A Power Analysis of the Crisis at City College of SF http://www.saveccsf.org/stop-the-accreditation-bullies-and-the-corporate-agenda-to-downsize-and-privatize-publiceducation/
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The mission of accreditation agencies is to…safeguard ed quality (move over the slide from long slideshow, try to use their real language)
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Move in slide 2 from orange “The ACCJC
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The college downsized rapidly after five years of deep budget cuts,followed by the accreditation shock and now aggressive “rightsizing” policies—only publicly mentioned on one occasion.
 More than 29% of non-credit (pre-college) students have disappeared compared to 2008;
 More than 21% of all students are gone;
 More than one quarter of all part-time faculty have lost their jobs, and most retiring full-time faculty are not replaced.
 As 2015 opens, there is open discussion about selling off irreplaceable College land and property, including 33 Gough and the Reservoir
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Many of us have a nagging feeling that there are corporate players behind the City College crisis: “It just makes no sense to ‘safeguard educational quality’ by closing one of the best community colleges in the country. The City
College situation seems so political.”
This line of critical thinking often gets shut down with the mocking charge, “Oh, that’s just a conspiracy theory.”
This presentation aims to give us an understanding of the corporate players behind the accreditation crisis at City
College, their goals and methods.
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A conspiracy is small and secret. But the agenda of downsizing and re-engineering the California community colleges is being pushed by a corporate coalition that operates substantially in the open— although they speak in polite code:
◦ They don’t say that corporations are dis-investing in all public services from food stamps to public education—they say “Sadly, government just doesn’t have the money,” when the data show that there is more money than ever at the very top of the social hierarchy.
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Put in the Khalil Bendib cartoon about the pigs crying about budget cuts (and remind us to pay him or something)
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They don’t say they are canceling the revered open access mission set forth in the
California Master Plan of 1960; they say they are “updating the Master Plan” by focusing on the most important priority—degrees and certificates for workforce preparation.
They don’t say they are pushing out the most marginalized students who can only attend part time; instead they say they are “rationing education more rationally” by focusing on full-time students most likely to succeed at completing degrees and certificates: “The community colleges can simply no longer afford to be all things to all people.”
They don’t say they are closing down student services built up over decades to support the most vulnerable students; they say “City College is not a social service agency.”
They don’t say that they want to tamp down critical thinking in an ever-more unequal society—they say
(paraphrasing interim chancellor Pamila Fisher): “All that social justice stuff--the Diversity Departments, San
Francisco, flowers in your hair—it’s nice, but we just can’t afford it any more.”
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Their aims are to downsize California’s big 112-college community college system radically to shrink the public sector and open market share for the for-profit colleges and the student loan industry; and to
re-engineer these shrunken community colleges to focus narrowly on corporate workforce preparation, at the public expense. To realize these unpopular goals, they are working to sweep aside
democratic governance structures including unions, locally elected boards of trustees, shared governance, and academic senates.
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The broad mission of the open access California community college system is dismissed as “no longer affordable.”
Statewide, a host of new push-out policies is shedding hundreds of thousands of students seen as disposable: part-time students who work, parents, low-income students, new immigrants, older students, and “second chance” students. Not coincidentally, these are the same demographics targeted by the for-profit colleges.
Corporate players are organized in long-standing lobbying organizations such as the California Business Roundtable and the Chamber of Commerce. They hash out and negotiate specific positions through reports and commissions (and this process involves conflict and compromise, there is no puppet master pulling all the strings). This corporate coalition runs a multi-year legislative agenda in Sacramento and Washington DC. They advocate for this agenda through a network of faux grassroots groups (astroturf organizations), well-financed think tanks, cooperative politicians and endorsements by associations drawn in through grants. The whole effort is amply funded through giant “venture philanthropy” foundations spun off from the corporations themselves--the Lumina Foundation (set up by the Student Loan Marketing
Corporation); the Gates Foundation (set up by Microsoft); and others set up by the tech and real estate industries.
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Regarding the City College crisis, the two most important reports are:
 The Student Success Task Force Final Report,
Advancing Student Success in the California
Community Colleges, 2012
 The Little Hoover Commission, A New Plan for a New
Economy: Reimagining Higher Education, 2013
These two reports outline a broad new vision for the
California community colleges favored by corporate and political elites.
