Summer of Kiko Rogues Gallery Information

Grossmont
http://www.gea-action.org/
	Grossmont’s action page, with lots of articles detailing the board stalling on contract negotiations.
http://www.signonsandiego.com/
	San Diego Tribune feature on Superintendent Ryan. He was hand-picked by the Christian right school board. Ward Granger, former superintendent, was forced out by the board so Ryan could take over. Article notes conservative Christian bent of the board. Union members see Ryan as totalitarian and incompetent. Teachers walk out of his speech during staff meeting at Grossmont High. Bruce Seaman, GEA president, says Ryan has a credibility problem because, “When he visits the schools, no one believes what he says.”
http://www.signonsandiego.com/
	History of the school board and the labor dispute we detail in our article. Ron Nehring, a Republican consultant with Americans for Tax Reform, considered by many to be the most influential conservative think tank in Washington, was appointed by the board to replace Cass.
http://www.geocities.com/
	A detailed perspective on Grossmont’s board, including interesting insights into Cass’ inappropriate Santee comments
http://www.signonsandiego.com/
	Ryan threatens to layoff 100 teachers in 2005. Move is seen as bargaining ploy:
http://www.sdnewsnotes.com/
	Gary Cass blamed the Santee High School shooting on the students’ “disrespect for life.” Cass would go to Santee and hold pro-life rallies, showing detailed posters of aborted fetuses to students. This conservative blogger supported Cass’ actions.
http://www.youth-guard.org/
	Grossmont Board edits out segment of tolerance film showing a gay San Francisco police officer talking about discrimination based on sexual orientation.
http://www.cwfa.org/
	Jim Kelly, Board President and former Baptist minister, wins campaign on an anti-tolerance platform along with two others. The trio thanks God and grass-roots effort. Money quote from Kelly: “There is no doubt we have been sent a mandate.”
http://www.signonsandiego.com/
	Grossmont’s board is dominated by Christian Right. The best article on the dysfunction. They all ran on an anti-homosexuality platform. Kelly and Schriber are friends, or were, until Kelly tried to violate the Brown act. Nehring routinely publishes anti-union articles in conservative publications.
http://rawstory.com/
	Ron Nehring is a protégé of Grover Norquist, Chairman of the San Diego County GOP, wants to be state GOP chair, and has no children. He is part of the Christian coalition on the school board. He was also connected to conservative think tank National Center for Public Policy Research, famous for raising and funneling money to convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff and for creating a fake conservative African-American think tank, Project 21, with an entirely white governing board. Money quote comes from Terry Ryan, also a Christian, who responded to a Jewish teacher’s complaint that a board meeting fell on a Jewish Holy Day with a one sentence email: “I will pray for you.”
http://www.signonsandiego.com/
	Terry Ryan gets his pay raised to 196k. The devil is in the details. Ryan’s old base salary was around 145k, but “contract incentives” raised his pay to 172k. He still has the salary incentives, which makes his salary 226k! And the board calls that “below market”!
http://www.sco.ca.gov/
	Does Ryan deserve the big bucks? He didn’t do the necessary paperwork when accepting out of district transfers; a state audit by Controller Steve Westly found the district owed the state half a million dollars. Nobody from Grossmont responded to the State Controller’s office upon release of the findings.
http://www.sdcitybeat.com/
	Student publication points to some of the deeper problems of the board and Ryan. Former board member Crooks loses reelection bid to Christian conservatives Kelly, Wills, and Schrier. Once on the board, they take away the power of the student board rep to make and second motions. Who is the student board rep? Crooks’ son. The new board also looks to ban books like “The Color Purple” and “Beloved”. When this article was written, the board hadn’t passed a school bond measure in 35 years. In spite of the lower voter threshold (55%) allowed under Proposition 39, the Grossmont Board sticks with the higher threshold established under Proposition 13 because it isn’t conservative enough. Or, to quote the future board president: “Let’s face it—I’m a conservative guy,” said Kelly. “I’ve always been a conservative guy. These are my principles.”
http://www.opinionjournal.com/
	Terry Ryan claims to like Nehring’s plan to convert all schools to charters. Wall Street Journal negatively implies Steele Canyon’s charter board won’t be effective because teacher union members will sit on the board.
http://www.beyer2006.com/
	Conservative state assembly member for the 77th district, Jay La Suer, endorses Debbie Beyer, who meets his criteria of being “Pro-America, Pro-Family, Pro-Gun, and Pro-Life.” Grossmont’s Larry Urdhal and Priscilla Schreiber also endorse.
http://www.steelecanyoncharter.net/
	All the news that’s fit to print on Steele Canyon’s charter movement, including the letter from the La Mesa mayor demanding Terry Ryan apologize to the city for his blatant lie about Helix High School causing an increase in La Mesa gang activity.
