Public education is no stranger to the corporate forces that rule and orchestrate their control and assault on it. It is not only detrimental to the entire system.
The corporate forces realize this and of course, they are not stupid.
They realize that their procedure of divide and conquer was backfiring at them cohesively.
It was breaking down as the teachers being blamed revolted through unions which brought everything into the right perspective.
The strong alliance created between teachers and parents to fight the system in Chicago – especially in the case of Black and Latino parents overruled the forces.
Similarly, another alliance is being formed in Philadelphia with at least 23 schools being shut down and naturally getting handed over to charter school organizations.
The anger is being directed towards school districts by revolting in the closures itself.
Resources are being denied as funds are being restricted. Everything is being directed at these corporate forces and they understand it. So now they are going to go ahead with the same strategy but fine-tune the material by regrouping and delving deeper into their packaging.
Rather than blaming teachers directly, the new packaging will focus on improving teaching practices.
With excess money at hand, they are willing to burn it as much needed.
It is a slick move at their end. In Oakland, they are going the extra mile to garner enough support from the community by manipulating the audience with their slick speeches and lucrative moves.
The Superintendent of the OUSD – Tony Smith – is already infamous as a talker. He is a good orator and can articulate his words with ease. The same cannot be said about the pedigree of the founder who also runs the GO Public Schools.
Role of Jonathan Klein
The man behind the GO Public Schools is Jonathan Klein who is also the Executive Director of GO Public Schools.
Visit the following site to get a profile of Jonathan Klein’s at the Broad Foundation:
http://www.broadcenter.org/residency/network/profile/jonathan-klein
There is no other individual of his merit whose resume resonates the thorough operations of the corporate billionaires — especially the Broad Foundation (and the local Rogers Foundation) — and how they have successfully planned and executed the crumbling of the public education system in Oakland.
This is a known move by the entire Oakland community, especially during the OUSD state takeover and its aftermath that is still prevalent.
Jonathan Klein was the student body president at Yale. He has various positions to his name including being a TFA teacher in Compton, California. He ran for the Bay Area Tech for America from 1999 to 2003 by coming to Oakland in the same year. He has also studied and taught extensively at UC Berkeley’s business school and has also secured his MBA degree in addition to teaching several business courses.
He was further installed in the OUSD by Eli Broad as he did his Broad Foundation residency from 2006 to 2008 serving as a Special Assistant to all of the three State Administrators – Randolph Ward, Kimberly Statham, and Vincent Matthews.
Jonathan Klein departed from the OUSD in 2008. Further, he went on to become the Chief Program Officer at the Rogers Family Foundation. It is also known as Oakland’s own home-grown corporate billionaire public education-bashing foundation.
The Foundation is known to constantly support schools, charter management organizations, and non-profit organizations that play a pivotal role in creating life-changing measures to promote the lives of Oakland students.
Jonathan Klein played a smart move in utilizing the time and resources made available to him at the Rogers Foundation to stabilize the connections he built at Yale, the Broad Foundation and even TFA. He also followed the OUSD top management to create the groundwork for the GO Public Schools. It has been more than a year since he left the Rogers Foundation and became the first-ever Executive Director of GO Public Schools.
Know Other People Too
A similar suit was followed by T. Gary Rogers who was the CEO of Dreyers. He pummelled through the toxic “Expect Success” initiative on OUSD during the state takeover. In the same fashion,
Brian Rogers who is now the Executive Director of the Rogers Foundation, and is also the founder of the Lighthouse Charter Schools had a rather troublesome run in the school board which was scheduled on a corporate deform agenda.
This entailed the old school evaluation of teacher test scores, shutting down failing schools in the public school and the formation of more charter schools in Oakland.