Getting to know the Schwarzenegger-appointed, Broad-connected, pro-charter-dominated State Board of Education

Arnold Schwarzenegger has been working overtime to expand charter schools in California. Since 2004 on their behalf, he has secured federal funding, removed school district approval obstacles, supported state bond funding, signed legislation to provide charters with tax exempt and low cost facility financing for school facilities, and removed roadblocks so charters can access millions in construction project funds (12/07/2009 press release). In addition, Schwarzenegger has insured that the California State Board of Education (SBE) is continually loaded with pro-charter members.

I suggest you take a moment to contrast Schwarzenegger’s intense, and near single-minded focus on fostering the expansion of charter schools (which serve less than 4.6% of the children or 285,617 kids) with his extreme neglect of the schools attended by the remaining 95.4% (5,966,394 kids) of California’s children. EdData figures here.

The SBE sets K-12 education policy in the areas of standards, curriculum, instructional materials, assessment, and accountability. It also authorizes charter schools and has been involved with developing charter school legislation. There are 11 members on the SBE, ten of whom are appointed by the Governor, one of which is a student. The eleventh member is the State Superintendent of Public Instruction who serves as the SBE's executive officer and secretary. SBE members are unpaid. Appointments are subject to confirmation by the state Senate.

Ending their State Board of Education terms just recently are Rae Belisle and Jorge Lopez.

RAE BELISLE, the recently-stepped-down CEO of EdVoice, had been appointed by Schwarzenegger in February 2009. She was a full SBE participant for one year until March 2010 when the Senate refused to give her a confirmation hearing. They had received staunch opposition to Belisle. For instance, this was the first time in its 39-year history that the Association of California School Administrators had taken an active stance against a state board appointee, according to Corey Johnson, K-12 Education Reporter of California Watch (a reporting initiative of the Center for Investigative Reporting). Belisle is a strong charter school advocate, who had previously given controversial legal advice to the SBE.

JORGE LOPEZ, the executive director of the Oakland Charter Academy, had been appointed in March 2009 and fully participated on the SBE until February 2010 when he abruptly withdrew his name. His withdrawal coincided with the point in the senate confirmation process when his financial documents and business arrangements were being reviewed and concerns were arising about complicated business and real estate arrangements with his partner Ben Chavis (of American Indian Public Charter School fame).

Three new Swarzenegger appointments are awaiting confirmation.

ALAN ARKATOV who, among other activities, sits on the board for Alliance for College-Ready Public Schools, a charter management organization which has opened 16 charter schools in the Los Angeles area. Source here. Alliance received a total of $2,525,000 from the Broad Foundation between 2006 and 2008. Alliance has received $4,635,100 from the NewSchools Venture Fund since 2003.

BEN AUSTIN is an assistant city attorney for Los Angeles and the executive director of the Los Angeles Parents Union (formerly the Small Schools Alliance, aka the Parent Revolution). He used to work for Green Dot Public Schools and also served as a Deputy Mayor under Richard Riordan. Austin was involved with the “Parent Trigger,” an initiative where if enough parents can be convinced, pressured, and tricked to sign a petition, a school will be closed down and replaced with a charter. Eli Broad contributed nearly 50% of the funding for the launch of the LAPU and gave a total of $4,469,040 to Green Dot from 2005-2008. Read my 2/21/2010 entry The "Parent Trigger" and its connections to the phony LA Parents Union, Green Dot, Steve Barr, and Eli Broad

(Update: Caroline Grannan writes, "At one school where Ben Austin's Parent Revolution has succeeded in getting enough signatures to take action against the school, the community member who's the lead spokesperson for the successful effort is an alumni parent, not a current parent at the school." Also, follow Robert Skeels' valuable research about Ben Austin by starting here.)

JEANNIE OROPEZA, program budget manager for the California Department of Finance, was also nominated, but on April 28 the Senate Rules Committee recommended rejecting her nomination because her job at the Department of Finance presented a conflict of interest.

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The confirmed members sitting on the SBE with strong ties to charter schools and/or Eli Broad are:

TED MITCHELL (SBE President) is the President and CEO of NewSchools Venture Fund, an organization which supplies charter management organizations with extra funding. He has been a member of the CSE since 2007 and was reappointed in February 2010. Mitchell has multiple strong connections to billionaire Eli Broad.

Mitchell's NSVF salary was $480,000 in 2007 (Form 990). NSVF received a total of $9,115,000 from the Broad Foundation (EIN 954686318) from 2002 to 2008.