Randy Ward
http://www.susanohanian.org/outrage_fetch.php?id=371
	The Oakland Outrage by Ohanian. Ward makes 240k a year, plus 100k for his 24-7 bodyguards. Here he moves to close a charter school, Growing Children, run by a person other than the Eli Broad-funded Aspire group
http://www.schooltakeover.com/frames.html
	State takeovers of school districts becomes such a point of contention a couple of documentary filmmakers shoot a movie about it. Randy Ward is part of the controversy.
http://slingshot.tao.ca/displaybi.php?86001
	Upon taking the job in Oakland, Randy Ward distributes a pamphlet to school administrators on how to fire a tenured teacher.
http://www.indybay.org/news/2005/12/1790516.php
	As contract negotiations stall, the threat of a strike looms. Ward puts out ads for scab teachers before the union is even strike legal. Ward advertises he will pay scabs $300.00 a day. A huge protest ensues.
http://www.unrulyrus.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=586&start=0
	Lots of politicians with ties to Ward, primarily his superiors O’Connell and former State Superintendent of Instruction Delaine Eastin, brag that Ward is masterful at managing budgets. However, when impasse was declared in Oakland and a non-partisan independent auditor reviewed the materials, Ward’s bean-counting reputation was called into question. The money quote: The district’s information "was often incomplete, inaccurate and unverifiable (and) reflected more of its ongoing internal accounting problems ... than any attempt to understate its actual financial position.
http://stoprandyward.com
	Stop Randy Ward.com says it all: Broad’s connection to Ward and O’Connell, a different perspective of Ward’s tenure in Compton, and perspectives on Ward’s autocratic management style
http://www.saccourt.com/courtrooms/trulings/dept54/d54-2006-0608-0900.pdf
	Randy Ward accused of sexual harassment while superintendent of Compton Unified. The money quote: “Randy Ward touched, winked and licked his lips at [the plaintiff].”
http://transformeducation.blogspot.com/
	Oakland has the most charter schools in the state—most came around during Ward’s tenure, circumstantial evidence that Ward is giving schools away to Eli Broad.
Jack O’Connell
http://www.latimes.com/
	Knopp takes a close 2nd. She’s a Green Party member. O’Connell raises a million dollar war chest. Why?
http://www.susanohanian.org/show_outrages.html?id=6088
	Jack O’Connell and Eli Broad connection from Susan Ohanian:
Eli Broad
http://www.bayces.org/advocacy/press.htm
	Bay Area Coalition for Equitable Schools, a non-profit front for “charter reformers,” shows the connection between Broad, O’Connell and Ward through their collective support of the Expect Success! small-school initiative through this press release.
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20010604/cooper
	Villariagosa, mayor of LA, gets support from Eli Broad!
http://www.broadacademy.org/faq/faq.php
	The Eli Broad Academy, which promotes hiring education outsiders as superintendents.
http://www.substancenews.com/content/view/173/81/
	Susan Ohanian writes an excellent column exposing the true motivation of Eli Broad. She cites Broad’s desire to reform education with an eye to students being business minded. She also notes some of the folks Broad sees as exemplary educational leaders: Arlene Ackerman, Joel Klein, and Alan Bersin, all Kiko winners.
http://www.hadd.com/websites.php
	Eli Broad pushes for improvements in education quality in order for students to be successful in the global economy. Broad’s company, however, seems to have its own problem with quality.
The New York Rubber Room
http://www.nycp.org/
	Union joins business leaders and Bloomberg in getting rid of rubber rooms—while speeding up teacher dismissals. Ironically, New York is also finding it difficult to retain good teachers! Duh!
http://www.educationnews.org/
	An interesting perspective of the Rubber Room — called teacher prisons
http://www.uft.org/
	Falsely accused man sent to “Rubber room”
http://www.reformk12.com/
	A “Reform ed” website mentioning a flimsy rubber room case.
http://cgood.org/burdenquestion-6.html
	The “Common Good” Burden chart.
http://www.educationnext.org/20054/12.html
	Hoover Institute, California’s premiere conservative think tank, suggests Bloomberg’s dictatorial policies have destroyed teacher morale.
http://www.readinglady.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=48
	New York’s Reading War: Bloomberg promises to fix up New York’s schools and institute a reading program that includes phonics. Klein institutes a whole-language with minimal phonics instead after he hires career superintendent Diana Lam as his deputy for instruction. The program, called “Balanced Literacy,” sparks controversy as reform advocates demand instituting scripted phonics reading programs as the best method for reform. If the reform advocates also blame incompetent teachers for the failure of New York’s schools, Team Unruly wonders what degree of administrative-determined competency is required to teach a scripted program?
