routinely Enrolls Unprepared Students In AP Classes — This Practice Improves The School’s Ranking Based On AP Enrollment — But LAUSD’s Proposed School Performance Framework Will Rate Schools On AP Success Rather Than Enrollment — Which Will Lower TAS’s Ranking Because — Entirely Predictably — These Underprepped Students Don’t Pass — In Other Words Rather Than Enrolling Students In Classes They’re Ready For — And Therefore Can Benefit From Academically — TAS Has Been Setting Students Up To Fail In Order To Boost Its Ranking — And Now They’re Mad That LAUSD Might Downgrade Them Because Of This Pernicious Practice

September 15, 2019 Mike Leave a comment

If you follow LAUSD issues in the news you will have heard of the newly proposed School Performance Framework, a rating system ostensibly meant to improve something about schools but much more likely to be part of the wicked plans of its proponents, Nick Melvoin and Kelly Gonez, to break up our public school system and hand over the still-valuable fragments to their zillionaire masters in the charter school industrial complex.

Whatever the ultimate purpose, though, of this proposal, and despite the fact that it was written for Melvoin by the privatizers themselves, it nevertheless has at least some charter schools very nervous about how they might fare under the new rating standards, which would correlate to some extent with measurable quantities, like e.g. student test results and course grades and which would rate each school on a highly simplified five star scale.

In particular amongst the anxious ones there are our old friends at The Accelerated Schools, whose August board meeting I managed to videotape a few weeks ago, capturing, among other interesting episodes, a weirdo white supremacist soliloquy by board president Juli Quinn. And among these episodes was a discussion led by TAS¹ supreme commander of secondary instruction Robert “Bobby” Canosa-Carr about the proposed rating system.
Continue reading Bobby Canosa-Carr — Director Of Secondary Education At The Accelerated Charter Schools — Admits On Camera That TAS Routinely Enrolls Unprepared Students In AP Classes — This Practice Improves The School’s Ranking Based On AP Enrollment — But LAUSD’s Proposed School Performance Framework Will Rate Schools On AP Success Rather Than Enrollment — Which Will Lower TAS’s Ranking Because — Entirely Predictably — These Underprepped Students Don’t Pass — In Other Words Rather Than Enrolling Students In Classes They’re Ready For — And Therefore Can Benefit From Academically — TAS Has Been Setting Students Up To Fail In Order To Boost Its Ranking — And Now They’re Mad That LAUSD Might Downgrade Them Because Of This Pernicious Practice →

LAUSD

Video Available Of August 29, 2019 Accelerated Schools Board Meeting — Protestors Speak Powerfully In Support Of Hilda Rodriguez-Guzman — Fired By The Board For Insubordination — Which Equals Saying Something True On The Radio — All White Board Credibly Accused By Activist Beverly Roberts Of Lacking Diversity — Demonic White Supremacist Nightmare Marionette And Board President Juli Quinn Not Only Won’t Explain She Says She Doesn’t Have To Explain — Later She Mentions Board Member Binti Yost — Who Has Darkish Skin And Therefore Evidently In The Mind Of Juli Quinn Counts As “Diversity” — And Says “We do have some diversity on the board, unfortunately they’re just not here” — And Then Explains How They Want To Have Parent Reps On The Board — But They Will Have To Be Trained All Summer To Be “More Verbal And Able To Assist Us On The Board” — Because Juli Quinn Is A White Supremacist — And This Is Less Than Ten Minutes Out Of Three Freaking Hours Of Video

August 31, 2019 Mike Leave a comment

I went to my first board meeting of The Accelerated Charter Schools last Thursday, and what a freaking horror show it turned out to be. Here’s the video, almost three damn hours of it, on YouTube and also on Archive.org for ease of downloading.¹ The meeting started out with a series of moving public comments in support of Hilda Rodriguez-Guzman, unceremoniously and unjustly fired by TAS last month in retaliation for her activism. Here’s my Twitter thread on that with links to some comments, and it is well worth watching the whole thing, which starts here.

In particular, though, see this comment by community activist Beverly Roberts, who wants to know why the board members present are all white when they’re running a school in South Los Angeles. She waits for an answer until the point where Juli P. Quinn, president of the board, who has a guilty conscience and a bad case of demonic possession, just seething with anger, with privilege, with rage at Roberts’s insubordinance, tells her out freaking loud that “this is public comment, we don’t need to respond.” The protest essentially lasted for the first half hour of this interminable meeting, ending with this exceedingly dramatic exit.

