Sunday, the newspapers and cable networks were full of Palin and Gustav.

Barack and Joe were on 60 Minutes. (A nice, strong joint interview with two men who seem to really like and respect each other.)

John McCain was on NBC Nightly News and, when he was asked about the inexperience of His VP choice, McCain told Brian Williams that “Facts are funny things…..She’s had executive experience as a governor, as mayor, as a city council member and PTA.” (PTA???)

But as we wait for and worry about what will happen when Gustav makes landfall, my pick for the SUNDAY MUST READ is this Op Ed from Sunday’s LA Times.

It’s about the kind of innovative thinking that is necessary—and possible—-if the next president really wants to rescue America’s public education system, rather than just tinker around the edges.

The authors of the Op Ed are an unlikely combo: the Mayor of Newark New Jersey, Cory Booker, a partner in the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, John Doerr, and Ted Mitchell the chief executive of NewSchools Venture Fund and president of the California Board of Education.

I’ve pasted a few ‘graphs below, but be sure to read the whole thing.

Today, the shame of our cities isn’t bubonic plague; it’s ignorance. In our urban areas, only one child in five is proficient in reading. On international tests, we rank behind the Czech Republic and Latvia; our high school graduation rate barely makes the top 20 worldwide. As columnist David Brooks has noted, educational progress has been so slow that “America’s lead over its economic rivals has been entirely forfeited.” Under-education may not end lives the way infectious diseases do, but it just as surely wastes them. For all the hard work of our good teachers, our system is failing to keep pace with the demands of a new century.

[SNIP]

We need a new, results-driven mind-set at the Department of Education that will drive pure educational innovation and “scale up” proven experiments and novel ideas that work. The federal government stands in a unique position to meet these needs.

The evidence for making a national commitment to innovation in educationis compelling. Today, many of the most promising solutions are emerging from entrepreneurial organizations that embrace freedom and accountability. Indeed, such social entrepreneurs represent a growing force. They have started nimble, typically nonprofit organizations that work in partnership with creative mayors and school superintendents.

Entrepreneurial charter schools such as KIPP, Uncommon Schools, Aspire, the Inner-City Education Foundation, the Alliance for College-Ready Public Schools and Green Dot demonstrate what a single-minded focus on excellence can achieve with low-income students. These public schools, open to all students, are dedicated to the idea that college success and wide career choices must be a reality regardless of the ZIP Code of a child’s birth. And they are proving what’s possible, sending students from the poorest neighborhoods to college at rates typical of far more affluent communities.

To call these solutions a drop in the bucket, as some critics do, is to miss the point. The federal government, through the NIH (and other programs such as the National Science Foundation, the Small Business Administration and the Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency), has proved that it can multiply innovations in many fields and spread the most successful ones. Yet, historically, the federal government has constrained its investment in education entrepreneurship to comparatively small, isolated programs, limited efforts in a bureaucracy that resists change. To fix this, there are key steps the next president should take.

For the steps….read ON.

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PS: What the HELL is up the Inglwood PD? (Paging Jacqueline Seabrooks.)

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PPS: PALIN VETTING ALERT: You know how Sarah Palin said a big NO to the Bridge From Nowhere? Well, apparently she, uh, didn’t. (She said yes until way late in the game when the Feds declined to fund the extra money needed for the thing, at which point she pulled the plug. And, oh, yeah, she kept the money for it anyway, and used it for other stuff.) The New York Times , Reuters and others have this story too. But we like it from our NBBFs—new best blog friends—at Mudflats.

UPDATE: Mudflats is pushing the Bristol/pregnancy story in a way that is not kind to this teenage girl. So while I’ll continue to check them, for now they’re off the NBBF list.

(Not that I don’t get that it’s a reporting delimma. It is.)

Education watchers were caught off guard when it was announced yesterday that Caprice Young, the former LAUSD board prez turned president of the California Charter Schools Association, was leaving the five-year-old organization that she helped to found to take a job with a global education company called Knowledge Universe.

During the day, Antonio Villaraigosa quickly put out a written statement about Young’s significance:

“From Day One in the LAUSD boardroom, Caprice has understood the need to reinvigorate our public school system with small, independent community schools,” Villaraigosa said, reported the Daily News.

“She leaves a legacy as one of the pioneers of an independent school movement that will fundamentally transform this district.”

