Crazy Crawfish’s Blog: Industry, Not Parents, Are Secretly Deciding What is Best For Our Children
Please read this post by Mike Deshotels, one of my allies in the fight to protect our children, our teachers and our public education system. He details a private meeting among folks that see our children as nothing more than “Human Capital.” This is actually a department John White created at LDOE to describe teachers but it just as easily can be used to describe how these folks feel about our students. He even built a data system around this belief that we are not people, not individuals, just Human Cattle, er, I mean, Capital.
They don’t see children and parents as people, they see children as raw materials, and parents as “obstacles” to be overcome.
A small private meeting was held in Baton Rouge a couple of weeks ago including representatives of several highly influential power brokers who are dedicated to a major overhaul and privatization of our K-12 education system. These groups were very concerned that much of the Jindal reform legislation has either been declared unconstitutional by the courts or is still tied up in litigation. They are frustrated that the supporters of our public education system are fighting back against their sweeping “reforms”. They figure that they have only the rest of the Jindal administration in which to push through revisions of the law that will keep their reforms intact.
Groups that were engaged were LABI, CABL, BAEO, Stand for Children, New Schools for Baton Rouge, voucher and charter schools.
Stand for Children, LaBAEO, and New Schools for Baton Rouge were all groups created for reformers recruited to the LDOE to form pseudo parent groups to fool parents and educators into believe these initiatives are community and parent driven, when actually the opposite is true. They are all funded by out of state interests like the Walton Foundation, Gates, etc.
- Stand for (on) Children: Rayne Martin
- BAEO/LaBAEO: Kenneth Campbell
- New Schools for Baton Rouge: Chris Meyer
These folks all represent out of state interest, business interests, and opportunists, but not parents. They are meeting in secret to try and figure out how to deal with us.
As you can see from this new letter about Common Core from LDOE, Stand for Children has been playing the part of the shill for DOE policies and support for Common Core Curriculum and PARCC. This is the community involvement they claimed that made, but this is their own people!
Read this summary of Rayne Martin from Kathy on Diane Ravitch’s blog.
- Kathy says:
July 4, 2012 at 5:10 pmStand for Children now has a chapter in Louisiana. They are making themselves more visible through the leadership of Rayne Martin. Rayne’s bio includes ties to the Recovery School District and the writing of reforms before joining as the Executive Director of the state chapter.
In 2007 Rayne became the Chief of Staff at the Recovery School District in New Orleans. The RSD, created by legislation, transforms chronically low-performing schools through direct state intervention. A shining beacon of hope, the RSD schools have shown outstanding progress posting double gains in almost every grade and every subject.
Rayne was lead author of the Louisiana Education Reform Plan, a 200-page strategic plan outlining initiatives designed to dramatically improve student academic outcomes statewide by ensuring an effective teacher in every classroom and an effective leader in every school. In 2010 she became the Louisiana Department of Education’s Chief of Innovation, managing a large department responsible for creating reform awareness and building district- and state-level capacity to implement human capital, school turnaround and district support best practices. http://stand.org/louisiana/staff/rayne-martin
If Stand for Children has not been a player in your state, it will. It’s still quite new in Louisiana. Public school supporters hope to be able to muffle their voices, before they can add any more harm to education here that has not yet been done..
You are all being fooled by liars and shills. Do not let the Orwellian named “Stand for Children”, stand for you and your real children. Go to the BESE meetings, go to your local school board meetings, go to your legislators and demand to have your voices heard.
This blog post has been shared by permission from the author.
Readers wishing to comment on the content are encouraged to do so via the link to the original post.
Find the original post here:
The views expressed by the blogger are not necessarily those of NEPC.