Oracle Protest/ Press Conference: Stop Public School Funds To Billionaire Ellison/Oracle

3/28 Protest Press Conference: Stop Public School Funds To Billionaire Ellison/Oracle Corporation For Charter School And More Privatization
Monday March 28, 2016 12:00 Noon
Oracle Conference Center
350 Oracle Pkwy, Redwood City, CA 94065
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Oracle+Conference+Center/@37.5322785,-122.2645094,15z/data=!4m2!3m1!1s0x0:0xdc75e8b1c02bbb91

One of the world wealthiest individuals Larry Ellison worth $49.4 Billion has decided that he wants to build a publicly funded charter school on Oracle's corporate campus in Redwood City.
This is one more example of how our schools are being privatized for the wealthy like Ellison or the tech billionaires like Zuckerberg, Gates and others who are profiting off of selling computers and software program to charter schools they have invested in. They are also pushing the "Common Core" and massive testing schemes from Pearson and other companies for tests that could be written by teachers but are driven by computer companies making more profits for the testing companies and the tech billionaires.
Since when should the California tax payer have to pay a billionaire to build a charter school on his corporate campus? This is an outrage and another reason that more and more teachers, parents and supporters for public education are supporting the Repeal Charter School Laws petition.
https://notocharterschools.wordpress.com
The California Charter School Association which is funded by Netflix billionaire Reed Hastings and other billionaires like Eli Broad are pushing for full privatization of all our schools in California leading to more segregation, corruption and destruction of public schools. There is also a growing corruption crisis at corporate driven and managed schools for profit that are virtually unregulated and do not have follow the rules of publicly run schools. They also ignore the Brown Act which requires that all organizations that get public money must provide proper records since the public is funding these organizations.
One of the schemes the California Charter School Association CCSA has pushed in Proposition 39 was to insert a clause that allows them to take over rooms and space in public schools which is called "co-location". This has led to over 4 charter schools in Independence High in East Side Union High school district in Santa Clara county and has helped divide and weaken public education at the school. It has also created havoc in other schools throughout the state as rooms and facilities are being grabbed from community public schools for privately run charters.
Teachers, students and parents will let Ellison know that we don't want a penny of our tax dollars used for his public funded charter school on his corporate campus.
While these same billionaires refuse to pay more taxes on their wealth they want to destroy our public education system for their own purposes. With over 100 billionaires in California we should have the greatest education system in the world from early education, to K-12, community colleges, CSU and UC. Working people and their children have a right to a free public education and these billionaires must be made to pay for a real public education and not a privatized charter system run by them for profit.

Sponsored by
Repeal Charter School Laws
Citizens For Education Restoration
Voices Against Privatizing Public Education- Repeal Charter School Laws Committee
https://notocharterschools.wordpress.com
https://www.facebook.com/CitizensForEducationRestoration/
Endorsed by
United Public Workers For Action
http://www.upwa.info
(415)282-1908




Billionaire Larry Ellison Of Oracle hopes to build home for publicly funded charter public school on its campus
Oracle hopes to build home for charter public school on its campus
http://www.sfchronicle.com/business/networth/article/Oracle-hopes-to-build-home-for-public-school-on-6857344.php
By Kathleen Pende
February 26, 2016 Updated: February 27, 2016 8:26am

Photo: Courtesy: Oracle Corp.
IMAGE 1 OF 8The proposed Design Tech High School, a public charter school, would be built on Oracle's Redwood Shores campus.
Plenty of tech companies are trying to re-engineer education. But Oracle is taking a novel approach — building a public high school at its headquarters in Redwood Shores.

If it wins the necessary approvals, Oracle will break ground in June on a 64,000-square foot, two-story structure that will become the permanent home of Design Tech High School, a two-year-old charter school authorized by the San Mateo Union High School District.


Students would take Oracle shuttles, eat Oracle food (in their own cafeteria) and use Oracle’s gym (when employees are not using it).

For now, the school known as D.tech occupies a former adult-education center in Burlingame owned by San Mateo County, its second home in two years.

Along with core subjects such as English, math and history, all students take a course each year in design thinking, a popular problem-solving strategy. Students learn at their own pace, some lectures are opt-in, and failure is celebrated as a learning experience.

“Failure is anathema to most schools today,” said Colleen Cassity, executive director of the Oracle Education Foundation. “If you could teach failure as a learning experience, you could change the game in education.”

Photo: Paul Chinn, The ChronicleKent Montgomery, Design Tech High’s executive director, observes students working at the school’s current home at a former adult-education center in Burlingame.
Oracle says it won’t design the curriculum or run the school. But its employees will continue to participate in two-week “intersessions,” when students take a break from core classes to learn coding, basic electrical engineering and other skills.

“The school will operate autonomously,” Cassity said. “We think the curriculum is powerful.”

School’s growth plans

D.tech currently has 274 students, all freshmen and sophomores. Next fall, it will have 420 freshmen, sophomores and juniors at its present location. Prospective students have until Monday to apply for the 2016-17 school year. The school has already received 462 applications for about 150 openings.