(For a fuller run down of what Caprice Young has accomplished in her five years of championing charter schools in California—which grew during her tenure by more than 300 new schools and enrolled more than 100,000 new students—see Howard Blume’s article in this morning’s LA Times.)
Since Caprice has been at the top of the food chain on the inside of the district and on the outside, battling the district in behalf of the So Cal charter movement, I thought that before she moves beyond the LA public school arena altogether, it would be a good time to ask her a few quick questions:

WitnessLA: In the last five years of being CCSA President, was there one most memorable moment?

Caprice Young: Last year during the charter school parent’s march. I was standing on corner of 4th and Broadway downtown, and I saw four thousand charter school parents streaming down 4th street to Beaudry [LAUSD headquarters on Beaudry St.]. They were loud, and they were organized and they were a sea diverse sea of faces.

At that moment, it was really clear to me that it didn’t matter if the power structure embraced charters. The parents embraced them. And parents who have their kids in a charter schools are never going back. They’re not going to allow their kids to be in unsafe school where they’re not getting a high quality education. As I watched them march, I saw the parents weren’t waiting to be given something. They were taking it for themselves. So in many ways, I was irrelevant.

WLA: What or whom are you going to be happiest to leave behind out of the whole LA California education drama?

CY: I’d be lying if I didn’t say I’m glad that I won’t be glad not to have to bang my head against the wall that is LA Unified It’s like poking mercury around in a bowl. Or it’s like Jell-O. You think it’s changed and then it goes back to the same old position.

WLA: As you look at it from the outside, what are some of the bright spots at the district?

CY: Look, of course there are good things going on at LA Unified, but they’re are going on covertly. Like the individual honors program at Reed Middle School. It’s a great program. And they have all these kids on the waiting list. It should be replicated. But frankly it’s a good thing that the central office doesn’t know much about it or they’d find a way to mess it up. I’m almost hesitant to mention it to you for that reason.

WLA: If that’s true, why do you think that happens? Obviously if someone runs for the school board one presumes they have their hearts in the right place….

CY: But, see it’s not about the people. There are good people at the district. It’s about this horrific system that is hurting our kids. And it’s hurting the adults. It takes young idealistic teachers and turns them into cynics.

Look: I was the president of the LA Unified school district and I had more power than anyone in all of public education in Los Angeles. The people who get into those roles think: I’m a smart person, and I’m really going to change things. I’m going to be on the one who fixes it. But then they accept all the chains and shackles when they get in there.

I love Ray Cortines, but But I think he’s making compromises that he shouldn’t continue to make. It doesn’t have to be this screwed up. That’s why a lot of us in public education who have slammed our head against that wall for so long, finally came to the conclusion that we just needed to go out and educate kids.

[NOTE: Cortines is LAUSD’s Superintendent of Instruction, but he is effectively running the district. No one even pretends any more that the actual district Superintendent, Admiral David Brewer, is calling the shots. He isn’t. Someone recently compared him to Queen Elizabeth. He may have the crown, but he doesn’t have the power.)

WLA: Other than Cortines, who are the most interesting characters in the high stakes soap opera that is public education in Los Angeles?

CY: There are a lot of them. When I was on the school board, my husband used to joke that I was on the first reality TV show. It’s sort of rife with interesting characters. I mean look a Julie Korenstein who’s been doing this for 25 years. After 25-years why isn’t there more progress? See, despite her demeanor, Julie’s not unintelligent. I served with the woman for four years. And it was perplexing that she didn’t have more rage that she has about why it hasn’t change. I mean, after all her time there, what does she want her legacy to be?

WLA: Speaking of legacies: What have you left undone?

CY: We’ve gone from people believing that charter schools were just an experiment, to really an understanding that they are a critical part of the public education formula. But it’s still almost impossible for charter schools to get a decent facility. That is truely hideous. Our schools are doing brilliant work in unbelievably unacceptable facility situations. But since LAUSD has been unwilling to comply with the law…. And the courts haven’t yet enforced the law….

WLA: So, other than the facilities issue, if there’s one piece of advice you could give Ray Cortines, what would it be?

CY: Do more of what works. Do less of what doesn’t work. And know the difference..

Can a group of enterprising South LA 15-year-olds (and a couple 16-year-olds) knit together a hidden part of LA history and, in so doing, teach Los Angeles a little more about itself?

That’s what a class-full of 9th graders at Animo Film and Theater Academy are attempting to do. Animo FTA is a charter school located among LAUSD’s most troubled high schools. The history the Animo kids are examining is that of Dodger stadium. But the project is a bit different than what you might think.

The story about how a tight-knit Mexican American community located in the hills of Chavez Ravine came to be yanked apart, and its houses demolished—the land eventually sold for a song to Walter O’Malley—has been immortalized in the form of a stage play by Culture Clash, a Ry Cooder music CD and a PBS special.