But the meeting went on for more than two hours after that. And as tedious as it was it was nevertheless filled with revelations.² And there are far, far too many for one post, as usual, so I’m going to have to lay it on you in increments. Today’s episode has to do with surprisingly life-like horrible white supremacist nightmare marionette³ Juli Quinn and her understanding of race in the context of her position as an affluent white president of an affluent white board of trustees in charge of a publicly funded private school located in a decidedly non-affluent, non-white community and whose student body is more than 98% Latinx and African American and pretty much 100% on free or reduced lunch.⁴ Continue reading Video Available Of August 29, 2019 Accelerated Schools Board Meeting — Protestors Speak Powerfully In Support Of Hilda Rodriguez-Guzman — Fired By The Board For Insubordination — Which Equals Saying Something True On The Radio — All White Board Credibly Accused By Activist Beverly Roberts Of Lacking Diversity — Demonic White Supremacist Nightmare Marionette And Board President Juli Quinn Not Only Won’t Explain She Says She Doesn’t Have To Explain — Later She Mentions Board Member Binti Yost — Who Has Darkish Skin And Therefore Evidently In The Mind Of Juli Quinn Counts As “Diversity” — And Says “We do have some diversity on the board, unfortunately they’re just not here” — And Then Explains How They Want To Have Parent Reps On The Board — But They Will Have To Be Trained All Summer To Be “More Verbal And Able To Assist Us On The Board” — Because Juli Quinn Is A White Supremacist — And This Is Less Than Ten Minutes Out Of Three Freaking Hours Of Video →

LAUSD

Johnathan Williams Of The Accelerated Schools Charter Empire And Marie Rumsey Of Zillionaire Terrorist Front The Central City Association Of Los Angeles — Working Together To Destroy Public Education In Los Angeles — One Of Their Weapons? — Commercial Real Estate Of Course — With Guest Appearances By Nightmare Zillionaire BID-Adjacent Clown Crew — Tom Gilmore — Adele Yellin — Steve Needleman — Wayne Ratkovich — Who Should Mostly Be In Literal Chains Rather Than Email Chains — But Here We Are In 21st Century Los Angeles

April 7, 2019 Mike Leave a comment

As you may recall, I got interested in charter schools in Los Angeles during the recent UTLA strike, and after learning that they are subject to the California Public Records Act I submitted a bunch of requests, and after a little amateurish obstructionism the goodies are starting to trickle in.¹ Today’s installment is this small set of emails between Johnathan Williams, founder and head honcho of charter school empire The Accelerated Schools, and various people associated with zillionaire terrorist front group The Central City Association.

And one thing I’ve been learning recently, confirmed by these emails, is that there’s an extensive nexus of relationships among BIDdies and Charterites. BIDdies and their hired guns, like e.g. Jessica Lall and Noel Hyun of the CCALA, serve on many a charter school board. Their companies fund charters, arrange their real estate deals, introduce their executives around in the local zillionaire communities, and so on. Ultimately this shouldn’t have been a surprise to me, although it was.

Both BIDs and charter schools serve the zillionaire privatization agenda. Both are attacks on the public realm, seeking to destroy it so that it can be replaced with private institutions even more firmly under direct zillionaire control. The emails at hand give the tiniest glimpse into this world, just consisting of zillionaires and charterites passing names and email addresses around trying to find a place where the staff of one of Williams’s schools, the Wallis Annenberg High School, can hold a two day retreat.

But don’t be turned off by the triviality of the subject. The real story here is the existence of the network that allows such transactions as these to be negotiated seamlessly, effortlessly, genially, without friction. The shared presupposition of the value of charter schools revealed by the fact that no one questions it. That’s ultimately what we’re learning about, and such knowledge, like all knowledge worth having, comes a speck at a time. Until a vast panorama is revealed, like pointillism. Turn the page for transcriptions and links to the emails!
Continue reading Johnathan Williams Of The Accelerated Schools Charter Empire And Marie Rumsey Of Zillionaire Terrorist Front The Central City Association Of Los Angeles — Working Together To Destroy Public Education In Los Angeles — One Of Their Weapons? — Commercial Real Estate Of Course — With Guest Appearances By Nightmare Zillionaire BID-Adjacent Clown Crew — Tom Gilmore — Adele Yellin — Steve Needleman — Wayne Ratkovich — Who Should Mostly Be In Literal Chains Rather Than Email Chains — But Here We Are In 21st Century Los Angeles →