Also, 2002 news reports revealed that Eli Broad had offered to donate $10 million to Occidental College in an attempt to persuade Mitchell (then O.C. President) to run against a L.A. school board trustee. Furthermore, Mitchell revealed to his trustees that that former Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan had also offered to donate money to cover a top-level executive position at the college if Mitchell ran for the seat. Mitchell did not run. Read here to learn about the close relationship between Broad and Riordan as longtime friends and allies in ed deform.

YVONNE CHAN is the principal of a conversion charter school in LA, the Vaughn Next Century Learning Center. Chan was appointed in 2005 and reappointed in 2008. Her term ends in 2012. Vaughn International Studies Academy, the high school at Chan’s “learning center,” is in the International Studies Schools Network (ISSN or Global Studies Schools), a charter management organization started by the Asia Society in 2003. Both Chan and Eli Broad have been speakers for the Asia Society. Broad donated $12,500 to the Asia Society in 2007 and $2,500 in 2008.

Schwarzenegger has been generous to Chan. From a May 2008 press release:

Today at one of the nation’s leading charter schools, the Vaughn Next Century Learning Center, Governor Schwarzenegger announced the allocation of $463 million in Proposition 1D funds for new construction and modernization projects for 29 charter schools statewide. The Vaughn Next Century Learning Center will receive $6 million of the $463 million to build seven new classrooms for 189 students at the center’s high school, Vaughn International Studies Academy…

…“This funding is exactly what our kids need to continuing excelling at Vaughn,” said Vaughn Next Century Learning Center Principal Dr. Yvonne Chan. “I will now be able to move forward with the new classrooms my students need and make improvements to our campus so we can continue to make a difference in this community.”

JOHNATHAN XAVIER WILLIAMS is a charter management organization founder and co-director (The Accelerated School network in South Central Los Angeles). He was appointed in 2004, and reappointed in March 2007. His term ends in January 2011. Williams is a member of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools (NAPCS), the California Charter Schools Association (CCSA) and the Black Alliance for Educational Options (BAEO). (Update: See article from 1/2007 "Charter School [The Accelerated School] is in default on $9.9 million LAUSD Loan", h/t Caroline Grannan)

DAVID P. LOPEZ, President of The National Hispanic University in East San Jose, was appointed to the SBE in July 2006, and reappointed in March 2010. He is awaiting reconfirmation. The National Hispanic University is a small, private non-profit institution which also runs the Latino College Preparatory Academy, a charter high school, adjacent to its campus.

RUTH BLOOM (SBE Vice President) was appointed in 2004 and reappointed in February 2007. Her term ends in January 2011. Bloom is a partner in a jewelry company (AR Designs), and is heavily involved with collecting art, art education, and art museums, both in Southern California and Sun Valley, Idaho.

From the 1990s until February 2009, Bloom served with Eli Broad on the board of trustees for the LA The Museum of Contemporary Art. Broad is LACMA’s Founding Chairman and Life Trustee.

And here's something interesting. In September 2007, Ruth Bloom (listed as Arts Educator from Marina Del Rey), a stated Democrat, gave $20,000 to Schwarzenegger, according to ElectionTrack.

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Only two SBE members appear to not have allegiances to the promotion of charter schools or direct connections to Eli Broad or the Broad Foundation.

JIM ASCHWANDEN was appointed in October 2006, and reappointed in February 2008. Aschwanden is executive director of the California Agricultural Teachers’ Association, and serves on advisory councils for Cal Poly State University, San Luis Obispo and Chico State University. In addition, he has served as Vice-Chair of the Vocational Alliance, a consortium of educational organizations supporting Career and Technical Education, for the past several years.

GREGORY W. JONES was appointed in March 2008. His term ends January 2012. Jones is a State Farm insurance executive. In addition, he is chair of the California Business Roundtable and chair of California Business for Education Excellence.


Read comments to the same posting here.

“The Broad Effect”: Part Two

Read Part One here.
Because of his immense wealth and interest, billionaire Eli Broad is one member in a very small set of non-elected, extremely wealthy individuals who have acquired the power to determine U.S. public education policy and the future of our public education system. Most of the masses are not aware that public schools are being dismantled by the coup. For those who have caught on and are reading this, I offer you some information about him, all easily accessible on the internet. Just consider "The Broad Effect": Part Two my variation of the popular TV show, ""Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous."