http://www.endteacherabuse.info/NYJail.html
	Notes from the NAPTA Underground. A teacher incarcerated in a Rubber Room describes the scene. She wonders why they just don’t use cattle cars.
http://www.nytimes.com/
	Mr. Kaufman, an outstanding, multi-award winning teacher on Riker’s Island, becomes a union rep. He blows the whistle on how bad school services are on Riker’s. Riker’s principal, Frank Dody, uses a technicality to send Kaufman to a Brooklyn Rubber Room for three months.
http://www.nydailynews.com/front/story/308469p-263850c.html
	New York Daily News editorial page believes incompetent teachers like the Rubber Room because they get full pay for doing nothing—and for that reason, the rubber rooms should go.
http://cgood.org/schools-newscommentary-inthenews-190.html
	Common Good, NY Daily News’ source, says it takes 83 steps to fire a tenured teacher.
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/ideas_opinions/story/307706p-263290c.html
	NY Daily News finds the most egregious examples of teacher misconduct to argue against what they believe is a system that goes to any measure to protect incompetent teachers. They essentially call for the elimination of a teacher’s due process rights. Two large false analogies: they use the union president’s name to define a rule in the pejorative (Weingarten’s rule), a rule that simply says a teacher has the right to have another union member present when accusations are made—standard with unions across the country. They use the false private sector analogy as well: “Most normal organizations would fire an executive for coming on to a subordinate.” (full quote: Most normal organizations would fire an executive who came on to a subordinate the way Hershkowitz and this music teacher did - without a rubber room, without a Weingarten rule, without years of hearings and without a doubt as to the need to enforce proper behavior between adults, let alone between an adult and a minor.)
http://www.nctq.org/
	A “quality education” website gives synopses of two seemingly unrelated stories. The first, bad teachers get to go to a paradise called “The Rubber Room” — and that paradise costs the city 20 million dollars a year to run. The second? There seems to be a mass exodus of teachers fleeing the New York City school system.
http://daily.nysun.com/Repository/
	Bloomberg and Klein are noted for having created a toxic working environment. The NY DOE is seen as the “Ministry of Fear.” :Office of the Public Advocate official Betsy Gotbaum releases a report on Special Education Programs. Since her office is not part of the school system, the DOE files a Freedom of Information Act request to force her to turn over the documents, emails, phone logs, etc. used in compiling her data. DOE is generating an enemies list.
http://parentadvocates.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=article&articleID=6986
	David Pakter, an award winning 37-year teaching veteran, works at a high school that serves a large minority population. The school’s principal closes the music program and offers an after-school music program instead. The after-school program does not serve neighborhood kids; it serves predominately white students from an affluent elementary school. Pakter videotapes the elementary schools students during their lesson, intending to blow the whistle on the principal. The Principal demands Pakter turn over the video; Pakter refuses. He is sent to the Rubber Room and ordered to undergo a psychiatric evaluation. Scroll down further and discover that his salary was frozen in an attempt to force him to quit. The principal also tried to pay off the DOE-appointed psychologist in an attempt to declare Pakter “bi-polar.” A year after his Rubber Room trip, the charges are dropped.
http://parentadvocates.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=article&articleID=6215
	A laundry list detailing various stories related to New York’s “Culture of Fear”. Whistleblowers are punished for speaking out
Larry Aceves
http://leadershipassociates.org/partner_bios_content.html#laceves
	A whole list of accolades paints a rosy picture of this Kiko winner, but don’t let Larry’s list of awards fool you. He is a partner in an education head-hunting firm, which tells us he’s got the best interests of his wallet at heart.
http://www.acsa.org/news/news_detail.cfm?type=periodical&id=1776
	Larry Aceves receives the Marcus Foster Memorial Award from the Association of California School Administrators (ACSA) in 2005. Aceves served as the ACSA president in 2002. Coincidence? According to the press release, Larry fits the profile of being a “skilled manager of change whose style involves broad community and professional involvement.” The award is also given to a person who “respects everyone as human beings,” which amply explains why Larry has allowed contract negotiations in Franklin McKinley to go to impasse. He also respects human beings so much that he uses district funds to pay his wife to implement a mind-numbing program that drives veteran teachers into neighboring districts.
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0HUL/is_2_32/ai_114006153
	Larry writes an article about school success filled with flowery adjectives and no substance.
http://www.sfbg.com/36/37/news_caltesting.html
	When the state began mandated standardized testing using the STAR system, they included a politically correct “opt out” clause for parents choosing to excuse their children from the exams. Larry Aceves suspended a teacher at J.W. Fair middle school for distributing the “opt out” information in her class!