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After these huge cuts, state budget funding to rebuild enrollment is set for 2% for 14-15 and 15-16,without the four-year commitment to rebuilding enrollment at the CSU and the UC.
In place of loud protest, we hear only SILENCE or weak laments from officials, along with calls for more career prep, STEM education and
“innovation” (often a code word for more on-line instruction)
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Between 2003-2008:
 89% of all the sanctions in the US were issued by one of six regional accrediting agencies, the Accrediting Commission for
Community and Junior Colleges (ACCJC)
 In the other five regions, the average rate of sanction is 2% of colleges per year; the ACCJC had a sanction rate of 37% per year.
Currently: 25% of California community colleges are on sanction.
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The official story is that the ACCJC is a peer organization elected by community college presidents, with a mission of safeguarding educational quality on behalf of students and the public.
In reality, it is a private 501c3, run by a small powerful staff. It has governmental-type powers to re-engineer, drive down enrollment, and ultimately to close public colleges. This power is athorized by the US
Department of Education, and an un-elected state body, the Board of
Governors of the California Community College system (mainly appointed by governors, with several of the current BOG appointed by Gov.
Schwartzenegger).
 The ACCJC holds three-day meetings that include 15 minutes for public comment; proceedings are secret;
 The executive staff of the ACCJC nominate like-minded commission members who are voted up or down as a block by community college presidents, so that their election is pro forma. The commission is dominated by conservative administrators from the Valley.
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In a week-long trial brought by the City Attorney’s Office in October 2014, many details came to light, including reports that site visit teams would receive instructions telegraphed in advance by senior staff of the ACCJC: “At College X, you will find that….”
Perhaps the most shocking finding:
The 16-person ACCJC inspection team spent five days in a site visit to City College in spring 2013, reviewing an exhaustive self-study and meeting with scores of people across the College. This team unanimously recommended to the ACCJC—by a vote of 16-0--that City College be removed from the
“show cause” sanction and placed on probation—i.e. be taken off death row.
Instead, the president of the commission, Barbara Beno, unilaterally altered the draft report to add new
“deficiencies” not found by the inspection team. She INCREASED the level of sanction to termination in
July 2014, giving the college one year to close down.
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Open access for all according to the California
Master Plan of 1960, including “second-chance” students, part-time students, basic-level ESL students, elders, lifelong learners
VERSUS
Success for a few, “human capital development” for full-time students pursuing degrees and certificates for the corporate workforce. This position is advocated by the California Business
Roundtable, the Campaign for College Opportunity
(affiliated with the CBR), the Little Hoover
Commission, the ACCJC and allies
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 Montgomery Securities: “The education industry,” according to these analysts, “represents, in our opinion, the final frontier of a number of sectors once under public control” that “have either voluntarily opened” or, they note in pointed terms, have “been forced” to open up to private enterprise.
“The education industry represents the largest market opportunity since health-care services were privatized during the 1970s…the K-12 market is the Big
Enchilada.”
 Size of K-12 education market in 2015: $789 billion

 In 2009, President Obama announced his plan to close 5000 “failing public schools:” “Chronically underperforming schools need a new start” [i.e. closure].
 So far, 4000 K-12 public schools have been closed, mainly in gentrifying Black and Latino neighborhoods near downtown areas
 6500 charter schools have been opened—mainly chain operations owned by hedge funds and private equity firms (large donors to the
Obama campaign):
 Charter teachers make 59% of what public school teachers do
(Ohio);
 Huge on-line charter corporations like K12, Inc. charge full tuition for enrolling students doing self-study at home;
 The “savings” from degrading the quality of teaching and learning is funneled to the investors and CEOs.
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http://www.saveccsf.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/1-Sneak-Peek-4-page-desktopversion.pdf
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 In K-12, high-stakes testing is the hammer used to create the narrative of “failed public education,” justifying the false solution of closing public schools in favor of charter schools, and pushing a new model of heavily on-line education oriented around a brand dominated by Microsoft with Pearson: the
Common Core
 In the community colleges, currently accreditation is the hammer being used to down-size and re-engineer.