The Inauguration Party thrown by Broad for President Obama

Broad, a longtime Democratic supporter, was so thrilled at the election of Barack Obama that he threw what was described as “the most exclusive dinner of the week” to salute his friends who are members of the new president's cabinet. As the New York Times reported:

Anyone who is anyone in Washington was at Tuesday night’s pre-ball dinner, thrown by the California billionaire Eli Broad at the Park Hyatt Hotel to honor members of the new Obama administration.
The guest list looked like a who’s who list of Washington old and new: Hillary Clinton, Mr. Obama’s choice for secretary of state and her husband, former President Bill Clinton; Lawrence Summers, the former treasury secretary and new White House chief economics adviser; Paul Volcker, former chairman of the Federal Reserve; Arne Duncan, Mr. Obama’s pick for Education Secretary, Leon Panetta, the nominee for director of the C.I.A.; Vernon Jordan, the power lawyer, as well as media celebrities like Larry King and Charlie Rose.

Jim Horn at Schools Matter expressed the feelings of betrayal felt by many when Obama selected Arne Duncan:

While many of us were out busting our humps to gather up a few dollars and votes for the change we thought we could believe in, the Harvard boys were cutting backroom deals with the multi-billionaire oligarchs to fully engage their plan to corporatize American public education, beginning with the urban schools.

(If you clicked on Horn's link, did you enjoy looking at the photo of Arne Duncan hanging out with Broad at the party?)

Eli Broad’s living quarters, lifestyle, etc.

Eli Broad’s primary residence is on Oakmont Drive in Los Angeles. (Brentwood, zip 90049). This would give Broad about a 5 mile & 11 minute commute to the Broad Foundation’s headquarters located at 10900 Wilshire Blvd. (at the corner of Westwood and Wilshire, zip 90024).

In June 2009, Broad threw a party at his home in honor of the 40th anniversary of Art Basel, an international contemporary art exhibition ("the Olympics of the art world") held each year in Basel, Switzerland, and in Miami, Florida. W Magazine describes the event:

Almost everything about a recent dinner at Eli Broad’s Los Angeles home in honor of the 40th anniversary of Art Basel was outsize, starting with the estate itself. Visitors approached the mansion—designed in part by Frank Gehry—through a private sculpture park, then entered a sitting room the size of a hotel lobby before descending a stairway into a series of double-height galleries. “This is bigger than the Gagosian Gallery,” said fashion-world fixture Richard Buckley as he arrived at the first subterranean white cube, with its cranelike Calder sculpture and pair of giant Chuck Close portraits.

High-end art collectors like Eli Broad pursue collecting as a financial investment. The article continues:

Throughout the evening, Broad loomed almost as large. “Times are tough,” he allowed, when he rose to address his guests. “But we got a lot of great things in the early Nineties, which were also tough times.”

Look at a slideshow of the amazing art party here.

As an aside, Broad’s Brentwood residence is only about 10 minutes from the Getty Center, a stunning and relatively new major art museum. J. Paul Getty (1892-1976) was an American industrialist who founded the Getty Oil Company, making him one of the world’s richest-ever men. He was an avid art collector.


Incidentally, the Getty Center was designed by Richard Meier, the same architect who Broad commissioned to design a Malibu beach house in 1999. On Meier’s Web site, scroll down near the end to see several photos of the house which is located on the Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu (zip 90265) along the famed Carbon Beach, “…the highest value beach neighborhood on Pacific Coast Highway…” where:

Homes here tend to be carefully designed by leading architects and adhere to very tasteful standards. Privacy has a high value along with insulation from PCH noise. Money, of course, is no object. When billionaire entrepreneur Eli Broad planned his Carbon Beach house he employed Getty Center architect Richard Meier to design a home on two adjoining parcels. Broad paid $2.5 million for one lot, then owned by Freddy DeMann, Madonna's former manager. It had 45 feet of beach frontage -- the 1952 three-bedroom 3,000-square-foot house was demolished. Next door was another 55 feet of beach frontage Broad bought for $2.6 million, including an 1,800-square-foot house built in 1955, also demolished.

But back in Brentwood...

