Miramonte Elementary, the largest public elementary school in the Los Angeles area and the second largest in the state of California, has been rocked in recent weeks by a scandal involving alleged inappropriate acts against students committed by teachers.
Mark Berndt, a teacher at the school for more than 30 years, has been charged with 23 counts of committing lewd acts. Another Miramonte teacher, Martin Springer, was subsequently arrested after the parents of two former students accused him of engaging in inappropriate physical contact with the children. One of the two students has since recanted her testimony.
One of the two students was transferred out of Berndt’s classroom to Springer’s after her father had complained to school principal Arturo Sandoval about inappropriate photos he had found of his daughter with Berndt. Allegations that Springer was fondling his daughter followed soon after.
Three thousand parents, teachers and students in New York City attended a hearing of the Panel for Educational Policy (PEP) on February 9 to voice their outrage at the plans to close another 18 public schools, as well as the co-location of 22 small schools, including 5 charter schools, into existing facilities.
The PEP is controlled by Mayor Michael Bloomberg and routinely rubber-stamps all of the mayor’s attacks on public education. The City Department of Education (DOE) has already closed 117 schools since Bloomberg took office 10 years ago.
The PEP will also be asked to place 33 schools under the Obama administration’s “turn-around” model. They would close at the end of June and reopen the next day under different names, with half of the teachers labeled ineffective and fired in order restore federal “Race To The Top” funds that were lost because of the city’s failure to finalize an agreement with the United Federation of Teachers (UFT).
Education Secretary Michael Gove has given the go-ahead for Breckland Middle School in Suffolk to be renamed IES Breckland, run under a £21 million, ten-year contract by Swedish for-profit firm Internationella Engelska Skolan.
Despite decades of encroachment by the private sector into state schools by successive Labour and Tory-led governments, the involvement of explicitly profit-making companies heralds a watershed in the drive to privatise state education.
The Guardian said of the development at Breckland, “The introduction of a profit-seeking company into the management of the school is allowed because of a technicality: the founder of the school is a charitable trust that has decided to outsource the entirety of the management to a fee-charging company—whose global business has a turnover of £60m a year, earning profits of £5m, according to analysis by the Adam Smith Institute. The development is set to open the floodgates.”
In December 2011, the California State University system announced that it will slash an additional $100 million from its general budget. This came after a $650 million reduction, as a result of lower-than-projected state revenues. The additional cut reduces the California State University system-wide funding to only $2 billion—a 27 percent reduction from 2010.
To compensate for the cuts, six California State Universities over-enrolled students for the Fall 2011 semester. California State University Northridge (CSUN)—located 25 miles northwest of downtown Los Angeles—over-enrolled the most students. The California State University system administration is threatening to withhold an additional $7 million from the campus if it doesn’t partly roll back enrollment by 2,800 students for the current spring semester.
On February 7, the International Students for Social Equality held a meeting on campus to oppose the deportation to the United States of Sheffield Hallam University student Richard O’Dwyer.
O’Dwyer is facing a maximum 10 years in prison on charges of copyright infringement. The meeting was addressed by Julie Hyland, assistant national secretary of the Socialist Equality Party and attended by a number of students and lecturers.
A second meeting will be held Tuesday, February 21, at 5:30 p.m., to continue the campaign in O’Dwyer’s defence.
Below we publish Hyland’s remarks.
In January, Judge Quentin Purdy, sitting at Westminster Magistrates Court, ruled that Richard O’Dwyer, a 23-year-old computer science student at Sheffield Hallam, can be extradited to the US on charges of copyright infringement. Richard has appealed the decision. He faces up to 10 years in prison if found guilty.