 Expect to see high-stakes testing and canned curricula coming to the community colleges: the Degree Qualifications Profile, a nationalized curriculum framework funded with student loan industry dollars (Lumina Foundation), is now being piloted by the ACCJC in 15 community colleges, funded by Lumina. This is the parallel to the Common Core in K-12, pushed by the Gates
Foundation. SLO crap
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Based on the K-12 experience with high-stakes testing, we predict that standardized testing for the community colleges will gradually emerge from the Student Learning Objectives process and the Degree Qualifications
Profile being pilot tested by the ACCJC.
The SLO process was developed by Texas investment banker Charles Miller as one of a trio of policies including the high-stakes testing law called “No Child Left Behind,” which has since morphed into the even more aggressive
“Race to the Top” law.
There is virtually zero research evidence that this process improves the quality of education—rather metrics are needed to move to a business model of education, with strict top-down control and a privatized market.
City College’s “insufficient progress” on SLOs was one of the two top reasons for the dis-accreditation of the college.
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Dishonor—dis-accreditation threat, with scores of attack articles led by the SF Chronicle—”City College is a behemoth, hopelessly mismanaged.”
The College’s excellent outcomes data are buried.
Disinvest—five years of draconian state budget cuts lead to poor conditions—for example, City College had old computers--resulting in an accreditation “ding.”
Destabilize—threat of closure; veiled policy to “right-size” the college with a host of student push-out policies, class cancellations and layoffs and sudden closure of a campus
Disenfranchise—state takeover run by a “Super Trustee with
Extraordinary Powers” appointed by the Chancellor’s Office, with the elected board of trustees suspended indefinitely by the statewide unelected Board of Governors. The STWEP in turn installed an all-new top administration, headed by a former three-star general from Houston. http://www.uic.edu/educ/ceje/articles/Fact%20Sheet%20Dyett.pdf
2 http://www.examiner.com/article/city-college-employees-go-underground
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The for-profit colleges are owned by Wall Street hedge funds and equity firms. They are financed by an open spigot of taxpayer dollars. After the for-profit corporations get their payment, the dollars are quickly converted into student debt--held by the five big banks and the Student
Loan Marketing Corporation, known as Sallie Mae. As of 2006, student debt can virtually never be discharged, so that many students must struggle to pay off these student loans for life.
In some cases the same company will both run a for-profit college, and hold student debt—for example Wells Fargo Bank, which owned 19% of
Corinthian. This for-profit college was fully accredited for nearly three decades by the ACCJC, but is now finally being broken up by regulators because of its longstanding fraudulent abuse of students.
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Why is California a juicy target for a privatization strategy in the two-year sector?
California has by far the the biggest community college system of all 50 states, and the smallest university system.
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California also has the least expensive community college tuition in the US.
The graph below shows that in San Francisco, for-profit
‘colleges’ are
17Xs as expensive as similar programs at City College
City and County of San Francisco, Budget and Legislative Office, (2013), Eva l uation of the Impact of the
Potential Closure of San Francisco City College page 11 http://www.sfbos.org/Modules/ShowDocument.aspx?documentid=46531
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“You will find overwhelming documentation of exorbitant tuition, aggressive recruiting practices, abysmal student outcomes, taxpayer dollars spent on marketing and pocketed as profit, and regulatory evasion and manipulation. These practices are not the exception—they are the norm. They are systemic throughout the industry…”
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 The on-line division of the #1 for-profit,
University of Phoenix, has a five percent graduation rate. This means that 95% of students end up with nothing but student debt.
 72% of for-profits produce graduates who, on average, earn less than a high school dropout who works full time.
 The for-profit colleges do intense race, class and gender profiling as they target people to suck in.
◦ Could someone remind me why this is legal?
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 96% of students at the for-profit colleges must take out student loans, compared to 13% of public community college students.
 At the for-profit colleges, pulling down taxpayer dollars is the main activity, with education and student services as a sidelight. According to the Harkin Report:
 22% of revenue is spent on marketing, advertising, recruiting
 19% on profit
 Only 17% on instruction.
 Average CEO pay is 7.3 million annually.
