Ex-S.F. Edison principal takes over Oakland USD
The state-appointed administrator who had been running Oakland schools just resigned suddenly, and today her interim successor was named: Vincent Matthews, last in the news running San Francisco's Edison Charter Academy. His biggest achievement was snookering the press (though not the S.F. Chron) into repeating (unchecked and unquestioned) the PR line that Edison was "a successful school in a failing district" at a time when it actually had the dead-lowest test scores in the San Francisco Unified School District -- so that was indeed quite an accomplishment.
Labels: Charters, SFUSD Politics
3 Comments:
Thanks for posting this Caroline. This is horrifying news for Oakland students and parents and their communities.
Check out the latest Edspresso commentary and blogs!
We've exposed the grassroots power of charter parents and teachers in California who overturned Speaker Nunez' and other anti-charter administrators' attempts to lasso CA charters with moonlight politics.
Offer your thoughts on the wildfire spread of teacher merit pay across 22 states and the unions staunchly resisting to save nothing more than their power and influence.
Have a great week,
Melanie Cameron
Managing Editor, Edspresso
The controversy Melanie refers to was a bill that would have curtailed the ability of county boards of education and the state Board of Education to force charters into unwilling school districts.
How "grassroots" the charter advocates can be is a question, considering that they have behind them the full force of the Bush Administration, the mighty right-wing so-called think tanks (actually advocacy groups) such as the Hoover Institution, the Cato Institute etc., and the wealthy foundations such as Gates, Broad, Wal-Mart et al. When those forces line up aiming to crush educators and elected school board members, the outcome is not exactly in question.
At a Commonwealth Club panel discussion of charters a couple of years ago, I asked the panelists if a charter school can have a productive working relationship with a school district into which the charter has been forced against the school district's will.
Caprice Young, the head lobbyist for charters schools in California, was surprisingly unprepared for that question. She hemmed and hawed and stammered and finally got out some comment like, "Well, they'd just have to learn to get along." She didn't exactly make a ringing case for the resounding success of forcing charter schools into unwilling school districts.
SO that's the other side of the triumph that Edspresso describes.
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