More Bad Press for LAUSD
I felt bad for the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) when I saw these two stories hit on the same day. Both of them make the district look ridiculous.
First, from the Sacramento Bee’s Dan Walter, this column about the fall-out from the latest teacher contract.
Given the district’s immense size, the cost of the contract will be hefty. LAUSD officials said the 6 percent raise will increase its salary costs by $240 million a year, the health care segment of the contract will cost another $60 million and class size reduction carries a $135 million-per-year price tag.
Some of the additional cost will be covered by projected increases in revenue from local property taxes and state aid, but the district’s newly hired superintendent, David Brewer, said the contract will create a $213 million shortfall over three years — not counting what salary boosts might cost in the other years of the agreement.
As Brewer and A.J. Duffy, the teachers union president, jointly announced the new contract, a reporter asked where they would find the money to finance it. “I don’t know,” the Los Angeles Times quoted Brewer in response. “Anybody else want to talk?” Later, Brewer assured reporters, “I think we will be able to find the money to do what we want to do.”
The plain fact is that school trustees presumably elected to govern prudently have approved a legally binding contract that commits them to shelling out hundreds of millions of dollars more than they know they’ll have.
This part of the story is shocking on its own, but what makes it worse, is what happened next.
Five days after the new LAUSD contract was ratified, the other shoe dropped. The Los Angeles Daily News reported that Los Angeles legislators have introduced a series of bills aimed at increasing the district’s share of state school aid.
Assemblyman Kevin de León, D-Los Angeles, for instance, has a measure to “weight” state funding formulas to direct more money into districts with high numbers of non-white and low-income students — with LAUSD the most conspicuous beneficiary. And of course, the money would come from other districts since the school finance pot is, in any given year, a fixed sum.
While de León and others carrying bills to divert more money to LAUSD cite all sorts of rationales — including, of course, the recently released foundation study on California schools’ failings — it’s difficult to escape this cause-and-effect conclusion: The new teacher contract costs more than the district can muster, so Los Angeles’ big legislative delegation, backed by union political muscle, would pay for it by taking money from other districts, their students and their teachers.
Do you think they had this in mind all the time? It sounds like LAUSD is using the muscle of their size in order to try to take money from smaller districts and punish their staff and students for LAUSD’s stupidity in approving a contract they couldn’t really afford. That’s not fair to anyone.
The second bit of LAUSD news is this LA Times story about Thursday’s LAUSD Board meeting. At the meeting, the board, in a split decision, rejected a request from Green Dot Public Schools, a local charter school operator, to allow the creation of 8 new charter schools.
What makes it even more amazing is that the board did this in spite of a recommendation by the district’s Director of the Charter Office, who is also a senior district lawyer that they approve the charters.
Before the vote, a senior district lawyer and the director of L.A. Unified’s charter office, Gregory McNair, repeatedly counseled the board to approve the charters. State law is clear, they said, that a school board can reject charters only if they fail to meet one of several criteria. Green Dot, the officials said, met all the criteria.
The vote was 6-6, with board member David Tokofsky recusing himself, because he is an employee of Green Dot. The three members voting against the approval were Marguerite Poindexter LaMotte, Jon Lauritzen and Julie Korenstein. Despite their claims that the vote had nothing to do with their pro-UTLA stance, board member Mike Lansing had his own idea about the reasons for the vote.
The rejection also infuriated board member Mike Lansing, who represents Watts voters and has pushed unsuccessfully for dramatic reforms there. Lansing accused his colleagues of bending to the wishes of the influential United Teachers Los Angeles, which largely opposes the charter movement.
“It’s really disappointing that we keep talking about wanting to do what’s best for children first, when without a doubt that vote was about a teachers union and three board members not having the backbone to stand up and do the right thing for kids over their ties to the union,” Lansing said after the vote.
All three of the trustees voting against the charters received signficant funding from UTLA in their campaigns for a seat on the board. “UTLA President A.J. Duffy denied that he or other union leaders pressured board members to vote against Green Dot.”
A.J. Duffy has a couple pretty significant reasons for being happy about the vote. In general, UTLA has been fought efforts to open additional charter schools since they see it as an attack on their constituents. More specifically, Duffy has been critical of Green Dot in the past, suggesting that Green Dot was hand-picking their students.
I think another possible reason for UTLA to press for the vote is something a little more personal. Last December, in this LA Weekly profile of Steve Barr, Barr made a comment regarding A.J.’s porcine love life. I suspect that comment didn’t do anything to improve A.J’s feelings toward Steve. Perhaps Thursday’s board vote is A.J.’s way of getting even.
In the long term, this probably won’t have much of an impact. Green Dot can now take their application to the local County Office of Education and then the State Board. I’m sure they’ll get an approval some where along the way.
I’d have not thought it possible, but the board did something else at that meeting that made it look even more ridiculous. They voted to renew the charter of the Academia Semillas del Pueblo, when three weeks earlier, the district’s staff recommended against renewing it citing “low test scores, unconventional instruction and potentially conflicting school governance.”
About two weeks later, facing growing political pressure from former City Councilman Richard Alatorre, former Assemblywoman Jackie Goldberg and others, the staff changed course.
McNair said his staff reversed its recommendation on Semillas in light of new details that reflected more favorably on the school’s progress since it opened five years ago. He said the school’s multilingual curriculum, which includes Spanish, English, Mandarin and Nahuatl-Mexicano, can’t be judged against existing research and needs more than the board’s initial five-year certification to show results.
“This is a seven- or eight-year program,” McNair said. “I think we’ve reached an agreement that allows them to carry out their program to fruition. Now, we want to see some improvements.”
After looking at three year’s of this school’s test results, I totally understand the original recommendation. Here’s what Just for the Kids – California shows:
English/Language Arts:
Mathematics:
I don’t think letting this school continue with its curriculum of Spanish, English, Mandarin and Nahuatl-Mexicano and instruction in the Aztec base-20 math system is doing those students any favors. Hopefully, they’re going to end up closing this school in a couple years when they’re unable meet the benchmarks the district required of them. Those students will just end up getting transferred to other schools where they’re going to need extensive remediation to undo this school’s work.
As far as I’m concerned, these articles are prime examples of why LAUSD is just too big to be successful. The mayor tried and he was fought by the LAUSD board at every step. The board is dysfunctional and needs something major changed now. I think that the suggestion to break LAUSD into 15 districts of under 50,000 students is probably the only solution to fixing the problems of public education in Los Angeles.
Many Teachers Don’t Believe Their Students Can Succeed Class Size Reduction Doesn’t Cut It
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