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With California’s big and affordable community college system, the for-profit colleges and student loan industry cannot grow as explosively as they have in the rest of the US. http://www.help.senate.gov/imo/media/for_profit_report/Contents.pdf
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For-profit colleges in Bay Area have only 3.8% of the two-year
“market”—the public sector has the lion’s share, and City College alone has 25.6%
Source: U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education
Statistics

 By far the highest proportion of full-time teachers of any Ca. community college–
(71.4%)
 86% compensation rate for part-time instructors, with benefits and real job security
 A locally elected Board of Trustees that registered public opinion. Cardinal sin: the BOT called for investigating moving college accounts away from Wells Fargo
Bank, because of the bank’s role in 22% of home foreclosures in San Francisco
 Real estate industry and mayors tried four times to take over undeveloped
College land—the Reservoir--defeated by grassroots mobilizations (late 1980s and
90s)
 City College led statewide advocacy for open access community colleges, against
Student “Success” Act
The “ungovernable” City College must be brought to heel. A good example must be crushed, as a warning to other colleges.
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A schizophrenic accreditation regime created by corporate lobbyists-de-regulation of the for-profit colleges; hyper-regulation of public colleges
Results:
1. Extreme expansion of for-profit ‘ colleges ’ that have single-digit graduation rates and saddle students with crushing debt. Through a taxpayer-funded federal voucher system, the for-profit colleges run on ever-growing open spigot funding of 32-34 billion a year.
Aggressive lobbying has removed nearly all regulations. The forprofits are so weakly regulated that the head of the California
Student Aid Commission said that we see “…an emerging ‘ Wild
West ’ of higher education – a frontier where anything goes and not much is regulated.”
2. Meanwhile, public California community colleges with affordable tuition and far higher graduation rates are starved, downsized and heavily disrupted by accreditation sanctions, losing
24% of all classes statewide from 2008-2013.
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 In a parallel universe not far away, in 2008 the US
Department of Education amped up the existing hyperregulation of California community colleges. Despite an already wildly disproportionate sanction rate, the US
Department of Education criticized the ACCJC for being “too lenient.” DOE said that the ACCJC had not strictly enough enforced the existing obscure ”two year rule,” under which community colleges were to be given only two years to correct “deficiencies” and come into “full compliance.”
 The ACCJC consistently cites the two-year rule as their reason for needing to close City College .
-
Amador & Kinsella, Apr 12, 2014,
SF Chronicle
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Long time leader of accreditation rule-making for US DOE, Schray departed after 13 years in January
2012 to become vice president of government and regulatory affairs of
Bridgepoint, the nation's second largest for-profit college. Bridgepoint was called by Sen. Harkin “a scam, an absolute scam.” According to the
Harkin Report, the estimated compensation for a Bridgepoint VP was 1-3 million annually in 2009.
*
Is this payola?
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A lobbyist who ran the Washington office of the
University of Phoenix, and a student loan company official, Stroup then became assistant secretary of postsecondary education under Bush, overseeing accreditation and other areas. When Bush left office, he helped her “burrow in” with a newly -established permanent position.
In 2006 Stroup left DOE to work as a congressional staffer on accreditation and other areas, under John
Boehner, speaker of the House and top recipient of campaign contributions from the student loan industry. Here she crafted industry-friendly legislation and regulations to direct the DOE, maintaining close ties at DOE.
Now: Executive vice president of the
Association of Private Sector Colleges and
Universities, the main lobby group of the for-profit colleges
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Developed by investment banker Charles Miller, Microsoft,
Lumina and others, through the Spellings Commission on
Higher Education (2005-06):
1. High stakes testing scaled up through socalled “No Child
Left Behind” --produces a multi-billion dollar testing industry, branded curriculum (Common Core), demand for millions of software licenses, tablets and other hardware, competitive teacher evaluation systems, closure of public schools;
2. Student learning outcomes—a corporate system of
‘management by objectives,’ laying the groundwork for standardized testing in colleges although it has no evidence that it improves education. The ACCJC cited “insufficient progress” on SLOs as a top reason for dis-accreditation of City College;
3. The use of “get tough” accreditation as a lever
Bush’s education Secretary Margaret
Spellings left DOE to run the education arm of the
US Chamber of Commerce, the oldest corporate lobby
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Illustration by Kahlil Bendib
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Lee Fang. Graphic: Vidhya Nagarajan for the Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute 42

Bill Gates’ foundation invested 400 million to get 44 states to adopt the Common Core. It is well documented that Gates invested heavily in public relations campaigns, and gave grants to associations that would endorse and lend legitimacy (ex: National Governor’s Association and many others).