In 2002, Barry Munitz sold a piece of Getty Trust-owned land to his close friend Eli Broad at a substantial discount. The LA Times reported the story:

The J. Paul Getty Trust sold a valuable piece of Brentwood real estate in 2002 for $700,000 less than its appraised value to billionaire philanthropist Eli Broad, a close friend and professional associate of Getty Chief Executive Barry Munitz, according to trust documents and officials.
Munitz directed his aides to delay listing the property so that he could discuss a transaction directly with Broad, despite what Getty records call "many requests to purchase the property," which is adjacent to Broad's hilltop estate.

and

Not long after Munitz took the Getty's helm, Broad invited Munitz to sail along the coast of southern France on his yacht, mixing recreation with visits to a string of small museums.
" 'Don't you think it would be nice if you actually knew something about what you are about to get into?' " Munitz recalled Broad, a noted art collector, teasingly asking him. Munitz came to the Getty with no background in the art world.
It was Munitz's first invitation to join Broad's "boat trip summers" and travels to such places as Croatia, Greece and Cuba with a circle of entrepreneurs and philanthropists. The group sometimes included then Los Angeles Mayor Richard J. Riordan and billionaire investor Ronald W. Burkle.
Back in Los Angeles, Munitz and Broad's collaborations in the arts, education and politics continued.

Did you notice Richard Riordan’s name popping up?

Riordan (b. 1930) is a longtime and good friend of Eli Broad (b. 1933). They have a strong common interest in LA civic and business affairs. Both are also strong promoters of charter schools and school choice, and, in particular these days, with supporting the candidacy of State Senator Gloria Romero for State Superintendent of Public Instruction.


Riordan served as Mayor of Los Angeles (1993–2001) and as the California Secretary of Education (2003–2005). Originally trained as a lawyer, he had become wealthy by founding a series of private equity firms which focused on venture capital investments and leveraged buyout transactions. Riordan ran for Governor of California unsuccessfully in 2002. The funding priorities of his foundation are listed as “…technology, school choice, and leadership development programs.”


Ravitch (p. 197) reminds us that, “Foundations exist to enable extremely wealthy people to shelter a portion of their capital from taxation...”


It is important to mention, that when Riordan was mayor, he employed Ben Austin as one of his Deputy Mayors. Austin, also once employed by Green Dot, has been serving as the Executive Director of the Parents Union (aka LAPU/aka Parents Revolution, a phony grassroots organization) for nearly two years. All those connections are reviewed here and here. (Maybe someday I'll write a book!)

In addition to yachting together in exotic locales, Riordan once owned a house next to Broad’s beach house along Malibu’s Billionaires Beach (aka Carbon Beach). It seems to now be officially owned by Riordan’s estranged wife, Nancy. At times, residents in this neighborhood have been annoyed with noisy, paparazzi-attracting parties thrown by the likes of Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton at beach houses which they've rented:

"On any given Monday morning, Eli Broad would be calling city hall with a list of what he'd had to put up with the previous weekend," said Jay Marose, a PR guru who worked alongside Fingerprint Communications in developing the Polaroid Beach House.

Billionaires Beach residents have also been annoyed by members of the masses who have demanded public beach access. That particular conflict seems to have been resolved:

Last Monday, two white wooden doors swung open for the first time onto Carbon Beach, courtesy of David Geffen, the DreamWorks co-founder, who owns a large shingled compound on the ocean and has the option of borrowing suntan lotion from billionaire neighbors like Eli Broad and Haim Saban. The mile-and-a-half-long beach, among the first glimpses of Malibu on the drive up from Los Angeles, is public by law, but to get to it, visitors must find a way to penetrate a wall of multimillion-dollar homes. [Here’s the solution to that puzzle, just in case you're in the area and feel like going for a beach stroll.]

Lastly, Broad has a New York City residence located on the 33rd floor of the Sherry-Netherland Hotel on 5th Avenue (zip 10022), adjacent to the bottom of Central Park on the east side. He had been trying to sell it and had even reduced the asking price, but ended up taking it off the market last June. Of course it is lovely, with a view of Central Park. Photos of the interior can be seen here. 




UPDATE: More than two years after listing it, Broad's luxury apartment was finally sold in March 2011 for $8 million. Its original asking price was $15 million.

Eli Broad’s wealth was most recently listed at $5.2 billion. Imagine that you are a person with a net worth of $50,000, and you happen to drop a penny and watch it roll away. No big deal, right? Broad would have the same relative mental response as you did, if he tossed $1040 up in the air and watched it blow away.


By this comparison I am just trying to describe the degree of relative wealth; it's nearly incomprehensibly vast, which is why Broad is winning, and public school devotees are loosing.

Hopefully, the picture I’ve now painted sufficiently illustrates the nature and lifestyle of Broad, the man. It doesn't seem right to me that this unelected individual should get to control so much of the direction of the future of our city’s, my state’s, and my country’s public education, education for which ALL taxpayers, each of them as hard-working as Eli Broad, are paying their fair share, and know about the realities and needs in the public schools much more than he ever will. Does it seem right to you?

Is there anyone with political power who would be willing to stand up and stop this anti-democratic force?