Okay now this is definitely what we call interesting.

But before we get to the interesting part, first let me tell you a little about Kathi Littmann: Until today, Littman has been a respected senior administrator at LAUSD with a varied and impressive background in both management and education.

Most recently, she has been the Executive Director of the district’s iDivision.

In case you’ve never of iDivision…I’ll fill you in.

Last year, after Green Dot won the right to transform Locke High School into a charter complex in September, the Los Angeles Unified School District realized (very, very, very belatedly) that it better start scrambling to keep up if it didn’t want to be left coughing in the dust of the charter movement’s gathering velocity.

So, with Admiral Brewer ostensibly leading the charge the district announced…ta-da! the Innovation Division—AKA iDivision.

It sounded pretty promising: A bunch of underperforming high schools and their feeder schools were invited to join iDivision and, if they agreed to join up they would get a (semi) no-expense spared creative makeover, at least as long as the funds held out. (The makeover was modeled suspiciously on Green Dot’s small schools protocol, but hey, whatever works.)

Eighteen schools said yes….and Kathi Littman was named head of the division that was bannered as the new jewel in the district’s crown. It was to be LAUSD’s answer to education reform and transforming a beleaguered district.

Littman was also one of the district’s main point persons when it came to facilitating the mayor’s own school cluster make-over.

NOW HERE IS WHERE the interesting part comes in:

Late yesterday I heard that Kathi Littman is leaving the district to take a job with……The California Charter Schools Organization.

According to the Charter School folks, she will join as the Senior Vice President of Intergovernmental Affairs. Part of her responsibilities will be to ensure “fair representation of charter schools at the state and national level.”

The official statement about Littman’s new gig talks cheerily about the district and the charters being “true partners.”

Yeah. Sure.

Bottom line: the fact the head of the district’s most innovative schools division has decided to leave and join the organization that LAUSD was most trying to counteract suggests that perhaps Littman was experiencing an teensy, weensy bit of bureaucratic frustration in her role as Innovation Queen…..and that maybe iDivision wasn’t turning out to be as innovative as originally advertised.

So maybe she went to where the heat—and the innovation—was more likely to be found?

“Charter schools,” said Littman, “are the most promising path for public school reform. I’m eager to join Caprice [Young, the organization’s prez] and her talented team during this exciting time when innovative and high quality programs are raising the bar and redefining the public school system here in California.”

More news as I get it.

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UPDATE: I HAVE NO IDEA HOW I MANAGED TO TURN OFF THE COMMENTS ON THIS POST, BUT THEY’RE BACK ON NOW. (And, while I’m at it, here’s Ray Cortines in conversation with the LA Times editorial board. Can we say Lame Duck Brewer?)
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Yesterday afternoon, the California Charter School Association and nearly 200 charter school parents held a rally outside the LAUSD board meeting to protest what they said was a broken deal. The deal came out of a legal settlement, reached in February of this year, that required the district to provide class room facilities for 2000 of LA’s charter school students, and charter parents say that LAUSD has, once again, caved into pressure from UTLA, the powerful local teacher’s union.

Here’s the back story, In 2000, the California voters passed Proposition 39, a state ballot measure that requires school districts to share public school facilities fairly among all public school students, including those attending charter public schools. The idea was that all public school children must be provided with a physical place to learn—be those students charter or district kids.

When LAUSD failed to comply to the law, the city’s charter schools sued the district for access to the facilities mandated by Prop. 39. This past February the school board voted to settle the lawsuit and agreed to provide some kind of physical site for all LA’s charter school kids.

For charter schools, the locating and paying for a physical facility is the biggest barrier to keeping a school afloat. Hence Prop 39 and the lawsuit.

On April 1, LAUSD offered space on its campuses for nearly 40 charter schools. But, then on the April 30th the district withdrew a bunch of the offers leaving many schools with no place to go in the fall, say charter operators. (Naush Boghossian of the Daily News has more of the details about LAUSD yanking the offers.)

The charter school people say LAUSD withdrew the offers because the teachers union, UTLA pushed its union reps at the various affected schools to organize parents and teachers to protest and apply pressure on the district.

“And the bureaucracy at the district just caved in to the pressure,” said Caprice Young, the head of the California Charter School Association said after the rally. “So it’s incumbent upon us to make sure that the district complies with the settlement.”

Greg McNair, LAUSD’s associate general counsel (who is generally supportive of the charter movement), said he thought it wasn’t so much pressure as it was that the district had agree to allocate space on the various campuses before it had thought the matter through.

According to McNair, when Senior Deputy Superintendent, Ray Cortines came on the job earlier this year, he had a look at the Prop. 39 situation and decided the due diligence had never been done regarding those campuses into which the charter kids were supposed to be shoehorned. So he sent staff to check out the situation, decided that certain of the campus sharing plans would cause too many problems, and subsequently withdrew seven of the offers.

So is (pre-Cortines) mismanagement a better excuse than caving in to political pressure? I asked McNair
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