Gates Foundation leaders got conflict of interest waivers to take official positions in the
US Dept of Ed.
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This year, states are expected to spend 12 billion on Common Core-branded products—with 1.25 billion set aside in the
California state budget alone (2014-15).
Gates was highly offended when a reporter inquired if he might conceivably have a pecuniary interest in the Common Core.
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 In 2008 and 2011, Sen. Tom Harkin issued two volumes of a 2000-page report on the scam nature of the rapidly growing for-profit college industry. The
Government Accounting Office issued two similar reports.
 In 2010, the new Obama administration proposed three new rules to mildly restrict the for-profits.
 Feeling threatened, the for-profit colleges formed a new Democratic-oriented lobby group—the Coalition for Educational Success, coordinated by two hedge fund executives. The lobby group projected a progressive-sounding message:
“We help low-income students.” They launched a 16-million dollar lobbying
campaign, hiring 14 former members of Congress. These lobbyists met more than two dozen times with Arne Duncan and other DOE staff (covered in detail in Huffington Post, the NYT and Mettler’s Degrees of Inequality).
Senator Tom
Harkin (D-Iowa) called it “ the most intense lobbying campaign I’ve seen in my 32 years in Washington.”
 The blitz succeeded. In 2011, Congress voted to drop the new proposed rules, and Arne Duncan issued a closing statement: “ As a country, we need this [for profit] sector to succeed.
”
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In 2011, Lumina directed $450K to ACCJC to pilot the Degree Qualifications Profile in 15 community colleges--the equivalent to the
Common Core in K-12;
It also gave 1.5 million to WASC to overhaul accreditation in California;
It was a funder of the Student Success Task Force which laid the foundation for the Student Success Act of 2012;
It funded California Competes to launch a public relations offensive and lawsuit against Academic Senates in California (the lawsuit was thrown out);
It funds (or funded?) the Campaign for College Opportunity, the main organizer of public and legislative support for the Student
Success Act
An interesting note is that as public awareness of Lumina’s role and origin has grown, many grantees appear to have taken down their funder lists, making it more difficult to follow the money.
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The Student Loan Marketing Corp set up Lumina in 2001 with $700 million. The corporation transferred its CEO and four board members over to run the new
Foundation, to establish a positive policy environment for the parent corporation.
Two Lumina policies:
A. Spearheads the “Big Goal” of 60% of the adult population having a degree or credential by 2025;
B. Lumina strongly pushes a 15 unit/semester load on students, forcing them out of part-time work and into student loan (debt).
A + B = C, millions of new student loans
Marty Hittelman, ACCJC gone wild p. 23-24
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California Business Roundtable – CEOs of the two dozen biggest multi-national corporations
– aims to vocationalize post-secondary
Powerhouse Sacramento lobbyist and
CBR president Bill Hauck co-founded and for seven years chaired the board of the
Campaign for College Opportunity, which spearheaded the organizing for the Student “Success” Act of 2012
CBR is a leading advocate against corporate taxation, for example Prop 30 and reform of Prop 13
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The California Business Roundtable and the Campaign for College Opportunity co-wrote a report that was essentially a work order to the California community colleges and the CSU, from the biggest multi-national corporations: Keeping California’s Edge, 2006
Employment by Occupation for the top 45 Occupations Requiring AA’s and
Postsecondary Vocation Education
50 300 45 500 26 600 22 300 15 700
7 200
62 100
83 400
598 900
118 700
197 600
132 300
153 700
Healthcare Practicioners and Technical
Computer and Mathematical
Architecture and Engineering
Legal
Life, Physical, and Social Science
Sales and Related
Arts, Design, Entertainment, Sports, and Media
Installation, Maintinence and Repair
Office and Administrative Support
Personal Care and Service
Production
Healthcare Support
Food Preparation and Serving Related
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A 2015 report by US Senator Bernie Sanders shows that the US Business Roundtable is responsible for 1 trillion of the total 2 trillion dollars in “legalized tax fraud” by US corporations, through tax havens in the
Cayman Islands, Bermuda, and other countries.