But, what few people seem to remember is that when Dodger owner O’Malley came to California in 1957 with the idea of relocating the his then Brooklyn-based ball club to Los Angeles, he originally considered housing the team, not in Chavez Ravine but at Wrigley Field, an art deco style stadium located on 160 acres in South Los Angeles. Wrigley was then the home of the Angels (but a different Angels than our present day Angels). O’Malley purchased both the Angels and their field in order to get a SoCal toe hold. Eventually, however, he decided he preferred the 300 acres of Chavez Ravine.

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Located in South LA a half mile from USC, Animo FTA routinely outperforms other public high schools schools in its area, including LAUSD’s nearest magnet school. (On the last released California Standardized Tests, FTA scored 701, Jefferson High school, 457, Santee High, 486, Manual Arts High, 513, and Orthopedic Medical Magnet 691.) Yet FTA draws from the same student pool as Jefferson and Santee.

FTA was founded in 2004 (and in an earlier incarnation in 1996) by former screen writer, Steve Bachrach, as a school within a school on the campus of troubled Jefferson High School. The idea was that a different teaching model, some creative approaches to classwork, and more personal attention for students, would help kids learn better. In 2005, when FTA’s test scores had jumped 50 points in less than a full year of existence, rather than try to replicate the model, LAUSD administrators instead threatened repeatedly to kill it.

“The way it works in this district,” former School Board Member David Tokofsky told me when I asked about LAUSD’s seemingly illogical behavior toward FTA. “The nail that sticks up is perceived as an inconvenience, and it gets hammered down. If that same nail sticks up in a more provocative way, like Steve Bachrach has, it’s in danger of being yanked out altogether and tossed away.”

After Bachrach grew tired of battling the district for his school, he yanked FTA away from LAUSD and accepted Steve Barr’s offer to bring it under the Green Dot umbrella as a charter.

I first ran across Steve and FTA when I was reporting on the race riots that took place at Jefferson in the spring of 2005 and have been following their progress ever since.

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The students’ Dodgers research was triggered when some other Animo FTA kids ran across the information about O’Malley and Wrigley while researching something unrelated. This, in turn, gave school principal Bachrach an idea that he proposed to some of his 9th graders who were in search of a class project: What if, asked Bachrach, they researched a sort of Tale of Two Los Angeles Neighborhoods and looked at what might have happened if the Dodgers had stayed at Wrigley? How might South LA be different if it was still home to a baseball team? And, what was the role of local and state government—for good and for ill—in influencing and facilitating that decision?

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Late in the afternoon on Thursday, the Los Angeles Unified School Board voted to put a $7 billion school bond on the November ballot. If the voters pass the bond, the money will be designated to both build new schools and to revamp old schools into smaller, kid-friendlier campuses. It is the largest local school bond in Los Angeles history.

But although the school board members unanimously approved the measure, the response among many of interested parties was not exactly upbeat.

On Wednesday, the Daily News ran a cogent and highly critical editorial stating that, unless the district can better explain why exactly it needs the $7 billion, the voters shouldn’t hand over the money. The DN also pointed out that the LAUSD folks still have quite a bit of money left over from the last building fund.

When some folks balked at such an amorphous goal for so large an amount of cash, school officials came up with a more concrete-sounding plan. Kind of. The bond money, they said, will be for charter schools. A clever pitch, this, since everyone seems to love charter schools and hate the district, which is why thousands of students are abandoning traditional campuses for charters every year.

But even then school officials wouldn’t say how much of that bond money would go to charters. Worse, they would give no written guarantees of anything.

Nevertheless the approval sailed through at around 4:30 p.m. with only a minor amount of pre-vote wrangling. Of the $7 billion, the board voted to give charter schools $450 million or around 6.4 percent. (This was up from the $300 million proposed earlier.)

So were people happy with the outcome? I asked some of the key players what they thought of the vote. Here are their reactions:

A.J DUFFY, UTLA President

“I’m never happy about money going to charter schools. I don’t think voters are going to like it either. This is essentially going to hit homeowners who are about to lose their homes. People are hurting. I think they’re going to look for any excuse to vote it down.”

MONICA GARCIA: School Board President

When I mentioned AJ Duffy’s remarks about voters not being eager for a new property tax burden, Garcia shook her head.

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

UPDATE: Ron Kaye also has a very good post on the issue today, complete with musical accompanyment—a funeral dirge for LAUSD by Chopin.

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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