The following school year, 2017-18, D.tech is expected to have 550 students in all four grades and move to the Oracle campus, assuming the new school is finished on time.

Photo: Paul Chinn, The ChronicleAlan Gjerstad (left) and Jared Lin are students at Design Tech High in Burlingame.
“Tech is one of our primary tools for teaching students,” said Ken Montgomery, D.tech’s executive director. “They all have Chromebooks, all materials are online. They also create technology.”

In the school’s “design realization garage,” on Thursday, one group of boys was building a trebuchet (a type of catapult), while another edited a video. A third group used a 3-D printer to make a replacement foosball for one that got lost. Nick Dal Porto was soldering a quadcopter piece that got broken.

Sophomore Cypress Sell was using a laser cutter to create what she called “a reasonably sized box” to store “witchcrafty items.” She likes D.tech because “you are doing something because you are interested in it, not because it’s an assignment.”

The only thing Sell doesn’t like is the long commute from the coastal town of Montara. “I’m sad I will only get to be at the (Oracle campus) for one year,” she added.

Oracle brass met the D.tech team at a design challenge the Oracle Education Foundation convened. It invited nine high schools to “help us rapidly prototype some elements of our new operating program,” Cassity said.

Photo: Paul Chinn, The ChronicleCypress Sell (left), a student at the Design Tech High School, programs a laser cutter to make a box "of a reasonable size" with teaching assistant Jasmine Calderon (center) and student Ezra Graves in Burlingame, Calif. on Thursday, Feb. 25, 2016. The charter school has plans to relocate its school to the Oracle campus in the near future.
D.tech, she said, “stood head and shoulders above the rest. They speak the language of education and also the language of innovation and technology sectors. We understand them. They understand us.”

Many tech companies and executives are aiming to transform schools. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife are starting a private school in East Palo Alto that will integrate education and health care for disadvantaged children. Laurene Powell Jobs, Steve Jobs’ widow, is giving $10 million to five or 10 teams that come up with the best ideas for a new high school.

IBM pioneered P-TECH, a six-year program that combines high school, community college and workplace skills. It’s now in 40 schools. Since 1999, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has given $6.7 billion to education, including $4 billion to K-12 schools.

Facebook and IBM, however, haven’t built public schools at their corporate headquarters.

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School lease plans

Oracle will own the land and building and lease it to the school “for zero or perhaps a buck,” Cassity said. Because it will retain ownership, Oracle will not get a tax deduction for the project, she added.

As a charter school, D.tech is open to any student in the state. But if demand exceeds supply, the school will hold a lottery, using a system that gives local students preference. Students from the San Mateo district will each get five virtual lottery tickets. Students from the neighboring Sequoia Union High School District, where Oracle is located, will get four each. Everyone else will get one.

The two high school districts agreed to pay D.tech about $8,400 for each student from their district who attends the charter school, even though the Sequoia district did not have to because it’s a basic-aid district that gets no state funding because its local property taxes are so high. The funding agreement between the San Mateo and Sequoia districts is a first, Montgomery said.

The new school needs approval from Redwood City and, because it’s near the shoreline, the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission. The city has posted the plan at http://www.redwoodcity.org/designtech and is taking public comments through March 10. Comments can be emailed to lchan [at] redwoodcity.org.

Photo: Paul Chinn, The ChronicleA student uses a calculator to solve a math problem at the Design Tech High School in Burlingame, Calif. on Thursday, Feb. 25, 2016. The charter school has plans to relocate its school to the Oracle campus in the near future.
Traffic concerns

At a meeting of the Redwood City Planning Commission on Feb. 16, the only concerns raised by residents were about increased traffic and ensuring that Redwood City students can attend. To mitigate traffic, students will not be allowed to park on campus. They can be dropped off or take an Oracle shuttle from the Millbrae BART and San Carlos Caltrain stations.

“People are happy that a school is getting built that doesn’t rely on taxpayer funding,” Montgomery said.

The school was Oracle CEO Safra Catz’s idea. Catz and Oracle Chairman Larry Ellison had been talking for years about the need for a school “that teaches students how to think,” Cassity said.

The school revolves around design thinking, also called human-centered design. “You begin by empathizing with your user, deeply understanding their problem,” Cassity said. The next steps are “ideation” or brainstorming a solution, building a rapid prototype, taking it back to the user for feedback and incorporating it into the next version.

“We have all kinds of agreements between high schools and career tech programs.” said Michael Kirst, president of the California State Board of Education. There are students learning auto repair at auto dealerships and future farmers working on farms.

But D.tech, he said, is different. “This is the total package.”

Kirst said the state will be monitoring the school to see how it works.

“Whether it can be scaled up depends on whether a lot of businesses want to do this,” Kirst said. “It’s one thing to run an experimental school on its grounds, another to extrapolate and say this should be done generally, or this is a big solution to solving schools.”


Kathleen Pender is a San Francisco Chronicle columnist. Email: kpender [at] sfchronicle.comBlog:http://blog.sfgate.com/pender Twitter: @kathpender

Privatization Of Science By Gates and Ellison
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/16/science/billionaires-with-big-ideas-are-privatizing-american-science.html?_r=0