California Business Roundtable members include:
--Chevron Corporation with $31,300,000 (billion) in such tax dodges
--Eli Lilly with $23,740,000,000
The five big banks are heavily involved in this tax evasion, for example Citigroup has 427 tax havens, 43.8 billion in profits held offshore, and would owe 11.7 billion in income taxes
Apple and Google use tax dodges in Ireland to pay almost no corporate taxes. Cisco has 56 tax havens and holds $48 billion in profit overseas.
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 Senator Dianne Feinstein and husband Richard Blum own the 3 rd and 4 th biggest for-profit colleges:
 Career Education Corporation
 ITT Tech
 Feinstein/Blum own the largest commercial real estate corporation in the world, CBRE. A leader in stripping out public assets, Blum has the exclusive contract for the sale of 56 main post offices (often sold to his business partners, at fire sale prices)
 Governor Jerry Brown is married to a top corporate lawyer for KIPP, a major charter school chain
 Mayor Ed Lee is extremely responsive to the tech industry, and Google’s number one advertiser is
University of Phoenix
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 John Burton, chair of the California Democratic Party, is on the board of
University of Phoenix
 Secretary of Education Arne Duncan was an originator of the public school closure strategy in Chicago, working with the Chicago Commercial Club. Ted
Mitchell, the current under secretary of US DOE, is a long-term edu-corp investor. James Shelton, the deputy secretary, is a longtime education investor and founder of a charter school chain.
 Representative George Miller’s son is a lobbyist for EDMC, a major for-profit college owned by major Obama campaign donor, Goldman Sachs.
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1) To DOWNSIZE public community colleges and EXPAND for-profit ‘colleges’ and student loans;
2) To EXPAND THE MARKET FOR TECH through a degraded model of on-line instruction and standardized testing;
3) To externalize the cost of corporate job training to the publicly-funded community colleges: VOCATIONALIZATION;
4) To WEAKEN TEACHER’S UNIONS through a precarious labor model, charterization and competitive teacher evaluation systems;
5) To take over City College land for real estate development and weaken an anchor for working class and people of color in San Francisco. ASSET STRIPPING
AND GENTRIFICATION;
6) To carry out a “revolution of the soul” to create a technically proficient but
STUDIES, ARTS, HUMANITIES, CRITICAL THINKING
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 We’re up against a long-term strategy by powerful players, so short-term crisis organizing won’t do: We need deep alliance building, long-haul strategy and organization, real leadership development, research and study;
 We must confront the bi-partisan nature of corporate education deform, and dispel illusions. We can work with the progressive base of the Democratic Party, but we can’t let the top ranks silence us. We need to build political independence from corporate Democrats.
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From City
Hall… http://www.saveccsf.org/category/website/page/3/
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..To Ocean Avenue http://theguardsman.com/category/featured/ralliers-demand-accountability/
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From faculty and staff… http://www.saveccsf.org/save-ccsf-coalition-rejects-legitimacy-of-accjc-ruling/ http://www.saveccsf.org/over-300-community-members-vote-to-take-action-to-save-ccsf/
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..to students and others http://www.saveccsf.org/ccsf-students-occupy-city-hall-26-arrested/
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We can all do our part to fight !
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This slideshow was created by the Research Committee serving the struggle to Save City College. It is made up of students, faculty, retirees and staff from City College, SF State, and UC Berkeley, with friends and colleagues at organizations working in low-income communities and communities of color, as well as at several other campuses. It is intended for organizers, activists, journalists and geeks. Please send comments or suggestions to
ResComm11@gmail.com. The contact person for the committee is
Allan Fisher.
To learn more, we suggest you read:
Pauline Lipman, The New Political Economy of Urban Education:
Neoliberalism, Race, and the Right to the City, and
Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine
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