PIE Board Moves for Direct Negotiations With District

When I wrote my gigantic post on the Sand Ridge renewal debacle, there was one thing I suggested that I hoped would not happen.

It's happening. Or, at least, Rick Alexander, Josh Wineteer, and Jay Jackson are doing their best to make it happen.

I said this:

One other possibility is that Alexander will try and micromanage the contract [emphasis added], or at least give directions to the negotiating team that undermine the interests of the district.

Turns out Jackson and Alexander convinced the PIE board (though who knows how much convincing it took; they may have been on the same page already) to do this:

By an unanimous vote Tuesday night, the People Involved in Education (PIE) board of directors approved a resolution to negotiate directly with the Lebanon Community School District School Board over Sand Ridge Charter School's new contract.

I am rendered speechless at the audacity of this move. The politics of brute force, indeed.

There are a couple of points to be made about this:

1. It fits that 'rejection of expertise' mentality I had wondered about.

2. It definitely counts as micromanaging... I had wondered how Alexander planned to get himself on the negotiating team; I guess he intends for the team to come to him.

3. Of course, it is also clearly designed to cut the Superintendent and his staff out of the process as much as possible. Interestingly, I wonder if the goal is to get the lawyers out of the process? I would remind Alexander (and everyone else) that there is a reason lawyers are involved in complex negotiations: They are certified experts and have to resolve the messes contract violations (and sloppily written contracts) create. They are not just for show.

Speaking of lawyers, I see that Jay Jackson is an active member with the Oregon Bar Association... with two disciplinary actions against him in the last 11 years (click the "Show Disciplinary History button). I wonder what they were for... and whether or not he, as chair of PIE, will be the head of PIE's 'negotiating team'.

I predict that PIE does indeed want the respective counsels out of the room (assuming they are scheduled to be there in the first place) since it still leaves Jackson in the room.

Wait.... on second thought, I'll amend that. PIE and Jackson (and Alexander and Wineteer) won't care if counsel is present, since they will simply ignore any legal advice they don't like. Who needs the law, anyway?

Alexander and Wineteer (and sadly, Shimmin, though since she never bothers speaking in public who knows what she really thinks) will almost certainly meet behind the scenes with Jackson and the PIE board to arrange for the terms of the contract to be incredibly favorable to Sand Ridge, so much so that they will provide for little to no accountability, oversight or enforcement mechanisms on the part of the district - which will guarantee that the long list of violations will not get fixed. This is my prediction.

Remember, it's illegal to collude with other board members outside meetings for the purpose of planning action. This whole episode is starting to reek of it.

As a result, I would like to see the Lebanon community turn out and convince the Lebanon School Board not to accept the PIE Board's offer of pistols at dawn direct negotiations. Doing so will most likely further hamper the LCSD to do its job, and in the long run, that will start to affect what happens to not only the Sand Ridge students, but the students in the rest of the district as well.

This is another step in a play for power (and public money without concurrent accountability) on the part of Jackson, Alexander and Wineteer that comes at the public's cost. When will the public decide they have had enough?

Further comment on the article will come in another post to be written after I recover my equilibrium. Watching this district face the demise of its own functionality in slow motion is getting to me.

One More Difference Between the "Left" and the "Right"

From a book review by Robert Farley over at LGM (the book is God's Harvard):

Patrick Henry was established explicitly to counter what its founder believed was leftist bias in the mainstream university community. Patrick Henry isn't so much a college for evangelicals as it is a college for extremely conservative evangelicals directly interested in working for the Republican party. As such, it's founded on a profound misconception about the left and the mainstream American university. While it's true that a large majority of faculty (especially in the liberal arts) are on the left politically, and also true that there is, as Michael Berube argues, something specifically liberal about the liberal arts, there is in my experience simply no counter-part to the Republican political machine that exists at Patrick Henry. Anyone who has spent five minutes on college campus should realize that, whatever may be going on, political action in service of the Democratic Party isn't it. For a time at the University of Oregon, one of the most leftist campuses in the country, there was no Democratic Party organization on campus at all. The Democrats had disintegrated as a result of vicious infighting between various of their elements, for reasons so arcane that the terms "moderate" and "radical" don't supply an accurate description. Even if, as David Horowitz would have it, lefty college professors were trying to recruit soldiers for the coming revolution, that project does not manifest itself in terms of institutional support for the Democratic Party. Patrick Henry, conversely, is directly tied in to conservative think tanks, NGOs, and Republican elected officials.

Those last few sentences are pretty key, I think. As "liberal" as universities are (and I would dispute that claim, even), I think Farley is right in noting that how it plays out is specifically not institutional support for a political party that's almost as beholden to big money as the Republican Party. I wonder why.

I also consider it evidence for my hypothesis that young, bright, motivated folks with views that are at all to the "left" don't, as a generalization, seek out the Democratic Party as their measure of success. They seek out nonprofits, NGOs, and other social and social justice work, often for the aforementioned reason (but certainly there are others).

Conservatives, on the other hand, tend to view the Republican Party as an ultimate goal. I think this actually has explanatory power when it comes to explaining why the Democratic Party is full of idiots is being outmaneuvered on both politics and policy in the last decade or so.

Truth and Power

Tristero, who writes at Hullaballo, gets one right:

But the truth, George W. Bush knows, can be magically nullified through the exercise of sufficient power. That - and only that - is his mad delusion, a delusion nurtured by his toxic upbringing where his family shielded him from the consequences of his failures and incompetence. It is a delusion that has led to the pointless suffering and death of hundreds of thousands of people.

All I have to say is that wouldn't it be nice to be a world where 'power' was not defined as the ability to fuck people over against their wills?

Oh, and in the case of the Lebanon School Board, um, the answer is no. Rick will never exercise enough power to nullify the truth. That doesn't mean he and his cohort haven't tried. But creating an alternate reality is hard.

Says Ralph Ellison: "Could politics ever be an expression of love?"

Were it only the case.

(h/t CM for the quote)

Blah Blah Blah, I Love Digby, You Know the Drill

Though she always makes me miss Billmon and the Whiskey Bar.

It's only 18 months until a new administration comes in and they figure they'll deal with all these issues when a Democrat gets in the white house. Or not. There's always the possibility that at least some of them believe these extra-constitutional powers really are a good thing and should be preserved to protect us from the boogeyman. (It should go without saying, however, that Republicans would never let Democrats get away with using these powers. They'd fight it just for the pleasure of it.)

...


By allowing these precedents to stand, these executive powers to go unchallenged, they will be waiting for the next would-be tyrant to pick them up and run with them. The constitutional system depends upon the truism that if all else fails and crooks and miscreants are the only ones holding office, that they will at least have enough ego to preserve their own power. If they fail to do even that, the system could be irretrievably broken.

Um, yeah. I rarely feel like I have one up on Digby, but I could have told you years ago that breaking the system was the whole point of the exercise, and of course Dems won't fight it, since a) they are ultimately beholden to similar (if not the same) forces as Republicans are, and b) Dems of course want the power for themselves. I suppose that c), The Dems are idiots, is also possible. In fact, I think C is very compatible with A or B.

Digby's point about the Republicans actually fighting the Dems on these powers if the Dems gain office is also at once hilarious and scary, mostly because it's totally accurate.