{"id":186731,"date":"2013-11-04T20:02:00","date_gmt":"2013-11-05T01:02:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2013\/11\/04\/tomorrow-im-going-to-write-about-school-board-elections-in-bridgeport-fing-connecticut\/"},"modified":"2013-11-04T20:02:00","modified_gmt":"2013-11-05T01:02:00","slug":"tomorrow-im-going-to-write-about-school-board-elections-in-bridgeport-fing-connecticut","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2013\/11\/04\/tomorrow-im-going-to-write-about-school-board-elections-in-bridgeport-fing-connecticut\/","title":{"rendered":"Tomorrow, I’m Going to Write About \u2026\u2026\u2026 School Board Elections?!?!!? In Bridgeport F%$#ing Connecticut?!?!?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Why yes, I will be writing about the returns in Bridgeport, because it is ground zero of attempts by the Education-Industrial complex to turn our school children into profit centers for Wall Street<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Education reform lightning rod Paul Vallas \u2013 who courted controversy helming school districts in Philadelphia, New Orleans and Chicago \u2014 isn\u2019t on the ballot tomorrow. But a school board election in Bridgeport, Conn. \u2013 the latest district to tap Vallas to oversee reforms \u2014 could effectively spell his fate. Tomorrow\u2019s vote will offer the latest referendum on the bipartisan, billionaire-backed mainstream education reform movement, and on a multi-year effort by local Democrats \u2013 aided by the likes of Michael Bloomberg and Michelle Rhee \u2014 to defeat or disempower labor-backed dissenters.<\/span>

<\/span> \u201cAs I\u2019ve gone around the country, I always point to Bridgeport as one of the signs that the people can beat the power,\u201d former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Education and high-profile reform critic Diane Ravitch told activists on a conference call last month. Tuesday\u2019s election is the latest round in a long-running war over ed reform, and who should shape it, in the largest city in one of the country\u2019s most unequal states.<\/span>

<\/span> For the sake of shielding Vallas and his agenda, activists allege that the city\u2019s Democratic machine has acted indifferent or even hostile to defeating Republicans tomorrow.<\/span>

<\/span> \u201cWhat\u2019s at stake is the future direction of Bridgeport schools,\u201d said Connecticut Working Families Party executive director Lindsay Farrell, citing issues including testing and class size. \u201cAnd I think, in a broader sense, the direction of public education in this country.\u201d<\/p>\n

As I\u2019ve reported, Bridgeport\u2019s school board became a battleground in 2009, when two of its Republican members were ousted in an election by candidates from the labor-backed Working Families Party. While Bridgeport is overwhelmingly Democratic, by law no more than two-thirds of its nine school board seats can be held by the same party. While the board\u2019s Democrats and Republicans had often seen eye to eye on education, the WFP didn\u2019t. \u201cThey were very effective at questioning the status quo,\u201d Bridgeport Education Association vice president Rob Traber told Salon last year, and when Mayor Bill Finch\u2019s superintendent pushed unpopular cuts in 2011, the Democratic machine and its business allies got \u201cafraid that they might lose control of the board.\u201d <\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Vallas has been failing down for years, practicing pump and dump, where focuses on standardized tests to the exclusion of real educations, eats his seed corn, and is forced out when it all implodes, when he blames the teachers.<\/p>\n

All the while, he sells<\/strike> gives the schools to the hedge fund managers to that they can loot the public school systems.<\/p>\n

His tenure in Connecticut it gets even worse, because he did not meet the legal requirements to be CEO, so they set up a no-show phony class for him to check off the necessary boxes. <\/p>\n

Interestingly enough, following the WFP victory in the Democratic primaries, the Democratic Party establishment appears to be pulling strings for the Republicans:<\/p>\n

The WFP notes a sharp contrast between the Democratic Party\u2019s efforts on behalf of its pro-Vallas candidates in the primary, and its approach to tomorrow\u2019s showdown with the GOP. \u201cThe Democratic Party put a lot of resources into the mayor\u2019s slate in the primary, and a lot of money,\u201d said Farrell. \u201cWe haven\u2019t really seen them doing anything to help the challengers who won in the primary in the general election.\u201d She told Salon that \u201ceducation budgets are large chunks of money, and you know, we\u2019ve been really stunned by the lengths to which Mayor Bill Finch, and the Democratic Chair Mario Testa, and Paul Vallas will go to maintain power over those budgets.\u201d<\/span>

<\/span> Some Bridgeport progressives take their allegations another step. Retired Judge Carmen Lopez, the local activist who filed the lawsuit against Vallas, told Salon she believes the mayor and his allies were \u201cworking to make sure that the Republicans win\u201d because \u201cthat\u2019s the only way that Finch could get what he wants, which is for Vallas to stay in power.\u201d Voter Jessica Allen told Salon that City Council president Thomas McCarthy visited her house and, when she asked about education, told her that while \u201cunder normal circumstances I would never tell anybody to vote Republican,\u201d in this case \u201cyou should be voting for [GOP contender] Larcheveque.\u201d Allen said McCarthy told her the mayor \u201ctried to make these fantastic changes, but everything that we try to do keeps getting blocked \u2026\u201d (Allen, a registered independent, told Salon she thinks \u201cthe schools are really screwed up\u201d and \u201cI don\u2019t know what the right answer is.\u201d) But Council member McCarthy told Salon in an email that he was \u201cencouraging my constituents to vote all of Row B, the Democratic line.\u201d<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

When you consider the proportion of a typical municipal budget that goes to education, it’s clear that there are a whole bunch of politicians in Bridgeport who are siding with the folks dedicated to ripping off the taxpayers.<\/p>\n

Yes, I’m also wondering if the Republicans’ attempt to vote Ken Cuccinelli into the Governor’s office, but I really think that Bridgeport is a bigger deal.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Why yes, I will be writing about the returns in Bridgeport, because it is ground zero of attempts by the Education-Industrial complex to turn our school children into profit centers for Wall Street: Education reform lightning rod Paul Vallas \u2013 who courted controversy helming school districts in Philadelphia, New Orleans and Chicago \u2014 isn\u2019t on …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1005,970,968,1000,978],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-186731","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business","category-corruption","category-education","category-elections","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186731"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=186731"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186731\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=186731"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=186731"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=186731"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}